Lilith

by George MacDonald

  I looked, and saw: before her, cast from unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty, She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one what God had intended her to be, the other what she had made herself.

  The rest of the night she lay motionless altogether.

  With the gray dawn growing in the room, she rose, turned to Mara, and said, in prideful humility, “You have conquered. Let me go into the wilderness and bewail myself.”

  Mara saw that her submission was not feigned, neither was it real. She looked at her a moment, and returned:

  “Begin, then, and set right in the place of wrong.”

  “I know not how,” she replied—with the look of one who foresaw and feared the answer.

  “Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go.”

  A fierce refusal seemed to struggle for passage, but she kept it prisoned.

  “I cannot,” she said. “I have no longer the power. Open it for me.”

  She held out the offending hand. It was more a paw than a hand. It seemed to me plain that she could not open it.

  Mara did not even look at it.

  “You must open it yourself,” she said quietly.

  “I have told you I cannot!”

  “You can if you will—not indeed at once, but by persistent effort. What you have done, you do not yet wish undone—do not yet intend to undo!”

  “You think so, I dare say,” rejoined the princess with a flash of insolence, “but I KNOW that I cannot open my hand!”

  “I know you better than you know yourself, and I know you can. You have often opened it a little way. Without trouble and pain you cannot open it quite, but you CAN open it. At worst you could beat it open! I pray you, gather your strength, and open it wide.”

  “I will not try what I know impossible. It would be the part of a fool!”

  “Which you have been playing all your life! Oh, you are hard to teach!”

  Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back on Mara, saying, “I know what you have been tormenting me for! You have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me stronger than you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have always known myself—queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds!”

  Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE IN DEATH—life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with her until now.

  She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to Lilith.

  Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was in it! We were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely apart. The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.

  Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she knew to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.

  She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on the face of one who knew existence but not love—knew nor life, nor joy, nor good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death! She knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing. She had killed her life, and was dead—and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever! She had tried her hardest to unmake herself, and could not! she was a dead life! she could not cease! she must BE! In her face I saw and read beyond its misery—saw in its dismay that the dismay behind it was more than it could manifest. It sent out a livid gloom; the light that was in her was darkness, and after its kind it shone. She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw now what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was as a conscious corpse, whose coffin would never come to pieces, never set her free! Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into the heart of horror essential—her own indestructible evil. Her right hand also was now clenched—upon existent Nothing—her inheritance!

  But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!

  Without change of look, without sign of purpose, Lilith walked toward Mara. She felt her coming, and rose to meet her.

  “I yield,” said the princess. “I cannot hold out. I am defeated.—Not the less, I cannot open my hand.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “I am trying now with all my might.”

  “I will take you to my father. You have wronged him worst of the created, therefore he best of the created can help you.”

  “How can HE help me?”

  “He will forgive you.”

  “Ah, if he would but help me to cease! Not even that am I capable of! I have no power over myself; I am a slave! I acknowledge it. Let me die.”

  “A slave thou art that shall one day be a child!” answered Mara.—“Verily, thou shalt die, but not as thou thinkest. Thou shalt die out of death into life. Now is the Life for, that never was against thee!”

  Like her mother, in whom lay the motherhood of all the world, Mara put her arms around Lilith, and kissed her on the forehead. The fiery-cold misery went out of her eyes, and their fountains filled. She lifted, and bore her to her own bed in a corner of the room, laid her softly upon it, and closed her eyes with caressing hands.

  Lilith lay and wept. The Lady of Sorrow went to the door and opened it.

  Morn, with the Spring in her arms, waited outside. Softly they stole in at the opened door, with a gentle wind in the skirts of their garments. It flowed and flowed about Lilith, rippling the unknown, upwaking sea of her life eternal; rippling and to ripple it, until at length she who had been but as a weed cast on the dry sandy shore to wither, should know herself an inlet of the everlasting ocean, henceforth to flow into her for ever, and ebb no more. She answered the morning wind with reviving breath, and began to listen. For in the skirts of the wind had come the rain—the soft rain that heals the mown, the many-wounded grass—soothing it with the sweetness of all music, the hush that lives between music and silence. It bedewed the desert places around the cottage, and the sands of Lilith’s heart heard it, and drank it in. When Mara returned to sit by her bed, her tears were flowing softer than the rain, and soon she was fast asleep.

  CHAPTER XL. THE HOUSE OF DEATH

  The Mother of Sorrows rose, muffled her face, and went to call the Little Ones. They slept as if all the night they had not moved, but the moment she spoke they sprang to their feet, fresh as if new-made. Merrily down the stair they followed her, and she brought them where the princess lay, her tears yet flowing as she slept. Their glad faces grew grave. They looked from the princess out on the rain, then back at the princess.

