The Worshipper of the Image - Richard Le Gallienne
The Worshipper of the Image
By
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON AND NEW YORK
1900
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO SILENCIEUX
THIS TRAGIC FAIRY-TALE
Contents
CHAPTER
I. SMILING SILENCE
II. THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX
III. THE NORTHERN SPHINX
IV. AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
V. SILENCIEUX SPEAKS
VI. THE THREE BLACK PONDS
VII. THE LOVERS OF SILENCIEUX
VIII. A STRANGE KISS FOR SILENCIEUX
IX. THE WONDERFUL WEEK
X. SILENCIEUX WHISPERS
XI. WONDER IN THE WOOD
XII. AUTUMN IN THE VALLEY
XIII. THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
XIV. A SONG OF THE LITTLE DEAD
XV. SILENCIEUX ALONE IN THE WOOD
XVI. THE FIRST TALK ON THE HILLS
XVII. ANTONY ALONE ON THE HILLS
XVIII. THE SECOND TALK ON THE HILLS
XIX. LAST TALK ON THE HILLS
XX. ANTONY'S JUDGMENT UPON SILENCIEUX
XXI. "RESURGAM!"
XXII. THE STRANGENESS OF ANTONY
XXIII. BEATRICE FULFILS HER DESTINY
The Worshipper of the Image
CHAPTER I
SMILING SILENCE
Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive,
moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She
wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close,
sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted
face.
The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as
she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the
foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bedtime nests. When
all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened
to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a
bough on which already hung a little star.
Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted
lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the
shadows and the toadstools and the silence.
"Silencieux," he said over to himself--"I love you, Silencieux."
Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white
gable of a little chalet to which he was dreaming his way.
Suddenly a small bronze object caught his eye moving across the mossy
path. It was a beautiful beetle, very slim and graceful in shape, with
singularly long and fine antennae. Antony had loved these things since
he was a child,--dragonflies with their lamp-like eyes of luminous horn,
moths with pall-like wings that filled the world with silence as you
looked at them, sleepy as death--loved them with the passion of a
Japanese artist who delights to carve them on quaint nuggets of metal.
Perhaps it was that they were so like words--words to which he had given
all the love and worship of his life. Surely he had loved Silencieux[1]
more since he had found for her that beautiful name.
He held the beetle in his hand a long while, loving it. Then he said to
himself, with a smile in which was the delight of a success: "A
vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns."
The phrase delighted him. He set the insect down on the path, tenderly.
He had done with it. He had carved it in seven words. The little model
might now touch its delicate way among the ferns at peace.
"A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns," he repeated as he walked on,
and then the gathering gloom of the wood suggested an addition: "And
some day I shall find in the wood that moth of which I have dreamed
since childhood--the dark moth with the face of death between his
wings."
The chalet stood on a little clearing, in a little circle of pines. From
it the ground sloped down towards the valley, and at some distance
beneath smoke curled from a house lost amid clouds of foliage, the
abounding green life of this damp and brooding hollow. A great window
looking down the woodside filled one side of the chalet, and the others
were dark with books, an occasional picture or figured jar lighting up
the shadow. A small fire flickered beneath a quaintly devised mantel,
though it was summer--for the mists crept up the hill at night and
chilled the souls of the books. A great old bureau, with a wonderful
belly of mahogany, filled a corner of the room, breathing antique
mystery and refinement. At one end of it, on a small vacant space of
wall, hung a cast, apparently the death-mask of a woman, by which the
eye was immediately attracted with something of a shock and held by a
curious fascination. The face was smiling, a smile of great peace, and
also of a strange cunning. One other characteristic it had: the woman
looked as though at any moment she would suddenly open her eyes, and if
you turned away from her and looked again, she seemed to be smiling to
herself because she had opened them that moment behind your back, and
just closed them again in time.
It was a face that never changed and yet was always changing.
She looked doubly strange in the evening light, and her smile softened
and deepened as the shadows gathered in the room.
Antony came and stood in front of her.
