CHAPTER. II

The breeze which had sprung up during the night had weakened after daybreak, and now it had died away completely. It was almost noon. The men were once again sweating at the oars, but their labor would soon be over, for the southern shore of the lake was clearly in sight. Pale golden hills extending in horizontal terraces bounded the distance; along their bases the richer gold of the desert was barred by deep blue belts of palmgrove. Eastward, within a stone's throw of the ship, flights of wild-duck with their necks strained forward skimmed the face of the water. Many hours before, Malchus had awakened from a deep sleep to find himself afloat between the pale-green mirrors of sky and water in which the stars had faded to blurs of faint white radiance. He was cold and very hungry and had bought a loaf and a small mug of wine from one of the crew. He had drunk the wine and eaten a piece of the loaf, putting the remainder away into his pouch. Already it seemed an age since that early waking; to remember it in the noonday heat was to recall early spring in the height of summer. As for his previous life—the life which yesterday at this hour he was still living—it had receded into the remote past. It was as if the voyage across the lake had carried him into another world and separated him by many years from the self of yesterday. The crisis, crowned by his momentous decision, had come so suddenly....

Yet it was only a few hours ago, hardly a day and a half, that he had dined at the house of his friend Diocles, the poet. The feast had been a splendid one—splendid not only for its food and wines, but for its company and their talk. But by an hour after midnight the guests, though none of them had yet risen from his couch to depart, had long ceased to eat and, all except a few, even to drink. On the tables stood dishes of grapes, figs, and pomegranates, and crystal wine flasks and cups, but the guests had turned away from the tables, and the confused din of voices, glasses, silver, and the soft padding of the slaves' feet upon the marble floor had died down. There was no longer any general conversation, but isolated gusts of talk rose and relapsed, the tones now deep, now high, now rippling upward in a woman's laughter, like flutes, oboes, and bassoons played at random.

The host was Diocles, the poet, a splendid young man, easy mannered, imperturbable, with broad shoulders, pointed golden beard, and gray eyes which could be strangely piercing or, by a curious change, gentle and dreamy as though their gaze had been turned inward. He had been trying to engage the friend on his right in a philosophical discussion, but in vain, for Malchus replied briefly and fell back again into the gloomy abstraction in which he had passed the evening, his head propped on his right hand, his large eyes scowling at the floor. From this position he never moved except sometimes to steal a furtive glance at a woman who reclined at another table.

She was young and of an extraordinary beauty. Her profile in repose had the dreaming loveliness of a marble goddess, but when she laughed or spoke she was suddenly transformed into another creature, and, as if for the first time, the vivid colors of eyes, lips, and beautiful teeth flashed into life. Helena was her name; she was known throughout Alexandria for her beauty, her great wealth, and the proud independence of her manner of life. Both her wealth and her beauty brought her many offers of marriage, but to each she was accustomed to reply that it would be time enough to think of husbands when she had grown tired of lovers. Now she was flirting with a very young man who sprawled on the floor beside her couch and leaned his head back against its cushioned edge, gazing up at her as he talked. His head was covered with crisp golden curls and he had the full and regular features which so often accompany an amiable but stupid character. Sometimes detachedly, as though she were inspecting a fur, Helena stretched out a white arm and slowly stroked the boy's head, watching the tight curls spring up as they escaped from the weight of her moving hand. Then she would shoot a quick glance at Malchus, wrapped in his sulks, and when her eyes returned to her boy their vague and contemplative gaze showed that she was not paying the slightest attention to what he was saying.

On the next couch lay an old man with a smooth, fat face and a bald head which he wiped from time to time with a yellow silk handkerchief. The richness of his dress gave a certain majesty to a heavy and bloated body. He had the glazed eye of one who has drunk heavily and he was making vague, fumbling gestures with one hand, as if he were trying to drive away a fly. But he was not driving away a fly; he was beckoning, and at last a girl ran up and stood beside his couch. She was small and slim, with the pure, flower-like face of a child.

"Come here, Thaïs, you little imp. Why have you been avoiding me all night?" He spoke indistinctly; his consonants were causing him some trouble, and when he reached out a heavy arm the girl shrank back laughing. But soon she had submitted and sat down on his couch and allowed him to put his arm about her.

