DESERT

A Legend

By

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

Author of
"At the Sign of the Goat & Compasses"

Woodcuts by
E. RAVILIOUS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1926

DESERT: A Legend

Copyright, 1916, by
HARPER & BROTHERS
Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition

H—A

Note--

The basis of this story lies in a brief tale occurring in the Syriac version of Palladius's Histories of the Fathers, which is to be found in a beautiful English translation in Sir Ernest Wallis Budge's book The Paradise of the Holy Fathers. I have derived many other incidents and a great mass of details from the same work, but this story is otherwise imaginary in the sense that I have troubled little about historical or topographical accuracy. The quotations from Plotinus and Proclus are from Thomas Taylor's translations, which, for reasons entirely unphilosophical, I have altered in one or two places.

M. A.

DESERT: A Legend

Chapter
One

It was not long past noon when Malchus, son of one of the foremost families of Alexandria, stepped out of his porch into the street. Everybody in the house was asleep; no one but the doorkeeper saw him go out. The street, too, was deserted. The arid heat of it struck against the sense like sounding brass. Its north side blazed with adamantine sunlight; its left was a long wedge-shaped trough of shade whose upper edge was bounded by the roof-ridges themselves, and the lower by their shadows zigzagging sharp-edged down the center of the paved roadway. Halfway down the street, on the shady side, two scavenger dogs were prowling, meekly sniffing the walls and pavement. A kite, small as a moth, sailed in the illimitable blue above. Malchus felt as if he had suddenly flung off a stifling cloak, dropped it from his shoulders and abandoned it in the street behind him. How easy it was, in the mood he was in, to discard relatives, friends, house, possessions, habits—all the material and spiritual accumulation of the past. In stepping from his house door he had stepped into a new life as easily as a swimmer dives from marble into water. The dogs, with tails down and lowered heads, slunk away at his approach and he turned the street corner and made for the southern boundary of the city. "Gone!" he said to himself, thinking of his house and the familiar street, and it seemed to him wonderful and unbelievable that he would never see them again. "Never again!" He tried in vain to realize the meaning of it and as he did so two stabs of pain shot through his heart. One was the memory of his mother making its desperate appeal—her hands, the calm, pure modeling of her temples, a sharp accidental pathos that came with her way of saying certain words; the other, keener, more cruel, more soul-shaking, was the memory of Helena, branded irremediably into every sense.

He halted, rooted to the spot in the molten sunshine, his right hand convulsively grasping his staff, and behind him, on the white wall to his left, the cowled black shadow which like the ghost of his past had dogged him, now on this side, now on that, from the moment he had left the shade of his house, paused, waiting to follow him. With a great effort he blotted from his mind those agonizing appeals, and man and following shadow moved on together. Soon they had emerged from the streets and, leaving the main road to Lake Mareotis, had turned into one of the many paths through the vineyards which spread to the shore of the lake. The heat, there, had lost something of its heaviness. Though the lake was not yet visible, the sense of it refreshed and sweetened the air, and the disheveled garlands of vines festooned from tree to tree shed a soft litter of shadows along the paths. Soon through the long ranks of tree trunks and foliage he caught sight of the live sparkle of water and, after that, great tracts of glassy surface, gray with heat, came gradually into view. His hope was to reach the lake before the hermit, who had visited him a few hours ago, had crossed it. If he did so, he would certainly discover him on the next ship that sailed; but if the hermit crossed the lake ahead of him, it might be many hours before Malchus could follow, and, once he had entered the desert, it would be impossible to trace him. But the hermit had not had more than three hours' start and he must have taken longer to reach the lake than Malchus, who had walked rapidly. Now his path left the vineyard and emerged between two warehouses on to the wharf that edged the lake. Not the faintest breath stirred the sultry air. Malchus looked anxiously out across the water. Far as the eye could reach, its vast, featureless monotony was unbroken. It was impossible, then, that the hermit could have left the shore, for in such weather no ship could sail or be rowed out of sight in three hours.

At its left extremity the wharf swung outward into a jetty which formed a small harbor, but its right end broke off in an abrupt wall and thence the shore of the lake curved away westward, the vineyards encroaching almost to its white, sandy margin.

Malchus turned to the left toward the harbor. A mast rose above the level of the wharf and he walked along the stone embankment to inquire whether a ship would soon be starting. After walking fifty yards he crossed to the edge where a flight of steps descended to the level of the water, and found himself looking down into a ship lying alongside the wharf immediately under him. Seen from above, it looked strangely broad for its length. The great sail lay rolled up along the deck and five or six oars were shipped along each gunwale. Among coils of rope and piles of wooden cases a few men, leaning forward so that their backs and heads almost hid their limbs, moved like slow, heavy beetles. Malchus shouted down his inquiries, and one of the men straightened himself and turned up a round, coppery face.

"We start in an hour," he shouted back. "The master'll be here before long and you can fix up with him. It'll be slow work." He waved an arm to the sky. "All rowing to-day, worse luck!"

Having got this information, Malchus strolled up the wharf toward the other end. He wished to discover the hermit without being discovered by him, for he was determined not to approach him until they entered the desert. Now, therefore, as he paced along the wharf, he examined the shadowy nooks between the warehouses in the hope that he might discover him sheltering from the heat. But the nooks were as empty as the wharf itself and soon Malchus was approaching its western extremity. As he did so he became suddenly convinced that he was on the point of discovering the hermit, and, sure enough, as he reached the edge and glanced along the sandy shore, he caught sight of a small bare-legged figure seated on the white sand not more than fifty yards away. He had avoided the green shade of the vineyard a few yards behind him and sat immovable in the full glare of the sun, like a god carved out of wood. The sun was high, and his squat shadow lay like a black bowlder behind him.

Malchus moved into a shady nook between two sheds and rested there till it was almost time to go back to the harbor. Then glancing cautiously from his hiding-place, he saw that the hermit was coming toward him and soon he must have climbed on to the wharf, for Malchus saw a small gnome-like shadow slide across the bright gap between the sheds. He waited a little and then himself came out into the glare. The slim figure of the hermit was by this time more than halfway down the long line of the wharf—the only vertical thing followed by the only shadow in all the horizontal glare. Malchus followed him slowly. When he reached the harbor the hermit was already squatting in the bows of the boat with his cowl over his head.

Malchus found a place for himself on deck in a patch of shadow cast by a pile of cargo. The great wall of golden stone which towered above the side of the ship threw off the afternoon heat like a stove; the heaps of wooden cases beside him exhaled a hot aromatic smell and across it there came another smell, the flat, earthy smell of shallow water. Malchus closed his eyes. A feeling of utter serenity possessed him. The noise and movement of the crew about him served only to increase his sense of calm isolation. Nothing of this stress and bustle concerned him; for him there was nothing to do but to sit still. The ropes would be loosed, the ship would be pushed off from the wharf by men sweating at long poles, the harbor would recede, and the oarsmen settle, with the rumble of wood on wood, to their long, monotonous labor at the oars; and through it all—through the long smooth crossing of the lake unchanging except for the slow transition from afternoon to evening, evening to darkness and darkness back to dawn, sunrise and sultry noon—he would have nothing to do but sit with eyes open or closed, contemplating the ebb and flow of his thoughts and feelings.

