Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon men’s shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr’s leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide-open throats and brazen lungs,— “Barabbas!”

  There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.

  One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.

  A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.

  A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod on him.

  A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned captive.

  A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle, dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the sacrifice.

  A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist, sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after her in Barabbas’ train.

  On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen, looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.

  And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and tearing at each other’s breasts.

  Six nights the conception occupied him — his days were not his own, he spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been many of the greatest works the world has seen; — oaks sprung from the acorn that a careless child has let fall.

  When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his sleepless eyes.

  He knew that his work was good.

  The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne their full fruit.

  It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor of his ideal; the more surely will he — though the world ring with applause of him — be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.

  But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense, surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain and of his hand contents him, — it is the purest joy on earth.

  Arslàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger and thirst and the passage of time.

  He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him. He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived there, recorded for the world that denied him.

  As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation remained with him.

  His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of the passing night.

  The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.

  He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the genius in him had ever conceived and put forth; — and he knew too that he was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame, unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.

  There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future generations, his claims to men’s remembrance after death: and there were none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his mind and his hand — and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for their meaning.

  To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.

  A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.

  “But what were the use?” he pondered as he stood there. “What the use to be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on it.”

  All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on canvas.

  If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the wing of the owl and the flittermouse.

  The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.

  Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.

  She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have remembered.

  She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him and looked; — looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.

  The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.

  One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.

  She stood and gazed at it.

  She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have b
een more marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the creation, its creator.

  All she saw was the face of the Christ, — the pale bent face, in whose eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.

  She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ moved her strangely — there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.

  Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated her with their ironies and with their woe — the parable of the genius rejected and the thief exalted.

  She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.

  “They have talked of their God — often — so often,” she muttered. “But I never knew till now what they meant.”

  Arslàn turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.

  “Is it so?” he said, slowly. “Well — the world refuses me fame; but I do not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your admiration.”

  “The world?” she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. “The world? You care for the world — you? — who have painted that?”

  Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.

  He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a worldly success.

  Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?

  It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious and mature intellect of the man of genius.

  He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.

  “Even I!” he answered her. “We, who call ourselves poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it, — we are prophets so far, — but when we come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire.”

  She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.

  Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the child, who, breaking from his mother’s arms, and, regardless of the soldier’s stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there kneeled and prayed.

  Without looking at her, Arslàn went out to his daily labor on the waters.

  The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and voices of innumerable birds.

  “And yet I desire nothing for myself,” he thought. “I would lie down and die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live.”

  Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire with a child’s desire, the stars.

  For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed on him and shut him forever from sight.

  When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden.

  But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be moved, and swift — terribly swift — to forget.

  Why should it not be?

  It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.

  And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of the wind, and forever — forever unanswered!

  CHAPTER VII.

  One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set.

  “The sea?” she repeated. “What is that?”

  “Is it possible that you do not know?” he asked, in utter wonder. “You who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!”

  “I have heard often of it,” she said, simply; “but I cannot tell what it is.”

  “The man has never yet lived who could tell — in fit language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech.”

  So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves.

  It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a broad estuary.

  She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to herself.

  When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in human nature.

  A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives’ oaths, and the death-screams of scalded shellfish.

  He did not take her thither.

  He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known restraint.

  Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look fo
r her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage; all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze, for they were both of them accursed in the people’s sight.

  “You find it hard to live apart from your kind?” he asked her suddenly as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale crescent of a week-old moon.

  “To live apart?” — she did not understand.

  “Yes — like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?”

  Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.

  “What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing — not so much as a fair word. That is well.”

  “I think it is well — if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength.”