CHAPTER. III

Half an hour later, Malchus was walking home, followed by his servant. It was the moment of the false dawn. In that pale, watery air, the familiar streets had changed their nature; they were hollow and desolate, the humanity frozen out of them. No mortal hands had made them; they had been grooved and sculptured by the slow labor of natural forces, like the channels of some deep-sunk, faintly luminous coral reef. In marble walls and colonnades, as they loomed up toward the walking Malchus, there was a dull, milky glow as though a veiled flame lurked within their substance. Overhead, stars showed their faint, frosty sparkle, in a limpid steel-blue sky. Not a breath rustled the palm trees and the tall rose-bays whose fantastic shapes spired up above the garden walls; but as he passed an iron gate his sense was caught by the subtle perfume of a flowering jasmine, which spread its invisible snare across his path, and his heart suddenly contracted with pain.

Further on, as he turned a corner, a faint draught smelling of the sea touched his face, and he saw beneath him, like two polished shields, the glimmering expanse of the two harbors with the Island of Pharos spread along their further rim in a long violet mound on which, here and there, a light twinkled. Far in the distance, from two different quarters, bright shafts of sound shot upward alternatively and were lost; two cocks were challenging each other in the silence, and Malchus felt that if he had opened his lips and spoken out aloud the passionate appeals which oppressed his heart, he would have heard, after a moment of listening, the voice of Helena answering him far and clear across the city....

"Helena, my beloved, listen to me at least, before you leave me. I cannot live without you any more than a man can live without his own heart. Though I still speak and move my limbs like other men, the soul within me is dying as surely as the body dies. I am the empty shell of a man, a moving cenotaph filled only with misery. Be merciful, beloved, even if you no longer love me. It cannot be that I have no meaning for you, no part in you, or how should I feel this intensity of pain? Helena, I could be content, even if you never spoke to me nor looked at me, if only you would give your body back to me. My mind, my senses are full of you; they have forgotten everything else. My sense of touch remembers only the shape and smoothness and warmth of your body, my sight its lines and curves and colors. They are burned into me, branded indelibly. Even when I die they will remain; and if, when all our generation is dead, men open my coffin, they will find not my decaying body, but yours, perfect and warm and ready to awake from sleep."

The cocks had ceased to crow; silence, like a clear and fragile bubble, inclosed the whole world. Then pure and small from the eastward came the voice of Helena:

"My foolish Malchus! I have been waiting for you ever since I left the feast of Diocles. Do you not remember how I always loved to tease you? You used to praise me for it afterward, because of the wonderful renewal of our love which always came with our reconciliation. And so, during this last month I have only been playing with you. Did you imagine that I could exchange that stupid young Heronion for you whom I have loved so long? Come back, my foolish one: I will not torment you any longer."

A sparrow fluttered from the wall above him and Malchus awoke to find that in the preoccupation of his daydream he had stopped and was now leaning against the pillar of a porch. His servant was standing a few paces behind him, surprised and troubled by his strange behavior. The houses were now clearly visible; each had taken on its familiar individuality. Color had come back into the trees and the flowers which festooned the walls and porticoes and heaped their mounds of color about the fountains in the squares. In half an hour the sun would rise. Malchus, the pain at his heart dulled a little by his hopeless imaginings, went on his way and, entering the house in which he had lived ever since, four years ago, he had left the home of his parents, lay down on his bed.....

He slept for five hours and awoke to confused memories of dreams. His mind, still unresigned to despair, had projected its agony into visionary struggles. At first he could remember nothing clearly, but his heart retained, like a scar, a sense of thwartings, disappointments, huge obstacles encountered but never overcome. Then details began to return to him. Helena, vivid and desirable as in her most ardent moments, had leaned to him with outstretched arms from an upper window, and knowing that he was on the brink of the solution of all his miseries, he had hurried to the door of the house. It opened and he entered. But indoors the house was empty and ruinous and he never found the upper chamber from which Helena had leaned. He wandered from room to room vainly seeking for her, but whenever he tried to get out of a room the door had vanished and he searched desperately along walls of solid stone. Once Helena's voice called him clearly and urgently from the next room, and after desperate gropings for an exit he climbed perilously up the face of the wall, clinging to projecting stones, and, pulling himself up to the top, dropped over the other side. But there he found himself in another doorless inclosure. Again Helena's voice called to him, but further away now, and the same terrible struggle began again. It seemed to him now, as he sat on the edge of his bed, a relief to have escaped from that frenzied striving. His waking mind was frozen and empty. The fire had gone out of his pain now; it had become a cold, dull ache, and he remembered Diocles' phrase of "a fire that had burned itself out." But with the name of Diocles, the memory of last night's feast returned and Malchus found that an unappeasable hatred of that life of refined luxury had entered into him. Its hollowness—the trivial culture, the aimless contentment, the mumming and miming, the little rules for gestures and speech which formed its code of good manners—sickened him. He knew that he could never take part in it again, but he did not realize that this sudden fierceness against a mode of life which he had willingly tolerated for years was merely the blind vengeance of his shattered passions....