A silence in the hubbub of preparation roused him: the moment for departure had arrived, and at a shout from the master the crew began to thrust away the ship from the harbor wall. Slowly the wall receded. Two oarsmen in the bows were already churning up the glassy harbor water and soon the ship glided out into the lake.

A plain of shimmering gray lay before them, but behind them the gray brightened to a milky blue where the shallows ran up on to the white margins, and in the shallows companies of flamingoes stood like long-stemmed rosy lilies, dreaming immovably upon the fainter rose of their reflections. Malchus gazed at them, and the thought came to him that each was a symbol of man contemplating the God in himself. The rowers began a rhythmical chant, swinging monotonously to their oars. Malchus closed his eyes. That chant and the rhythmical forward lurch of the ship were all he knew of the outward world; and after an hour the chanting ceased and his world dimmed to the heave of the boat and the regular plash and gurgle of the cloven water. He shut out all thought from his mind. He did not even try to determine what he would say to the hermit when he revealed himself to him in the desert, nor did he examine his feelings, desires, or beliefs. Whether or not his reason accepted Christ he did not inquire. He was passionately determined to submit himself without reservation, body and soul: therefore, he could not be troubled to reason about his belief. The idea of God and of his son Jesus Christ was burnt into his emotional life. It had been his intellect only—the intellect of an impetuous youth—which had rejected it. Now the elegant logical structure of his disbelief had collapsed before the emotional storm through which he was passing, and the old idea had flowered again upon the ruins. The words spoken by the hermit during their conversation a few hours ago had come to him as a revelation:—"We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning." That was the state of mind after which he had always been unconsciously striving. What a relief it was now to abandon all the troublesome mechanism of argument and explanation, to allow to impulse and emotion the authority for which, with him, they had hitherto always appealed in vain. He felt himself free at last. Never again would he submit to the imposture of logic. But it was no sluggish serenity into which he had escaped. The mind and the soul must, he knew, be disciplined, for only thus could they attain to perfect freedom. And now, as he sat on the deck with closed eyes, assuming already by an unconscious imitation the attitude of the hermit, he drew his attention inward, retiring into that innermost chamber of being which is one with the eternal and divine. At first his contemplation was disturbed by intruding memories and once he found himself spinning a long fantasy about Helena. How would she receive the news of his disappearance? He pictured her in tears, imploring his pardon too late. The picture gave him a fierce appeasement and his lips twisted into a grim smile.

The physical sensation of that smile roused him. How was he to master this idle wandering of the mind? For a moment he was overcome by discouragement, but soon he had lulled himself back into contemplation, and gradually his mind, wearied by the emotions of the day, threw off the burden of intruding cares....

He must have sat thus for many hours, for when he again opened his eyes he was astounded to find himself in darkness. Everything about him, the mast, the ropes, the piles of cargo, stood out sharply in planes and edges of frosty white, the rowers were modeled in flickering black and silver as they swung to and fro, and looking upward, Malchus saw a full moon, small, brilliant, and immeasurably high. Beside him lay a pool of blond silver light, so bright that it seemed as if it were itself the source of light. Everywhere it was as though the moonward faces of things were coated with phosphorus. The air had grown deliciously cool; a draught stirred about the deck as if the lake were breathing. Then a shout sounded above the noise of rowing and the rowers leaned back motionless upon their oars. There was silence above and below except for the clucking of water against the ship's still-moving sides and the tapping of a rope against the mast. The wind was freshening. Again a shout out of the darkness, and, with bumping of wood on wood, the rowers shipped their oars and then lined up along the sail, while others loosened the ropes at the mast. When all was ready there came another shout and the great sail swung up, huge as a house side, shivered and fluttered heavily in the wind, and then, as the ship came round, yawned out into a great dark cavern. The ship lurched slowly over, and growing up slowly out of the silence the hiss of moving water was heard along the sides.

Chapter
Two

The breeze which had sprung up during the night had weakened after daybreak, and now it had died away completely. It was almost noon. The men were once again sweating at the oars, but their labor would soon be over, for the southern shore of the lake was clearly in sight. Pale golden hills extending in horizontal terraces bounded the distance; along their bases the richer gold of the desert was barred by deep blue belts of palmgrove. Eastward, within a stone's throw of the ship, flights of wild-duck with their necks strained forward skimmed the face of the water. Many hours before, Malchus had awakened from a deep sleep to find himself afloat between the pale-green mirrors of sky and water in which the stars had faded to blurs of faint white radiance. He was cold and very hungry and had bought a loaf and a small mug of wine from one of the crew. He had drunk the wine and eaten a piece of the loaf, putting the remainder away into his pouch. Already it seemed an age since that early waking; to remember it in the noonday heat was to recall early spring in the height of summer. As for his previous life—the life which yesterday at this hour he was still living—it had receded into the remote past. It was as if the voyage across the lake had carried him into another world and separated him by many years from the self of yesterday. The crisis, crowned by his momentous decision, had come so suddenly....

Yet it was only a few hours ago, hardly a day and a half, that he had dined at the house of his friend Diocles, the poet. The feast had been a splendid one—splendid not only for its food and wines, but for its company and their talk. But by an hour after midnight the guests, though none of them had yet risen from his couch to depart, had long ceased to eat and, all except a few, even to drink. On the tables stood dishes of grapes, figs, and pomegranates, and crystal wine flasks and cups, but the guests had turned away from the tables, and the confused din of voices, glasses, silver, and the soft padding of the slaves' feet upon the marble floor had died down. There was no longer any general conversation, but isolated gusts of talk rose and relapsed, the tones now deep, now high, now rippling upward in a woman's laughter, like flutes, oboes, and bassoons played at random.

The host was Diocles, the poet, a splendid young man, easy mannered, imperturbable, with broad shoulders, pointed golden beard, and gray eyes which could be strangely piercing or, by a curious change, gentle and dreamy as though their gaze had been turned inward. He had been trying to engage the friend on his right in a philosophical discussion, but in vain, for Malchus replied briefly and fell back again into the gloomy abstraction in which he had passed the evening, his head propped on his right hand, his large eyes scowling at the floor. From this position he never moved except sometimes to steal a furtive glance at a woman who reclined at another table.

