Books: Ardath

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He ceased; the wind howled furiously outside, flinging gusty
dashes of rain against the one window of the room, a tall arched
casement that clattered noisily with every blow inflicted upon it
by the storm. Heliobas gave him a swift, searching glance, half
pitying, half disdainful.

"Haschisch or opium should serve your turn," he said curtly. "I
know of no other means whereby to temporarily still the clamorings
of conscience."

Alwyn flushed darkly. "Conscience!" he began in rather a resentful
tone,

"Aye, conscience!" repeated Heliobas firmly. "There is such a
thing. Do you profess to be wholly without it?"

Alwyn deigned no reply--the ironical bluntness of the question
annoyed him.

"You have formed a very unjust opinion of me, Mr. Alwyn,"
continued Heliobas, "an opinion which neither honors your courtesy
nor your intellect--pardon me for saying so. You ask me to 'mock'
and 'delude' you as if it were my custom and delight to make dupes
of my suffering fellow-creatures! You come to me as though I were
a mesmerist or magnetizer such as you can hire for a few guineas
in any civilized city in Europe--nay, I doubt not but that you
consider me that kind of so-called 'spiritualist' whose
enlightened intelligence and heaven-aspiring aims are demonstrated
in the turning of tables and general furniture-gyration. I am,
however, hopelessly deficient in such knowledge. I should make a
most unsatisfactory conjurer! Moreover, whatever you may have
heard concerning me in Paris, you must remember I am in Paris no
longer. I am a monk, as you see, devoted to my vocation; I am
completely severed from the world, and my duties and occupations
in the present are widely different to those which employed me in
the past. Then I gave what aid I could to those who honestly
needed it and sought it without prejudice or personal distrust;
but now my work among men is finished, and I practice my science,
such as it is, on others no more, except in very rare and special
cases."

Alwyn heard, and the lines of his face hardened into an expression
of frigid hauteur.

"I suppose I am to understand by this that you will do nothing for
me?" he said stiffly.

"Why, what CAN I do?" returned Heliobas, smiling a little. "All
you want--so you say--is a brief forgetfulness of your troubles.
Well, that is easily obtainable through certain narcotics, if you
choose to employ them and take the risk of their injurious action
on your bodily system. You can drug your brain and thereby fill it
with drowsy suggestions of ideas--of course they would only he
SUGGESTIONS, and very vague and indefinite ones too, still they
might be pleasant enough to absorb and repress bitter memories for
a time. As for me, my poor skill would scarcely avail you, as I
could promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joy. I have
a certain internal force, it is true--a spiritual force which when
strongly exercised overpowers and subdues the material--and by
exerting this I could, if I thought it well to do so, release your
SOUL--that is, the Inner Intelligent Spirit which is the actual
You--from its house of clay, and allow it an interval of freedom.
But what its experience might be in that unfettered condition,
whether glad or sorrowful, I am totally unable to predict."

Alwyn looked at him steadfastly.

"You believe in the Soul?" he asked.

"Most certainly!"

"As a separate Personality that continues to live on when the body
perishes?"

"Assuredly."

"And you profess to be able to liberate it for a time from its
mortal habitation--"

"I do not profess," interposed Heliobas quietly. "I CAN do so."

"But with the success of the experiment your power ceases?--you
cannot foretell whether the unimprisoned creature will take its
course to an inferno of suffering or a heaven of delight?--is
this what you mean?"

Heliobas bent his head in grave assent.

Alwyn broke into a harsh laugh--"Come then!" he exclaimed with a
reckless air,--"Begin your incantations at once! Send me hence, no
matter where, so long as I am for a while escaped from this den of
a world, this dungeon with one small window through which, with
the death rattle in our throats, we stare vacantly at the blank
unmeaning honor of the Universe! Prove to me that the Soul exists
--ye gods! Prove it! and if mine can find its way straight to the
mainspring of this revolving Creation, it shall cling to the
accused wheels and stop them, that they may grind out the tortures
of Life no more!"

