Napoleon
It was the 4th of July, 1809, and a thunderous, close evening. In Lobau, the largest of the five islands on the Danube, where were the imperial headquarters, the huge machinery of war, human and insentient, was getting up steam, so to speak, for the morrow’s milling, and eliciting, as its flywheel slowly revolved, an automatic response in all its myriad parts from Pressburg to Vienna. The occasion, it might be said, was an emergency occasion. If the Emperor, himself commanding, had not been thrashed by the Austrians, under the Archduke Charles, a couple of months earlier at Aspern, his retreat upon the islands had looked so much like a defeat, that for the moment his supremacy, moral and material, hung in the balance. For the first time the Grand Army had suffered a shock to its amour-propre and its hitherto invincible faith in its leader. A little might turn the scale, and send all its disintegrated legions scuttling back to Strasburg.
That the impenetrable “Antichrist” himself was fully aware of the nature of the hazard there is no reason to doubt, or that he was concentrating all the deepest faculties of his genius on the delivery of a blow which should be immense and final. He was much alone in his tent, and his orders were laconic and momentous. The ordinary mind cannot picture such a situation, and dismiss its surrounding distractions—one might say its hauntings. There were the arsenals, the forges, the rope-walks, the sheds for boat-mending, the canteens and parks of artillery all over the five islands; there were the boats themselves in the river, scores of them, and the massive chains which bound them into bridges; there were the ammunition wagons and their loaded boxes, the forests of piled arms, the tossed oceans of tents, the miles of tethered horses, the ring-fences of palisades; and there were the troops for last, enough to people a great city, and each man of them as cheerily busy as if he were one of an exodus of Israelites picketing on his way to the promised land. Seven weeks before this same island of Lobau had been littered with the legs and arms of those wounded at Aspern—limbs hastily severed and flung helter-skelter among the grass of its meadows. Its soil was soaked with blood; thousands of mangled men and horses had sunk screaming in the waters which thundered by its shores; a hail of iron had smashed into it and its even more luckless neighbours; fire from burning mills had roared down upon its bridges, melting men and metal into one horrible annealing; it had heaved and vomited with the filth of war. And had all that hideous picture a place in the background of the mastermind, or had its present aspect, of busy preparation for another scene as sickening, or worse? One sorrow may have haunted him, one bloody ghost out of all the multitudes—the figure of his old comrade Marshal Lannes, as he had seen him borne hither on a litter of branches and muskets on the fatal day—one shattered horror more to feed the carnage. He had been moved a moment, had wept, and kissed the dying man. An unconscious thought of him may have lingered still like a melancholy shadow in his soul. But, for the rest, one may be sure that he looked over and beyond all these things, as a great architect sees through the maze of scaffolding the glory of the fabric his soul has raised. This man, it is to be supposed, ever regarded a battlefield but as a map, so clear to his mind that, as the opposing troops manœuvred on it, he could check or reinforce them, show them the way to defeat or victory with his eyes shut. He was a calculating “freak,” and as such superhuman—or superdiabolic.
As the dark gathered, lit only by the flickering lightnings, an immense hush fell over the islands. Every lamp and fire was extinguished; the multitudinous tramp of moving hosts mingled with the boom of the river, and became part with it; the song of the bugles, soft and short, mounted on the wind, and fled with its shrilling through the branches of the trees. One might never have guessed the universal movement that was taking itself cover, as it were, under these silences, as if the islands themselves had been unmoored, and were drifting soundlessly, with their freight of death, towards the shores.
In the midst, a little cry, sharp and sudden, rang out in the neighbourhood of the Emperor’s tent—it might have been a trodden bird’s; it passed, and was not repeated. A young officer, de Sainte Croix, of the personal staff, hurried towards the spot. It was he, vigorous and enthusiastic, who had often gained the Emperor’s approval by climbing tall trees on the island to watch the Austrian preparations on the distant plain. He found a sentry standing by a clump of bushes, and another, one of the Old Guard, lying prone at his feet.
“Malediction!” he whispered. “Who had the daring?”
The man saluted.
“It is Corporal Lebrun, Monsieur. He gave one cry—thus; and I saw him fall. He was hit over the heart at Essling, and only his cartouchier saved him; but he has complained since of an oppression. I think the closeness, the thunder——”
The officer interrupted him:
“That will do. You had no right to leave your post. Return to it.”
The soldier saluted again, wheeled, and retreated. De Sainte Croix bent over the fallen man.
“How is it, Lebrun?”
The corporal lay with a ghastly face, his breath labouring, his chest lifting in spasms. He was not a young man, yet prematurely aged, toughened, grizzled, tanned like old leather in the service of his god. There was a wild, lost look in his eyes which betokened the coming end. He struggled to speak.
“Lift me up, monsieur, in God’s name!”
De Sainte Croix took the livid head on his knee. The posture somewhat eased the fighting heart.
“Courage, comrade! This fit will pass with the oppression. Why, I myself feel it—I. When the storm breaks——”
The blue lips caught at the word.
“When the storm breaks! What will he have answered?”
“He? Who?” said the young officer.
The dying corporal, twisting in his arms, made an awful gesture towards the Emperor’s tent.
“As always,” said de Sainte Croix, “with the cry to victory.”
The other clutched his hand with a grip like madness.
“I believe it, monsieur. He will have renewed the compact.”
“What compact, my poor friend?”
“With the red man.”
De Sainte Croix could hardly catch the answer.
He laughed—men must laugh, though they died for it—and spoke a soothing word. He believed the poor fellow delirious.
