The Wind Bloweth Part 25

"Do you want to go?"

"No."

"Then stay. Others stay."

"But--"

"Are you better than the others? Think."

"No," he thought. "Of course not. Worse perhaps. I know better."

"You are nearly as honest as I am," she laughed. She put her hand out in a great frank gesture.

"If I can smile, surely you can." Her fingers beckoned. "Come, don't be silly."

He caught her hands and laughed with her. He had been acting like a boy in his twenties, and he a man of forty-two....

-- 6

He had thought somehow that in this affair of Hedda he would find--oh, something: that once more the moon would take on its rippling smile and the sun its sweet low laughter, and the winds be no longer a matter of physics, but strong ent.i.ties. Quickly, unconsciously, the thought had come to him.... With the wife of his young days had come the magic of romance, and with Claire-Anne of Ma.r.s.eilles had come a sublime storm of pa.s.sion, and with the Arab lady had come the scheme of an ordered life, good composition and rich color.... They had lasted but little and gone as a rainbow goes.... With Hedda there was nothing.... It was just abominably wrong....

Here he was, young--for his forty-two he was young,--supple, successful in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great n.o.ble frame, her surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners, conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling ... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of him.... They both knew better, yet there you were ... G.o.d! Even animals had the excuse of nature's indomitable will!

Yes, this made him face things he had been trying to pa.s.s casually by.

Forty-two, a touch of gray at the temples, a body like a boy's, hooded eyes like a hawk's, and a feeling in him somehow that an organ--his heart maybe--was dead: not ailing--just unalive. Once he had zest, and he didn't even have despair now. If he could only have despair....

Despair was healthy. It meant revolt. A man might sob, gnash his teeth, batter walls with his bare fists, but that only meant he was alive in every fiber. He might curse the stars, but he was aware of their brilliance. He might curse the earth that would one day take his lifeless body, but he must know its immense fecundity. A man in revolt, in despair, was a healthy man.

But despair was so futile. Ah, there it was! Life's futility. It was the sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility, spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him of his youth was a belief in G.o.d. At sea he was too close to the immense mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to believe, not to accept him as an incontrovertible fact.

But the G.o.d of degenerate peoples, the antagonistic, furious, implacable G.o.d--that was a ridiculous conception. A cheap, a vain one. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the G.o.ds." Wasn't that how Shakspere's blind king had uttered it? "They kill us for their sport." How strangely flattering--to believe that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, his poor natural functions!

And as to the G.o.d of the optimists, how ridiculous, too. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." So pathetic! They never saw that they did want. That for every well-filled body, there were a hundred haggard men.

They thought of him as benevolent, firm but benevolent, like Mr.

Gladstone. To them he was an infinitely superior vestryman with a tremendous power for dispensing coal and food to the poor. And the poor devils were so patient, so loyal. And so stupid; they thought that much flattery, much fear, would move Him. Their conception never even rose to considering G.o.d as a gentleman, despising flattery and loathing fear.

Poor, poor devils!

To Shane He existed, though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will.

Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. He had so much brains....

It seemed to Shane that this optimism, this despair were strange mental drugs, going through the mental system as a depressant or a stimulant would go through the physical, creating illusions ... illusions ... and the sane man was one who had no illusions, not the meaning a man uses of the phrase when he has been jilted by a woman or wronged out of money by a friend, but actually, finitely, no illusions.... He was sane, a few other men in the world must be sane, but the rest were drugged for their h.e.l.l or their Fiddlers' Green....

Fiddlers' Green! Good G.o.d! Fiddlers' Green!

His mind flashed back a moment to the s.h.i.+ning isle, the green sward, the singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself.

Symbols were barren algebraic formulae. Not enchanters' words. No light.

No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers--no more!

It wasn't his past that was dead. The past lived. It was he was dead, he, his present, his future.

Out of the gray caverns of his head came a thin echo of a word he had known and he a boy. The Valley of the Black Pig. A phrase from some old folk-tale heard on a wintry Antrim coast. Some prophecy of old wives that when the Boar without Bristles would appear in the Valley of the Black Pig, then the end of all things was nigh.... He had a faint memory that somewhere in Roscommon was the Valley of the Black Pig.... But that didn't matter; what mattered was the memory it evoked.... Gray, gray, gray.... Gray hills, gray boulders, gray barren trees, a gray mist sluggishly rising from the ground, and a gray drizzle of rain, falling, so slowly.... And gray rotting leaves beneath his feet.... A little wind that moaned among the boulders, and the cawing of unseen, horrible birds.... Neither was there direction, nor time, nor s.p.a.ce....

Everything gray like the grayness of old women's bodies.... There was no sun, and the moon abhorred the valley. In such a place as this wandered the souls of women who had killed their children, of monks who at dark of night had said the Black Ma.s.s.... Here were masters who had deserted tall, gallant s.h.i.+ps.... Hither witches rode on the bleak east wind, to be flogged by their masters and horribly caressed.... The Valley of the Black Pig.... Here were those who had read the frightful inscription on the altar of the Unknown G.o.d ... Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, and Avicenna; Nicolas Flamel and his wife Petronella; Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, and Gerald of Desmond, the Great Earl; and newer names, Dee and Edward Kelly.... Degraded majesty with soiled beards.... Gray, gray.... And the faint ghosts in cerecloths, and the horrible shapes of the mist.... The drizzle of the rain, and the rustle of the Feet of the Goat.... The cawing of strange birds and the wind among the boulders and souls, weeping, weeping--unhoping, undespairing, weeping, weeping.... The Valley of the Black Pig....