He flung up his hand with a wild gesture: his countenance, darkly
threatening and defiant, was yet beautiful with the evil beauty of
a rebellious and fallen angel. His breath came and went quickly,--
he seemed to challenge some invisible opponent. Heliobas meanwhile
watched him much as a physician might watch in his patient the
workings of a new disease, then he said in purposely cold and
tranquil tones:

"A bold idea! singularly blasphemous, arrogant, and--fortunately
for us all--impracticable! Allow me to remark that you are
overexcited, Mr. Alwyn; you talk as madmen may, but as reasonable
men should not. Come," and he smiled,--a smile that was both grave
and sweet, "come and sit down--you are worn out with the force of
your own desperate emotions--rest a few minutes and recover your
self."

His voice thouqh gentle was distinctly authoritative, and Alwyn
meeting the full gaze of his calm eyes felt bound to obey the
implied command. He therefore sank listlessly into an easy chair
near the table, pushing back the short, thick curls from his brow
with a wearied movement; he was very pale,--an uneasy sense of
shame was upon him, and he sighed,--a quick sigh of exhausted
passion. Heliobas seated himself opposite and looked at him
earnestly, he studied with sympathetic attention the lines of
dejection and fatigue which marred the attractiveness of features
otherwise frank, poetic, and noble. He had seen many such men. Men
in their prime who had begun life full of high faith, hope, and
lofty aspiration, yet whose fair ideals once bruised in the mortar
of modern atheistical opinion had perished forever, while they
themselves, like golden eagles suddenly and cruelly shot while
flying in mid-air, had fallen helplessly, broken-winged among the
dust-heaps of the world, never to rise and soar sunwards again.
Thinking this, his accents were touched with a certain compassion
when after a pause he said softly:

"Poor boy!--poor, puzzled, tired brain that would fain judge
Infinity by merely finite perception! You were a far truer poet,
Theos Alwyn, when as a world-foolish, heaven-inspired lad you
believed in God, and therefore, in godlike gladness, found all
things good!"

Alwyn looked up--his lips quivered.

"Poet--poet!" he murmured--"why taunt me with the name?" He
started upright in his chair--"Let me tell you all," he said
suddenly; "you may as well know what has made me the useless wreck
I am; though perhaps I shall only weary you."

"Far from it," answered Heliobas gently. "Speak freely--but
remember I do not compel your confidence."

"On the contrary, I think you do!" and again that faint, half-
mournful smile shone for an instant in his deep, dark eyes,
"though you may not be conscious of it. Anyhow I feel impelled to
unburden my heart to you: I have kept silence so long! You know
what it is in the world, ... one must always keep silence, always
shut in one's grief and force a smile, in company with the rest of
the tormented, forced-smiling crowd. We can never be ourselves--
our veritable selves--for, if we were, the air would resound with
our ceaseless lamentations! It is HORRIBLE to think of all the
pent-up sufferings of humanity--all the inconceivably hideous
agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed! When I was
young,--how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are
taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon
me--when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I
inherited the fatal love of it from my mother--she was a Greek-and
she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even
my father's English coldness. She named me Theos, little guessing
what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove! It was well, I think,
that she died early."

"Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you," said Heliobas
with a keen, kindly glance at him.

Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,--for I should have chafed
at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been
disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical
business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment
of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so
far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor
of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than
satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left
me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little
I earned by my pen--I was content to live an anchorite and dine
off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped. Fate,
however, willed it otherwise,--and though I scarcely cared for the
wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing--that of
perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation,
and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy
as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke
from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was
as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and
heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with
shining shapes Protean,--alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and
I shall enter it no more!"

"'No more' is a long time, my friend!" interposed Heliobas gently.
"You are too despondent,--perchance too diffident, concerning your
own ability."

"Ability!" and he laughed wearily. "I have none,--I am as weak and
inapt as an untaught child--the music of my heart is silenced! Yet
there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the
past--when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon's
silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and
indescribable ecstasy--when the thought of Love, like a full chord
struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious
delight--fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain--Earth
was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity--men
were gods--women were angels'--the world seemed but a wide scroll
for the signatures of poets, and mine, I swore, should be clearly
written!"

