Part 3 (1/2)
And then the ranks form in line, and once more the sound, the ecstatic sound it had seemed but a short time before, of girls marching--but no!--no!--there is no Alice.
In sick despair Narcissus stalked that Amazonian battalion, crouching behind hedges, dropping into by-lanes, lurking in coppices,--he held his breath as they pa.s.sed two and two within a yard of him. Two followed two, but still no Alice!
Narcissus lay in wait, dinnerless, all that afternoon; he walked about that dreary house like a patrol, till at last he was observed of the inmates, and knots of girls gathered at the windows--alas! only to giggle at his forlorn and desperate appearance.
Still there was no Alice ... and then it began to rain, and he became aware how hungry he was. So he returned to his inn with a sad heart.
And all the time poor little Alice lay in bed with a sore throat, oblivious of those pa.s.sionate boyish eyes that, you would have thought, must have pierced the very walls of her seclusion.
And, after all, it was not her voice Narcissus had heard in the church.
It was but the still sweeter voice of his own heart.
CHAPTER VI
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
I hope it will be allowed to me that I treat the Reader with all respectful courtesy, and that I am well bred enough to a.s.sume him familiar with all manner of exquisite experience, though in my heart I may be no less convinced that he has probably gone through life with nothing worth calling experience whatsoever. It is our jaunty modern fas.h.i.+on, and I follow it so far as I am able. I take for granted, for instance, that every man has at one time or another--in his salad days, you know, before he was embarked in his particular provision business--had foolish yearnings towards poesy. I respect the mythical dreams of his 'young days'; I a.s.sume that he has been really in love; but, pray press me not too curiously as to whether I believe it all, as to whether I really imagine that his youth knew other dreams than those of the foolish young 'masherdom' one meets in the train every morning, or that he has married a wife for other than purely 'masculine' reasons.
These matters I do not mind leaving in the form of a postulate--let them be granted: but that every man has at one time or another had the craze for saving the world I will not a.s.sume. Narcissus took it very early, and though he has been silent concerning his mission for some time, and when last we heard of it had considerably modified his propaganda, he still cherishes it somewhere in secret, I have little doubt; and one may not be surprised, one of these days, to find it again bursting out 'into sudden flame.'
His spiritual experience has probably been the deepest and keenest of his life. I do not propose to trace his evolution from Anabaptism to Agnosticism. The steps of such development are comparatively familiar; they have been traced by greater pens than mine. The 'means' may vary, but the process is uniform.
Whether a man deserts the ancestral Brahminism that has so long been 'good enough for his parents,' and listens to the voice of the Buddhist missionary, or joins Lucian in the seat of the scornful, shrugging at augur and philosopher alike; whether it is Voltaire, or Tom Paine, or Thomas Carlyle, or Walt Whitman, or a Socialist tract, that is the emanc.i.p.ator, the emanc.i.p.ation is all one.
The seed that is to rend the rock comes in all manner of odd, and often unremembered, ways; but somehow, it is there; rains and dews unnoticed feed it; and surely, one day the rock is rent, the light is pouring in, and we are free! It is often a matter of anguish that, strive as we may, it is impossible to remember what helping hand it was that sowed for us.
Our fickle memory seems to convict us of ingrat.i.tude, and yet we know how far that sin is from us; and how, if those sowers could but be revealed to us, we would fall upon their necks, or at their feet.
I talked of this one day with Narcissus, and some time after he sent me a few notes headed 'Spiritual Pastors,' in which he had striven to follow the beautiful example set by Marcus Aurelius, in the anxiously loving acknowledgment with which he opens his meditations. I know he regarded it as miserably inefficient; but as it does actually indicate some of the more individual side of his experience, and is, moreover, characteristic in its style, I shall copy a few pa.s.sages from it here:--
'To some person or persons unknown exceeding grat.i.tude for the suggestion, in some dim talk, antenatal it would almost seem, that Roman Catholics might, after all, be ”saved.” Blessed fecundating suggestion, that was the earliest loophole!
'To my father I owe a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss. But one's greatest debt to a good mother must be simply--herself.
'To the Rev. Father Ignatius for his earnest preaching, which might almost have made me a monk, had not Thomas Carlyle and his _Heroes_, especially the lecture on Mahomet, given me to understand the true significance of a Messiah.
'To Bulwer for his _Zanoni_, which first gave me a hint of the possible natural ”supernatural,” and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising in negatives against the transcendental.
'To Sir Edwin Arnold for his _Light of Asia,_ also to Mr. Sinnett for his _Esoteric Buddhism,_ books which, coming to me about the same time, together with some others like them, first gave some occupation to an ”unchartered freedom,” gained in many forgotten steps, in the form of a faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful enthusiasm a man could know,--and which had almost sent me to the Himalayas!
'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the bare star-light were alone in its place.
'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange, almost childlike, simplicity: ”_Is_ there a soul?” But I have not forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how, with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:--
'”This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burn Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil; Ay! and those argent b.r.e.a.s.t.s of thine will turn To water-lilies; the brown fields men till Will be more fruitful for our love to-night: Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.
'”So when men bury us beneath the yew Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be, And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with dew; And when the white narcissus wantonly Kisses the wind, its playmate, some faint joy Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.