  “The sky is falling!” said one.

  “The white juice is running out of the princess!” cried another, with an awed look.

  “Is it rivers?” asked Odu, gazing at the little streams that flowed adown her hollow cheeks.

  “Yes,” answered Mara, “—the
most wonderful of all rivers.”

  “I thought rivers was bigger, and rushed, like a lot of Little Ones, making loud noises!” he returned, looking at me, from whom alone he had heard of rivers.

  “Look at the rivers of the sky!” said Mara. “See how they come down to wake up the waters under the earth! Soon will the rivers be flowing everywhere, merry and loud, like thousands and thousands of happy children. Oh, how glad they will make you, Little Ones! You have never seen any, and do not know how lovely is the water!”

  “That will be the glad of the ground that the princess is grown good,” said Odu. “See the glad of the sky!”

  “Are the rivers the glad of the princess?” asked Luva. “They are not her juice, for they are not red!”

  “They are the juice inside the juice,” answered Mara.

  Odu put one finger to his eye, looked at it, and shook his head.

  “Princess will not bite now!” said Luva.

  “No; she will never do that again,” replied Mara. “—But now we must take her nearer home.”

  “Is that a nest?” asked Sozo.

  “Yes; a very big nest. But we must take her to another place first.”

  “What is that?”

  “It is the biggest room in all this world.—But I think it is going to be pulled down: it will soon be too full of little nests.—Go and get your clumsies.”

  “Please are there any cats in it?”

  “Not one. The nests are too full of lovely dreams for one cat to get in.”

  “We shall be ready in a minute,” said Odu, and ran out, followed by all except Luva.

  Lilith was now awake, and listening with a sad smile.

  “But her rivers are running so fast!” said Luva, who stood by her side and seemed unable to take her eyes from her face. “Her robe is all—I don’t know what. Clumsies won’t like it!”

  “They won’t mind it,” answered Mara. “Those rivers are so clean that they make the whole world clean.”

  I had fallen asleep by the fire, but for some time had been awake and listening, and now rose.

  “It is time to mount, Mr. Vane,” said our hostess.

  “Tell me, please,” I said, “is there not a way by which to avoid the channels and the den of monsters?”

  “There is an easy way across the river-bed, which I will show you,” she answered; “but you must pass once more through the monsters.”

  “I fear for the children,” I said.

  “Fear will not once come nigh them,” she rejoined.

  We left the cottage. The beasts stood waiting about the door. Odu was already on the neck of one of the two that were to carry the princess. I mounted Lona’s horse; Mara brought her body, and gave it me in my arms. When she came out again with the princess, a cry of delight arose from the children: she was no longer muffled! Gazing at her, and entranced with her loveliness, the boys forgot to receive the princess from her; but the elephants took Lilith tenderly with their trunks, one round her body and one round her knees, and, Mara helping, laid her along between them.

  “Why does the princess want to go?” asked a small boy. “She would keep good if she staid here!”

  “She wants to go, and she does not want to go: we are helping her,” answered Mara. “She will not keep good here.”

  “What are you helping her to do?” he went on.

  “To go where she will get more help—help to open her hand, which has been closed for a thousand years.”

  “So long? Then she has learned to do without it: why should she open it now?”

  “Because it is shut upon something that is not hers.”

  “Please, lady Mara, may we have some of your very dry bread before we go?” said Luva.

  Mara smiled, and brought them four loaves and a great jug of water.

  “We will eat as we go,” they said. But they drank the water with delight.

  “I think,” remarked one of them, “it must be elephant-juice! It makes me so strong!”

  We set out, the Lady of Sorrow walking with us, more beautiful than the sun, and the white leopardess following her. I thought she meant but to put us in the path across the channels, but I soon found she was going with us all the way. Then I would have dismounted that she might ride, but she would not let me.

  “I have no burden to carry,” she said. “The children and I will walk together.”

  It was the loveliest of mornings; the sun shone his brightest, and the wind blew his sweetest, but they did not comfort the desert, for it had no water.

  We crossed the channels without difficulty, the children gamboling about Mara all the way, but did not reach the top of the ridge over the bad burrow until the sun was already in the act of disappearing. Then I made the Little Ones mount their elephants, for the moon might be late, and I could not help some anxiety about them.