“I have laughed too, I have scorned, I have feigned to disbelieve,” said Lebrun, thickly and passionately. “I laugh no longer. Marengo, Hohenlinden, Jena, Austerlitz—what mortal brain unassisted could have so added victory to victory, could so, and for so long a time, have held the world’s destinies in the hollow of one hand? I am a soldier, monsieur, a simple, uneducated man, and yet I know things and I have seen things that would make the wise falter in their wisdom.”
“This red man, amongst others,” said the young officer conciliatingly.
A quiver of lightning at the moment glazed the dying face. Great drops stood on it; the fallen cheeks were filling with shadow; the eyeballs shone like porcelain. In spite of himself, a shiver ran down de Sainte Croix’s spine. There was certainly something uncanny in the night, even to war-toughened nerves. Lebrun’s voice had sunk to a whisper as he answered:
“Didst thou never hear of the General’s proclamation in Egypt to the Ulemas and Shereefs? He stood then on shifting sand—the English sea-captain had just beaten us. A false step, and he were engulfed for ever. And, to gain the people, he told them that their God had sent him to destroy the enemies of Islam and to trample on the cross.”
“Policy, Lebrun,” said de Sainte Croix, lifting his hand to wipe his own wet forehead. “He never meant it.”
“Then why, monsieur, did this blasphemy follow immediately on the visit of the red man? There had been no hint of it before—and afterwards he swore to them that their false bible was the true word.”
De Sainte Croix snapped somewhat fretfully:
“This red man? Who the devil is he?”
A shudder quite convulsed the corporal.
“Thou hast spoken it, monsieur.”
“A figment of your excited fancy, soldier.”
“With these eyes I saw him, monsieur. It was ten years ago. I was on guard in a corridor of the Palace at Cairo, and there came out of the General’s cabinet one who had never gone in. Little he was, like a child of a hundred years, and he had on a blood-red bernous, and his face was black as a Nubian’s. Only at the lips it pulsed with fire, and fire, dim and wavering, travelled under his cheeks. One moment thus he stood—I could have touched him—and, behold! he was a little draped black figure of bronze that stood on a pedestal by a red curtain. It had always been there—I rubbed my eyes——”
“Voilà la chose!”
“Monsieur, I dared. I listened at the General’s door, and I heard him laugh softly to himself—he who never laughs—and he said: ‘Greet thee, Zamiel! Ten years I have given thee to make me a god, or our compact is ended!’ Monsieur, the ten years are passed, and to-night he stands again, as he stood then, at the parting of the ways.”
A flash, more brilliant than any that had yet shown, weltered and was gone. The dying soldier lifted his head quickly, with a fearful cry:
“Ne savoir à quel saint se vouer! I saw him again—but now, before I fell, I saw the red man again, and he passed into the Emperor’s tent!”
The thunder followed on his word, with a rolling slam that shook the island.
“Lebrun!” cried the young officer. “Lebrun!”
The head was like a stone in his hands; he peered down sickly; the soul of the corporal had been shaken out of him with the crash.
And, even as de Sainte Croix rose, the storm broke, and under cover of it, and of the tearing wind and rain, began the first of those silent movements which were to precipitate the gathered hosts of the French upon the opposite shore—and victory.
A moment later the young man was back at his post, amid a shadowy flurry of equerries and staff officers. All seemed confusion, but it was the kaleidoscopic agitation which falls into place and order. As he stood, the enemy’s guns, startled into action, flashed deep and melancholy from the distant blackness, their roar mingling with the thunder’s.
It was in an instant of quivering light that, looking down, he was aware of something strange and red standing by his side. It might have been a child, a dwarf, a cuirassier’s scarlet cloak, grotesquely alive. In the momentary blinding darkness which followed it was lost to him. He heard, as his eyes recovered their focus, a measured voice speaking close by:
“I think we have them, M. de Sainte Croix, since I have resolved to renew my compact with Destiny.”
He started violently, saluted instinctively. It was the Emperor himself.
“By God’s favour, sire,” he said.
“Precisely,” said the Emperor dryly, and walked away.
Leonardo da Vinci
“I cannot read the truth into these eyes. Their riddle still eludes me.” When the passion of two natures meets in perfect reciprocity the resulting fruit is genius. It is procreation in the divine sense—divine creation by deputy, that is to say—whereby the love that is in the souls of both, each for the other, blossoms in the flawless understanding. Leonardo, the glorious bastard, was the earnest of such a meeting—a moment rarely possible, but still possible to any union—and the seal of its creative ecstasy was on his hand and on his brow. He was beautiful as he was inspired; yet, even as the Fates keep secrets from the gods themselves, from him was withheld the full interpretation of his own transcendent visions.
The young man to whom he spoke, and into whose eyes he had turned to look, lowered his lids as if abashed or aggrieved, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders.
“Master,” he said, presuming on the Master’s tolerance, “is it not the mystery of original sin in them which baffles you? And where on this earth are eyes to lack that riddle? You are too old, Master, by near fifteen hundred years to find the model you seek. There was never but one in all the world.”
He looked up suddenly, an odd shadow of challenge or defiance in those same vilified orbs, and again veiled them under drooped lashes.
Messer Leonardo stood musing, half abstracted. He was wont to hunt for the faces for his pictures about the city, and when he marked a quarry, to pursue it in and out of the human warren like a weasel, tasting its life in anticipation, until the moment came to seize and drain it. So had he captured the model for his Christ—among the people, as was meet—Lucio, the widow’s son, who had a face like an angel’s, and the gift, it seemed, of immortal youth. Lucio’s mother was the poorest of the poor, and bedridden at that; yet the fond pride in her kept her grown child in idleness. She embroidered rich cloths for tailors, and made a sufficient pittance; but him she would never let soil his lovely hands in menial service. It had been a different thing, however, when Messer Leonardo, the Duke’s own petted protégé, had proposed to introduce Lucio into the great picture of the Last Supper he was about to paint for the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And as its divine protagonist! Here was service deliriously sanctified. Lucio must be enraptured to consecrate his young glowing beauty to an end so sublime. And he went, indeed, to the great Master’s atelier in the Palace, and was made the subject of innumerable studies, pending his appearance in the fresco.