She was young and of an extraordinary beauty. Her profile in repose had the dreaming loveliness of a marble goddess, but when she laughed or spoke she was suddenly transformed into another creature, and, as if for the first time, the vivid colors of eyes, lips, and beautiful teeth flashed into life. Helena was her name; she was known throughout Alexandria for her beauty, her great wealth, and the proud independence of her manner of life. Both her wealth and her beauty brought her many offers of marriage, but to each she was accustomed to reply that it would be time enough to think of husbands when she had grown tired of lovers. Now she was flirting with a very young man who sprawled on the floor beside her couch and leaned his head back against its cushioned edge, gazing up at her as he talked. His head was covered with crisp golden curls and he had the full and regular features which so often accompany an amiable but stupid character. Sometimes detachedly, as though she were inspecting a fur, Helena stretched out a white arm and slowly stroked the boy's head, watching the tight curls spring up as they escaped from the weight of her moving hand. Then she would shoot a quick glance at Malchus, wrapped in his sulks, and when her eyes returned to her boy their vague and contemplative gaze showed that she was not paying the slightest attention to what he was saying.

On the next couch lay an old man with a smooth, fat face and a bald head which he wiped from time to time with a yellow silk handkerchief. The richness of his dress gave a certain majesty to a heavy and bloated body. He had the glazed eye of one who has drunk heavily and he was making vague, fumbling gestures with one hand, as if he were trying to drive away a fly. But he was not driving away a fly; he was beckoning, and at last a girl ran up and stood beside his couch. She was small and slim, with the pure, flower-like face of a child.

"Come here, Thaïs, you little imp. Why have you been avoiding me all night?" He spoke indistinctly; his consonants were causing him some trouble, and when he reached out a heavy arm the girl shrank back laughing. But soon she had submitted and sat down on his couch and allowed him to put his arm about her.

At that moment Helena rose and, as though she were the controlling force of the whole company, the sound of voices broke off sharp and everyone looked at her. She moved toward her host with the slow, exquisite poise of one to whom even walking is a conscious art. Her robe of silver tissue embroidered with blue and crimson leopards enhanced with its shining surfaces the forms and motions of her beautiful, supple body.

And with her departure everyone became aware that the feast was over. Like a soundless tide the large silence of the night, of which the guests had recently been so oblivious, subtly took possession of the room, broken rarely by a murmured phrase, a giggle of laughter from one of the girls, or the snores of a sleeping feaster which rose from time to time out of the silence, soared up gradually and formidably, and exploded with a snort which aroused the sleeper to a fretful change of position. But over each interruption the silence closed like a flood, and audible in it, as if an integral part of it, streamed the cold, airy rush of a fountain, faintly seen like a silver ghost in the deep-blue hollow of the courtyard. Softly and incessantly it hissed, a silence grown audible. But to one who listened intently, small, clear sounds emerged from the pervading hush; sometimes a tiny spark shot with a crackle like the snapping of a cane splinter from one of the steady lamp flames and four pure musical notes made by water dripping from a leak in the fountain pipe into the basin below, repeated their little tune with monotonous persistence.

At the departure of Helena, Malchus had stirred himself on his couch with a long sigh. Her going had eased the intolerable oppression which had tormented him, as if with an insomnia of the nerves, all evening. Now he had sunk into a deep revery when a voice close beside him startled him into consciousness. "Like a fire that has burned itself out!" said the voice. It was the voice of Diocles, but when Malchus turned his head it seemed to him that Diocles had been talking to himself, for he was looking, not at him, but at the rows of feasters silent on their couches.

"What has burned itself out?" asked Malchus.

The poet turned to him. "The feast, Malchus," he said, with a gesture which included the whole room. "Look! Life here is frozen, suspended as in a marble sculpture. At every feast I am conscious of this moment when the feast has burned itself out. I watch for it, for when it comes I feel that I am seeing more deeply into this clouded pool of life. Don't ask me what I see, because I can't tell you. What I see speaks to the emotions, not to the reason, and so it can never be expressed except in poetry. But do you not feel that some larger and more enduring power has entered the room and superseded the small, isolated activities of all these helpless folk—helpless now because of drunkenness or sleep, but just as helpless when they are laughing, chattering, eating, drinking, and making love? This moment shows us human life in a truer perspective. It teaches us who are awake to it patience, resignation, love, and pity. I picture men as fish in the sea suspended in the middle waters halfway between the sea floor and the boundary of the bright upper world, and occupied solely with feeding, playing, fighting, and reproducing their kind. But when they rest from those activities the greater number sink, drawn down by their own density, to the empty darkness below; but a few, buoyed up by some bladder in the heart or brain which is filled with a divine air, float upward to the surface and afterward return to the middle waters with their heads filled with dreams of sunsparks, starlight, vast moving shadows, and a boundless dome of blue."

Diocles paused, and before he could continue, a voice broke, profanely loud, upon the stillness of the night. It was a young man who had lain long on his back, sleeping with half-open mouth and firmly grasping an empty wine cup in his right hand. He had awakened suddenly out of a drunken sleep, and was calling for wine. "Wine, boy! Wine! Come, fill up!" he shouted, hoarsely. But his shout disturbed no one and the sound of it vanished like a gaudy bird into the silence of the court. The slaves had long since fallen asleep on their bench in a corner of the hall, and even if they had been awake, the young man had turned feverishly on to his side and fallen asleep again before they could have filled his cup.

Diocles indicated the occurrence with a humorous shrug, and then, turning to Malchus, appealed to him more personally. "I wish I could teach you to be a poet, Malchus," he said.

Malchus smiled and shook his head. "The arts are not for me."

"Perhaps not. But when I said I wished to turn you into a poet I did not mean that I wished you to write poetry. God forbid! There are too many of us writing it already. I meant that I wished you to live poetically. I wish even that I could turn you into a philosopher. That at least would be a stage on the way to becoming a poet; for a philosophic creed is good as a temporary discipline, though it kills in the end. It is good while it feeds the emotions, but if we persist in it for its own sake we pinion our souls with ropes made out of withered truths. We must never allow the philosophers and sages to enslave us; on the contrary, we must use them as our servants. Nor must we allow life, any more than philosophy, to enslave us, for we must retain the mastery of our senses. The end of life is the perfect development of our faculties. If we allow life to enslave us through our senses and desires we resign the control of ourselves to blind chance and become like dead leaves in the whirlwind, helpless in the face of adversity, like you, my poor Malchus. That is what I mean by living poetically. It is something more than living philosophically. It is to be open to every influence from outside and to extend our knowledge deeper and deeper inward into our own being."

"We shall never agree, Diocles. This careful self-control which you preach is no good to me. It limits experience. How can we ever know if we shut our field of discovery within such narrow bounds? It is only by abandoning ourselves to life that we can live fully."

"And whither does your abandonment lead you, my friend? Have you been living fully to-night? No; you have spent the last six hours tortured by jealousy and despair. That is not living, it is dying. Let me be your physician. Come and live here for a month or two and I will put you through a discipline which will help you to regain control of yourself."

"Control of myself? If you could teach me how to forget myself it would be more to the purpose."

"I will teach you how to forget Helena, which will be more to the purpose still."

