Lilith

by George MacDonald

  “I do.”

  “Where do you think it stands?”

  “Why THERE, where you know it is!”

  “Where is THERE?”

  “You bother me with your silly questions!” I cried. “I am growing tired of you!”

  “That tree stands on the hearth of your kitchen, and grows nearly straight up its chimney,” he said.

  “Now I KNOW you are making game of me!” I answered, with a laugh of scorn.

  “Was I making game of you when you discovered me looking out of your star-sapphire yesterday?”

  “That was this morning—not an hour ago!”

  “I have been widening your horizon longer than that, Mr. Vane; but never mind!”

  “You mean you have been making a fool of me!” I said, turning from him.

  “Excuse me: no one can do that but yourself!”

  “And I decline to do it.”

  “You mistake.”

  “How?”

  “In declining to acknowledge yourself one already. You make yourself such by refusing what is true, and for that you will sorely punish yourself.”

  “How, again?”

  “By believing what is not true.”

  “Then, if I walk to the other side of that tree, I shall walk through the kitchen fire?”

  “Certainly. You would first, however, walk through the lady at the piano in the breakfast-room. That rosebush is close by her. You would give her a terrible start!”

  “There is no lady in the house!”

  “Indeed! Is not your housekeeper a lady? She is counted such in a certain country where all are servants, and the liveries one and multitudinous!”

  “She cannot use the piano, anyhow!”

  “Her niece can: she is there—a well-educated girl and a capital musician.”

  “Excuse me; I cannot help it: you seem to me to be talking sheer nonsense!”

  “If you could but hear the music! Those great long heads of wild hyacinth are inside the piano, among the strings of it, and give that peculiar sweetness to her playing!—Pardon me: I forgot your deafness!”

  “Two objects,” I said, “cannot exist in the same place at the same time!”

  “Can they not? I did not know!—I remember now they do teach that with you. It is a great mistake—one of the greatest ever wiseacre made! No man of the universe, only a man of the world could have said so!”

  “You a librarian, and talk such rubbish!” I cried. “Plainly, you did not read many of the books in your charge!”

  “Oh, yes! I went through all in your library—at the time, and came out at the other side not much the wiser. I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. To be sure I have given up reading for a good many years—ever since I was made sexton.—There! I smell Grieg’s Wedding March in the quiver of those rose-petals!”

  I went to the rosebush and listened hard, but could not hear the thinnest ghost of a sound; I only smelt something I had never before smelt in any rose. It was still rose-odour, but with a difference, caused, I suppose, by the Wedding March.

  When I looked up, there was the bird by my side.

  “Mr. Raven,” I said, “forgive me for being so rude: I was irritated. Will you kindly show me my way home? I must go, for I have an appointment with my bailiff. One must not break faith with his servants!”

  “You cannot break what was broken days ago!” he answered.

  “Do show me the way,” I pleaded.

  “I cannot,” he returned. “To go back, you must go through yourself, and that way no man can show another.”

  Entreaty was vain. I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds!

  I had never yet done anything to justify my existence; my former world was nothing the better for my sojourn in it: here, however, I must earn, or in some way find, my bread! But I reasoned that, as I was not to blame in being here, I might expect to be taken care of here as well as there! I had had nothing to do with getting into the world I had just left, and in it I had found myself heir to a large property! If that world, as I now saw, had a claim upon me because I had eaten, and could eat again, upon this world I had a claim because I must eat—when it would in return have a claim on me!

  “There is no hurry,” said the raven, who stood regarding me; “we do not go much by the clock here. Still, the sooner one begins to do what has to be done, the better! I will take you to my wife.”

  “Thank you. Let us go!” I answered, and immediately he led the way.

  CHAPTER V. THE OLD CHURCH

  I followed him deep into the pine-forest. Neither of us said much while yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round. We came to larger and yet larger trees—older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with age. Then the forest grew thinner.

  “You see that hawthorn?” said my guide at length, pointing with his beak.

  I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.

  “I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head,” I answered.

  “Look again,” he rejoined: “it is a hawthorn.”

  “It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the hawthorn to blossom!” I objected.

  “The season for the hawthorn to blossom,” he replied, “is when the hawthorn blossoms. That tree is in the ruins of the church on your home-farm. You were going to give some directions to the bailiff about its churchyard, were you not, the morning of the thunder?”

  “I was going to tell him I wanted it turned into a wilderness of rose-trees, and that the plough must never come within three yards of it.”

