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Books: Hypatia

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Hypatia




'Do not speak,' said Raphael gently, leading him to his chair again.
'I know all.'

'You know all? And are you, then, so unlike the rest of the world,
that you alone have come to visit the bereaved and the deserted in
his misery?'

'I am like the rest of the world, after all; for I came to you on my
own selfish errand, to seek comfort. Would that I could give it
instead! But the servants told me all, below.'

'And yet you persisted in seeing me, as if I could help you? Alas!
I can help no one now. Here I am at last, utterly alone, utterly
helpless. As I came from my mother's womb, so shall I return again.
My last child--my last and fairest--gone after the rest!--Thank God,
that I have had even a day's peace wherein to lay him by his mother
and his brothers; though He alone knows how long the beloved graves
may remain unrifled. Let it have been shame enough to sit here in
my lonely tower and watch the ashes of my Spartan ancestors, the
sons of Hercules himself, my glory and my pride, sinful fool that I
was! cast to the winds by barbarian plunderers .... When wilt thou
make an end, O Lord, and slay me?'

'And how did the poor boy die?' asked Raphael, in hope of soothing
sorrow by enticing it to vent itself in words.

'The pestilence.--What other fate can we expect, who breathe an air
tainted with corpses, and sit under a sky darkened with carrion
birds? But I could endure even that, if I could work, if I could
help. But to sit here, imprisoned now for months between these
hateful towers; night after night to watch the sky, red with burning
homesteads; day after day to have my ears ring with the shrieks of
the dying and the captives--for they have begun now to murder every
male down to the baby at the breast--and to feel myself utterly
fettered, impotent, sitting here like some palsied idiot, waiting
for my end! I long to rush out, and fall fighting, sword in hand:
but I am their last, their only hope. The governors care nothing
for our supplications. In vain have I memorialised Gennadius and
Innocent, with what little eloquence my misery has not stunned in
me. But there is no resolution, no unanimity left in the land. The
soldiery are scattered in small garrisons, employed entirely in
protecting the private property of their officers. The Ausurians
defeat them piecemeal, and, armed with their spoils, actually have
begun to beleaguer fortified towns; and now there is nothing left
for us, but to pray that, like Ulysses, we may be devoured the last.
What am I doing? I am selfishly pouring out my own sorrows, instead
of listening to yours.'

'Nay, friend, you are talking of the sorrows of your country, not of
your own. As for me, I have no sorrow--only a despair: which, being
irremediable, may well wait. But you--oh, you must not stay here.
Why not escape to Alexandria?'

'I will die at my post as I have lived, the father of my people.
When the last ruin comes, and Cyrene itself is besieged, I shall
return thither from my present outpost, and the conquerors shall
find the bishop in his place before the altar. There I have offered
for years the unbloody sacrifice to Him, who will perhaps require of
me a bloody one, that so the sight of an altar polluted by the
murder of His priest, may end the sum of Pentapolitan woe, and
arouse Him to avenge His slaughtered sheep! There, we will talk no
more of it. This, at least, I have left in my power, to make you
welcome. And after supper you shall tell me what brings you
hither.'

And the good bishop, calling his servant, set to work to show his
guest such hospitality as the invaders had left in his power.

Raphael's usual insight had not deserted him when, in his utter
perplexity, he went, almost instinctively, straight to Synesius.
The Bishop of Cyrene, to judge from the charming private letters
which he has left, was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless
men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet
abundantly and passionately. He lived, as Raphael had told Orestes,
in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere
pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done,
which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the
penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of
magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit;
yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching
courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical
faculty, and a very muddy speculative one--though, of course, like
the rest of the world, he was especially proud of his own weakest
side, and professed the most passionate affection for philosophic
meditation; while his detractors hinted, not without a show of
reason, that he was far more of an adept in soldiering and dog-
breaking than in the mysteries of the unseen world.

To him Raphael betook himself, he hardly knew why; certainly not for
philosophic consolation; perhaps because Synesius was, as Raphael
used to say, the only Christian from whom he had ever heard a hearty
laugh; perhaps because he had some wayward hope, unconfessed even to
himself, that he might meet at Synesius's house the very companions
from whom he had just fled. He was fluttering round Victoria's new
and strange brilliance like a moth round the candle, as he
confessed, after supper, to his host; and now he was come hither, on
the chance of being able to singe his wings once more.

