Mary Johnston - Foes

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Ian and Alexander stood upon trodden earth and grass, about them the
yet encumbering ruins of an ancient building, pillars and architraves
and capitals, broken friezes and headless caryatids. Here was the
river, here the ancient street. They breathed in the air, they looked
at the sky, but then at Rome. Somewhere a trumpet was fiercely crying.
Like an impatient hand, like a spurred foot, it tore the magician's
fabric of the past few hours.

Ian laughed. "We had best rub our eyes!" To the fine hearing there was
a catch of the breath, a small dancing hope in his laughter. "_Or,
Glenfernie, shall we dream on?_"

But the other opened his eyes upon things like the Kelpie's Pool and
the old room in the keep where a figure like himself read letters that
lied. He saw in many places a figure like himself, injured and fooled,
stuck full of poisoned arrows. The figure grew as he watched it, until
it overloomed him, until he was passionately its partisan. He said no
word, but he flung the smoking torch yet held in hand among the ruins,
and, leaving Ian and his black and silver, plunged down the slope to
the old, old street along which now poured a wave of carnival.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The laird of Glenfernie lay in the flowering grass, beneath a
pine-tree, rising lonely from the Roman Campagna. The grass flowed for
miles, a multitudinous green speculating upon other colors, here and
there clearly donning a gold, an amethyst, a blue. The pine-tree
looked afar to other pine-trees. Each seemed solitary. Yet all had the
oneness of the great stage, and if it could comprehend the stage might
swim with its little solitariness into a wider uniqueness. In the
distance lay Rome. He could see St. Peter's dome. But around streamed
the ocean of grass and the ocean of air. Lifted from the one, bathed
in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome.
There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among
time-cleansed bones and vestiges. Rome and its Campagna were like
Sargasso Seas and held the hulks of what had been great galleons. The
air swam above endless grass, endless minute flowers. In long
perspective traveled the arches of an Aqueduct.

He lay in the shadow of a broken tomb. It was midspring. The bland
stillness of this world was grateful to him, after long inner storm.
He lay motionless, not far from the skirts of Contemplation.

The long line of the Aqueduct, arch after arch, succession fixed,
sequence which the gaze made unitary, toled on his thought. He was
regarding span after span of imagery held together, a very wide and
deep landscape of numerous sequences, more planes than one. He was
seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around
the organ the luminous mist of the organism. He passed calmly from one
great landscape to another.

Rome. To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow. The
"to-morrow" put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless
breathing. He saw Rome the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast
animal life of her, the vast passional, the mental clutch and
hammer-blow. The spiritual Rome? He sought it--it must be there. At
last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....
Rome.

If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and
floating. He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to. Like
and like, and synthesis of syntheses! Images, finding that of which
they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line,
their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of
riddles never meant to be answered.... He had a great fund of images,
material so full that it must begin to build higher. Building higher
meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.

He lay still among the grasses, and it was as though he lay also amid
the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living. Now
and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always
momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and
space, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them. The lightning
went--but always left something transforming. And then for three years
all gleams stopped, a leaden wall that they could not pierce rearing
itself.

Latterly they had begun to return.... The proud will might rise
against them, but they came. Then it must be so, he would have said of
another, that the will was divided. Part of it must still have kept
its seat before the door whence the lights came, stayed there with its
face in its hands, waiting its season. And a part that had said no
must be coming to say yes, going and taking its place beside the other
by the door. And together they were strong enough to bring the
gleaming back, watching the propitious moment. But still there was the
opposed will, and it was strong.... When the light came it sought out
old traces of itself, and these became revivified. Then all joined
together to make a flood against the abundant darkness. A day like
this joined itself through likeness to others on the other side of the
three years, and also to moments of the months just passed and
passing. Union was made with a sleepless night in an inn of Spain,
with the hours after his encounter with Ian in the Paris theater, with
that time he sat upon the river steps and saw that the dead were
living and the prisoners free, with the hour in the amphitheater and
after, in carnival.

He saw and heard, felt and tasted, life in greater lengths and
breadths. He comprehended more of the pattern. The tones and
semi-tones fell into the long scale. Such moments brought always
elevation, deep satisfaction.... More of the will particles traveled
from below to the center by the door.