"Silencieux," he whispered, "I love you, Silencieux. Smiling Silence, I
love you. All day long on the moors your smile has stolen like a
moonbeam by my side--"
As he spoke, from far down the wood came the gentle sound of a woman's
voice calling "Antony," and coming nearer as it called.
With a shade of impatience, Antony bent nearer to the image and kissed
it.
"Good-bye, Silencieux," he whispered, "Good-bye, until the rising of the
moon."
Then he passed out on to the little staircase that led down into the
wood, and called back to the approaching voice: "I am coming,
Beatrice,"--'Beatrice' being the name of his wife.
As he called, a shaft of late sunlight suddenly irradiated the tall
slim form of a woman coming up the wood. She wore no hat, and the sun
made a misty glory of her pale gold hair. She seemed a fairy romantic
thing thus gliding in her yellow silk gown through the darkening pines.
And her face was the face of the image, feature for feature. There was
on it too the same light, the same smile.
"Antony," she called, as they drew nearer to each other, "where in the
wide world have you been? Dinner has been waiting for half-an-hour."
"Dinner!" he said, laughing, and kissing her kindly. "Fancy! the High
Muses have made me half-an-hour late for dinner. Beauty has made me
forget my dinner. Disgraceful!"
"I don't mind your forgetting dinner, Antony--but you might have
remembered me."
"Do you think I could remember Beauty and forget you? Yes! you _are_
beautiful to-night, Silen--Beatrice. You look like a lady one meets
walking by a haunted well in some old Arthurian tale."
"Hush!" said Beatrice, "listen to the night-jar. He is worth a hundred
nightingales."
"Yes; what a passion is that!" said Antony, "so sincere, and yet so
fascinating too."
"'Yet,' do you say, Antony? Why, sincerity is the most fascinating thing
in the world."
And as they listened, Antony's heart had stolen back to Silencieux, and
once more in fancy he pressed his lips to hers in the dusk: "It is with
such an eternal passion that I love you, Silencieux."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Of course, the writer is aware that while "Silencieux" is
feminine, her name is masculine. In such fanciful names, however, such
license has always been considered allowable.]
CHAPTER II
THE COMING OF SILENCIEUX
The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a
strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of
another--that law by which men love living women because of the dead,
and dead women because of the living.
One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes,
the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon
a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying
vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad
window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern
London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.
Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of
classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for
ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.
Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence. Some one was
smiling near him. He turned, and, almost with a start, found that--as he
then thought--it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the
others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead. A face not
ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
Instantly he knew he had seen the face before. Where?
Why, of course, it was the face of Beatrice, feature for feature. How
strange!--and, loving Beatrice, he bought it, because of his great love
for her! Who was the artist, what the time and circumstance, that had
anticipated in this strange fashion the only face he had ever really
loved on earth?
He sought information of the shopkeeper, who told him a strange little
story of an unknown model and an unknown artist, and two tragic fates.
When Antony had brought Silencieux home to Beatrice, she had at first
taken that delight in her which every created thing takes in a perfect,
or even an imperfect, reflection of itself. To have been anticipated in
a manner so unusual gave back in romantic suggestiveness what at first
sight it seemed to steal from one's personal originality. Only at first
sight--for, if like Beatrice, you were the possessor of a face so
uncommon in type that your lover might, with little fear of disproof,
declare, at all events in England, that there was none other like it,
you might grow superstitious as you looked at an anticipation so
creepily identical, and conceive strange fancies of re-incarnation. What
if this had been you in some former existence! Or at all events, if
there is any truth in those who tell us that in the mould and lines of
our faces and hands--yes! and in every secret marking of our bodies--our
fates are written as in a parchment; would it not be reasonable to
surmise, perhaps to fear, that the writing should mean the same on one
face as on the other, and the fates as well as the faces prove
identical?
Beatrice gave the mask back to Antony, with a little shiver.
"It is very wonderful, very strange, but she makes me frightened. What
was the story the man told you, Antony?"
"No doubt it was all nonsense," Antony replied, "but he said that it was
the death-mask of an unknown girl found drowned in the Seine."
"Drowned in the Seine!" exclaimed Beatrice, growing almost as white as
the image.