At that moment Helena rose and, as though she were the controlling force of the whole company, the sound of voices broke off sharp and everyone looked at her. She moved toward her host with the slow, exquisite poise of one to whom even walking is a conscious art. Her robe of silver tissue embroidered with blue and crimson leopards enhanced with its shining surfaces the forms and motions of her beautiful, supple body.

And with her departure everyone became aware that the feast was over. Like a soundless tide the large silence of the night, of which the guests had recently been so oblivious, subtly took possession of the room, broken rarely by a murmured phrase, a giggle of laughter from one of the girls, or the snores of a sleeping feaster which rose from time to time out of the silence, soared up gradually and formidably, and exploded with a snort which aroused the sleeper to a fretful change of position. But over each interruption the silence closed like a flood, and audible in it, as if an integral part of it, streamed the cold, airy rush of a fountain, faintly seen like a silver ghost in the deep-blue hollow of the courtyard. Softly and incessantly it hissed, a silence grown audible. But to one who listened intently, small, clear sounds emerged from the pervading hush; sometimes a tiny spark shot with a crackle like the snapping of a cane splinter from one of the steady lamp flames and four pure musical notes made by water dripping from a leak in the fountain pipe into the basin below, repeated their little tune with monotonous persistence.

At the departure of Helena, Malchus had stirred himself on his couch with a long sigh. Her going had eased the intolerable oppression which had tormented him, as if with an insomnia of the nerves, all evening. Now he had sunk into a deep revery when a voice close beside him startled him into consciousness. "Like a fire that has burned itself out!" said the voice. It was the voice of Diocles, but when Malchus turned his head it seemed to him that Diocles had been talking to himself, for he was looking, not at him, but at the rows of feasters silent on their couches.

"What has burned itself out?" asked Malchus.

The poet turned to him. "The feast, Malchus," he said, with a gesture which included the whole room. "Look! Life here is frozen, suspended as in a marble sculpture. At every feast I am conscious of this moment when the feast has burned itself out. I watch for it, for when it comes I feel that I am seeing more deeply into this clouded pool of life. Don't ask me what I see, because I can't tell you. What I see speaks to the emotions, not to the reason, and so it can never be expressed except in poetry. But do you not feel that some larger and more enduring power has entered the room and superseded the small, isolated activities of all these helpless folk—helpless now because of drunkenness or sleep, but just as helpless when they are laughing, chattering, eating, drinking, and making love? This moment shows us human life in a truer perspective. It teaches us who are awake to it patience, resignation, love, and pity. I picture men as fish in the sea suspended in the middle waters halfway between the sea floor and the boundary of the bright upper world, and occupied solely with feeding, playing, fighting, and reproducing their kind. But when they rest from those activities the greater number sink, drawn down by their own density, to the empty darkness below; but a few, buoyed up by some bladder in the heart or brain which is filled with a divine air, float upward to the surface and afterward return to the middle waters with their heads filled with dreams of sunsparks, starlight, vast moving shadows, and a boundless dome of blue."

Diocles paused, and before he could continue, a voice broke, profanely loud, upon the stillness of the night. It was a young man who had lain long on his back, sleeping with half-open mouth and firmly grasping an empty wine cup in his right hand. He had awakened suddenly out of a drunken sleep, and was calling for wine. "Wine, boy! Wine! Come, fill up!" he shouted, hoarsely. But his shout disturbed no one and the sound of it vanished like a gaudy bird into the silence of the court. The slaves had long since fallen asleep on their bench in a corner of the hall, and even if they had been awake, the young man had turned feverishly on to his side and fallen asleep again before they could have filled his cup.

Diocles indicated the occurrence with a humorous shrug, and then, turning to Malchus, appealed to him more personally. "I wish I could teach you to be a poet, Malchus," he said.

Malchus smiled and shook his head. "The arts are not for me."