The process of bathing and dressing seemed to him now a tedious thing, but it was a thing which had become a part of his life and he submitted to it and controlled his anger at the restless movements of the slaves about him, enduring patiently until they should have finished.

At last it was ended; but with nothing more to distract and anger him, he found himself face to face again with the awful emptiness of his life. A sudden bitterness, like a poisonous spring, flooded his soul at the thought that there was no longer any motive for this careful cleansing and beautifying. In the old days, this moment of the completion of his toilet had been full of delightful anticipation. Refreshed and invigorated by sleep and with the heaviness of sleep dispelled and body and mind warm and tingling from the touch of warm water and the unguents with which he had been rubbed, he had contemplated the day that lay before him with an ever renewed sense of adventure. During the last two years his love affair with Helena had raised this daily pleasure to an ecstasy, for then he had known that each day held for him the delicious and almost magical renewal of their love.

It was some months ago that he had first become aware of a change in their relations. In what the change consisted he could not exactly have said: a faint, indefinable discord had sounded through the perfect harmony of their love. From that moment their ardor had declined until Helena's feeling for him had passed from indifference to something not far from hatred. How had it started? Malchus did not know. But of this, at least, he was sure—it had not started with him. No sooner had he asserted this than a doubt rang a small silver bell in his mind and he became conscious of things which he had not admitted to himself before—of little failures, disappointments, wearinesses which had begun, some months ago, to creep into his rapture. Their passion, formerly so triumphantly effortless, had, it seemed, reached a limit which could not be passed, and from that moment it was no longer a wonderful still-renewed adventure, but a desperate reiteration of the physical. And with this flagging of their passion he had begun to be aware of a sense of stress, failure, emptiness, for which the union of their minds could not compensate. Weariness of the flesh had begun to assail him. But he had never confessed these things to Helena, for he could not have expressed them in words; and, even if he had been able to, he would not have dared, for, in spite of them, he still desired her. His desire possessed him like a hunger, undiminished, and as he watched her gradually receding from him the hunger only became the more fierce. No, his love had not diminished; it was hers that had failed them. And as he again came round to the unendurable thought that Helena no longer loved him, bitterness overwhelmed him and he sat staring again at the empty desolation of his life. By degrees he came to feel that all love of women was a hateful thing, a thing of feverish and restless longing whose brief fulfillment always fell short of the hoped-for ecstasy. Perhaps the weak and clumsy body was incapable of achieving that passion of which the soul dreamed.

He thought of older loves in the days before he had met Helena, and he told himself now, in his cold, clear-sighted mood, that his love for Helena was not the supreme passion of his life. It was merely one of many. Each of his loves in turn he had proclaimed to be the supreme passion; that was the illusion by which the fancy always strove to cheat the soul into a disregard of the sure disappointment. Each, as he saw it now, had begun with this parade of flattering delusions, this intoxication which turned a girl into a creature of more than mortal perfection and a brief quickening of the pulses into an undying ecstasy, and he recalled the heartache of that first moment when his eyes met the cold eyes of disillusion, the sickening weariness of the attempt to pretend that all was still as wonderful as it had been before. Yes, it was hateful and vile, this itch for the impossible which no experience could cure. Yet even if the dream were realized, what would it be worth? An ecstasy of sensation made permanent would be an agony, a destruction for both body and soul; it would be a thing more terrible than this disillusionment and disgust which tortured him now....

It was the hour when he had been in the habit of listening to music or the reading of poetry or philosophy, and now his musicians and the Greek who was his reader approached to receive his orders. He sent the musicians away, for he could not have endured the emotional excitement of even the most sober music, but he retained his reader, who began to unroll the epic poem from which, during the last week, he had been reading to Malchus every morning. But Malchus waved it away.

"Not poetry to-day, Chalchas," he said. "Read me rather some philosophy; but not at length, for I cannot attend to arguments to-day. Read me fragments—passages which will soothe me and help to banish thought. I cannot choose. Choose, yourself, what you think best."