"How simple it seems to you, Diocles. But you, with your golden mean and your carefully ordered life, cannot realize the intensity of a passion such as mine for Helena. It is branded into my heart. What can your rules and disciplines do for that? You must not bring philosophy and poetry, but a knife, if you want to doctor me. I am done for, like a fire which has burned itself out, as you said just now with an unintentional aptness which startled me."

"Done for? But, my dear Malchus, Helena was not your first love. You recovered from the others."

"They were different. I was younger then and I did not take them so seriously."

"On the contrary, I should say that you took them more seriously because more sanely. The disaster of your affair with Helena is that you have not taken it seriously enough. Love is a perilous and explosive thing, like fire. If you do not take fire seriously it will devour life instead of warming and illuminating it."

Malchus shook his head. "In the difference between our use of the word serious, Diocles, lies the whole difference between our two minds."

"Then, in your own terms, Malchus—try to take love less seriously. Try in your next love affair to be frivolous."

"I have done with love affairs, Diocles. I am sick to death of this sort of life." He included the hall, the tables, and the recumbent guests in a sweep of the arm.

"For the moment, Malchus," Diocles assented. "But in a few weeks, when this amatory wound has healed, you will be reconciled to it once more, for whatever else this civilization of ours has done, it has at least produced the ideal mode of life for a cultured mind."

"Yes, and it is just this mode of life and this culture of the mind which I have come to hate. You are going to say, Diocles, that jealousy or love-sickness has poisoned my mind. I deny it. It has not poisoned my mind, it has opened my eyes. The life we lead is futile, both bodily and mentally. We boast of our broad-mindedness, but really we have a mind for nothing. We believe in nothing except not believing in anything. We dabble in all the religions and philosophies and select the little bits that please us from each of them, like children picking up colored shells on the beach."

"But, my dear Malchus, is not that the true wisdom? For thus we allow our minds to nourish themselves naturally, like our bodies, giving them a variety of foods and leaving it to them to select from each the vital principle and to excrete the rest. To be bound to one philosophy or one religion alone is the mark of a narrow mind."

"Only if we bind ourselves to it from idleness or cowardice, or for some such unworthy reason. But the man who has made one religion or philosophy a part of himself is not bound; he is freed. He has gained a means of self-expression and has concentrated his emotional life into a full channel instead of squandering it, as we do, in a hundred trivial driblets. We refined and cultured folk have no beliefs, no worthy enthusiasms, no prejudices."

"No prejudices? But I thought we had agreed years ago that to rid ourselves of prejudices was the first step on the path of wisdom."

"We did, Diocles; and a more foolish idea, it seems to me now, could not be conceived. Without prejudices our lives are empty, all the fury has gone out of them."

"Fury, my dear Malchus? Well, you may have my share of fury. I have no desire to return to the condition of a wild beast."

"It would be better for us if we were more like wild beasts."

"Well, you are not unlike one at present, if that is any consolation to you. But explain yourself, my friend."

"I have already said what I mean, which is that this cultured, sophisticated life takes all the vigor out of us. And not only out of our minds, but out of our bodies, too. What does it leave for our bodies to do? Nothing. We have limbs and muscles, strong and aching to be used, yet if we wish to use them we must squander their energies in some artificial occupation like games or hunting. Real life ought to tax body, mind, and soul. It should be a contest, not a series of elegant postures."

"Well, each according to his taste, my friend. But this mood of yours will pass off in time. It is simply the result of your present unhappiness. Meanwhile, since you feel the need of physical exercise, why not try a few days of this despised hunting? It would distract your mind as well as exercising your body, and if you have reasonably good sport you will soon lose sight of the artificiality of it."

The two friends had almost forgotten that they were not alone, but now a movement on one of the couches interrupted their talk. One of the girls had stirred and awakened. It was Thaïs, who had fallen asleep on old Chronius's couch. She sat up bewildered, with disheveled hair and shining eyes, lovely as a naiad rising from a pool. Then realizing her surroundings she looked down in disgust at the fat sleeping face of Chronius and, stretching out her hand to the table, she took one by one four purple grape skins from his plate and stuck them carefully on his nose, his chin, and his cheeks. Chronius shivered and opened his eyes. "Don't! Don't! They're wet!" he mumbled, making groping movements with his hands. But Thaïs held down his hands, so that he could not brush off the grape skins, and immediately he fell asleep again. Then with an indignant little shake of her shoulders she rose and, smoothing her hair with one hand, came toward Diocles and Malchus.

"Tell me, Thaïs," asked Diocles, rising as she approached and putting an arm round her shoulders, "have you enjoyed yourself?"

"No, I haven't," replied Thaïs, without hesitation.

"Then my feast has been a failure."

Thaïs looked at him intently. "That is a polite lie, Diocles. I do wish that everybody would not treat me as a child to whom one must always be offering sweets."

"But what I said was not a lie, Thaïs. I meant it."

"How could you mean it? You're not in love with me. Why, then, am I so important?"

"Because, my dear, you are young and innocent."

"Innocent?" replied Thaïs, with a wry smile.

"Yes, Thaïs, quite innocent. And youth and innocence are the most beautiful and touching things in the world. If I were told that any of these others had not enjoyed themselves—any except Gelasia, who is young and innocent like yourself, or Malchus here, who is my special friend—I should be horribly annoyed, because it would show that I had been found wanting in the art of hospitality. It would be as bad as if my poetry had been accused of technical weaknesses. But when I hear that you have not enjoyed yourself, it does not annoy me; it pains me, and it is much more serious to be pained than to be annoyed. Annoyance is of the mind, but it is the heart that is pained. But tell me why you have not enjoyed yourself."

Thaïs hung her head and was silent. After a moment she raised a face in which shone the ingenuous seriousness of youth.

"It's always the same," she said. "I never know till afterward that I have not enjoyed myself. I thought I was enjoying myself to-night."

"You were, dear child. I watched you."

"Yes, perhaps I was. I didn't mind even when that old pig Chronius beckoned me over to his couch. But he touched me and stroked me too much and I felt a sudden rage and smacked his face. Then I felt ashamed, and I was nicer to him than I wanted to be, to make up for it. However, he fell asleep soon, and suddenly I too felt sleepy, so sleepy that I just settled down against him—feeling that he was a bolster, you know, not a human being—and went off to sleep with my head on his chest. But when I woke up just now and saw where I was and saw his horrid old swollen face, I was, oh, shriveled up with disgust. That's why I stuck the grape skins on his face. It was not for fun; it was from fury, just as one might smudge an ugly painting. And now I'm going. But before I go I'll tell you one thing. You are the only man whose arm I could bear to have round me at present; and that's a very great compliment, Diocles."