He paused, as though ashamed of his own fervor. and glanced at
Heliobas, who, leaning a little forward in his chair was regaling
him with friendly, attentive interest; then he continued more
calmly:

"Enough! I think I had something in me then,--something that was
new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full
of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that
something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,--it
was soon crushed out of me. The world is fond of slaying its
singing buds and devouring them for daily fare--one rough pressure
of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are
mute forever. So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and
fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense
save fair hearing and justice. They obtained neither--they were
tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at
for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies--lies all! The
finely spun web of any fancy,--the delicate interwoven intricacies
of thought,--these were torn to shreds with as little compunction
as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport
the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and
emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool--so I was told with
many a languid sneer and stale jest--to talk of hidden mysteries
in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves--such sounds
were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely
conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages
into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds--and these went on
rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason nobody knew,
but then nobody cared! And Love--the key-note of the theme to
which I had set my mistaken life in tune--Love was only a graceful
word used to politely define the low but very general sentiment of
coarse animal attraction--in short, poetry such as mine was
altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts
of every-day existence--facts which plainly taught us that man's
chief business here below was simply to live, breed, and die--the
life of a silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform
of ability; beyond this--nothing!"

"Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry--
"really nothing?"

"Nothing!" repeated Alwyn, with an air of resigned hopelessness;
"for I learned that, according to the results arrived at by the
most advanced thinkers of the day, there was no God, no Soul, no
Hereafter--the loftiest efforts of the highest heaven--aspiring
minds were doomed to end in non-fruition, failure, and
annihilation. Among all the desperately hard truths that came
rattling down upon me like a shower of stones, I think this was
the crowning one that killed whatever genius I had. I use the word
'genius' foolishly--though, after all, genius itself is nothing to
boast of, since it is only a morbid and unhealthy condition of the
intellectual faculties, or at least was demonstrated to me as such
by a scientific friend of my own who, seeing I was miserable, took
great pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,--to his own
satisfaction if not altogether to mine,--that the abnormal
position of certain molecules in the brain produced an
eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically
viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania,
but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a
purely scientific standpoint it was evident that the poets,
painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great
ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or
less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly
speaking amounted to brain-deformity. He assured me, that to the
properly balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal,
genius was an impossibility--it was a malady as unnatural as rare.
'And it is singular, very singular,' he added with a complacent
smile, 'that the world should owe all its finest art and
literature merely to a few varieties of molecular disease!' I
thought it singular enough, too,--however, I did not care to argue
with him; I only felt that if the illness of genius had at any
time affected ME, it was pretty well certain I should now suffer
no more from its delicious pangs and honey-sweet fever. I was
cured! The probing-knife of the world's cynicism had found its way
to the musically throbbing centre of divine disquietude in my
brain, and had there cut down the growth of fair imaginations for
ever. I thrust aside the bright illusions that had once been my
gladness; I forced myself to look with unflinching eyes at the
wide waste of universal Nothingness revealed to me by the rigid
positivists and iconoclasts of the century; but my heart died
within me; my whole being froze as it were into an icy apathy,--I
wrote no more; I doubt whether I shall ever write again. Of a
truth, there is nothing to write about. All has been said. The
days of the Troubadours are past,--one cannot string canticles of
love for men and women whose ruling passion is the greed of gold.
Yet I have sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it
is, were the voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish--yes! I
wish I had it in my power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen
face of this coldly callous age-brand it deep in those letters of
living lire called Fame!"

A look of baffled longing and un gratified ambition came into his
musing eyes,-his strong, shapely white hand clenched nervously, as
though it grasped some unseen yet perfectly tangible substance.
Just then the storm without, which had partially lulled during the
last few minutes, began its wrath anew: a glare of lightning
blazed against the uncurtained window, and a heavy clap of thunder
burst overhead with the sudden crash of an exploding bomb.

"You care for Fame?" asked Ileliobas abruptly, as soon as the
terrific uproar had subsided into a distant, dull rumbling mingled
with the pattering dash of hail.

"I care for it--yes!" replied Alwyn, and his voice was very low
and dreamy. "For though the world is a graveyard, as I have said,
full of unmarked tombs, still here and there we find graves, such
as Shelley's or Byron's, whereon pale flowers, like sweet
suggestions of ever-silenced music, break into continuous bloom.
And shall I not win my own death-garland of asphodel?"

There was an indescribable, almost heart-rending pathos in his
manner of uttering these last words--a hopelessness of effort and
a despairing sense of failure which he himself seemed conscious
of, for, meeting the fixed and earnest gaze of Ileliobas, he
quickly relapsed into his usual tone of indolent indifference.