Not that his confession was extracted without much trouble to the
good old man, who, seeing at once that Raphael had some weight upon
his mind, which he longed to tell, and yet was either too suspicious
or too proud to tell, set himself to ferret out the secret, and
forgot all his sorrows for the time, as soon as he found a human
being to whom he might do good. But Raphael was inexplicably
wayward and unlike himself. All his smooth and shallow persiflage,
even his shrewd satiric humour, had vanished. He seemed parched by
some inward fever; restless, moody, abrupt, even peevish; and
Synesius's curiosity rose with his disappointment, as Raphael went
on obstinately declining to consult the very physician before whom
he presented himself as patient.

'And what can you do for me, if I did tell you?'

'Then allow me, my very dear friend, to ask this. As you deny
having visited me on my own account, on what account did you visit
me?'

'Can you ask? To enjoy the society of the most finished gentleman
of Pentapolis.'

'And was that worth a week's journey in perpetual danger of death?'

'As for danger of death, that weighs little with a man who is
careless of life. And as for the week's journey, I had a dream one
night, on my way, which made me question whether I were wise in
troubling a Christian bishop with any thoughts or questions which
relate merely to poor human beings like myself, who marry and are
given in marriage.'

'You forget, friend, that you are speaking to one who has married,
and loved--and lost.'

'I did not. But you see how rude I am growing. I am no fit company
for you, or any man. I believe I shall end by turning robber-chief,
and heading a party of Ausurians.'

'But,' said the patient Synesius 'you have forgotten your dream all
this while.

'Forgotten!--I did not promise to tell it you--did I?'

'No; but as it seems to have contained some sort of accusation
against my capacity, do you not think it but fair to tell the
accused what it was?'

Raphael smiled.

'Well then .... Suppose I had dreamt this. That a philosopher, an
academic, and a believer in nothing and in no man, had met at
Berenice certain rabbis of the Jews, and heard them reading and
expounding a certain book of Solomon--the Song of Songs. You, as a
learned man, know into what sort of trumpery allegory they would
contrive to twist it; how the bride's eyes were to mean the scribes
who were full of wisdom, as the pools of Heshbon were of water; and
her stature spreading like a palm-tree, the priests who spread out
their hands when blessing the people; and the left hand which should
be under her head, the Tephilim which these old pedants wore on
their left wrists; and the right hand which should hold her, the
Mezuzah which they fixed on the right side of their doors to keep
off devils; and so forth.'

'I have heard such silly Cabbalisms, certainly.'

'You have? Then suppose that I went on, and saw in my dream how
this same academic and unbeliever, being himself also a Hebrew of
the Hebrews, snatched the roll out of the rabbis' hands, and told
them that they were a party of fools for trying to set forth what
the book might possibly mean, before they had found out what it
really did mean; and that they could only find out that by looking
honestly at the plain words to see what Solomon meant by it. And
then, suppose that this same apostate Jew, this member of the
synagogue of Satan, in his carnal and lawless imaginations, had
waxed eloquent with the eloquence of devils, and told them that the
book set forth, to those who had eyes to see, how Solomon the great
king, with his threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and
virgins without number, forgets all his seraglio and his luxury in
pure and noble love for the undefiled, who is but one; and how as
his eyes are opened to see that God made the one man for the one
woman, and the one woman to the one man, even as it was in the
garden of Eden, so all his heart and thoughts become pure, and
gentle, and simple; how the song of the birds, and the scent of the
grapes, and the spicy southern gales, and all the simple country
pleasures of the glens of Lebanon, which he shares with his own
vine-dressers and slaves, become more precious in his eyes than all
his palaces and artificial pomp; and the man feels that he is in
harmony, for the first time in his life, with the universe of God,
and with the mystery of the seasons; that within him, as well as
without him, the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth, and the voice of the turtle is heard in
the land .... And suppose I saw in my dream how the rabbis, when
they heard those wicked words, stopped their ears with one accord,
and ran upon that son of Belial and cast him out, because he
blasphemed their sacred books by his carnal interpretations. And
suppose--I only say suppose--that I saw in my dream how the poor man
said in his heart, "I will go to the Christians; they acknowledge
the sacredness of this same book; and they say that their God taught
them that 'in the beginning God made man, male and female.' Perhaps
they will tell me whether this Song of Songs does not, as it seems
to me to do, show the passage upwards from brutal polygamy to that
monogamy which they so solemnly command, and agree with me, that it
is because the song preaches this that it has a right to take its
place among the holy writings? You, as a Christian bishop, should
know what answer such a man would receive .... You are silent?
Then I will tell you what answer he seemed to receive in my dream.
"O blasphemous and carnal man, who pervertest Holy Scripture into a
cloak for thine own licentiousness, as if it spoke of man's base and
sensual affections, know that this book is to be spiritually
interpreted of the marriage between the soul and its Creator, and
that it is from this very book that the Catholic Church derives her
strongest arguments in favour of holy virginity, and the glories of
a celibate life."'