"Yes! and he said too that the story went that the sculptor who moulded
it had fallen so in love with the dead girl, that he had gone mad and
drowned himself in the Seine also."
"Can it be true, Antony?"
"I hope so, for it is so beautiful,--and nothing is really beautiful
till it has come true."
"But the pain, the pity of it--Antony."
"That is a part of the beauty, surely--the very essence of its beauty--"
"Beauty! beauty! O Antony, that is always your cry. I can only think of
the terror, the human anguish. Poor girl--" and she turned again to the
image as it lay upon the table,--"see how the hair lies moulded round
her ears with the water, and how her eyelashes stick to her cheek--Poor
girl."
"But see how happy she looks. Why should we pity one who can smile like
that? See how peaceful she looks;" and with a sudden whim, Antony took
the image and set it lying back on a soft cushion in a corner of the
couch, at the same time throwing round its neck his black cloak, which
he had cast off as he came in.
The image nestled into the cushion as though it had veritably been a
living woman weary for sleep, and softly smiling that it was near at
last. So comfortable she seemed, you could have sworn she breathed.
Antony lifted her head once or twice with his fingers, to delight
himself with seeing her sink back luxuriously once more.
Beatrice grew more and more white.
"Antony, please stop. I cannot bear it. She looks so terribly alive."
At that moment Antony's touch had been a little too forcible, the image
hung poised for a moment and then began to fall in the direction of
Beatrice.
"Oh, she is falling," she almost screamed, as Antony saved the cast from
the floor. "For God's sake, stop!"
"How childish of you, Beatrice. She is only plaster. I never knew you
such a baby."
"I cannot help it, Antony. I know it is foolish, but I cannot help it. I
think living in this place has made me morbid. She seems so alive--so
evil, so cruel. I am sorry you bought her, Antony. I cannot bear to look
at her. Won't you take her away? Take her up into the wood. Keep her
there. Take her now. I shall not be able to sleep all night if I know
she is in the house."
She was half hysterical, and Antony soothed her gently.
"Yes, yes, dear. I'm sorry. I'll take her up the wood now this minute.
Wait till I light the lantern. Poor Beatrice, I never dreamed she would
affect you so. I loved her, dear--because I love you; but I would rather
break her in pieces than that she should make you unhappy. Though to
break any image of you, dear," he added tenderly, "would seem a kind of
sacrilege. You know how I love you, Beatrice, don't you?"
"Of course I do, dear; and it was sweet of you to buy her for my sake,
and I'm quite silly to-night. To-morrow I shall think nothing about her.
Still, dear, she does frighten me, I can't tell why. There seems
something malignant about her, something that threatens our happiness.
Oh, how silly I am--"
Meanwhile, Antony had lit an old brass lantern, and presently he was
flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with
that ghostly face tenderly pressed against his side.
He stopped once to turn his lantern upon her. How mysterious she looked,
here in the night, under the dark pines!
He too felt a little haunted as he climbed his chalet staircase and
unlocked the door, every sound he made echoing fatefully in the silent
wood; and when he had found a place for the image and hung her there,
she certainly looked a ghostly companion for the midnight lamp, in the
middle of a wood.
How strangely she smiled, the smile almost of one taking possession.
No wonder Beatrice had been frightened. Was there some mysterious life
in the thing, after all? Why should these indefinite forebodings come
over him as he looked at her!--But he was growing as childish as
Beatrice. Surely midnight, a dark wood, a lantern, and a death-mask,
with two owls whistling to each other across the valley, were enough to
account for any number of forebodings! But Antony shivered, for all
that, as he locked the door and hastened back again down the wood.