"You see," he said, with a forced smile, "my story is not very
interesting! No hairbreadth escapes, no thrilling adventures, no
love intrigues--nothing but mental misery, for which few people
have any sympathy. A child with a cut finger gets more universal
commiseration than a man with a tortured brain and breaking heart,
yet there can be no quotion as to which is the most intense duel
long enduring anguish of the two. However, such as my troubles are
I have told you all I have laid bare my 'wound of living'--a
wound that throbs and burns, and aches, more intolerably with
every pissing hour and day--it is not unnatural, I think, that I
should seek for a little cessation of suffering; a brief dreaming
space in which to rest for a while, and escape from the deathful
Truth--Truth, that like the flaming sword placed east of the
fabled garden of Eden, turns ruthlessly every way, keeping us out
of the forfeited paradise of imaginative aspiration, which made
the men of old time great because they deemed themselves immortal.
It was a glorious faith! that strong consciousness, that in the
change and upheaval of whole universes the soul of man should
forever over-ride disaster! But now that we know ourselves to be
of no more importance, relatively speaking, than the animalculae
in a drop of stagnant water, what great works can be done, what
noble deeds accomplished, in the face of the declared and proved
futility of everything? Still, if you can, as you say, liberate me
from this fleshly prison, and give me new sensations and different
experiences, why then let me depart with all possible speed, for I
am certain I shall find in the storm-swept areas of space nothing
worse than life as lived in this present world. Remember, I am
quite incredulous as to your professed power--" he paused and
glanced at the white-robed, priestly figure opposite, then added,
lightly, "but I am curious to test it all the same. Are you ready
to being your spells?--and shall I say the Nunc Dimittis?"

CHAPTER III.

DEPARTURE.

Heliobas was silent--he seemed engaged in deep and anxious
thought,--and he kept his steadfast eyes fixed on Alwyn's
countenance, as though he sought there the clew to some difficult
problem.

"What do you know of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a
half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,--both canticle
and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you
are,--or let me say as you WERE,--inasmuch as no atheist was ever
a poet at the same time--"

"You are wrong," interrupted Alwyn quickly. "Shelley was an
atheist."

"Shelley, my good friend, was NOT an atheist [Footnote: See the
last two verses of Adonais]. He strove to be one,--nay, he made
pretence to be one,--but throughout his poems we hear the voice of
his inner and better self appealing to that Divinity and Eternity
which, in spite of the material part of him, he instinctively felt
existent in his own being. I repeat, poet as your WERE, and poet
as you will be again when the clouds on your mind are cleared,--
you present the strange, but not uncommon spectacle of an Immortal
Spirit fighting to disprove its own Immortality. In a word, you
will not believe in the Soul."

"I cannot!" said Alwyn, with a hopeless gesture.

"Why?"

"Science can give us no positive proof of its existence; it cannot
be defined."

"What do you mean by Science?" demanded Heliobas. "The foot of the
mountain, at which men now stand, grovelling and uncertain how to
climb? or the glittering summit itself which touches God's
throne?"

Alwyn made no answer.

"Tell me," pursued Heliobas, "how do you define the vital
principle? What mysterious agency sets the heart beating and the
blood flowing? By the small porter's lantern of to-day's so-called
Science, will you fling a light on the dark riddle of an
apparently purposeless Universe, and explain to me why we live at
all?"

"Evolution," responded Alwyn shortly, "and Necessity."

"Evolution from what?" persisted Heliobas. "From one atom? WHAT
atom? And FROM WHENCE came the atom? And why the NECESSITY of any
atom?"

"The human brain reels at such questions!" said Alwyn, vexedly and
with impatience. "I cannot answer them--no one can!"

"No one?" Heliobas smiled very tranquilly. "Do not be too sure of
that! And why should the human brain 'reel'?--the sagacious,
calculating, clear human brain that never gets tired, or puzzled,
or perplexed!--that settles everything in the most practical and
common-sense manner, and disposes of God altogether as an
extraneous sort of bargain not wanted in the general economy of
our little solar system! Aye, the human brain is a wonderful
thing!--and yet by a sharp, well-directed knock with this"--and he
took up from the table a paper-knife with a massive, silver-
mounted, weighty horn-handle--"I could deaden it in such wise that
the SOUL could no more hold any communication with it, and it
would lie an inert mass in the cranium, of no more use to its
owner than a paralyzed limb."