Synesius was still silent.

'And what do you think I saw in my dream that that man did when he
found these Christians enforcing, as a necessary article of
practice, as well as of faith, a baseless and bombastic metaphor,
borrowed from that very Neo-Platonism out of which he had just fled
for his life? He cursed the day he was born, and the hour in which
his father was told, "Thou hast gotten a man-child," and said,
"Philosophers, Jews, and Christians, farewell for ever and a day!
The clearest words of your most sacred books mean anything or
nothing' as the case may suit your fancies; and there is neither
truth nor reason under the sun. What better is there for a man,
than to follow the example of his people, and to turn usurer, and
money-getter, and cajoler of fools in his turn, even as his father
was before him?"'

Synesius remained a while in deep thought, and at last-

'And yet you came to me?'

'I did, because you have loved and married; because you have stood
out manfully against this strange modern insanity, and refused to
give up, when you were made a bishop, the wife whom God had given
you. You, I thought, could solve the riddle for me, if any man
could.'

'Alas, friend! I have begun to distrust, of late, my power of
solving riddles. After all, why should they be solved? What
matters one more mystery in a world of mysteries? "If thou marry,
thou hast not sinned," are St. Paul's own words; and let them be
enough for us. Do not ask me to argue with you, but to help you.
Instead of puzzling me with deep questions, and tempting me to set
up my private judgment, as I have done too often already, against
the opinion of the Church, tell me your story, and test my sympathy
rather than my intellect. I shall feel with you and work for you,
doubt not, even though I am unable to explain to myself why I do
it.'

'Then you cannot solve my riddle?'

'Let me help you,' said Synesius with a sweet smile, 'to solve it
for yourself. You need not try to deceive me. You have a love, an
undefiled, who is but one. When you possess her, you will be able
to judge better whether your interpretation of the Song is the true
one; and if you still think that it is, Synesius, at least, will
have no quarrel against you. He has always claimed for himself the
right of philosophising in private, and he will allow the same
liberty to you' whether the mob do or not.'

'Then you agree with me? Of course you do!'

'Is it fair to ask me whether I accept a novel interpretation, which
I have only heard five minutes ago, delivered in a somewhat hasty
and rhetorical form?'

'You are shirking the question,' said Raphael peevishly.

'And what if I am? Tell me, point-blank, most self-tormenting of
men, can I help you in practice, even though I choose to leave you
to yourself in speculation?'

'Well, then, if you will have my story, take it, and judge for
yourself of Christian common sense.'

And hurriedly, as if ashamed of his own confession, and yet
compelled, in spite of himself, to unbosom it, he told Synesius all,
from his first meeting with Victoria to his escape from her at
Berenice.

The good bishop, to Aben-Ezra's surprise, seemed to treat the whole
matter as infinitely amusing. He chuckled, smote his hand on his
thigh, and nodded approval at every pause--perhaps to give the
speaker courage--perhaps because he really thought that Raphael's
prospects were considerably less desperate than he fancied....

'If you laugh at me, Synesius, I am silent. It is quite enough to
endure the humiliation of telling you that I am--confound it!--like
any boy of sixteen.'

'Laugh at you?--with you, you mean. A convent? Pooh, pooh! The
old Prefect has enough sense, I will warrant him, not to refuse a
good match for his child.'

'You forget that I have not the honour of being a Christian.'