The fresco itself was to be painted on an end wall of the monastery refectory, continuing in perspective the actual rafters of the room, and so far consisted in no more than a charcoal drawing, masterly outlining the group assembled at the consecration. Only the Christ Himself bloomed in flowery suggestion from the midmost throng, a figure iridescent, half revealed, as if it were verily a dream materialising.
Before this figure da Vinci, tall, comely, a rapt look on his beardless, keen-cut features, the solemnity of the riddle in his eyes, stood one morning, his forefinger to his lip, and pondered—pondered. His model for the Christ stood at his shoulder.
“Ho, Lucio!” he said suddenly, like a man awakening; “you suggest it is thus; and perhaps it is thus. How, then, to elude the riddle which eludes me?”
“Why not paint me so, Master, with my lids down?”
Leonardo glanced quickly at the speaker; then, raising his left hand with the brushes and the pallet in it, selected here and there and began to work. Presently, as he modelled with deft fingers, half-murmured fragments of speech came from him.
“What is thine age, Lucio? I forget.”
“Yet under twenty-five, Master.”
“Why, a miracle, Lucio! The bloom of thee; the round chin of thee; the golden dusky wings of thy hair! What ensures such youth in manhood? Innocence? A mother’s love? Art thou very innocent, Lucio?”
“Who can be wholly innocent, Master, with the stain of that original sin in him?”
“True. Yet, for all that, a good son, a pious son. Show me thine eyes again. Ah, the shy revealing! Art afraid it will out—the answer to the riddle?”
“No, Master.”
“Once more, then. There! Now keep them so.”
Presently he spoke again:
“Your poor mother, Lucio—she mends?”
“She mends a little, Messer.”
“All due to the reliquary, is it not? Tell me the true story.”
“The story, Messer!”
“Saints, what a gasp! Yes, the story, Lucio. I had heard a whisper of it—how a dream came to the bedridden woman, down by the Volta gate, promising her she should recover if she would make gift to the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin at Saronno of that possession which, next to her son, she held in all the world most dear. You know what thing that was—a little gold and crystal reliquary, empty of all save her child’s and her husband’s hair; you know—or doth the story lie? It relates at least of how the woman called her son to her, and yielded to him that treasure from its hiding-place, and bade him by his love of her do with it what he would. He did not hesitate, the good son who owed his mother all in all, but straightway he went his pilgrimage, fifteen miles thither and fifteen back, through perils and much hunger, and left his reliquary at the shrine, and won his guerdon. Well won, I say. He owed her all, and what he could pay he paid. There ends the story—and she mends, you say?”
“Faith is the great physician, Messer.”
“Well, God be thanked for it. I think it is.”
He looked round again quickly, then wrought on, while a long silence ensued. Presently, with an exclamation, he threw down his brushes.
“The stain!” he said. “What folly! It confounds the issue. I shall not find my Christ!”
He dismissed his model, and returned to the ducal Palace. On his way he encountered a birdseller; a number of wee songsters imprisoned in a yoke of netted sieves hung over his shoulders. He paid the man for all, cut the strings, and released the pretty flock. A wide-eyed child, his moist lips parted in an eager smile, watched the quivering escape heavenwards.
“There stands my Christ,” thought the artist. “For the moment his small soul is free, free from the world, free from the shadow of the Fall, mounting with the happy little birds all mirrored in his eyes.”
From that day he set aside the divine problem, and confined his labours to the grosser figures of his group. He worked, forgetting his former model, and Lucio, the ideal of guileless manhood, passed into the mist of half-remembered things.
Messer Leonardo was a very great man. His genius was as multifarious as it was gigantic; but of its very nature it confessed a flaw. One vast conception in him pushed out another, so that the last was for ever claiming precedence over all before. His mind was a great hall thronged with uncompleted Titans. A scheme once realised, the way pointed out, he was impatient of its mere achievement. No supreme creator ever left so many immortal works unfinished—the varnishing and the sand-papering, so to speak, were matters for lesser souls.
Of these, perhaps, was the Prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the aged Padre Bandelli. He “kicked” over the intolerable tardiness of the artist; years rolled by—five years, ten years, and more—and still the fresco was not done. At length all was finished saving only two heads, those of the betrayer and the Betrayed, the opposite poles of darkness and glory; and there once more, and finally it seemed, the composition halted. Bandelli protested, grew wroth, complained at last to the Duke himself. Leonardo responded with a demand for models—the one wholly guiltless of original sin, the other—Judas. Of the latter he lived in hopes; if he could find him, he might help him to the former, as the deepest darkness of a well betrays the stars above; if he could not, he might use the Prior himself at a pinch. The Duke laughed, sided with his favourite, and the Prior withdrew discomfited. More years went by.
At length one day, as he was strolling in the streets with Duke Ludovico, his Magnificence hanging familiarly on his arm, Leonardo looked up and saw his Judas. He was one of two criminals, being carted for their gibbeting, who went by at the moment. The rogues jogged in a tumbril, their arms spliced back, their teeth grinning without merriment. A monk, holding up a small crucifix and gabbling mechanically as he ogled the passing petticoats, faced them; the executioner, brawny and impassive, sat before, chewing a fig; a ragged contadino with straw in his shoes, leading a horse as dusty and threadbare as an old overbeaten carpet, shambled at the head. Leonardo exclaimed “At last!” and adding excitedly “Release unto me Barabbas!” halted the procession with a gesture. “Give me this man,” he appealed to the Duke, “for my Judas. Eternal infamy shall be his in lieu of death.”