The soul turned the mind and directed it upon Alexander Jardine's own
history. It spread like a landscape, like a continent viewed from the
air, and here it sang with attainment and here it had not attained;
and here it was light, and here there were darknesses; right-doing
here and wrong-doing there and every shade between. He saw that there
was right- and wrong-doing quite outside of conventional standards.

Where were frontiers? The edges of the continent were merely spectral.
Where did others end and he begin, or he end and others begin? He saw
that his history was very wide and very deep and very high. Through
him faintly, by nerve paths in the making, traveled the touch of
oneness.

Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and
all others.

There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light,
Buddha in light. The glorified--the unified. _Union._

Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and
all others. _For we are members, one of another._

The feathered, flowered grass, miles of it, and the sea of air.... By
degrees the level of consciousness sank. The splendid, steadfast
moment could not be long sustained. Consciousness drew difficult
breath in the pure ether, it felt weight, it sank. Alexander moved
against the old tomb, turned, and buried his face in his arms. The
completer moment went by, here was the torn self again. But he strove
to find footing on the thickening impressions of all such moments.

Moving back to Rome, along the old way where had marched all the
legions, by the ruins, under the blue sky, he had a sense of going
with Caesar's legions, step by step, targe by targe, and then of his
footstep halting, turning out, breaking rhythm.... From this it was
suddenly a winter night and at Glenfernie, and he sat by the fire in
his father's death-room. His father spoke to him from the bed and he
went to his side and listened to dying words, distilled from a wide
garden that had relaxed into bitterness, growths, and trails of ideal
hatred.... _What was it, setting one's foot upon an adder?... What was
the adder?_

He entered the city. His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a
recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender
of these and merchant to whom would buy. The man was artist besides,
maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought.

Glenfernie liked him--an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed,
subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage. No great custom came to the
shop in front; the owner of it might work all day in the room behind,
with only two or three peals of a small silvery summoning bell. The
lodger acquired the habit of sitting for perhaps an hour out of each
twenty-four in this workroom. He might study at the window gem or coin
and the finish of old designs, or he might lift and look at sheet
after sheet of the man's drawings, or watch him at his work, or have
with him some talk.

The drawings had a fascination for him. "What did you mean behind this
outward meaning? Now here I see this, and I see that, but here I don't
penetrate." The man laid down his mending a broken Eros and came and
stood by the table and spoke. Glenfernie listened, the wood propping
elbow, the hand propping chin, the eyes upon the drawing. Or he leaned
back in the great visitor's chair and looked instead at the draftsman.
They were strange drawings, and the draftsman's models were not
materially visible.

To-day Glenfernie came from the noise of Rome without into this room.
His host was sitting before a drawing-board. Alexander stood and
looked.

"Are you trying to bring the world of the plane up a dimension? Then
you work from an idea above the world of the solid?"

"_Si._ Up a dimension."

"What are these forms?"

"I am dreaming the new eye, the new ear, the new hand."

Glenfernie watched the moving and the resting hand. Later in the day
he returned to the room.

"It has been a fertile season," said the artist. "Look!"

At the top of a sheet of paper was written large in Latin, LOVE IS
BLIND. Beneath stood a figure filled with eyes. "It is the same
thing," said the man.

The next day, at sunset, going up to his room after restless wandering
in this city, he found there from Ian another intimation of the
latter's movements:

GLENFERNIE,--I am going northward. There will be a
month spent at monseigneur's villa upon the Lake of Como.
Then France again.--IAN RULLOCK.

Alexander laid the paper upon the table before him, and now he stared
at it, and now he gazed at space beyond, and where he gazed seemed
dark and empty. It was deep night when finally he dipped quill into
ink and wrote:

IAN RULLOCK,--Stay or go as you will! I do not
follow you now as I did before. I come to see the crudeness,
the barrenness, of that. But within--oh, are you not my
enemy still? I ask Justice that, and what can she do but
echo back my words? "Within" is a universe.--ALEXANDER
JARDINE.

