"Know ye me not?"
And they cried in fear: "Master!"
"Yea!" he said, laughing softly. And he turned suddenly away, down a side
lane, and was gone under the wall before they knew.
So he came to an inn where the asses stood in the yard. And he called for
fritters, and they were made for him. So he slept under a shed. But in
the morning he was wakened by a loud crowing, and his cock's voice
ringing in his ears. So he saw the rooster of the inn walking forth to
battle, with his hens, a goodly number, behind him. Then the cock of the
man who had died sprang forth, and a battle began between the birds. The
man of the inn ran to save his rooster, but the man who had died said:
"If my bird wins I will give him thee. And if he lose, thou shalt eat
him."
So the birds fought savagely, and the cock of the man who had died killed
the common cock of the yard. Then the man who had died said to his young
cock:
"Thou at least hast found thy kingdom, and the females to thy body. Thy
aloneness can take on splendour, polished by the lure of thy hens."
And he left his bird there, and went on deeper into the phenomenal world,
which is a vast complexity of entanglements and allurements. And he asked
himself a last question:
"From what, and to what, could this infinite whirl be saved?"
So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past
belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance
and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion.
It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he
must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours wound the strangling of
their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for
all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him,
and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and
societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For
men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own
nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay
the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him.
For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a
compulsion. And already he had been compelled even into death. The nausea
of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with
repulsion, dreading its mean contacts.
The wind came cold and strong from inland, from the invisible snows of
Lebanon. But the temple, facing south and west, towards Egypt, faced the
splendid sun of winter as he curved down towards the sea, the warmth and
radiance flooded in between the pillars of painted wood. But the sea was
invisible, because of the trees, though its dashing sounded among the hum
of pines. The air was turning golden to afternoon. The woman who served
Isis stood in her yellow robe, and looked up at the steep slopes coming
down to the sea, where the olive trees silvered under the wind like water
splashing. She was alone save for the goddess. And in the winter
afternoon the light stood erect and magnificent off the invisible sea,
filling the hills of the coast. She went towards the sun, through the
grove of Mediterranean pine trees and evergreen oaks, in the midst of
which the temple stood, on a little, tree–covered tongue of land between
two bays.
It was only a very little way, and then she stood among the dry trunks of
the outermost pines, on the rocks under which the sea smote and sucked,
facing the open where the bright sun gloried in winter. The sea was dark,
almost indigo, running away from the land, and crested with white. The
hand of the wind brushed it strangely with shadow, as it brushed the
olives of the slopes with silver. And there was no boat out.
The three boats were drawn high up on the steep shingle of the little
bay, by the small grey tower. Along the edge of the shingle ran a high
wall, inside which was a garden occupying the brief flat of the bay,
then rising in terraces up the steep slope of the coast. And there, some
little way up, within another wall, stood the low white villa, white and
alone as the coast, overlooking the sea. But higher, much higher up,
where the olives had given way to pine trees again, ran the coast road,
keeping to the height to be above the gullies that came down to the bays.
Upon it all poured the royal sunshine of the January afternoon. Or
rather, all was part of the great sun, glow and substance and immaculate
loneliness of the sea, and pure brightness.
Crouching in the rocks above the dark water, which only swung up and
down, two slaves, half naked, were dressing pigeons for the evening meal.
They pierced the throat of a blue, live bird, and let the drops of blood
fall into the heaving sea, with curious concentration. They were
performing some sacrifice, or working some incantation. The woman of the
temple, yellow and white and alone like a winter narcissus stood between
the pines of the small, humped peninsula where the temple secretly hid,
and watched.
A black–and–white pigeon, vividly white, like a ghost escaped over the
low dark sea, sped out, caught the wind, tilted, rode, soared and swept
over the pine trees, and wheeled away, a speck, inland. It had escaped.
The priestess heard the cry of the boy slave, a garden slave of about
seventeen. He raised his arms to heaven in anger as the pigeon wheeled
away, naked and angry and young he held out his arms. Then he turned and
seized the girl in an access of rage, and beat her with his fist that was
stained with pigeon's blood. And she lay down with her face hidden,
passive and quivering. The woman who owned them watched. And as she
watched, she saw another onlooker, a stranger, in a low, broad hat, and a
cloak of grey homespun, a dark bearded man standing on the little
causeway of a rock that was the neck of her temple peninsula. By the
blowing of his dark–grey cloak she saw him. And he saw her, on the rocks
like a white–and–yellow narcissus, because of the flutter of her white
linen tunic, below the yellow mantle of wool. And both of them watched
the two slaves.