Chapter
Three

Half an hour later, Malchus was walking home, followed by his servant. It was the moment of the false dawn. In that pale, watery air, the familiar streets had changed their nature; they were hollow and desolate, the humanity frozen out of them. No mortal hands had made them; they had been grooved and sculptured by the slow labor of natural forces, like the channels of some deep-sunk, faintly luminous coral reef. In marble walls and colonnades, as they loomed up toward the walking Malchus, there was a dull, milky glow as though a veiled flame lurked within their substance. Overhead, stars showed their faint, frosty sparkle, in a limpid steel-blue sky. Not a breath rustled the palm trees and the tall rose-bays whose fantastic shapes spired up above the garden walls; but as he passed an iron gate his sense was caught by the subtle perfume of a flowering jasmine, which spread its invisible snare across his path, and his heart suddenly contracted with pain. Further on, as he turned a corner, a faint draught smelling of the sea touched his face, and he saw beneath him, like two polished shields, the glimmering expanse of the two harbors with the Island of Pharos spread along their further rim in a long violet mound on which, here and there, a light twinkled. Far in the distance, from two different quarters, bright shafts of sound shot upward alternatively and were lost; two cocks were challenging each other in the silence, and Malchus felt that if he had opened his lips and spoken out aloud the passionate appeals which oppressed his heart, he would have heard, after a moment of listening, the voice of Helena answering him far and clear across the city....

"Helena, my beloved, listen to me at least, before you leave me. I cannot live without you any more than a man can live without his own heart. Though I still speak and move my limbs like other men, the soul within me is dying as surely as the body dies. I am the empty shell of a man, a moving cenotaph filled only with misery. Be merciful, beloved, even if you no longer love me. It cannot be that I have no meaning for you, no part in you, or how should I feel this intensity of pain? Helena, I could be content, even if you never spoke to me nor looked at me, if only you would give your body back to me. My mind, my senses are full of you; they have forgotten everything else. My sense of touch remembers only the shape and smoothness and warmth of your body, my sight its lines and curves and colors. They are burned into me, branded indelibly. Even when I die they will remain; and if, when all our generation is dead, men open my coffin, they will find not my decaying body, but yours, perfect and warm and ready to awake from sleep."

The cocks had ceased to crow; silence, like a clear and fragile bubble, inclosed the whole world. Then pure and small from the eastward came the voice of Helena:

"My foolish Malchus! I have been waiting for you ever since I left the feast of Diocles. Do you not remember how I always loved to tease you? You used to praise me for it afterward, because of the wonderful renewal of our love which always came with our reconciliation. And so, during this last month I have only been playing with you. Did you imagine that I could exchange that stupid young Heronion for you whom I have loved so long? Come back, my foolish one: I will not torment you any longer."

A sparrow fluttered from the wall above him and Malchus awoke to find that in the preoccupation of his daydream he had stopped and was now leaning against the pillar of a porch. His servant was standing a few paces behind him, surprised and troubled by his strange behavior. The houses were now clearly visible; each had taken on its familiar individuality. Color had come back into the trees and the flowers which festooned the walls and porticoes and heaped their mounds of color about the fountains in the squares. In half an hour the sun would rise. Malchus, the pain at his heart dulled a little by his hopeless imaginings, went on his way and, entering the house in which he had lived ever since, four years ago, he had left the home of his parents, lay down on his bed.....

He slept for five hours and awoke to confused memories of dreams. His mind, still unresigned to despair, had projected its agony into visionary struggles. At first he could remember nothing clearly, but his heart retained, like a scar, a sense of thwartings, disappointments, huge obstacles encountered but never overcome. Then details began to return to him. Helena, vivid and desirable as in her most ardent moments, had leaned to him with outstretched arms from an upper window, and knowing that he was on the brink of the solution of all his miseries, he had hurried to the door of the house. It opened and he entered. But indoors the house was empty and ruinous and he never found the upper chamber from which Helena had leaned. He wandered from room to room vainly seeking for her, but whenever he tried to get out of a room the door had vanished and he searched desperately along walls of solid stone. Once Helena's voice called him clearly and urgently from the next room, and after desperate gropings for an exit he climbed perilously up the face of the wall, clinging to projecting stones, and, pulling himself up to the top, dropped over the other side. But there he found himself in another doorless inclosure. Again Helena's voice called to him, but further away now, and the same terrible struggle began again. It seemed to him now, as he sat on the edge of his bed, a relief to have escaped from that frenzied striving. His waking mind was frozen and empty. The fire had gone out of his pain now; it had become a cold, dull ache, and he remembered Diocles' phrase of "a fire that had burned itself out." But with the name of Diocles, the memory of last night's feast returned and Malchus found that an unappeasable hatred of that life of refined luxury had entered into him. Its hollowness—the trivial culture, the aimless contentment, the mumming and miming, the little rules for gestures and speech which formed its code of good manners—sickened him. He knew that he could never take part in it again, but he did not realize that this sudden fierceness against a mode of life which he had willingly tolerated for years was merely the blind vengeance of his shattered passions....

The process of bathing and dressing seemed to him now a tedious thing, but it was a thing which had become a part of his life and he submitted to it and controlled his anger at the restless movements of the slaves about him, enduring patiently until they should have finished.

At last it was ended; but with nothing more to distract and anger him, he found himself face to face again with the awful emptiness of his life. A sudden bitterness, like a poisonous spring, flooded his soul at the thought that there was no longer any motive for this careful cleansing and beautifying. In the old days, this moment of the completion of his toilet had been full of delightful anticipation. Refreshed and invigorated by sleep and with the heaviness of sleep dispelled and body and mind warm and tingling from the touch of warm water and the unguents with which he had been rubbed, he had contemplated the day that lay before him with an ever renewed sense of adventure. During the last two years his love affair with Helena had raised this daily pleasure to an ecstasy, for then he had known that each day held for him the delicious and almost magical renewal of their love. It was some months ago that he had first become aware of a change in their relations. In what the change consisted he could not exactly have said: a faint, indefinable discord had sounded through the perfect harmony of their love. From that moment their ardor had declined until Helena's feeling for him had passed from indifference to something not far from hatred. How had it started? Malchus did not know. But of this, at least, he was sure—it had not started with him. No sooner had he asserted this than a doubt rang a small silver bell in his mind and he became conscious of things which he had not admitted to himself before—of little failures, disappointments, wearinesses which had begun, some months ago, to creep into his rapture. Their passion, formerly so triumphantly effortless, had, it seemed, reached a limit which could not be passed, and from that moment it was no longer a wonderful still-renewed adventure, but a desperate reiteration of the physical. And with this flagging of their passion he had begun to be aware of a sense of stress, failure, emptiness, for which the union of their minds could not compensate. Weariness of the flesh had begun to assail him. But he had never confessed these things to Helena, for he could not have expressed them in words; and, even if he had been able to, he would not have dared, for, in spite of them, he still desired her. His desire possessed him like a hunger, undiminished, and as he watched her gradually receding from him the hunger only became the more fierce. No, his love had not diminished; it was hers that had failed them. And as he again came round to the unendurable thought that Helena no longer loved him, bitterness overwhelmed him and he sat staring again at the empty desolation of his life. By degrees he came to feel that all love of women was a hateful thing, a thing of feverish and restless longing whose brief fulfillment always fell short of the hoped-for ecstasy. Perhaps the weak and clumsy body was incapable of achieving that passion of which the soul dreamed. He thought of older loves in the days before he had met Helena, and he told himself now, in his cold, clear-sighted mood, that his love for Helena was not the supreme passion of his life. It was merely one of many. Each of his loves in turn he had proclaimed to be the supreme passion; that was the illusion by which the fancy always strove to cheat the soul into a disregard of the sure disappointment. Each, as he saw it now, had begun with this parade of flattering delusions, this intoxication which turned a girl into a creature of more than mortal perfection and a brief quickening of the pulses into an undying ecstasy, and he recalled the heartache of that first moment when his eyes met the cold eyes of disillusion, the sickening weariness of the attempt to pretend that all was still as wonderful as it had been before. Yes, it was hateful and vile, this itch for the impossible which no experience could cure. Yet even if the dream were realized, what would it be worth? An ecstasy of sensation made permanent would be an agony, a destruction for both body and soul; it would be a thing more terrible than this disillusionment and disgust which tortured him now....