Five days later he knew that Ian with the Frenchman in whose company
he was had departed Rome. On that morning he went again without the
city and lay among the grasses. But the sky to-day was closed, and all
dead Rome that had been proud or violent or a lover of self seemed to
move around him multitudinous. He fought the shapes down, but the sea
in storm then turned sluggish, dead and weary.... What was he going to
do? Scotland? Was he going back to Scotland? The glen, the moor, White
Farm and the kirk, Black Hill and his own house--all seemed cold and
without tint, gray, small, and withered, and yet oppressive. All that
would be importunate, officious. He cried out, "O my God, I want
healing!" For a long time he lay there still, then, rising, went
wandering by arches and broken columns, choked doorways, graved slabs
sunken in fairy jungles. Into his mind came a journey years before
when he had just brushed a desert. The East, the Out-of-Europe, called
to him now.

CHAPTER XXIX

Ian guided the boat to the water steps. Above, over the wall, streamed
roses, a great, soundless fall of them, reflected, mass and color, in
the lake. Above the roses sprang deep trees, shade behind shade, and
here sang nightingales. Facing him sat the Milanese song-bird, the
singer Antonia Castinelli. She had the throat of the nightingale and
the beauty of the velvety open rose.

"Why land?" she said. "Why climb the steps to the chatter in the
villa?"

"Why indeed?"

"They are not singing! They are talking. There is deep, sweet shadow
around that point."

The boat turned glidingly. Now it was under tall rock, parapeted with
trees.

"Let Giovanni have the boat. Come and sit beside me! You are too far
away for singing together."

Old Giovanni at the helm, boatman upon this lake since youth, used
long since to murmuring words, to touching hands, stayed brown and
wrinkled and silent and unspeculative as a walnut. Perhaps his mind
was sunk in his own stone hut behind vine leaves. The two under the
rose-and-white-fringed canopy leaned toward each other.

"Tell me of your strange, foreign land! Have you roses
there--roses--roses? And nightingales that sing out your heart under
the moon?"

"I will tell you of the heather, the lark, and the mavis."

She listened. "Oh, it does not taste as tastes this lake! Give me
pain! Tell me of women you have loved.... Oh, hear! The nightingales
stop singing."

"Do you ever listen to the silence?"

"Of course ... when a friend dies--or I go to Mass--and sometimes when
I am singing very passionately. But this lake--"

She began to sing. The contralto throbbed, painted, told, brought
delight and melancholy. He sat with his hand loosened from hers, his
eyes upon the lake's blue-green depths. At last she stopped.

"Oh--h!... Let us go back to the talking shore and the chattering
villa! Somebody else is singing--somebody or something! I hear
silence--I hear it in the silence.... Some things I can sing against,
and some things I can't."

They went underneath the wall of roses. Her arm, sleeved as with mist,
touched his; her low, wide brow and great liquid eyes were at his
shoulder, at his breast. "O foreigner--and yet not at all foreign!
Tell me your English words for roses--walls of roses--and music that
never ceases in the night--and pleasing, pleasing, pleasing love!"

The boat came to the water steps. The two left it, climbing between
flowers. Down to them came a wave of laughter and hand-clapping.

"Celestina recites--but I do not think she does it so well!... That
is my window--see, where the roses mount!"

The company, flowing forth, caught them upon the terrace. "Lo, the
truants!"

But that night, instead of climbing where the roses climbed, he took a
boat from the number moored by the steps and rowed himself across the
lake to a piece of shore, bare of houses, lifting by steep slope and
crag into the mountain masses. He fastened the boat and climbed here.
The moon was round, the night merely a paler day. He went up among low
trees and bushes until he came to naked rock. He climbed here as far
as he might, found some manner of platform, and threw himself down,
below him the lake, around him the mountains.

He lay still until the expended energy was replaced. At last the mind
moved and, apprentice-bound to feeling, began again a hot and heavy
and bitter work, laid aside at times and then renewed. It was upon the
vindication to himself of Ian Rullock.

It was made to work hard.... Its old task used to be to keep asleep
upon the subject. But now for a considerable time this had been its
task. Old feeling, old egoism, awakened up and down, drove it hard! It
had to make bricks without straw. It had to fetch and carry from the
ends of the earth.