"Perhaps not. But when I said I wished to turn you into a poet I did not mean that I wished you to write poetry. God forbid! There are too many of us writing it already. I meant that I wished you to live poetically. I wish even that I could turn you into a philosopher. That at least would be a stage on the way to becoming a poet; for a philosophic creed is good as a temporary discipline, though it kills in the end. It is good while it feeds the emotions, but if we persist in it for its own sake we pinion our souls with ropes made out of withered truths. We must never allow the philosophers and sages to enslave us; on the contrary, we must use them as our servants. Nor must we allow life, any more than philosophy, to enslave us, for we must retain the mastery of our senses. The end of life is the perfect development of our faculties. If we allow life to enslave us through our senses and desires we resign the control of ourselves to blind chance and become like dead leaves in the whirlwind, helpless in the face of adversity, like you, my poor Malchus. That is what I mean by living poetically. It is something more than living philosophically. It is to be open to every influence from outside and to extend our knowledge deeper and deeper inward into our own being."

"We shall never agree, Diocles. This careful self-control which you preach is no good to me. It limits experience. How can we ever know if we shut our field of discovery within such narrow bounds? It is only by abandoning ourselves to life that we can live fully."

"And whither does your abandonment lead you, my friend? Have you been living fully to-night? No; you have spent the last six hours tortured by jealousy and despair. That is not living, it is dying. Let me be your physician. Come and live here for a month or two and I will put you through a discipline which will help you to regain control of yourself."

"Control of myself? If you could teach me how to forget myself it would be more to the purpose."

"I will teach you how to forget Helena, which will be more to the purpose still."

"How simple it seems to you, Diocles. But you, with your golden mean and your carefully ordered life, cannot realize the intensity of a passion such as mine for Helena. It is branded into my heart. What can your rules and disciplines do for that? You must not bring philosophy and poetry, but a knife, if you want to doctor me. I am done for, like a fire which has burned itself out, as you said just now with an unintentional aptness which startled me."

"Done for? But, my dear Malchus, Helena was not your first love. You recovered from the others."

"They were different. I was younger then and I did not take them so seriously."

"On the contrary, I should say that you took them more seriously because more sanely. The disaster of your affair with Helena is that you have not taken it seriously enough. Love is a perilous and explosive thing, like fire. If you do not take fire seriously it will devour life instead of warming and illuminating it."

Malchus shook his head. "In the difference between our use of the word serious, Diocles, lies the whole difference between our two minds."

"Then, in your own terms, Malchus—try to take love less seriously. Try in your next love affair to be frivolous."

"I have done with love affairs, Diocles. I am sick to death of this sort of life." He included the hall, the tables, and the recumbent guests in a sweep of the arm.

"For the moment, Malchus," Diocles assented. "But in a few weeks, when this amatory wound has healed, you will be reconciled to it once more, for whatever else this civilization of ours has done, it has at least produced the ideal mode of life for a cultured mind."

"Yes, and it is just this mode of life and this culture of the mind which I have come to hate. You are going to say, Diocles, that jealousy or love-sickness has poisoned my mind. I deny it. It has not poisoned my mind, it has opened my eyes. The life we lead is futile, both bodily and mentally. We boast of our broad-mindedness, but really we have a mind for nothing. We believe in nothing except not believing in anything. We dabble in all the religions and philosophies and select the little bits that please us from each of them, like children picking up colored shells on the beach."

"But, my dear Malchus, is not that the true wisdom? For thus we allow our minds to nourish themselves naturally, like our bodies, giving them a variety of foods and leaving it to them to select from each the vital principle and to excrete the rest. To be bound to one philosophy or one religion alone is the mark of a narrow mind."

"Only if we bind ourselves to it from idleness or cowardice, or for some such unworthy reason. But the man who has made one religion or philosophy a part of himself is not bound; he is freed. He has gained a means of self-expression and has concentrated his emotional life into a full channel instead of squandering it, as we do, in a hundred trivial driblets. We refined and cultured folk have no beliefs, no worthy enthusiasms, no prejudices."

"No prejudices? But I thought we had agreed years ago that to rid ourselves of prejudices was the first step on the path of wisdom."

"We did, Diocles; and a more foolish idea, it seems to me now, could not be conceived. Without prejudices our lives are empty, all the fury has gone out of them."