It was a trifling gift; Ludovico graciously, of his omnipotence, bestowed it. Leonardo begged permission to return to the Palace, and thence ascended to his atelier, that unclean hostage slinking at his heels. In the room he stood the creature up against a wall and studied him. Low cupidity, bestial self-indulgence, sin at its meanest and rankest were struggling there, out of the abject terror of death, to reassert themselves. Squalid, fulsome, with battered evil face and wild eyes shadowed under hair, the tint and almost the texture of ruined thatch, the thing fawned on its preserver, and was repelled, and fawned again, but at a distance, and stood whimpering. And thenceforward Leonardo set himself to unravel the riddle of this monstrous life.
He wrought for many days; and then gradually a strange awe began to assail him. There was something emerging from the darkness, a light, a vibration, which shook and confused his purpose. What was it? A Judas—with the glimmer of some lost angel reappearing, faint and indefinite, in the backward abysm of his eyes! That would never do—or would it—perhaps the best of all? He stayed his hand in amazement. The wonder grew, and with it some emotion, some reluctant sympathy with the debased thing—reciprocal, he somehow felt it to be.
And then one morning suddenly the creature spoke. It was in the refectory, whither he had been conveyed, that the Master might consider him in his actual relation to the composition—whence, still flowered, faint and mystic, the unsolved riddle of the Christ—and his voice came in a moment like a breaking water:
“He lied to Heaven and his mother, Messer; he had never hung the little gold and crystal reliquary at the shrine of the Beata Virgine in Saronno!”
Leonardo started violently and faced round. He stood gazing rigid at the speaker, like one stricken by some mortal memory.
“He was a hypocrite and a libertine,” cried the apparition, wildly striking its breast. “He had never left Milan. He had hung the reliquary about the neck of a little evil courtesan of the Ghetto, and with it had bought of her the hour’s bliss he had long and greedily coveted. But his mother, believing him, was cured through her faith; and, when she was restored, she herself made a pilgrimage of gratitude to the shrine, and she discovered what alone was to be found there—the killing truth. And thence she returned, the false life ebbing from her drop by drop, and, coming home, she read the confirmation in his eyes and she died of it. And you could not read it, Messer, as a mother came to; but the riddle spoiled your Christ—as it need not spoil your Judas. I am well portrayed at last—I am well.”
He ceased, dropping his head; and Leonardo found his voice in a cry:
“Thou art Lucio!”
And the other muttered:
“Yes, I am Lucio, who came to thee for Christ and remain’st as Judas.”
Then Leonardo said:
“He forgave them on the cross. As thou look’st towards Him whom in thine own image thou hast betrayed, so shalt thou find mercy, even thou. In Judas’ eyes I find my Christ at last.”
Wu Taotsz, the Celestial
Painter
In his fortress-palace at Nankin sat the Emperor Shun-yuen. It was a torrid day of the year 750, and the Emperor was fretful. Surfeit of power, he was reflecting, did not spell content. On the contrary, like lesser surfeits, it discomposed. It was a natural paradox, perhaps, that his seeming so full should make life appear so empty. He could not, for all his omnipotence, both eat his cake and have it.
The Emperor drew his imperial yellow silk surtout querulously about him, and “wah’d” snappishly. What was wrong with everything? As the third or fourth of his dynasty—the Tang, now long matured in a peaceful despotism—he possessed the lordship of all the good that existed. And yet the good was not good enough—it was failing somehow to satisfy. And why? He wished, by the celestial dragon, that he could tell!
Shun-yuen, as the product and successor of warriors, of their kin but not of their kind, was really, had he known it, in the throes of a new birth. There was represented in him at the moment the line of demarcation between the forces of the blood and of the intellect. He stood far enough away from the spirit which had enthroned his dynasty to have developed wholly in the ameliorating atmosphere of the peace which that spirit had won for itself; and yet there survived in him a virility which vaguely aspired to new fields of conquest. Surely there was something yet to be gained from the world beside territory and power; surely to be constituted Emperor of the Sun was not to be condemned to eternal stagnation in its glare? The germ of unrecognised thoughts and aspirations moved in him like a wriggling indigestion.
Suddenly in some near corridor of the Palace there rose a sound of repressed but excited voices, awaking a sympathetic response in his own restlessness. He attributed the disturbance to the general agitation evoked by his condition, since any imperial distress was automatically reflected in the imperial household, which was constituted very much on the lines of a hive; and it was with a thrill of interest, therefore, that he observed the entrance and reverential approach of his Chamberlain Chung-chi, an official of the second rank of the opaque red button and the three peacock feathers in an agate tube.
“Speak,” said the Emperor, ready to chastise for a disappointment, but longing for something novel.
Chung-chi, prostrating himself at the imperial feet, and bowing his forehead nine times to the floor, raised his fat face and obeyed:
“Light of the day, and supreme effulgence, under One, of the entire universe, on whom once to gaze in thy quintessential splendour is to be condemned to perpetual blindness, know that there has been seized in the town a stranger capable of the impossible heresy of asserting that there is on the earth a power greater than the Emperor himself.”
Shun-yuen sat erect, a sudden excitement tingling in his veins.
“Bring this slave before us,” he said, “that we may face and wither him in his blasphemy.”
Chung-chi rose, backed from the presence, disappeared, and returned in a moment, ushering in a man under guard. The stranger, offering no obeisance, stood up calm and fearless before the Emperor.