The boy suddenly left off beating the girl. He crouched over her,
touching her, trying to make her speak. But she lay quite inert, face
down on the smoothed rock. And he put his arms round her and lifted her,
but she slipped back to earth like one dead, yet far too quickly for
anything dead. The boy, desperate, caught her by the hips and hugged her
to him, turning her over there. There she seemed inert, all her fight was
in her shoulders. He twisted her over, intent and unconscious, and pushed
his hands between her thighs, to push them apart. And in an instant he
was covering her in the blind, frightened frenzy of a boy's first
passion. Quick and frenzied his young body quivered naked on hers, blind,
for a minute. Then it lay quite still, as if dead.
And then, in terror, he peeped up. He peeped round, and drew slowly to
his feet, adjusting his loin–rag. He saw the stranger, and then he saw,
on the rocks beyond, the lady of Isis, his mistress. And as he saw her,
his whole body shrank and cowed, and with a strange cringing motion he
scuttled lamely towards the door in the wall.
The girl sat up and looked after him. When she had seen him disappear,
she too looked round. And she saw the stranger and the priestess. Then
with a sullen movement she turned away, as if she had seen nothing, to
the four dead pigeons and the knife, which lay there on the rock. And she
began to strip the small feathers, so that they rose on the wind like
dust.
The priestess turned away. Slaves! Let the overseer watch them. She was
not interested. She went slowly through the pines again, back to the
temple, which stood in the sun in a small clearing at the centre of the
tongue of land. It was a small temple of wood, painted all pink and white
and blue, having at the front four wooden pillars rising like stems to
the swollen lotus–bud of Egypt at the top, supporting the roof and open,
spiky lotus–flowers of the outer frieze, which went round under the
eaves. Two low steps of stone led up to the platform before the pillars,
and the chamber behind the pillars was open. There a low stone altar
stood, with a few embers in its hollow, and the dark stain of blood in
its end groove.
She knew her temple so well, for she had built it at her own expense, and
tended it for seven years. There it stood, pink and white, like a flower
in the little clearing, backed by blackish evergreen oaks; and the shadow
of afternoon was already washing over its pillar bases.
She entered slowly, passing through to the dark inner chamber, lighted by
a perfumed oil–flame. And once more she pushed shut the door, and once
more she threw a few grains of incense on a brazier before the goddess,
and once more she sat down before her goddess, in the almost–darkness, to
muse, to go away into the dreams of the goddess.
It was Isis; but not Isis, Mother of Horus. It was Isis Bereaved, Isis in
Search. The goddess, in painted marble, lifted her face and strode, one
thigh forward, through the frail fluting of her robe, in the anguish of
bereavement and of search. She was looking for the fragments of the dead
Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in
fragments over the wide world. And she must find his hands and his feet,
his heart, his thighs, his head, his belly, she must gather him together
and fold her arms round the re–assembled body till it became warm again,
and roused to life, and could embrace her, and could fecundate her womb.
And the strange rapture and anguish of search went on through the years,
as she lifted her throat and her hollowed eyes looked inward, in the
tormented ecstasy of seeking, and the delicate navel of her bud–like
belly showed through the frail, girdled robe with the eternal asking,
asking, of her search. And through the years she found him bit by bit,
heart and head and limbs and body. And yet she had not found the last
reality, the final clue to him, that alone could bring him really back to
her. For she was Isis of the subtle lotus, the womb which waits submerged
and in bud, waits for the touch of that other inward sun that streams its
rays from the loins of the male Osiris.
This was the mystery the woman had served alone for seven years, since
she was twenty, till now she was twenty–seven. Before, when she was
young, she had lived in the world, in Rome, in Ephesus, in Egypt. For her
father had been one of Anthony's captains and comrades, had fought with
Anthony and had stood with him when Caesar was murdered, and through to
the days of shame. Then he had come again across to Asia, out of favour
with Rome, and had been killed in the mountains beyond Lebanon. The
widow, having no favour to hope for from Octavius, had retired to her
small property on the coast under Lebanon, taking her daughter from the
world, a girl of nineteen, beautiful but unmarried.