Emotion, when it must rest, provided for it a dull place of
listlessness and discontent. But the taskmaster now would have it up
at all hours, fashioning reasons and justifications. The soonest found
straw in the fields lay in the faults of others--of the world in
general and Alexander Jardine in particular. Feeling got its anodyne
in gloating over these. It had the pounce of a panther for such a
bitter berry, such a weed, such a shameful form. It did not always
gloat, but it always held up and said, _Who could be weaker here--more
open to question?_ It made constant, sore comparison.

The lake gleamed below him, the herded mountains slept in a gray
silver light. How many were the faults of the laird of Glenfernie!
Faults! He looked at the dark old plains of the moon. That was a light
word! He saw Alexander pitted and scarred.

Pride! That had always been in the core of Glenfernie. That has been
his old fortress, walled and moated against trespass. Pride so high
that it was careless--that its possessor could seem peaceable and
humble.... But find the quick and touch it--and you saw! What was his
was his. What he deemed to be his, whether it was so or not! Touch him
there and out jumped jealousy, hate, and implacableness--and all the
time one had been thinking of him as a kind of seer!

Ian turned upon the rock above Como. And Glenfernie was ignorant! The
seer had seen very little, after all. His touch had not been precisely
permeative when it came to the world, Ian Rullock. If liking meant
understanding, there had not been much understanding--which left
liking but a word. If liking was a degree of love, where then had been
love, where the friend at all? After all, and all the time,
Glenfernie's notion of friendship was a sieve. The notion that he had
held up as though it were the North Star!

The world, Ian Rullock, could not be so contemned....

He felt with heat and pain the truth of that. It was a wrong that
Glenfernie should not understand! The world, Ian Rullock, might be
incomplete, imperfect--might have taken, more than once, wrong turns,
left its path, so to speak, in the heavens. But what of the world,
Alexander Jardine? Had it no memories? He brooded over what these
memories might be--must be; he tried to taste and handle that other's
faults in time and space. But he could not plunge into Alexander's
depths of wrath. As he could not, he made himself contemptuous of all
that--of Old Steadfast's power of reaction!

A star shot across the moon-filled night, so large a meteor that it
made light even against that silver. A mass within Ian made a slow
turn, with effort, with thrilling, changed its inclination. He saw
that disdain, that it was shallow and streaked with ebony. He moved
with a kind of groan. "Was there--is there--wickedness?... What, O
God, is wickedness?"

He pressed the rock with his hand--sat up. The old taskmaster,
alarmed, gathered his forces. "I say that it is just that--pride,
vengefulness, hard misunderstanding!"

A voice within him answered. "Even so, is it not still yourself?"

He stared after the meteor track. There was a conception here that he
had not dreamed of.

It seemed best to keep still upon the rock. He sat in inner wonder.
There was a sense of purity, of a fresh coolness not physical, of
awe. He was in presence of something comprehensive, immortal.

"Is it myself? Then let it pour out and make of naught the old poison
of myself!"

The perception could not hold. It flagged and sank, echoing down into
the caves. He sat still and felt the old taskmaster stir. But this
time he found strength to resist. There resulted, not the divine
novelty and largeness of that one moment, but a kind of dim and bare
desert waste of wide extent. And as it ate up all width, so it seemed
timeless. Across this, like a person, unheralded, came and went two
lines from "Richard III"

Clarence is come--false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury.

It went and left awareness of the desert.
"False--fleeting--perjured...."

He saw himself as in mirrors.

The desert ached and became a place of thorns and briers and
bewilderment. Then rose, like Antaeus, the taskmaster. "_And what of
all that--if I like life so?_"

Sense of the villa and the roses and the nightingales in the
coverts--sense of wide, mobile sweeps and flowing currents inwashing,
indrawing, pleasure-crafts great and small--desire and desire for
desire--lust for sweetness, lust for salt--the rose to be plucked, the
grapes to be eaten--and all for self, all for Ian....

He started up from the rock above Como, and turned to descend to the
boat. That within him that set itself to make thin cloud of the
taskmaster pulled him back as by the hair of the head and cast him
down upon the rocky floor.

He lay still, half upon his face buried in the bend of his arm. He
felt misery.

"My soul is sick--a beggar--like to become an outcast!"