  The Lady of Sorrow now led the way by my side; the elephants followed—the two that bore the princess in the centre; the leopardess brought up the rear; and just as we reached the frightful margin, the moon looked up and showed the shallow basin lying before us untroubled. Mara stepped into it; not a movement answered her tread or the feet of my horse. But the moment that the elephants carrying the princess touched it, the seemingly solid earth began to heave and boil, and the whole dread brood of the hellish nest was commoved. Monsters uprose on all sides, every neck at full length, every beak and claw outstretched, every mouth agape. Long-billed heads, horribly jawed faces, knotty tentacles innumerable, went out after Lilith. She lay in an agony of fear, nor dared stir a finger. Whether the hideous things even saw the children, I doubt; certainly not one of them touched a child; not one loathly member passed the live rampart of her bodyguard, to lay hold of her.

  “Little Ones,” I cried, “keep your elephants close about the princess. Be brave; they will not touch you.”

  “What will not touch us? We don’t know what to be brave at!” they answered; and I perceived they were unaware of one of the deformities around them.

  “Never mind then,” I returned; “only keep close.”

  They were panoplied in their blindness! Incapacity to see was their safety. What they could nowise be aware of, could not hurt them.

  But the hideous forms I saw that night! Mara was a few paces in front of me when a solitary, bodiless head bounced on the path between us. The leopardess came rushing under the elephants from behind, and would have seized it, but, with frightful contortions of visage and a loathsome howl, it gave itself a rapid rotatory twist, sprang from her, and buried itself in the ground. The death in my arms assoiling me from fear, I regarded them all unmoved, although never, sure, was elsewhere beheld such a crew accursed!

  Mara still went in front of me, and the leopardess now walked close behind her, shivering often, for it was very cold, when suddenly the ground before me to my left began to heave, and a low wave of earth came slinking toward us. It rose higher as it drew hear; out of it slouched a dreadful head with fleshy tubes for hair, and opening a great oval mouth, snapped at me. The leopardess sprang, but fell baffled beyond it.

  Almost under our feet, shot up the head of an enormous snake, with a lamping wallowing glare in its eyes. Again the leopardess rushed to the attack, but found nothing. At a third monster she darted with like fury, and like failure—then sullenly ceased to heed the phantom-horde. But I understood the peril and hastened the crossing—the rather that the moon was carrying herself strangely. Even as she rose she seemed ready to drop and give up the attempt as hopeless; and since, I saw her sink back once fully her own breadth. The arc she made was very low, and now she had begun to descend rapidly.

  We were almost over, when, between us and the border of the basin, arose a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth. I went on; it retreated, then drew aside. The lady stepped on the firm land, but the leopardess between us, roused once more, turned, and flew at the throat of the terror.
I remained where I was to see the elephants, with the princess and the children, safe on the bank. Then I turned to look after the leopardess. That moment the moon went down, For an instant I saw the leopardess and the snake-monster convolved in a cloud of dust; then darkness hid them. Trembling with fright, my horse wheeled, and in three bounds overtook the elephants.

  As we came up with them, a shapeless jelly dropped on the princess. A white dove dropped immediately on the jelly, stabbing it with its beak. It made a squelching, sucking sound, and fell off. Then I heard the voice of a woman talking with Mara, and I knew the voice.

  “I fear she is dead!” said Mara.

  “I will send and find her,” answered the mother. “But why, Mara, shouldst thou at all fear for her or for any one? Death cannot hurt her who dies doing the work given her to do.”

  “I shall miss her sorely; she is good and wise. Yet I would not have her live beyond her hour!”

  “She has gone down with the wicked; she will rise with the righteous. We shall see her again ere very long.”

  “Mother,” I said, although I did not see her, “we come to you many, but most of us are Little Ones. Will you be able to receive us all?”

  “You are welcome every one,” she answered. “Sooner or later all will be little ones, for all must sleep in my house! It is well with those that go to sleep young and willing!—My husband is even now preparing her couch for Lilith. She is neither young nor quite willing, but it is well indeed that she is come.”

  I heard no more. Mother and daughter had gone away together through the dark. But we saw a light in the distance, and toward it we went stumbling over the moor.

  Adam stood in the door, holding the candle to guide us, and talking with his wife, who, behind him, laid bread and wine on the table within.

  “Happy children,” I heard her say, “to have looked already on the face of my daughter! Surely it is the loveliest in the great world!”

  When we reached the door, Adam welcomed us almost merrily. He set the candle on the threshold, and going to the elephants, would have taken the princess to carry her in; but she repulsed him, and pushing her elephants asunder, stood erect between them. They walked from beside her, and left her with him who had been her husband—ashamed indeed of her gaunt uncomeliness, but unsubmissive. He stood with a welcome in his eyes that shone through their severity.