When she was young the girl had known Caesar, and had shrunk from his
eagle–like rapacity. The golden Anthony had sat with her many a
half–hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood, and
talked with her of the philosophies and the gods. For he was fascinated
as a child by the gods, though he mocked at them, and forgot them in his
own vanity. But he said to her:
"I have sacrificed two doves for you, to Venus, for I am afraid you make
no offering to the sweet goddess. Beware you will offend her. Come, why
is the flower of you so cool within? Does never a ray nor a glance find
its way through? Ah, come, a maid should open to the sun, when the sun
leans towards her to caress her."
And the big, bright eyes of Anthony laughed down on her, bathing her in
his glow. And she felt the lovely glow of his male beauty and his
amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body. But it was as he said: the
very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow
of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine. So Anthony, respecting
her father, who loved her, had left her.
And it had always been the same. She saw many men, young and old. And on
the whole, she liked the old ones best, for they talked to her still and
sincere, and did not expect her to open like a flower to the sun of their
maleness. Once she asked a philosopher: "Are all women born to be given
to men?" To which the old man answered slowly:
"Rare women wait for the re–born man. For the lotus, as you know, will
not answer to all the bright heat of the sun. But she curves her dark,
hidden head in the depths, and stirs not. Till, in the night, one of
these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more, rises
among the stars in unseen purple, and like the violet, sends its rare
purple rays out into the night. To these the lotus stirs as to a caress,
and rises upwards through the flood, and lifts up her bent head, and
opens with an expansion such as no other flower knows, and spreads her
sharp rays of bliss, and offers her soft, gold depths such as no other
flower possesses, to the penetration of the flooding, violet–dark sun
that has died and risen and makes no show. But for the golden brief
day–suns of show such as Anthony, and for the hard winter suns of power,
such as Caesar, the lotus stirs not, nor will ever stir. Those will only
tear open the bud. Ah, I tell you, wait for the re–born and wait for the
bud to stir."
So she had waited. For all the men were soldiers or politicians in the
Roman spell, assertive, manly, splendid apparently but of an inward
meanness, an inadequacy. And Rome and Egypt alike had left her alone,
unroused. And she was a woman to herself, she would not give herself for
a surface glow, nor marry for reasons. She would wait for the lotus to
stir.
And then, in Egypt, she had found Isis, in whom she spelled her mystery.
She had brought Isis to the shores of Sidon, and lived with her in the
mystery of search; whilst her mother, who loved affairs, controlled the
small estate and the slaves with a free hand.
When the woman had roused from her muse and risen to perform the last
brief ritual to Isis, she replenished the lamp and left the sanctuary,
locking the door. In the outer world, the sun had already set, and
twilight was chill among the humming trees, which hummed still, though
the wind was abating.
A stranger in a dark, broad hat rose from the corner of the temple steps,
holding his hat in the wind. He was dark–faced, with a black pointed
beard. "Oh, madam, whose shelter may I implore?" he said to the woman,
who stood in her yellow mantle on a step above him, beside a
pink–and–white painted pillar. Her face was rather long and pale, her
dusky blonde hair was held under a thin gold net. She looked down on the
vagabond with indifference. It was the same she had seen watching the
slaves.
"Why come you down from the road?" she asked.
"I saw the temple like a pale flower on the coast, and would rest among
the trees of the precincts, if the lady of the goddess permits."
"It is Isis in Search," she said, answering his first question. "The
goddess is great," he replied.
She looked at him still with mistrust. There was a faint, remote smile in
the dark eyes lifted to her, though the face was hollow with suffering.
The vagabond divined her hesitation, and was mocking her.
"Stay here upon the steps," she said. "A slave will show you the
shelter."
"The lady of Egypt is gracious."
She went down the rocky path of the humped peninsula in her gilded
sandals. Beautiful were her ivory feet, beneath the white tunic, and
above the saffron mantle her dusky–blonde head bent as with endless
musings. A woman entangled in her own dream. The man smiled a little,
half bitterly, and sat again on the step to wait, drawing his mantle
round him, in the cold twilight.
At length a slave appeared, also in hodden grey.
"Seek ye the shelter of our lady?" he said insolently. "Even so."
"Then come."
With the brusque insolence of a slave waiting on a vagabond, the young
fellow led through the trees and down into a little gully in the rock,
where, almost in darkness, was a small cave, with a litter of the tall
heaths that grew on the waste places of the coast, under the stone–pines.
The place was dark, but absolutely silent from the wind. There was still
a faint odour of goats.