The slave went out and returned with two or three books and a stool, and seating himself near Malchus's chair, he unrolled one of the books and began to read. At first Malchus understood nothing. He could not detach his attention from the pulsing nerve of his misery and he heard only the gentle inflexions of the reading voice and the flights of words which dispersed like flocks of sparrows, uncontrolled by any connecting sense. Then with an effort he forced himself to focus his attention and gradually the sounds wove themselves into meaning.

"What is it you are reading about, Chalchas?" he asked.

Chalchas looked up from the scroll. "About eternity, sir," he said.

"'Hence it hastens to be in futurity'"—Malchus repeated the last phrase which still echoed in his memory. "What is it that hastens?"

"The universe, sir."

"Good. Read on from there."

Hence, read Chalchas, it hastens to be in futurity, and is not willing to stop, since it attracts existence to itself, in performing another and another thing, and is moved in a circle through a certain desire of essence. So that we have found what existence is in such natures as these, and also what the cause is of a motion which thus hastens to be perpetually in the future periods of time. But in first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future; for they are now the whole, and whatever of life they ought to possess, they wholly possess, so that they do not seek after anything, because there is not anything which can be added to them in futurity.

The voice read on, but Malchus had ceased to listen. A phrase had caught his attention and he repeated it to himself, feeling somehow a vague consolation in it. In first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future. Surely it was just in that desire of the future, the desire to continue his possession of Helena, that his present misery consisted. If only he could achieve a state of stability such as the philosopher seemed to be trying to define—a state of peaceful being instead of this endless craving for the unfulfilled. Again he focused his attention on the reading.

What then, if some one should never depart from the contemplation of eternity, but should incessantly persevere in admiring its nature, and should be able to do this through the possession of an unwearied nature; such a one, perhaps, running to eternity, would there stop and never decline from it, in order that he might become similar to it and eternal, surveying eternity, and the eternal by that which is eternal in himself.

Malchus closed his eyes. The words and ideas, only half comprehended by his reason, brought comfort to his heart. He withdrew his mind from Helena and from the pain which obsessed him and concentrated it within upon the pure awareness of being, the eternal in himself. But soon, by no will of his own, his mind had escaped and was clamoring again at the doors behind which Helena had withdrawn herself. How could philosophy help a pain like his? It was beyond the control of will. This beautiful system of thought in which mind broke from the bonds of reason and flowered into ecstasy was accessible only to untroubled minds.

We must think of the soul, Chalchas was reading, as not receiving in the body irrational desires and angers and other passions, but as abolishing all these and as having, as far as possible, no communion with the body.

Chalchas looked up and seeing that Malchus was listening attentively he unrolled more of the scroll and chose another passage.

It is not by running after external things that the soul beholds temperance and justice, but she perceives them in contemplation of herself and of that which she formerly was, and views them like statues set up in herself which time has covered with rust. Then she purifies them, even as if gold had taken unto itself life and, because it was encrusted with earth, perceived not that it was gold and knew not itself; but afterward, shaking off the earth which clung to it, had been filled with wonder to behold itself pure and alone.

As if struck by a sudden thought, Chalchas laid down the book and took up one of the others. As he unrolled it and began to search for the passage he had thought of, Malchus's eyes wandered into the court where a slim fountain leaped from a little grove of flowering plants. The fountain, he thought, was a symbol of that pure being, always vividly alive, yet always unchanging and self-sufficing, which the philosopher vainly tried to define when he wrote of eternity and the soul.

Its clear watery music soothed his sense as the voice of Chalchas had done; and as he listened the voice rose, gentle and unobtrusive, again, the words it spoke mixing with the voice of the water. Dissimilar Natures ... The Immortal and the mortal ... The spiritual and that which is deprived of spirit ... The indivisible and that which is broken by division,—the phrases danced like bubbles on the surface of Chalchas's speech, and then Malchus was once again listening attentively. For by reason of all these things there comes upon the soul mighty tumult and labor in the realms of generation, since we pursue a flying mockery which is ever in motion. And the soul, declining to a material life, kindles a light in her dark tenement the body, but she herself is lodged in obscurity; but by giving life to the body she destroys herself and her own spirit in as great a degree as these can suffer destruction. For thus the mortal nature participates in spirit, but the spiritual nature in death, and the whole becomes a prodigy, as Plato beautifully observes in his Laws, composed of the mortal and immortal, of the spiritual, and that which is deprived of the spirit. For the physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life but giver of life to the mortal body.

Malchus raised his hand as a sign that the reading should cease, and the Greek, taking up the books and the stool on which he had been sitting, retired across the court.