He was a small man, and old; yet the age in him, certified by a thousand minute wrinkles, seemed somehow discounted by the glow of a couple of brown eyes, as glossy and visionary as a child’s. His feet and ankles were bare; his short trousers and waistless blouse were of the ignoble butchers’ blue; his hair was clipped close to his scalp—for in those days the Tartar imposition of the pigtail was not, nor had women yet adopted the decadent fashion of hoofs. Over the stranger’s shoulder hung an open wallet, stuffed with brushes and pigments.
“Thy name?” demanded the Emperor.
“I am called Wu Taotsz, the celestial painter,” answered the stranger in a voice like a clear echo.
The Emperor’s lip curled slightly. This was one of the despised crafts, as yet held in contempt. Even at that date, to shine in letters or learning was the surest road to distinction, which is worth recording of a people warlike enough in the eighth century, however their reputation for arms may have suffered since. A uniform did not with them excuse and glorify a multitude of inanities; the fighting man got his due and no more. But still, however the intellectual arts were respected, the art of painting had not come into its own.
“Thou bearest thy head high,” said the Emperor. “Wilt thou remain celestial if we dock thee of it?”
He alluded to the common belief that to be deprived of one’s head, the seat of understanding, was to be disgraced beyond acceptance in paradise.
“Aye, even then,” answered the stranger.
The Emperor stared.
“By what authority?” he cried.
“By the power of Imagination,” said Wu Taotsz, “which is greater under God than all.”
“Greater than I am?”
“Greater than thou, O Emperor!”
Shun-yuen gave a little gasp.
“Thou hast said it,” he spake. “Who or what, then, is this Imagination?”
“It is that which penetrates and possesses even me, Wu Taotsz.”
“Thee? Then it is thou who art greater than I?”
“It is I, by virtue of that power.”
“What, then, can this Imagination do that I cannot do?”
“There is nothing which it cannot do, Shun-yuen. At its summons the world crawls prostrate at its feet; the Emperors bow their necks; wealth, beauty, power throng to worship it; nay, it can reach down the starry bodies from the skies and weld them into a single sphere, as potters knead clay, incomparably stupendous. Ask me what it can do!”
The Emperor glanced about him. His eyes had suddenly assumed a perplexed and troubled look; he shook his head slightly. The vague emotions and aspirations which had lately dejected him returned with redoubled force, and he thought, What is to seek here that this Imagination could perchance supply?
Suddenly his face brightened, and when all thought he was about to condemn the presumptuous madman to most exquisite tortures, he smiled upon Wu Taotsz, and spoke:
“Is it conceivable that in all these years we have not learned to honour lovely Peace with other than a fortress for her habitation? Mine eyes are dim with dreams of things I cannot shape—gold walls, and tumbling waters, and shining birds, and the misty loom of turrets clouding a vast space. Can Imagination build me such a shrine for Peace?”
“Aye, and more than thou dreamest,” answered the painter.
Shun-yuen rose. He bade the attendants honour Wu Taotsz, and minister to him, and give him all that he needed.
“Only the bare wall of a quiet room, and much rice-water, and my paints and brushes,” said the stranger, his eyes gleaming.
And he was allotted such a room as he desired; and, by his wish, none, not even the Emperor, came near him while he wrought. But every day Shun-yuen looked from his Palace windows upon the surrounding emptiness, and wondered when he was to see arise there the first evidences of the glorious fabric which Wu Taotsz was to build for him of his Imagination. And still every morning his soul was unsatisfied and the waste glared desolate.
Now in the meantime speculation was rife as to the stranger and his genesis. Some believed him to be a wizard embryo hatched from the sands of the great river; others that he was the spirit of the kilns where they baked the earth Kaolin into the porcelain which, in its hues and forms of increasing beauty, was coming to express more and more day by day the creative genius of the age. But of all these surmises Wu Taotsz was unconscious, as he worked on alone in his empty room.
And at last one morning he sent for the Emperor.
Eagerly Shun-yuen, dispensing, for the first time in his life, with forms and punctilio, hurried to obey the summons, and entered the room alone. And instantly he uttered a cry of rapture, and stood like one half stupefied. For there before him stood realised the pleasance of his dreams, only a thousand times transfigured.
He was gazing upon the clustered minarets of a palace such as his soul had never conceived, a fabric all builded of cloud and amber and foam, and yet as solid as the sward from which it sprang. There, in the midst of heavenly gardens which receded down terrace on terrace of loveliness to low hills and a blue horizon, the pearly structure sprang into a sky of lazulite; and to the golden gates of the main pavilion a flight of marble steps ascended.
Rousing himself as if from a trance of ecstasy, the Emperor spake:
“Who builded this, Wu Taotsz?”
“Imagination,” was the answer.
“Bid, then, Imagination to make the winds blow, the river sing, the birds warble.”
“They are vocal to my ears, Shun-yuen, and beautiful are the forms within the house.”
At that moment a droning fly settled with a flop upon the golden gate. The emperor started violently, and cried out, “A fly, and so far yet so plain!”
He hurried forward, peered closely, put out his hand and turned, with a scream of fury.
“Wretch! This is no more than a painted picture.”
“To Imagination it is real,” said Wu Taotsz.
The Emperor, his face orange with rage, leapt and drew his sword.
“Impostor,” he shrieked, “let Imagination, so it can, preserve thee from my wrath.”
He flew at the artist, who sped before him, across and round the room, until, reaching the foot of the painted steps, up the flight sprang Wu Taotsz, and, with a laugh, disappeared within the golden gates.
Following blindly in his anger, the Emperor rushed at the steps, staggered, recovered himself, gave a mortal gasp, and fell back. Before his eyes was just the blank wall of the room. The Palace and Wu Taotsz had vanished together.
Cleopatra and the Decurion
On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait, and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed, and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.
Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his leman’s treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment. The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that crushed her—to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.
One night they sat at supper in the Palace, a fierce nucleus, where enthroned, to all the blazing splendour of the hall. It was so alight with torches that the marble columns on which those hung aloft looked, in their deep reflections in the pavement, as if they were rooted in hell fire. Not a sleek Nubian crossing the floor with a golden dish in his hands but had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping step with him, like a devil reversed and busy in that under inferno. There were far faint cries in the air—of a doomed city, of some nearer anguish—punctuating the throb and swoon of harps. The swaying of peacock fans in soft undulating arms stirred the floating incense, lest the rank breath of torture should enter and overpower it. There was not a man or woman there whose heart, for all the sensuous glamour, was void of fear—unless it were, perhaps, the Decurion Dentatus. He was young, cold, beautiful as Antinous—a Græco-Roman of the heroic type—and he loved his master Antony.
A Hebe, sweet in years and looks, filled the wine cups of the King and Queen. Antony, lifting his, hesitated on the draught. His eyes, already inflamed, sought his partner’s, half covertly, half challengingly. Cleopatra laughed, and putting her glass to her full lips, drank. She followed a formula in doing so, conceding it agreeably to the very madness of his passion. He was haunted, since his defeat, with the thought that she would poison him to save herself. And yet he loved her. It was not the first or the last time in the history of worship that the supreme egotism had evoked the supreme adoration.
Presently, amidst some amorous fondlings, the Queen took the lily chaplet from her hair and shredded a petal or two from it into her lord’s wine.
“Do you the same by mine, my soul,” she whispered, “and let us drink the very perfume of each other’s wit.”
His eyes burning, he lifted the wreath from his brow and obeyed, dropping a flower into her cup. As he raised his own to drink, she stopped him, coaxed the vessel from his hand, and calling the little Hebe to her, bade her take it.
“Thou art fair,” she said. “My lord pledges thee. Drink to his passing fancy.”
Like one of those woodland growths which, being torn, flush a faint, slow sapphire through all their tender flesh, the child’s face, as she stood, seemed to sicken to the hue of death. She shuddered; her limbs began to fail her.
“Drink!” said Cleopatra, rising in her place with a smile. “Drink, child—for thine own sake.”
Better swift death than nameless torture. The poor slave drained the cup, and, casting it, with a scream, from her, dropped upon the pavement, a glittering, voluble shadow, writhing to its own reflection.
Antony had risen, the company with him—speechless all, breathing out the long minutes of the tragedy. It amounted to no more than this, that the child had been so young and lovely—and that now she was spoiled.
At the end, the Queen, scornful, magnificent, turned her burning eyes on her lover’s face. There was a look in its ruined strength which made her pause a moment.
“Read there, sweet lord,” she said, “the groundlessness, the unworthiness of thy suspicions. Were my love false, what precautions of thine could avail against my wit and will to end thee?”
He turned, still without a word, and, the light glinting a moment on his grizzling hair and fuddled, frowning eyes, passed from the banquet.
Then, coming down into the hall, Cleopatra, with a wave of her hand, dismissed the company, the slaves, the musicians—all without exception, save the Decurion Dentatus, whom she called to her.
Under the blazing lights the two stood together, and the body of the dead girl lay at their feet. The Queen pointed to it. Her arm and hand were of faultless beauty. She was thirty-eight, but with all the bloom and fullness of just-ripened womanhood. Years had not set one streak of alloy in the treasure of her golden hair, or clouded the azure of her eyes, or done more than perfect in her the natural weapons of the sorceress. She might have been the Decurion’s sister, so like he was to her in grace and Grecian fairness.
She fixed him with her eyes.
“I marked thee, Decurion,” she said—“and not for the first time. Thy looks defied me, thine eyes condemned. What—did you dare! And thy lip curled when Antony yielded me the cup. Answer why, so thou wouldst not——”
He stayed her fearlessly:
“Because I love him.”
“What, then?” she said, wondering.
“Could he not see, as we all saw,” he answered, “that thou hadst poisoned it? For his wit’s sake I would have had him comprehend; for his nobility’s sake I would have had him refuse thee the cup; for his soul’s sake I would have had him drink from it himself, and die, and be free.”
“Free? From what?”
“From his thrall.”
“What callest thou that?”
“The Curse of Antony.”
“Meaning Cleopatra?”
“Meaning thee, O Queen!”
She laughed. She did not strike his mouth, as was her first mad impulse.
“Darest thou?” she breathed again; then stared into his eyes in pure amazement. Was he not the first man who had ever spoken to her thus?
“Well, thou lovest him,” she said presently, with a deep sigh—“and I, too, in my poor way. It shall be a contest of loves between us.”
She gazed a moment unmoved on the little distorted body at her feet, glanced mockingly at the Decurion, and, turning, left him lost in wonderment.
He never saw her again until near the end. She was occupied in the meanwhile in building herself an unsurpassable mausoleum, and in testing on the bodies of slaves the effects of various poisons. Foreseeing the worst, and prepared for it, she would yet woo Death like a voluptuary, and borrow rapture of his embrace. Yet so far the test had failed her; and not from any inhumanity; for indeed she would have kissed in ecstasy that slave who suffered nothing in obliging her. But one and all they would persist most perversely in dying in extreme agony.
And then one day she sent for the Decurion Dentatus, who, in the thick of the general treachery, was among the few noble who stood by their leader. It was when Octavius was at Pelusium, and the fate of Alexandria appeared sealed.