How long he lay here now he did not know. The nadir of night was
passed, but there was cold and voidness, an abyss. He felt as one
fallen from a great height long ago. "There is no help here! Let me
only go to an eternal sleep--"

A wind began. In the east the sky grew whiter than elsewhere. There
came a sword-blow from an unseen hand, ripping and tearing veils.
_Elspeth--Elspeth Barrow!_

In a bitterness as of myrrh he came into touch with cleanness, purity,
wholeness. Henceforth there was invisible light. Its first action was
not to show him scorchingly the night of Egypt, but with the quietness
of the whitening east to bring a larger understanding of Elspeth.

CHAPTER XXX

The caravan, having spent three days in a town the edge of the desert,
set forth in the afternoon. The caravan was a considerable one. Three
hundred camels, more than a hundred asses, went heavily laden. Twenty
men rode excellent horses; ten, poorer steeds; the company of others
mounted with the merchandise or, staff in hand, strode beside. In safe
stretches occurred a long stringing out, with lagging at the rear; in
stretches where robber bands or other dangers might be apprehended
things became compact. Besides traders and their employ, there rode or
walked a handful of chance folk who had occasion for the desert or for
places beyond it. These paid some much, some little, but all something
for the advantage of this convoy. The traders did not look to lose,
whoever went with them. Altogether, several hundred men journeyed in
company.

The elected chief of the caravan was a tall Arab, Zeyn al-Din. Twelve
of the camels were his; he was a merchant of spices, of wrought stuff,
girdles, and gems--a man of forty, bold and with scope. He rode a fine
horse and kept usually at the head of the caravan. But now and again
he went up and down, seeing to things. Then there was talking, loud
or low, between the head man and units of the march.

Starting from its home city, this caravan had been for two days in
good spirits. Then had become to creep in disaster, not excessive, but
persistent. One thing and another befell, and at last a stealing
sickness, none knew what, attacking both beast and man. They had made
the town at the edge of the desert. Physicians were found and rest
taken. Recuperation and trading proceeded amicably together. The day
of departure wheeling round, the noontide prayer was made with an
especial fervor and attention. Then from the _caravanserai_ forth
stepped the camels.

The sun descending, the caravan threw a giant shadow upon the sand.
Ridge and wave of sterile earth broke it, confused it, made it an
unintelligible, ragged, moving, and monstrous shade. The sun was red
and huge. As it lowered to the desert rim Zeyn al-Din gave the order
for the seven-hour halt. The orb touched the sand; prayer carpets were
spread.

Night of stars unnumbered, the ineffable tent, arched the desert. The
caravan, a small thing in the world, lay at rest. The meal was over.
Here was coolness after heat, repose after toil. The fires that had
been kindled from scrub and waste lessened, died away. Zeyn al-Din
appointed the guards for the night, went himself the rounds.

Where one of the fires had burned he found certain of those men who
were not merchants nor servants of merchants, yet traveled with the
caravan. Here were Hassan the Scribe, and Ali the Wanderer, and the
dervish Abdallah, and others. Here was the big Christian from some
outlandish far-away country, who had dwelt for the better part of a
year in the city whence the caravan started, who had money and a wish
to reach the city toward which the caravan journeyed. In the first
city he had become, it seemed, well liked by Yusuf the Physician, that
was the man that Zeyn al-Din most admired in life. It was Yusuf who
had recommended the Christian to Zeyn, who did not like infidel
sojourners with caravans. Zeyn himself was liberal and did not so much
mind, but he had had experience with troubles created along the way
and in the column itself. The more ignorant or the stiffer sort
thought it unpleasing to Allah. But Zeyn al-Din would do anything
really that Yusuf the Physician wanted. So in the end the big
Christian came along. Zeyn, interpreting fealty to Yusuf to mean care
in some measure for this infidel's well-being, began at once with a
few minutes' riding each day beside him. These insensibly expanded to
more than a few. He presently liked the infidel. "He is a man!" said
Zeyn and that was the praise that he considered highest. The big
Christian rode strongly a strong horse; he did not fret over small
troubles nor apparently fear great ones; he did not say, "This is my
way," and infer that it was better than others; he liked the red
camel, the white, and the brown. "Who dances with the sand is not
stifled," said Zeyn.

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