  “Listen!” said the raven, seeming to hold his breath.

  I listened, and heard—was it the sighing of a far-off musical wind—or the ghost of a music that had once been glad? Or did I indeed hear anything?

  “They go there still,” said the raven.

  “Who goes there? and where do they go?” I asked.

  “Some of the people who used to pray there, go to the ruins still,” he replied. “But they will not go much longer, I think.”

  “What makes them go now?”

  “They need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together; and then, they say, the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the river at high water.”

  “Do they pray as well as sing?”

  “No; they have found that each can best pray in his own silent heart.—Some people are always at their prayers.—Look! look! There goes one!”

  He pointed right up into the air. A snow-white pigeon was mounting, with quick and yet quicker wing-flap, the unseen spiral of an ethereal stair. The sunshine flashed quivering from its wings.

  “I see a pigeon!” I said.

  “Of course you see a pigeon,” rejoined the raven, “for there is the pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.—I wonder now what heart is that dove’s mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!”

  “How can a pigeon be a prayer?” I said. “I understand, of course, how it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come out of a heart!”

  “It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!”

  “A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual!” I pursued.

  “Very true! But if you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.—When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says t
o the great Thinker:—’Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’ that is a prayer—a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.—Look, there is another!”

  This time the raven pointed his beak downward—to something at the foot of a block of granite. I looked, and saw a little flower. I had never seen one like it before, and cannot utter the feeling it woke in me by its gracious, trusting form, its colour, and its odour as of a new world that was yet the old. I can only say that it suggested an anemone, was of a pale rose-hue, and had a golden heart.

  “That is a prayer-flower,” said the raven.

  “I never saw such a flower before!” I rejoined.

  “There is no other such. Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like another,” he returned.

  “How do you know it a prayer-flower?” I asked.

  “By the expression of it,” he answered. “More than that I cannot tell you. If you know it, you know it; if you do not, you do not.”

  “Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?” I said.

  “I could not. But if I could, what better would you be? you would not know it of YOURSELF and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!”

  But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever seen before; therefore I knew that I must be seeing a shadow of the prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart listening to the flower.

  CHAPTER VI. THE SEXTON’S COTTAGE

  We had been for some time walking over a rocky moorland covered with dry plants and mosses, when I descried a little cottage in the farthest distance. The sun was not yet down, but he was wrapt in a gray cloud. The heath looked as if it had never been warm, and the wind blew strangely cold, as if from some region where it was always night.

  “Here we are at last!” said the raven. “What a long way it is! In half the time I could have gone to Paradise and seen my cousin—him, you remember, who never came back to Noah! Dear! dear! it is almost winter!”

  “Winter!” I cried; “it seems but half a day since we left home!”

  “That is because we have travelled so fast,” answered the raven. “In your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife’s house! She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the sexton’s cottage!”

  “But where is your churchyard—your cemetery—where you make your graves, I mean?” said I, seeing nothing but the flat heath.

  The raven stretched his neck, held out his beak horizontally, turned it slowly round to all the points of the compass, and said nothing.

  I followed the beak with my eyes, and lo, without church or graves, all was a churchyard! Wherever the dreary wind swept, there was the raven’s cemetery! He was sexton of all he surveyed! lord of all that was laid aside! I stood in the burial-ground of the universe; its compass the unenclosed heath, its wall the gray horizon, low and starless! I had left spring and summer, autumn and sunshine behind me, and come to the winter that waited for me! I had set out in the prime of my youth, and here I was already!—But I mistook. The day might well be long in that region, for it contained the seasons. Winter slept there, the night through, in his winding-sheet of ice; with childlike smile, Spring came awake in the dawn; at noon, Summer blazed abroad in her gorgeous beauty; with the slow-changing afternoon, old Autumn crept in, and died at the first breath of the vaporous, ghosty night.

  As we drew near the cottage, the clouded sun was rushing down the steepest slope of the west, and he sank while we were yet a few yards from the door. The same instant I was assailed by a cold that seemed almost a material presence, and I struggled across the threshold as if from the clutches of an icy death. A wind swelled up on the moor, and rushed at the door as with difficulty I closed it behind me. Then all was still, and I looked about me.