The soldier was brought in to the Queen where she lay in a private chamber of her Palace. Two faithful women attended upon their mistress; an enamelled casket lying on a table near by was half buried under scented blossoms. Cleopatra fanned herself languidly; a luminous green scarab burned on her forehead between the wings of golden hair; the gauzy film which enwrapped her deepened to a tender flush over hips and bosom. Yet in her eyes some shadow of a mortal fear belied the sensuous abandonment of her attitude.
“The contest of our loves, Decurion,” she said. “Art thou prepared to wage it?”
He looked at her steadfastly, and answered, “Yes, Queen.”
“To free thy master,” she said, “from this curse? Wilt thou teach me how to die?”
“Aye, gladly,” he said.
She pointed to the casket. “It lies therein—the means. Open and handle it. It is said its sting benumbs—puts Death asleep. So thou diest sweetly, I am thy slave and grave-fellow.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he strode to the casket, and unfastened and raised the lid. Within, upon a mat of green leaves, lay coiled a thick emblazoned worm, all bronzed and gold—a poisonous horned viper. He grasped and held it aloft; received the stabbing tooth, once, twice, in his arm; flung the reptile back into its box and closed the lid.
After long waiting, he was down upon his knees, pallid but triumphant.
“Sufferest thou?” she demanded.
“But too much bliss,” he answered faintly. “I swoon from it.”
He crawled towards her, but sank on the way and died, forcing a smile to his agonised lips.
Then, when it was over, she rose in great emotion, and looked down upon the body.
“I have conquered all others,” she said. “Thou conquerest me. Greater than mine is thy love.” She turned to her trembling women. “Keep the worm safe.” And then she kneeled and, bending, kissed the dead man’s lips. “Take me for thy slave, Dentatus,” she whispered, “in the shadows to come. Not Antony, not another, but thou alone.”
The Galilean
A solitary goatherd sat crouched on a slope above the Sea of Galilee. It was approaching morning, and he had lit a little fire on the rocks in order to roast his breakfast of fish. It was still dark, though the embroidered velvet canopy overhead was beginning to reveal a grape-like bloom along its eastern verge. Seven miles across, on the opposite shore, the lamps of Tiberias, minute and liquid, dripped threads of gold into the motionless lake; to the north the snows of Mount Hermon lay like a pillow to the quiet hills; everywhere was the swoon and stillness which characterise that last deep hour of slumber when sleep itself sleeps.
The smoke of the goatherd’s fire rose in a thin, unbroken shaft; the hiss and explosion of its thorns were uttered in a subdued voice; he himself sat like a figure carved in old ivory. His arms and legs were bare; his only garment was a tunic of brown sackcloth; he was the gauntest man of his race in all Galilee. He suggested some grotesque vulturine fledgling rather than a human being, in his leathery skin, denuded scalp, prominent eyes, and great horny beak of a nose. Whatever juice there was in him must have been as brown and acrid as a walnut’s.
He had laid his sticks upon a little ledge or plateau where the green of the banks, rising some fifty feet or so from the margin of the lake, first strayed to lose itself among the waste and tumble of the sandstone heights above. Scattered among the bents and yellow boulders from which he had descended lay his silent flock. He was the only soul awake, it seemed, in all that heaped-up solitude.
Suddenly he raised his head. The sound of a footstep, distant at first, but regularly approaching, penetrated to his ears. It fell low and loud, unmistakably human, until it resolved itself into the tramp of a worried man coming over the hills from the south. The goatherd was not interested or concerned. He sat apathetic, even when the traveller, appearing round a bend of the rocks, walked grunting into the firelight and revealed himself a Roman soldier.
The new-comer had a heavy, colourless face with thick black eyebrows. The close chin-piece of his small cap-like helmet gave his lower jaw a bulldog look. His body to the hips was cased in a laminated cuirass of brass, epaulets of which covered his shoulders, and his short tunic was garnished with hanging straps of leather plated with strips of the same metal. Skin-tight drawers descended to the middle of his calves, and were succeeded by puttees of pliant felt, which ended in military caligæ with spiked soles. A short, double-edged sword hung in a sheath at his right side, and in his hand he carried a javelin of about his own height, the shaft of which had served him for a staff. Weary and benighted as he appeared to be, his speech and bearing expressed the arrogance of the dominant race.
“Ho!” he said, “ho!” and stretched himself relieved. “Food and fire, and a respite at least from this cursed chase. What lights are yon across the lake, goatherd?”
“Tiberias.”
It might have been an automaton speaking. The soldier swore by all his gods.
“Eighty miles from Jerusalem—a land of rogues and fools! Now directed this way, now that, mountains where I was told valleys, and torrents for fords, and to find at last that I have taken the wrong bank! Harkee, thou wooden Satyrus: my horse fell foundered among the hills, and I saw thy fire and made for it on foot. Well, I carry dispatches for thy Tetrarch, and thou tellest me that is Tiberias yonder. Should I not do well to beat thee for it?”
The large eyes of the goatherd conned the speaker immovably.
“Tiberias,” he repeated. And then he added, “With dawn will come the fishermen.”
The soldier cursed: “What, calf!” and checked himself. “Thou meanest,” he said, “a boat to carry me across?” He heaved out a sigh. “Well, goatherd, so be it; and while I wait I starve. Dost thou not hunger too?”
“Aye,” said the goatherd, “always and for ever.”
The fish were spluttering on the embers. The soldier speared one with his javelin, and, blowing on it, began to eat unceremoniously.
“I would not concede so much to my Fates,” he said. “I would rob sooner. Besides, here is proof plenty that you lie, old goatherd.”
The goatherd bent forward, and prodded the speaker once with a finger like a crooked stick.
“How old wouldst call me?” he said.
“A hundred.”
“I am seven-and-twenty, Roman.”
The soldier laughed and stared.
“Bearest thy years ill. Since when beganst to age?”