CHAPTER III
THE NORTHERN SPHINX
Antony had not written a poem to his wife since their little girl Wonder
had been born, now some four years ago. Surely it was from no lack of
love, this silence, but merely due to the working of what would seem to
be a law of the artistic temperament: that to turn a muse into a wife,
however long and faithfully loved, is to bid good-bye to the muse. But a
day or two after the coming of Silencieux, Antony found himself suddenly
inspired once more to sing of his wife. It was the best poem he had
written for a long time, and when it was finished, he came down the wood
impatient to read it to Beatrice. This was the poem, which he called
"The Northern Sphinx":--
Sphinx of the North, with subtler smile
Than hers who in the yellow South,
With make-believe mysterious mouth,
Deepens the _ennui_ of the Nile;
And, with no secret left to tell,
A worn and withered old coquette,
Dreams sadly that she draws us yet,
With antiquated charm and spell:
Tell me your secret, Sphinx,--for mine!--
What means the colour of your eyes,
Half innocent and all so wise,
Blue as the smoke whose wavering line
Curls upward from the sacred pyre
Of sacrifice or holy death,
Pale twisting wreaths of opal breath,
From fire mounting into fire.
What is the meaning of your hair?
That little fairy palace wrought
With many a grave fantastic thought;
I send a kiss to wander there,
To climb from golden stair to stair,
Wind in and out its cunning bowers,--
O garden gold with golden flowers,
O little palace built of hair!
The meaning of your mouth, who knows?
O mouth, where many meanings meet--
Death kissed it stern, Love kissed it sweet,
And each has shaped its mystic rose.
Mouth of all sweets, whose sweetness sips
Its tribute honey from all hives,
The sweetest of the sweetest lives,
Soft flowers and little children's lips;
Yet rather learnt its heavenly smile
From sorrow, God's divinest art,
Sorrow that breaks and breaks the heart,
Yet makes a music all the while.
Ah! what is that within your eyes,
Upon your lips, within your hair,
The sacred art that makes you fair,
The wisdom that hath made you wise?
Tell me your secret, Sphinx,--for mine!--
The mystic word that from afar
God spake and made you rose and star,
The _fiat lux_ that bade you shine.
While Antony read, Beatrice's face grew sadder and sadder. When he had
finished she said:--
"It is very beautiful, Antony--but it is not written for me."
"What can you mean, Beatrice? Who else can it be written for?"
"To the Image of me that you have set up in my place."
"Beatrice, are you going mad?"
"It is quite true, all the same. Time will show. Perhaps you don't know
it yourself as yet, but you will before long."
"But, Beatrice, the poem shows its own origin. Has your image blue eyes,
or curiously coiled hair--"
"Oh, yes, of course, you thought of me. You filled in from me. But the
inspiration, the wish to write it, came from the image--"
"It is certainly true that I love to look at it, as I love to look at a
picture of you--because it is you--"
"As yet, no doubt, but you will soon love it for its own sake. You are
already beginning."
"I love an image! You are too ridiculous, Beatrice."
"Does it really seem so strange, dear? I sometimes think you have never
loved anything else."
Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had
been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was
appealing to him with a perverse fascination.
To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of
her,--surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love,
a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.
As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious,
knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire
which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had
spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had
conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love--a love of
beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death,
inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of
humanity.
To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve
that--and never come out of the dream.
These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image. He felt
that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a
strange expectancy.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
But a week or two more, and Beatrice's prophecy had progressed so far
towards fulfilment, that Antony was going about the woods and the moors
saying over to himself the name he had found for the Image, as we saw in
the first chapter; and his love for Silencieux, begun more or less as a
determined self-illusion, grew more and more of a reality. Every day new
life welled into Silencieux's face, as every day life ebbed from the
face of Beatrice, surely foreseeing the coming on of what she had
feared. For the love he gave to Silencieux Antony must take away from
Beatrice, from whom as the days went by he grew more and more withdrawn.
It was true that the long lonely days which he spent in the wood bore
fruit in a remarkable productiveness. Never had his imagination been so
enkindled, or his pen so winged. But this very industry, the proofs of
which he would each evening bring down the wood for that fine judgment
of Beatrice's, which, in spite of all, still remained more to him than
any other praise--this very industry was the secret confirmation for
Beatrice's sad heart. No longer the inspirer, she was yet, she bitterly
told herself, honoured among women as a critic. Her heart might bleed,
and her eyes fill with tears, as he read; but then, as he would say, the
Beauty, the Music! Is it Beautiful? Is it Music? If it be that, no
matter how it has been made! Let us give thanks for creation, though it
involves the sacrifice of our own most tender and sacred feelings. To
set mere personal feelings against Beauty--human tears against an
immortal creation! Did he spare his own feelings? Indeed he did not.