It was the hour when he had been in the habit of listening to music or the reading of poetry or philosophy, and now his musicians and the Greek who was his reader approached to receive his orders. He sent the musicians away, for he could not have endured the emotional excitement of even the most sober music, but he retained his reader, who began to unroll the epic poem from which, during the last week, he had been reading to Malchus every morning. But Malchus waved it away.

"Not poetry to-day, Chalchas," he said. "Read me rather some philosophy; but not at length, for I cannot attend to arguments to-day. Read me fragments—passages which will soothe me and help to banish thought. I cannot choose. Choose, yourself, what you think best."

The slave went out and returned with two or three books and a stool, and seating himself near Malchus's chair, he unrolled one of the books and began to read. At first Malchus understood nothing. He could not detach his attention from the pulsing nerve of his misery and he heard only the gentle inflexions of the reading voice and the flights of words which dispersed like flocks of sparrows, uncontrolled by any connecting sense. Then with an effort he forced himself to focus his attention and gradually the sounds wove themselves into meaning.

"What is it you are reading about, Chalchas?" he asked.

Chalchas looked up from the scroll. "About eternity, sir," he said.

"'Hence it hastens to be in futurity'"—Malchus repeated the last phrase which still echoed in his memory. "What is it that hastens?"

"The universe, sir."

"Good. Read on from there."

Hence, read Chalchas, it hastens to be in futurity, and is not willing to stop, since it attracts existence to itself, in performing another and another thing, and is moved in a circle through a certain desire of essence. So that we have found what existence is in such natures as these, and also what the cause is of a motion which thus hastens to be perpetually in the future periods of time. But in first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future; for they are now the whole, and whatever of life they ought to possess, they wholly possess, so that they do not seek after anything, because there is not anything which can be added to them in futurity.

The voice read on, but Malchus had ceased to listen. A phrase had caught his attention and he repeated it to himself, feeling somehow a vague consolation in it. In first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future. Surely it was just in that desire of the future, the desire to continue his possession of Helena, that his present misery consisted. If only he could achieve a state of stability such as the philosopher seemed to be trying to define—a state of peaceful being instead of this endless craving for the unfulfilled. Again he focused his attention on the reading.

What then, if some one should never depart from the contemplation of eternity, but should incessantly persevere in admiring its nature, and should be able to do this through the possession of an unwearied nature; such a one, perhaps, running to eternity, would there stop and never decline from it, in order that he might become similar to it and eternal, surveying eternity, and the eternal by that which is eternal in himself.

Malchus closed his eyes. The words and ideas, only half comprehended by his reason, brought comfort to his heart. He withdrew his mind from Helena and from the pain which obsessed him and concentrated it within upon the pure awareness of being, the eternal in himself. But soon, by no will of his own, his mind had escaped and was clamoring again at the doors behind which Helena had withdrawn herself. How could philosophy help a pain like his? It was beyond the control of will. This beautiful system of thought in which mind broke from the bonds of reason and flowered into ecstasy was accessible only to untroubled minds.

We must think of the soul, Chalchas was reading, as not receiving in the body irrational desires and angers and other passions, but as abolishing all these and as having, as far as possible, no communion with the body.

Chalchas looked up and seeing that Malchus was listening attentively he unrolled more of the scroll and chose another passage.

It is not by running after external things that the soul beholds temperance and justice, but she perceives them in contemplation of herself and of that which she formerly was, and views them like statues set up in herself which time has covered with rust. Then she purifies them, even as if gold had taken unto itself life and, because it was encrusted with earth, perceived not that it was gold and knew not itself; but afterward, shaking off the earth which clung to it, had been filled with wonder to behold itself pure and alone.

As if struck by a sudden thought, Chalchas laid down the book and took up one of the others. As he unrolled it and began to search for the passage he had thought of, Malchus's eyes wandered into the court where a slim fountain leaped from a little grove of flowering plants. The fountain, he thought, was a symbol of that pure being, always vividly alive, yet always unchanging and self-sufficing, which the philosopher vainly tried to define when he wrote of eternity and the soul. Its clear watery music soothed his sense as the voice of Chalchas had done; and as he listened the voice rose, gentle and unobtrusive, again, the words it spoke mixing with the voice of the water. Dissimilar Natures ... The Immortal and the mortal ... The spiritual and that which is deprived of spirit ... The indivisible and that which is broken by division,—the phrases danced like bubbles on the surface of Chalchas's speech, and then Malchus was once again listening attentively. For by reason of all these things there comes upon the soul mighty tumult and labor in the realms of generation, since we pursue a flying mockery which is ever in motion. And the soul, declining to a material life, kindles a light in her dark tenement the body, but she herself is lodged in obscurity; but by giving life to the body she destroys herself and her own spirit in as great a degree as these can suffer destruction. For thus the mortal nature participates in spirit, but the spiritual nature in death, and the whole becomes a prodigy, as Plato beautifully observes in his Laws, composed of the mortal and immortal, of the spiritual, and that which is deprived of the spirit. For the physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life but giver of life to the mortal body.

Malchus raised his hand as a sign that the reading should cease, and the Greek, taking up the books and the stool on which he had been sitting, retired across the court.

Chapter
Four

Malchus remained wrapped in thought till he was roused by the sound of approaching footsteps, and, raising his eyes, saw one of his slaves coming toward him, carrying a long palm-leaf mat which he spread before Malchus saying:

"There is a hermit at the door, sir, with mats and baskets for sale." He stood waiting for Malchus to speak and inspecting the mat critically; and, believing that Malchus was debating whether he should buy the mat or not, he added, "The weaving is unusually good, sir."