"Fury, my dear Malchus? Well, you may have my share of fury. I have no desire to return to the condition of a wild beast."

"It would be better for us if we were more like wild beasts."

"Well, you are not unlike one at present, if that is any consolation to you. But explain yourself, my friend."

"I have already said what I mean, which is that this cultured, sophisticated life takes all the vigor out of us. And not only out of our minds, but out of our bodies, too. What does it leave for our bodies to do? Nothing. We have limbs and muscles, strong and aching to be used, yet if we wish to use them we must squander their energies in some artificial occupation like games or hunting. Real life ought to tax body, mind, and soul. It should be a contest, not a series of elegant postures."

"Well, each according to his taste, my friend. But this mood of yours will pass off in time. It is simply the result of your present unhappiness. Meanwhile, since you feel the need of physical exercise, why not try a few days of this despised hunting? It would distract your mind as well as exercising your body, and if you have reasonably good sport you will soon lose sight of the artificiality of it."

The two friends had almost forgotten that they were not alone, but now a movement on one of the couches interrupted their talk. One of the girls had stirred and awakened. It was Thaïs, who had fallen asleep on old Chronius's couch. She sat up bewildered, with disheveled hair and shining eyes, lovely as a naiad rising from a pool. Then realizing her surroundings she looked down in disgust at the fat sleeping face of Chronius and, stretching out her hand to the table, she took one by one four purple grape skins from his plate and stuck them carefully on his nose, his chin, and his cheeks. Chronius shivered and opened his eyes. "Don't! Don't! They're wet!" he mumbled, making groping movements with his hands. But Thaïs held down his hands, so that he could not brush off the grape skins, and immediately he fell asleep again. Then with an indignant little shake of her shoulders she rose and, smoothing her hair with one hand, came toward Diocles and Malchus.

"Tell me, Thaïs," asked Diocles, rising as she approached and putting an arm round her shoulders, "have you enjoyed yourself?"

"No, I haven't," replied Thaïs, without hesitation.

"Then my feast has been a failure."

Thaïs looked at him intently. "That is a polite lie, Diocles. I do wish that everybody would not treat me as a child to whom one must always be offering sweets."

"But what I said was not a lie, Thaïs. I meant it."

"How could you mean it? You're not in love with me. Why, then, am I so important?"

"Because, my dear, you are young and innocent."

"Innocent?" replied Thaïs, with a wry smile.

"Yes, Thaïs, quite innocent. And youth and innocence are the most beautiful and touching things in the world. If I were told that any of these others had not enjoyed themselves—any except Gelasia, who is young and innocent like yourself, or Malchus here, who is my special friend—I should be horribly annoyed, because it would show that I had been found wanting in the art of hospitality. It would be as bad as if my poetry had been accused of technical weaknesses. But when I hear that you have not enjoyed yourself, it does not annoy me; it pains me, and it is much more serious to be pained than to be annoyed. Annoyance is of the mind, but it is the heart that is pained. But tell me why you have not enjoyed yourself."

Thaïs hung her head and was silent. After a moment she raised a face in which shone the ingenuous seriousness of youth.

"It's always the same," she said. "I never know till afterward that I have not enjoyed myself. I thought I was enjoying myself to-night."

"You were, dear child. I watched you."

"Yes, perhaps I was. I didn't mind even when that old pig Chronius beckoned me over to his couch. But he touched me and stroked me too much and I felt a sudden rage and smacked his face. Then I felt ashamed, and I was nicer to him than I wanted to be, to make up for it. However, he fell asleep soon, and suddenly I too felt sleepy, so sleepy that I just settled down against him—feeling that he was a bolster, you know, not a human being—and went off to sleep with my head on his chest. But when I woke up just now and saw where I was and saw his horrid old swollen face, I was, oh, shriveled up with disgust. That's why I stuck the grape skins on his face. It was not for fun; it was from fury, just as one might smudge an ugly painting. And now I'm going. But before I go I'll tell you one thing. You are the only man whose arm I could bear to have round me at present; and that's a very great compliment, Diocles."