"You mean to infer that the brain cannot act without the influence
of the soul?"

"Precisely! If the hands on the telegraph dial will not respond to
the electric battery, the telegram cannot be deciphered. But it
would be foolish to deny the existence of the electric battery
because the dial is unsatisfactory! In like manner, when, by
physical incapacity, or inherited disease, the brain can no longer
receive the impressions or electric messages of the Spirit, it is
practically useless. Yet the Spirit is there all the same, dumbly
waiting for release and another chance of expansion."

"Is this the way you account for idiocy and mania?" asked Alwyn
incredulously.

"Most certainly; idiocy and mania always come from man's
interference with the laws of health and of nature--never
otherwise. The Soul placed within us by the Creator is meant to be
fostered by man's unfettered Will; if man chooses to employ that
unfettered Will in wrong directions, he has only himself to blame
for the disastrous results that follow. You may perhaps ask why
God has thus left our wills unfettered: the answer is simple--that
we may serve Him by CHOICE and not by COMPULSION. Among the myriad
million worlds that acknowledge His goodness gladly and
undoubtingly, why should He seek to force unwilling obedience from
us castaways!"

"As we are on this subject," said Alwyn, with a tinge of satire in
his tone, "if you grant a God, and make Him out to be supreme
Love, why in the name of His supposed inexhaustible beneficence
should we be castaways at all?"

"Because in our overweening pride and egotism we have ELECTED to
be such," replied Heliobas. "As angels have fallen, so have we.
But we are not altogether castaways now, since this signal," and
he touched the cross on his breast, "shone in heaven."

Alwyn shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.

"Pardon me," he murmured coldly, "with every desire to respect
your religious scruples, I really cannot, personally speaking,
accept the tenets of a worn-out faith, which all the most
intellectual minds of the day reject as mere ignorant
superstition. The carpenter's son of Judea was no doubt a very
estimable person,--a socialist teacher whose doctrines were very
excellent in theory but impossible of practice. That there was
anything divine about Him I utterly deny; and I confess I am
surprised that you, a man of evident culture, do not seem to see
the hollow absurdity of Christianity as a system of morals and
civilization. It is an ever-sprouting seed of discord and hatred
between nations; it has served as a casus belli of the most
fanatical and merciless character; it is answerable for whole seas
of cruel and unnecessary bloodshed ..."

"Have you nothing NEW to say on the subject?" interposed Heliobas,
with a slight smile. "I have heard all this so often before, from
divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful
habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning
His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity:
'Think not that I come to send peace on the earth. I come, not to
send peace, but a sword.' Again 'Ye shall be hated of all men for
my name's sake.' ... 'all ye shall be offended because of me.'
Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown away upon this
present generation. And do you know I find a curious lack of
originality among so-called 'freethinkers'; in fact their thoughts
can hardly be designated as 'free' when they all run in such
extremely narrow grooves of similitude--a flock of sheep mildly
trotting under the guidance of the butcher to the slaughterhouse
could not be more tamely alike in their bleating ignorance as to
where they are going. Your opinions, for instance, differ scarce a
whit from those of the common boor who, reading his penny Radical
paper, thinks he can dispense with God, and talks of the
'carpenter's son of Judea' with the same easy flippancy and scant
reverence as yourself. The 'intellectual minds of the day' to
which you allude, are extraordinarily limited of comprehension,
and none of them, literary or otherwise, have such a grasp of
knowledge as any of these dead and gone authors," and he waved his
hand toward the surrounding loaded bookshelves, "who lived
centuries ago, and are now, as far as the general public is
concerned, forgotten. All the volumes you see here are vellum
manuscripts copied from the original slabs of baked clay, stone
tablets, and engraved sheets of ivory, and among them is an
ingenious treatise by one Remeni Adranos, chief astronomer to the
then king of Babylonia, setting forth the Atom and Evolution
theory with far more clearness and precision than any of your
modern professors. All such propositions are old--old as the
hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more
suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its
progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general
dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have
the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their
greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history;
they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable
fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,--who, according to your own
showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and
inspiration to still higher endeavor--you have been, poisoned by
the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously
spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper
classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals
and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise
and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most
unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes
of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it
without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity
of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor
creature struck down by a plague. You have caught the negative,
agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,--it is not the
natural, healthy condition of your temperament."