But Malchus had not been considering the mat. The news that a hermit selling palm-leaf mats was at his door had strengthened rather than interrupted the train of thought which had occupied him since Chalchas had ceased reading. Malchus knew from the fact the hermit was selling mats and baskets that he must be one of the Christian hermits from the desert. They were familiar figures in Alexandria, for many of them, having tramped across the burning sands till they reached the Nile or the southern bank of Lake Mareotis and having there taken ship, appeared at rare intervals in the city to sell the work of their hands and so earn enough to buy for themselves the bare necessities of life.

Malchus himself, like most of his friends, had been born a Christian and had been christened, for his parents were of orthodox faith. As a child, like many children, he had taken religion very seriously. The ceremonies of the church delighted him: he used to imitate them very accurately in his nursery, repeating portions of the services by heart to the astonishment of his nurse. Later he became a great student of the Scriptures and was much taken up with his own religious experiences and his successful or unsuccessful encounters with sin. The priest who had charge of him predicted a pious future. Then, quite suddenly, at the age of eighteen he changed. Christianity, he discovered, was fit only for children and women. He discarded it and proclaimed himself, with Diocles and the other cultured young men who were his friends, a free thinker with a sympathy for Greek classicism. They formed an exquisite society of their own which, helped by Diocles's growing reputation as a poet, became notorious for its artistic intellectualism, its refined licentiousness, and the extreme elegance of its feasts. But no man can change his nature, and in Malchus there was an impulsiveness, a violence, which was much more in accordance with Christianity than with Greece; and, though he would have been the last to admit it, he retained in his attitude to life the mental habit of a Christian.

But the Christianity of Alexandria, with its endless bickerings and riots, was a very different thing from the Christianity of the desert. Everyone in Alexandria had heard of those strenuous desert monasteries, buried in waterless wastes or high pitched on barren hills, and of the hermits who fled from even that strict and primitive existence and led solitary lives of incredible asceticism in cells built by themselves in the sand-swept wastes of Nitria or far south in the Thebaid. It was not so many years since Saint Anthony himself, the greatest of the hermits, had died at a great age and had been buried in an unknown desert grave, bequeathing his leather tunic and the coverlet of his bed to the bishop Athanasius; and the stories which were still told of his lonely battles against evil spirits and those gnawing temptations which lay hold on men living in solitude, held a strange and profound fascination for the earnest, unquiet, and fanatical heart of Malchus.

The philosophers whom Chalchas had just been reading to him, reduced life to mere thought and contemplation. In spite of the comforting ideas which he had received from them, he had realized, as he reflected on their words, that they could not help him, for his only hope lay in strenuous action, while all they could offer him was thought. The idea of a life of thought, of bodily passivity, terrified Malchus. For one of his violent nature, passivity meant despair; for passivity, he knew, would leave him at the mercy of his misery and his desires. For him action was imperative. He must do, not think, if ever he was to escape from himself and from Helena. He longed to hand over the control of himself to some directing discipline, to slave-drive his body, to tire himself out in some austere bodily labor which should have an arbitrary but supreme significance....

It was thoughts such as these that had leaped, like a sudden light, into his mind when the slave had told him that a hermit stood at his door, and it was for this reason that he roused himself and ordered the slave to invite the hermit to enter.

The slave, leaving the mat where he had laid it, went off to obey, and a few minutes later Malchus, raising his eyes, saw the hermit standing in the court, immovable as a vision. He was an old man, upright and gaunt. The small, sharply defined features and bright eyes, looking out from a thicket of gray hair and short, thick beard, gave an ingenuous, bird-like look to the sun-tanned face. Over his right shoulder several long mats were slung, like the one the slave had brought for Malchus to see, and strung on a rope which crossed the same shoulder and was grasped in his right hand he carried on his back a great bunch of palm-leaf baskets which rose above the height of his shoulders on each side of his face. In his left hand he held a staff.

After Malchus had beckoned to him twice the old man moved and began slowly to approach.

"Come, my friend," said Malchus. "I should like to buy some of your mats and baskets. Throw them down here and sit down yourself. My slave will spread out each mat so that I can examine it."

The hermit flung down his load as if glad to be eased of it, and Malchus saw that he was dressed in a rough tunic of untanned goatskin. He wore it with the hair turned inward against his body; a fringe of hair showed along the rough edges about his throat and round each thigh. His arms and legs were bare and he was shod with sandals. He ignored the couch which Malchus had ordered to be brought for him and sat down on the sample mat, spreading his bent knees outward and crossing his ankles. Malchus noticed the sharp shinbones and the extraordinary thinness and brownness of the legs. On their hairy, sun-parched skin patches of dry scurf showed white through the black hairs like salt on a brick. He sat immovable, with hanging head and fixed gaze, and there came from him the pungent animal smell of stale sweat. Once the smell would have sickened Malchus, but now it had no repulsion for him, for it savored of a simple and primitive life free from the luxuries and refinements against which his whole soul was in revolt.

"Before we attend to business," he said, "you must have some food and wine."

The hermit slowly raised his head. "I should be glad of a handful of dates and a cup of water," he said in a small, clear, tranquil voice.

"Wine would be better," answered Malchus. "You are exhausted. A little wine will act as a tonic."

The old man shook his head. "To give a tonic to the body," he said, "is to offer a weapon to the Enemy."

A slave brought him what he had asked for and he sat silently munching the dates and sometimes taking a little bird-like sip from the cup. There was something strangely touching in the spectacle of him sitting there, quietly ministering to the bare need of his frail body. For Malchus, in his present state of mind, he was a being from another world—a world of liberation and new powers, mysterious, peaceful, and ecstatic. In his attitude and his still gaze there was the limitless serenity of the desert. Malchus longed to talk to him intimately and frankly, and after a moment's thought he sent away the slaves and, leaving his couch, sat down on the floor near the hermit.

"Listen to me, my father," he said. "I will buy all your mats and baskets so that you will not need to wander from house to house, because I want you to stay here and help me with your advice."

The old man's voice came clear and calm: "Why should you ask a foolish man for advice?"

"You are not foolish, my father."

"I am foolish according to the wisdom of this world."

"I am not seeking for the wisdom of this world. I know that you are wise in the wisdom that I desire."

"If you truly believed that I am wise, you would not want to ask me questions. You would follow my example."

"But there are many ways of living wisely—different ways for different men. Of late, my father, I have been in great trouble and bewilderment and I cannot see my way. I desire the perfect life but I do not know how to find it. Recently I have read some of the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and I have found much that is good and beautiful in them. When they write of becoming one with the Divine my soul is drawn to their philosophy, but I am afraid of a life of thought because I know that I shall not find peace in thought alone. I hoped that you might explain to me a better way."

"I can explain nothing. We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning, because we have the faith which is made perfect through the love of the Lord Jesus."

"Is reason, then, of no value?"