On the night when we first met him bidding good-bye to Silencieux "until
the rising of the moon," he had sat through dinner eating but little,
feverishly and somewhat cruelly gay. Though he was as yet too kind to
admit it to himself, Beatrice was beginning to bore him, not merely by
her sadness, which his absorption prevented his realising except in
flashes, but by her very resemblance to the Image--of which, from having
been the beloved original, she was, in his eyes, becoming an indifferent
materialisation. The sweet flesh he had loved so tenderly became an
offence to him, as a medium too gross for the embodiment of so beautiful
a face. Such a face as Silencieux's demanded a more celestial porcelain.
Dinner at last finished, he made an excuse to Beatrice for leaving her
alone once more at the end as he had during all the rest of the day,
and hastened to keep his tryst with Silencieux. During dinner the
conscious side of his mind had been luxuriating in the romantic sound of
"until the rising of the moon,"--for he was as yet a long way from being
quite simple even with Silencieux,--and the idea of his going out with
serious eagerness to meet one who, if she was as he knew a living being,
was an image too, delighted his sense of fantastic make-believe.
There is in all love that element of make-believe. Every woman who is
loved is partly the creation of her lover's fancy. He consciously
siderealises her, and with open eyes magnifies her importance to his
life. Antony but made believe and magnified uncommonly--and his dream of
vivifying white plaster was perhaps less desperate than the dreams of
some, that would breathe the breath of life into the colder clay of some
beloved woman, who seems spontaneously to live but is dead all the
while.
Silencieux appeared to be dead, but beneath that eternal smile, as
Beatrice had divined, as Antony was learning, she was only too terribly
alive. Yes! Antony's was the easier dream.
The moon and Antony came up the wood together from opposite ends, and
when Antony entered his chalet Silencieux was already waiting for him,
her head crowned with a moonbeam. He kissed her softly and took her with
him out into the ferns.
CHAPTER V
SILENCIEUX SPEAKS
So long as the moon held, Antony stole up the wood each night to meet
Silencieux--"at the rising of the moon." Sometimes he would lie in a
hollow with her head upon his knee, and gaze for an hour at a time,
entranced, into her face. He would feign to himself that she slept, and
he would hold his breath lest he should awaken her. Sometimes he would
say in a tender whisper, not loud enough for her to hear:--
"It is cold to-night, Silencieux. See, my cloak will keep you warm."
Once as he did this she heaved a gentle sigh, as though thanking him.
At other times he would place her against the gable of the chalet, so
that the moonlight fell upon her, and then he would plunge into the
wood and walk its whole length, so that, as he wound his way back
through the intervening brakes, her face would come and go, glimmering
away off through the leafage, beckoning to him to return. And once he
thought he heard her call his name very softly through the wood.
That may have been an illusion, but it was during these days that he did
actually hear her speak for the first time. He had been writing till
past midnight, with her smile just above him, and when he had turned out
the lamp and was moving to the door through the vague flickering light
of the fire, he distinctly heard a voice very luxurious and tender say
"Antony," just behind him. It was hardly more than a whisper, but its
sweetness thrilled his blood, and half in joy and fear he turned to her
again. But she was only smiling inscrutably as before, and she spoke no
more for that night.
CHAPTER VI
THE THREE BLACK PONDS
At the bottom of the valley, approached by sunken honeysuckle lanes that
seemed winding into the centre of the earth, lay three black ponds,
almost hidden in a _cul-de-sac_ of woodland. Though long since
appropriated by nature, made her own by moss and rooted oaks, they were
so set one below the other, with green causeways between each, that an
ancient art, long since become nature, had evidently designed and dug
them, years, perhaps centuries, ago. So long dead were the old
pond-makers that great trees grew now upon the causeways, and vast
jungles of rush and water grasses choked the trickling overflows from
one pond to the other. Once, it was said, when the earth of those parts
had been rich in iron, these ponds had driven great hammers,--but long
before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their
labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence. Where iron had
once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had
been healed by the kisses of five hundred springs.