What was it? In G.o.d's name what was it that had made him this way, his being suddenly lifeless, like a cow that goes dry, or a field that is mysteriously, suddenly fallow.... And weariness seemed immortal.... What had led him into this dreadful cemetery of the mind? Had he gone too far in thought and emotion and come to a dreadful desert plane within himself ...? Had he eaten of the tree of which the cabalist wrote:

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Had he blundered on it unwittingly, eaten ignorantly and surely died?...

Or was he going mad? Good G.o.d! Could that be it? Was there something they hadn't told him--a strange taint in his blood, or his mother's blood.... Would he end his days in a madhouse.... What a fate, what a dreadful fate! A slavering gray-headed man, wandering through the Valley of the Black Pig, forever and forever?

Better to end it now.

Yes, but would that end it? The material envelope of cells and fluids gone, might there not ...? Christ! Worse off yet, if anything were left.... There might be something left; there was the trouble.... One knew so little, so abominably little.... Only material wisdom was certain, and that said: Don't chance it....

Drink? He had his men to think of, his s.h.i.+p.... It might grip him.

But was he forever doomed to this mournful weeping place, place of rain, place of mists, gray boulders, and moaning winds? Must he abide in the Valley of the Black Pig until the Boar without Bristles came lumbering out of the red west, and went grunting, eating ravenously, eating prey of souls, until he lay down in obscene sleep, and the stars one by one guttered like candles, and the sun shot into a vast explosion, and the moon was a handful of peat ashes, and the whole great universe snapped like a gunshot and the debris of all created things fell downward like a shattered wall, faster, faster, faster, to where, where, where?

-- 7

In the streets now the June snow fell, not the soft and flaky petals of the North, but a bitter steel-like snow, that whirled. And the winds of the pampas hurried like Furies through the sordid streets, and stopped to snarl, as a dog snarls, and now moaned, and now howled sharply, as a wolf howls. There was something cold, malignant, about it all ... Old Irish writers said that h.e.l.l was cold. _An Ait Fuar_, they called it, the Cold Place. _Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan ghaire_, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in winter on his voyage to Hy Brazil, and thought in his navete that here was h.e.l.l ...? And was he wrong?

Cold of wolves! It must have been like this in ancient Paris when Villon thieved and sang, and the wolves came clamoring at the gates ... and the crusaders in warm Palestine.... Or in Russia--Siberia, a cold name....

Here it was h.e.l.l, but in Europe ... oh, different there! The heavy flakes, so solid, so wonderful, the laden trees, the great stretch of white. And in the houses the farmers blessing the snow, that would keep the ground warm and fertile for the coming year, that the blue flax might arise, and the fields of corn, with the great pleasance of the clover, and the golden-belted bees.... And the turf fires of Ulster, and Christmas coming, and after that Candlemas, and then March of the plowing, and glossy crows busy in the fields.... Always something to see ahead.... Not in Ireland only, but England, the jingle of bells and the people of ruddy faces.... And in Germany, too, the bluff important burghers having their houses heated by quaint porcelain stoves, huddling themselves in furs, and waddling obesely.... Very pleasant.... And in France, too, in the _a.s.sommoirs_, the tang of wine in the air and the blue hue of smoke, excited Latin voices. "_Encore un bock! T'es saoul, mon vieux! Flute! Je suis comme le Pont Neuf!_" A raucous voice singing a political skit:

Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?

Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?

Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!

Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!

Buenos Aires, h.e.l.l!

And the worst was the strange inversion of time. Here winter was, cold streets, steely snow, garbage frozen to stone.... And in Europe was sane June. Purple flower of the heather in Ulster, and white flower of the bogs, and in the little bays of Antrim, men spearing flounders from boats in the long summer evenings. And the bairns hame from school, with a' their wee games, fis.h.i.+ng for sticky-backs wi' pins, and the c.u.mmers spinning. Eigh, Ulster! And in England, they punting on the Thames, among the water-lilies. Soft Norman days, and in Germany the young folks going to the woods.... In Buenos Aires, h.e.l.l!

Within the house a cold that the little fire could only gallantly fight against. Without, cold of wolves.

"Hedda, you come from a cold country. Tell me, is it like this in Sweden, any time?"

She was sitting in the candle-light, doing the needlework she took such quietness in. Her firm white hands moving rhythmically, her body steady, her eyes a-dream. It was hard ever to think that she was--what she was.

It was hard for him to think the word now, knowing her. She looked up and smiled.

"No, Shane, not like this. It's cold, very cold. But very beautiful. By day the country-side is quiet, white, ascetic, like some young nun. And at night there are lights and jollity. It is like a child's idea of fairy-land. One wishes one were further north, where the reindeer are.

One is not enemy to the cold, as you are here. One accepts it. It has dignity. Here it is naked, malevolent. That's the difference."

"Naked, with awful hands.... A cold that seizes...."

"Yes, Shane." She took up her work again. "Sometimes I think long until I get back to Sweden."