'Then we'll make you one. You won't let me convert you, I know; you
always used to gibe and jeer at my philosophy. But Augustine comes
to-morrow.

'Augustine?'

'He does indeed; and we must be off by daybreak, with all the armed
men we can muster, to meet and escort him, and to hunt, of course,
going and coming; for we have had no food this fortnight, but what
our own dogs and bows have furnished us. He shall take you in hand,
and cure you of all your Judaism in a week; and then just leave the
rest to me; I will manage it somehow or other. It is sure to come
right. No; do not be bashful. It will be real amusement to a poor
wretch who can find nothing else to do--Heigho! And as for lying
under an obligation to me, why we can square that by your lending me
three or four thousand gold pieces--Heaven knows I want them!--on
the certainty of never seeing them again.'

Raphael could not help laughing in his turn.

'Synesius is himself still, I see, and not unworthy of his ancestor
Hercules; and though he shrinks from cleansing the Augean stable of
my soul, paws like the war-horse in the valley at the hope of
undertaking any lesser labours in my behalf. But, my dear generous
bishop, this matter is more serious, and I, the subject of it, have
become more serious also, than you fancy. Consider: by the
uncorrupt honour of your Spartan forefathers, Agis, Brasidas, and
the rest of them, don't you think that you are, in your hasty
kindness, tempting me to behave in a way which they would have
called somewhat rascally?'

'How then, my dear man! You have a very honourable and praiseworthy
desire; and I am willing to help you to compass it.'

'Do you think that I have not cast about before now for more than
one method of compassing it for myself? My good man, I have been
tempted a dozen times already to turn Christian: but there has risen
up in me the strangest fancy about conscience and honour .... I
never was scrupulous before, Heaven knows--I am not over-scrupulous
now--except about her. I cannot dissemble before her. I dare not
look in her face when I had a lie in my right hand .... She looks
through one-into one-like a clear-eyed awful goddess .... I never
was ashamed in my life till my eyes met hers....'

'But if you really became a Christian?'

'I cannot. I should suspect my own motives. Here is another of
these absurd soul-anatomising scruples which have risen up in me. I
should suspect that I had changed my creed because I wished to
change it--that if I was not deceiving her I was deceiving myself.
If I had not loved her it might have been different: but now--just
because I do love her, I will not, I dare not, listen to Augustine's
arguments, or my own thoughts on the matter.'

'Most wayward of men!' cried Synesius, half peevishly; 'you seem to
take some perverse pleasure in throwing yourself into the waves
again, the instant you have climbed a rock of refuge!'

'Pleasure? Is there any pleasure in feeling oneself at death-grips
with the devil? I bad given up believing in him for many a year
.... And behold, the moment that I awaken to anything noble and
right, I find the old serpent alive and strong at my throat! No
wonder that
I suspect him, you, myself--I, who have been tempted, every hour in
the last week, temptations to become a devil. Ay,' he went on,
raising his voice, as all the fire of his intense Eastern nature
flashed from his black eyes, 'to be a devil! From my childhood till
now never have I known what it was to desire and not to possess. It
is not often that I have had to trouble any poor Naboth for his
vineyard: but when I have taken a fancy to it, Naboth has always
found it wiser to give way. And now .... Do you fancy that I have
not had a dozen hellish plots flashing across me in the last week?
Look here! This is the mortgage of her father's whole estate. I
bought it--whether by the instigation of Satan or of God--of a
banker in Berenice, the very day I left them; and now they, and
every straw which they possess, are in my power. I can ruin them--
sell them as slaves--betray them to death as rebels--and last, but
not least, cannot I hire a dozen worthy men to carry her off, and
cut the Gordian knot most simply and summarily? And yet I dare not.
I must be pure to approach the pure; and righteous, to kiss the feet
of the righteous. Whence came this new conscience to me I know not,
but come it has; and I dare no more do a base thing toward her, than
I dare toward a God, if there be one. This very mortgage--I hate
it, curse it, now that I possess it--the tempting devil!'

'Burn it,' said Synesius quietly.