“Since I began to starve.”
“And when was that?”
“When one said to me, ‘Feed on the illusions of the flesh until I come again.’”
“One—one? What one?”
“A strange white man. They called him Jesus of Nazareth about here.”
The soldier, his cheek bulged with fish, stopped masticating a moment to stare, then burst into a hoarse laugh.
“Ho, ho! my friend! Art in a sorry case indeed! Thou shalt starve and starve, by Cæsar. Tell me the story, goatherd.”
The gaunt creature mused a little.
“Why, there is none, Roman, but just this. I had heard of him and scoffed—I, a practical man—and one day (it was many seasons back) he came across the water to these hills, and a great multitude followed and gathered to him from all sides. And they brought with them a number that were maimed and sick, and the man touched them and they appeared healed, rising and blessing his name, so that I, though counting it an illusion of the spirit, could not but marvel in his magic and the people’s blindness. Now the crowd abode here into the third day, and they felt neither thirst nor hunger; but I, that durst not leave my flock, waiting for them to go, was like a ravenous wolf. And on the third day this Jesus called for food to give to his followers, and some that were his went down to the boat, and I with them. And, lo! there were but a few loaves and fishes—nothing at all for such a multitude. But I helped to carry these up, and on the way the largest fish of all I hid beneath my tunic, for I thought, ‘Great he may be, but nothing is lost that I take precautions against his failure to assuage my hunger.’ Then did he bid us all to sit upon the ground, and he blessed and brake the fish and bread; and so it happened—account it to what you will—for every soul there was a meal and to spare. But when it came to my turn he would give me none; only, gazing on me, he bade me, since faith I had not, to feed on the illusions of the flesh until he came again. And I laughed to myself, thinking of the fish; but, Roman, that fish when I came to devour it was like a shadow in the water, having form but no substance, and so it is with all food to me since. Though I behold it, handle it, I put a shadow to my lips. Yet every day do I prepare my meal, hoping the curse removed, and knowing always it shall not be until he come again.”
The soldier broke into a roar of laughter.
“Until he come again!” he cried, “until he come again! O, a jockeyed Jew, a poor deluded Jew!”
He was so gloriously tickled that he had to gasp and choke himself into sobriety.
“Harkee, goatherd,” he said presently; “there was a day, not long past, in Jerusalem—a lamentable day for thee. It thundered—gods, how it thundered, rattling the Place of Skulls! I ought to remember, seeing I was on duty there. Nazareth was it, now? Why, to be sure—I know my letters, and it was writ plain enough and high enough. Jesus of Nazareth, who saved others, but could not save himself—that was it—one of three rogues condemned. Well, he laid an embargo on thee, did he? You see this spear——”
He paused, in the very act of lifting his javelin, and sat staring stupidly at it. Its point was tipped with crimson.
“The rising sun!” muttered the goatherd, and, getting suddenly to his feet, stood gazing seawards. The soldier came and stood beside him.
The whole wide valley, while they spoke, had opened to the morning like a rose, the clustered hills its petals, its calyx the deep lake, the lights upon it dewdrops shining at its heart. And there upon the dim waters, swinging close inshore, was a fisherman’s boat, its crew gathering in an empty net.
Now the two on the hill stood too remote to distinguish sounds or faces, while the conformation of the rocks hid the shore from their view. But of a sudden, as they looked, the forms in the boat started erect, and, all standing in a huddled group, appeared to gaze landwards. And instantly, as if they had received therefrom some direction, they seized and cast their net the other side of the boat and drew on it, and the watchers saw by their straining muscles that the net was full. Perceiving which, one of the fishermen, a burly fellow, quitted his hold of the cords, and, leaping into the water, floundered for the shore and disappeared.
“What now?” said the soldier. “Do they spy and seek us?” He muttered vacantly, and glanced again at his spearhead, and shook the haft impatiently. But the sunrise would not be detached from it.
Now the goatherd ran to a cleft which commanded the shore below, and, glaring a moment, returned swiftly, his face alight.
“Rabboni,” he said excitedly, “it is the man of Nazareth himself come back, and he ascendeth the hill towards us, and the spell will be removed from me so that I shall taste fish once more.”
But the words were hardly out of his mouth when the soldier seized his arm, and, dragging him to the shelter of a great boulder at a distance, forced him to crouch with him behind it, so that they might see without being seen. And so hidden, they were aware of a shape that came into the firelight, and it was white like a spirit of the hills and waters, and it stretched its hands above the embers, so that they leaped again.
And the goatherd heard the soldier mutter in his ear:
“A practical man—you say you are a practical man! Now, who is it?”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” he answered.
But the soldier looked at his javelin and it ran with sunrise.
“That cannot be,” he said, “for seven days ago I opened his side with this spear as he hung upon the cross, and there is the blood to testify to it.”
“I know nothing about that,” said the goatherd; “my palate is sufficient evidence for me. Look where they come and lay their fish upon my embers. The very savour of their cooking tells me I can taste again. It is Jesus, sure enough!”
[The End]
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
The author produced two books titled Historical Vignettes: one in 1910 (T. Fisher Unwin, London), and the other in 1912 (Sidgwick & Jackson, London). Being the later, “2nd Series” has been appended to the title to distinguish it from the former (i.e. “1st Series”).
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. birdseller/bird-seller, etc.) have been preserved.
Alterations to the text:
Abandon the usage of drop-caps.
[Title page]
Add “2nd Series” to the book title. (See above).
[The Princess Elizabeth]
Change “... when the Earl came home. prepared to attend...” to Prepared.
[James II]
“Abaddie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless” to Abbadie.
[George III]
“Of a sudden be became aware... was all about him again” to he.
[End of text]