"I will ask you a question. Which comes first, reason or mind? Is reason the source of mind, or the mind of reason?"

"I should say that the mind was the source of reason, because reasoning is an activity of the mind."

The old man nodded his head. "Then is not a bright and illumined mind greater than reason? Faith is the divine reason and deeds are truer and sharper than words."

"Tell me this, at least, my father. If I become a Christian and a hermit shall I escape from the love of women and the desires of the flesh?"

"No. They will assail you more fiercely in the desert than ever they did in the city."

Malchus sat silent. He was accustomed to the impassioned arguments of the town and was surprised that this old man, who had devoted his whole life to his faith, should have no desire to convert others to it. On the contrary, the replies he had given to Malchus's questions seemed intended to repulse rather than to draw him toward the hermit life. And yet, in the small, calm voice there had been no repulsion. It was unclouded by violence or stress, more like the sound of running water, or the murmur of the wind about walls and roofs. And turning his eyes to the old man now, he saw that he had relapsed into his attitude of contemplation, his head bent slightly forward and his eyes gazing steadfastly before him; and as Malchus watched him he raised his right arm without stirring his body and, reaching over his left shoulder, drew over his head a linen cowl which Malchus had not noticed before. It hung to his breast, covering his face, and when he had dropped his hand to the ground again he remained immovable in that attitude, like an idol carved out of wood.

Malchus rose and sat silent on his couch, occupied with his troubles and vague desires and afraid to disturb the hermit. But after an hour of immobility the old man rose, threw back his head cloth, and began to walk toward the door. He had forgotten his mats and baskets, but Malchus followed him and, touching his arm, offered him a handful of money. He stopped and took the money with a nod of the head, and was on the point of moving again, when Malchus spoke:

"I beg of you to stay here for a day or two, my father."

The old man turned his quiet, luminous gaze upon Malchus. "I cannot, my son," he replied, "for as a fish dies when a man lifts it from the water, so, if we hermits remain long among men, our minds become troubled and perverted. I must return to the city not built with hands."

"Which way will you go?"

"By the Lake Mareotis."

A sudden impulse made Malchus kneel down. "Bless me, my father," he said.

The hermit lifted his right hand, and Malchus heard the small, clear voice above him: "The blessing of God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son be upon you."

Malchus rose to his feet. "Tell me your name, my father?" he asked.

"My name is Serapion," replied the hermit. He vanished quietly out of the court and Malchus read in his face and movement that he was setting out immediately on his long journey back to the desert....

After the hermit had gone, Malchus fell again into meditation. His mind was in that state of ferment in which transformations which normally take shape by slow degrees throughout months and even years, may occur in the upheaval and agony of a single day. His soul, disturbed and harassed by the gradual crumbling of his union with Helena, had revolted suddenly and violently when she had deliberately flaunted a new lover in his face, and he had turned with all the fierceness of his nature, not against her, but against the whole life and society of which he and she were a part. Then, snatching in despair for some support in the ruin which had engulfed him, he had seized upon the idea which had attracted him both in the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and in the Christian faith—the idea of a life isolated and self-sufficing, relying neither on human relationship nor on material support, but deriving its strength from a power within or beyond itself to which it resigned itself completely. In that idea he had felt a vague comfort even though the passivity and emptiness which it seemed to imply had discouraged him. Upon this the chance arrival of the hermit Serapion had come as a sudden solution. In the old man's serene detachment, his primitive and elemental air, Malchus had felt something more than a discipline of the mind: these things spoke of a discipline of the body, a life of physical battle, strenuous, unrelenting, the necessary and satisfying counterpart to those battles of the soul. The brevity of his replies, the perfect assurance of his faith, had embodied for Malchus that security after which he was groping. The hermit's impatience of argument, his lack of any desire to win over others to his faith, had roused in him more zeal than the most impassioned pleading could have roused. Now as he sat with bowed head he felt an excitement stirring within him. He was like one who, having wandered long in the dark, sees a light moving far ahead and, careless now of the pitfalls about him, runs straight on, absorbed body and soul in the pursuit of that vision of salvation.

It was in this state that his mother found him when, an hour after the hermit's departure, she came to visit him. She advanced down the portico, straight and dignified with her grave smile, and at the sight of her a sudden longing rose in him to drop back into his boyhood and take refuge again in her protecting love. It was a momentary impulse, no more; for such a regression, even if it had been possible, would have carried him back also into a life which had now grown hateful to him. As he rose to greet her, she saw the feverish light in his eyes, and when he had led her into an inner room and they had sat down side by side, she laid a cool hand on his forehead.

"Your head is cool," she said. "I was afraid at first that you had a headache!" And, knowing that inquiries about his health always irritated him, she went on, without waiting for him to speak, to talk of various matters—of relatives and friends recently seen or heard of, and of how Malchus's father had just secured a famous artist to redecorate their dining hall.

"You must come and see the designs when they are ready," she said. "The house will be yours some day, so you, as well as your father and I, must approve of them."

Malchus felt himself suddenly recalled by that casual remark to the world from which in spirit he had already traveled so far, and when his mother went on to speak to him with gentle anxiety of his future, he saw almost with the vividness of actuality the life which she contemplated for him. It was not the life of luxurious unconventionality which he had led for the last few years. It was the life of aristocratic conservatism in which he had been brought up, and the thought of it repelled him as much as the gay life against which he was in revolt. But the sight of his mother's gentle and earnest face as she leaned toward him with a little look of inquiry disarmed all show of antagonism in him. He loved her, and whenever, as so often happened, their sympathies clashed, he strove always not to hurt her.

"We have a feast next Thursday," she said to him. "I know you dislike these solemn dinners of ours, but come if you have nothing better to do. It would please your father. Crassus and Pompilla are coming and are bringing Julia."

"So you are still plotting, mother!" said Malchus with a smile.

She smiled back at him. "Well," she replied, "we have not yet quite given up hope. You cannot deny, at least, that Julia is an excellent young woman and that it would be a very good match. But if you do not care about her, there are others. What your father and I are thinking about most is the children. We were still young when you were born, but your boyhood prolonged our youth. Since you left us the house has been too quiet; we feel our age and long for your children so that with them we can grow young again. Then, as you know, your father is ambitious for you. We are both proud of the fact that for generations the family has held high positions in the state and it has been a disappointment to your father that you have not followed the family tradition."

"I only wish," answered Malchus, "that I could satisfy you both in this, but politics and government have no attraction for me, mother. If I took up a government post I should be an irritable and disillusioned old man before I reached forty."

"A thing too horrible to be thought of! Let us say no more about it, my boy. It is useless, I fully admit, to do violence to oneself in such matters. But you can have no such prejudice against marriage. In that direction, at least, your father and I can reasonably indulge our hopes." She rose to depart. "And you will come to our solemn dinner?" Her lip curled humorously.

"If I am here, I will come," Malchus replied, and he accompanied her to the house door and helped her into her litter.