'Perhaps I may. At least, used it never shall be. Compel her? I
am too proud, or too honourable, or something or other, even to
solicit her. She must come to me; tell me with her own lips that
she loves me, that she will take me, and make me worthy of her. She
must have mercy on me, of her own free will, or--let her pine and
die in that accursed prison; and then a scratch with the trusty old
dagger for her father, and another for myself, will save him from
any more superstitions, and me from any more philosophic doubts, for
a few aeons of ages, till we start again in new lives--he, I
suppose, as a jackass, and I as a baboon. What matter? but unless I
possess her by fair means, God do so to me, and more also, if I
attempt base ones!'

'God be with you, my son, in the noble warfare!' said Synesius, his
eyes filling with kindly tears.

'It is no noble warfare at all. It is a base coward fear, in one
who never before feared man or devil, and is now fallen low enough
to be afraid of a helpless girl!'

'Not so,' cried Synesius, in his turn; 'it is a noble and a holy
fear. You fear her goodness. Could you see her goodness, much less
fear it, were there not a Divine Light within you which showed you
what, and how awful, goodness was? Tell me no more, Raphael Aben-
Ezra, that you do not fear God; for he who fears Virtue, fears Him
whose likeness Virtue is. Go on--go on .... Be brave, and His
strength will be made manifest in your weakness.'
...............

It was late that night before Synesius compelled his guest to
retire, after having warned him not to disturb himself if he heard
the alarm-bell ring, as the house was well garrisoned, and having
set the water-clock by which he and his servants measured their
respective watches. And then the good bishop, having disposed his
sentinels, took his station on the top of his tower, close by the
warning-bell; and as he looked out over the broad lands of his
forefathers, and prayed that their desolation might come to an end
at last, he did not forget to pray for the desolation of the guest
who slept below, a happier and more healthy slumber than he had
known for many a week. For before Raphael lay down that night, he
had torn to shreds Majoricus's mortgage, and felt a lighter and a
better man as he saw the cunning temptation consuming scrap by scrap
in the lamp-flame. And then, wearied out with fatigue of body and
mind, he forgot Synesius, Victoria, and the rest, and seemed to
himself to wander all night among the vine-clad glens of Lebanon,
amid the gardens of lilies, and the beds of spices; while shepherds'
music lured him on and on, and girlish voices, chanting the mystic
idyll of his mighty ancestor, rang soft and fitful through his weary
brain.
...............

Before sunrise the next morning, Raphael was faring forth gallantly,
well armed and mounted, by Synesius's side, followed by four or five
brace of tall brush-tailed greyhounds, and by the faithful Bran,
whose lop-ears and heavy jaws, unique in that land of prick-ears and
fox-noses, formed the absorbing subject of conversation among some
twenty smart retainers, who, armed to the teeth for chase and war,
rode behind the bishop on half-starved, raw-boned horses, inured by
desert training and bad times to do the maximum of work upon the
minimum of food.

For the first few miles they rode in silence, through ruined
villages and desolated farms, from which here and there a single
inhabitant peeped forth fearfully, to pour his tale of woe into the
ears of the hapless bishop, and then, instead of asking alms from
him, to entreat his acceptance of some paltry remnant of grain or
poultry, which had escaped the hands of the marauders; and as they
clung to his hands, and blessed him as their only hope and stay,
poor Synesius heard patiently again and again the same purposeless
tale of woe, and mingled his tears with theirs, and then spurred his
horse on impatiently, as if to escape from the sight of misery which
he could not relieve; while a voice in Raphael's heart seemed to ask
him--'Why was thy wealth given to thee, but that thou mightest dry,
if but for a day, such tears as these?'

And he fell into a meditation which was not without its fruit in due
season, but which lasted till they had left the enclosed country,
and were climbing the slopes of the low rolling hills, over which
lay the road from the distant sea. But as they left the signs of
war behind them, the volatile temper of the good bishop began to
rise. He petted his hounds, chatted to his men, discoursed on the
most probable quarter for finding game, and exhorted them cheerfully
enough to play the man, as their chance of having anything to eat at
night depended entirely on their prowess during the day.

'Ah!' said Raphael at last, glad of a pretext for breaking his own
chain of painful thought, 'there is a vein of your land-salt. I
suspect that you were all at the bottom of the sea once, and that
the old Earth-shaker Neptune, tired of your bad ways, gave you a
lift one morning, and set you up as dry land, in order to be rid of
you.'