  A candle burned on a deal table in the middle of the room, and the first thing I saw was the lid of a coffin, as I thought, set up against the wall; but it opened, for it was a door, and a woman entered. She was all in white—as white as new-fallen snow; and her face was as white as her dress, but not like snow, for at once it suggested warmth. I thought her features were perfect, but her eyes made me forget them. The life of her face and her whole person was gathered and concentrated in her eyes, where it became light. It might have been coming death that made her face luminous, but the eyes had life in them for a nation—large, and dark with a darkness ever deepening as I gazed. A whole night-heaven lay condensed in each pupil; all the stars were in its blackness, and flashed; while round it for a horizon lay coiled an iris of the eternal twilight. What any eye IS, God only knows: her eyes must have been coming direct out of his own! the still face might be a primeval perfection; the live eyes were a continuous creation.

  “Here is Mr. Vane, wife!” said the raven.

  “He is welcome,” she answered, in a low, rich, gentle voice. Treasures of immortal sound seemed to be buried in it.

  I gazed, and could not speak.

  “I knew you would be glad to see him!” added the raven.

  She stood in front of the door by which she had entered, and did not come nearer.

  “Will he sleep?” she asked.

  “I fear not,” he replied; “he is neither weary nor heavy laden.”

  “Why then have you brought him?”

  “I have my fears it may prove precipitate.”

  “I do not quite understand you,” I said, with an uneasy foreboding as to what she meant, but a vague hope of some escape. “Surely a man must do a day’s work first!”

  I gazed into the white face of the woman, and my heart fluttered. She returned my gaze in silence.

  “Let me first go home,” I resumed, “and come again after I have found or made, invented, or at least discovered something!”

  “He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!” said the woman, turning to her husband. “Tell him he must rest before he can do anything!”

  “Men,” he answered, “think so much of having done, that they fall asleep upon it. They cannot empty an egg but they turn into the shell, and lie down!”

  The words drew my eyes from the woman to the raven.

  I saw no raven, but the librarian—the same slender elderly man, in a rusty black coat, large in the body and long in the tails. I had seen only his back before; now for the first time I saw his face. It was so thin that it showed the shape of the bones under it, suggesting the skulls his last-claimed profession must have made him familiar with. But in truth I had never before seen a face so alive, or a look so keen or so friendly as that in his pale blue eyes, which yet had a haze about them as if they had done much weeping.

  “You knew I was not a raven!” he said with a smile.

  “I knew you were Mr. Raven,” I replied; “but somehow I thought you a bird too!”

  “What made you think me a bird?”

  “You looked a raven, and I saw you dig worms out of the earth with your beak.”

  “And then?”

  “Toss them in the air.” “And then?”

  “They grew butterflies, and flew away.”

  “Did you ever see a raven do that? I told you I was a sexton!”

  “Does a sexton toss worms in the air, and turn them into butterflies?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never saw one do it!”

  “You saw me do it!—But I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.”

  “But you have just told me you were sexton here!”

  “So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”

  “You bewilder me!”

  “T
hat’s all right!”

  A few moments he stood silent. The woman, moveless as a statue, stood silent also by the coffin-door.

  “Upon occasion,” said the sexton at length, “it is more convenient to put one’s bird-self in front. Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self—and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too—which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more—all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front.”

  He turned to his wife, and I considered him more closely. He was above the ordinary height, and stood more erect than when last I saw him. His face was, like his wife’s, very pale; its nose handsomely encased the beak that had retired within it; its lips were very thin, and even they had no colour, but their curves were beautiful, and about them quivered a shadowy smile that had humour in it as well as love and pity.

  “We are in want of something to eat and drink, wife,” he said; “we have come a long way!”

  “You know, husband,” she answered, “we can give only to him that asks.”

  She turned her unchanging face and radiant eyes upon mine.

  “Please give me something to eat, Mrs. Raven,” I said, “and something—what you will—to quench my thirst.”

  “Your thirst must be greater before you can have what will quench it,” she replied; “but what I can give you, I will gladly.”

  She went to a cupboard in the wall, brought from it bread and wine, and set them on the table.

  We sat down to the perfect meal; and as I ate, the bread and wine seemed to go deeper than the hunger and thirst. Anxiety and discomfort vanished; expectation took their place.

  I grew very sleepy, and now first felt weary.

  “I have earned neither food nor sleep, Mrs. Raven,” I said, “but you have given me the one freely, and now I hope you will give me the other, for I sorely need it.”

  “Sleep is too fine a thing ever to be earned,” said the sexton; “it must be given and accepted, for it is a necessity. But it would be perilous to use this house as a half-way hostelry—for the repose of a night, that is, merely.”