CHAPTER XXXIX
THAT NIGHT
Their night was a troubled one, and they brought a strange report
of it into the day. Whether the fear of their sleep came out into
their waking, or their waking fear sank with them into their dreams,
awake or asleep they were never at rest from it. All night something
seemed going on in the house--something silent, something terrible,
something they were not to know. Never a sound awoke; the darkness
was one with the silence, and the silence was the terror.
Once, a frightful wind filled the house, and shook its inside, they
said, so that it quivered and trembled like a horse shaking himself;
but it was a silent wind that made not even a moan in their chamber,
and passed away like a soundless sob.
They fell asleep. But they woke again with a great start. They
thought the house was filling with water such as they had been
drinking. It came from below, and swelled up until the garret was
full of it to the very roof. But it made no more sound than the
wind, and when it sank away, they fell asleep dry and warm.
The next time they woke, all the air, they said, inside and out,
was full of cats. They swarmed--up and down, along and across,
everywhere about the room. They felt their claws trying to get
through the night-gowns lady Mara had put on them, but they could
not; and in the morning not one of them had a scratch. Through
the dark suddenly, came the only sound they heard the night long--the
far-off howl of the huge great-grandmother-cat in the desert: she
must have been calling her little ones, they thought, for that
instant the cats stopped, and all was still. Once more they fell
fast asleep, and did not wake till the sun was rising.
Such was the account the children gave of their experiences. But
I was with the veiled woman and the princess all through the night:
something of what took place I saw; much I only felt; and there was
more which eye could not see, and heart only could in a measure
understand.
As soon as Mara left the room with the children, my eyes fell on
the white leopardess: I thought we had left her behind us, but there
she was, cowering in a corner. Apparently she was in mortal terror
of what she might see. A lamp stood on the high chimney-piece, and
sometimes the room seemed full of lamp-shadows, sometimes of cloudy
forms. The princess lay on the settle by the wall, and seemed never
to have moved hand or foot. It was a fearsome waiting.
When Mara returned, she drew the settle with Lilith upon it to the
middle of the room, then sat down opposite me, at the other side of
the hearth. Between us burned a small fire.
Something terrible was on its way! The cloudy presences flickered
and shook. A silvery creature like a slowworm came crawling out
from among them, slowly crossed the clay floor, and crept into the
fire. We sat motionless. The something came nearer.
But the hours passed, midnight drew nigh, and there was no change.
The night was very still. Not a sound broke the silence, not a
rustle from the fire, not a crack from board or beam. Now and again
I felt a sort of heave, but whether in the earth or in the air or
in the waters under the earth, whether in my own body or in my
soul--whether it was anywhere, I could not tell. A dread sense of
judgment was upon me. But I was not afraid, for I had ceased to
care for aught save the thing that must be done.
Suddenly it was midnight. The muffled woman rose, turned toward
the settle, and slowly unwound the long swathes that hid her face:
they dropped on the ground, and she stepped over them. The feet of
the princess were toward the hearth; Mara went to her head, and
turning, stood behind it. Then I saw her face. It was lovely
beyond speech--white and sad, heart-and-soul sad, but not unhappy,
and I knew it never could be unhappy. Great tears were running down
her cheeks: she wiped them away with her robe; her countenance grew
very still, and she wept no more. But for the pity in every line
of her expression, she would have seemed severe. She laid her hand
on the head of the princess--on the hair that grew low on the
forehead, and stooping, breathed on the sallow brow. The body
shuddered.
"Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so
long?" said Mara gently.
The princess did not answer. Mara put the question again, in the
same soft, inviting tone.
Still there was no sign of hearing. She spoke the words a third
time.
Then the seeming corpse opened its mouth and answered, its words
appearing to frame themselves of something else than sound.--I
cannot shape the thing further: sounds they were not, yet they were
words to me.
"I will not," she said. "I will be myself and not another!"
"Alas, you are another now, not yourself! Will you not be your real
self?"
"I will be what I mean myself now."
"If you were restored, would you not make what amends you could for
the misery you have caused?"
"I would do after my nature."
"You do not know it: your nature is good, and you do evil!"
"I will do as my Self pleases--as my Self desires."
"You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?"
"I will do what I will to do."
"You have killed your daughter, Lilith!"
"I have killed thousands. She is my own!"
"She was never yours as you are another's."
"I am not another's; I am my own, and my daughter is mine."
"Then, alas, your hour is come!"
"I care not. I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!"
"You are not the Self you imagine."
"So long as I feel myself what it pleases me to think myself, I care
not. I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose
to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me;
my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!"
"But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have
made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself
anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have
satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are
aware of the coming change!"
"No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free
woman! You are his slave, and I defy you! You may be able to
torture me--I do not know, but you shall not compel me to anything
against my will!"
"Such a compulsion would be without value. But there is a light
that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness
behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours
and not another's--not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour
itself the creating will, and so redeem it!"
"That light shall not enter me: I hate it!--Begone, slave!"
"I am no slave, for I love that light, and will with the deeper
will which created mine. There is no slave but the creature that
wills against its creator. Who is a slave but her who cries, `I am
free,' yet cannot cease to exist!"
"You speak foolishness from a cowering heart! You imagine me given
over to you: I defy you! I hold myself against you! What I choose
to be, you cannot change. I will not be what you think me--what you
say I am!"
"I am sorry: you must suffer!"
"But be free!"
"She alone is free who would make free; she loves not freedom who
would enslave: she is herself a slave. Every life, every will,
every heart that came within your ken, you have sought to subdue:
you are the slave of every slave you have made--such a slave that
you do not know it!--See your own self!"
She took her hand from the head of the princess, and went two
backward paces from her.
A soundless presence as of roaring flame possessed the house--
the same, I presume, that was to the children a silent wind.
Involuntarily I turned to the hearth: its fire was a still small
moveless glow. But I saw the worm-thing come creeping out,
white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential
fire. Along the floor it crawled toward the settle, going very
slow. Yet more slowly it crept up on it, and laid itself, as
unwilling to go further, at the feet of the princess. I rose and
stole nearer. Mara stood motionless, as one that waits an event
foreknown. The shining thing crawled on to a bare bony foot: it
showed no suffering, neither was the settle scorched where the worm
had lain. Slowly, very slowly, it crept along her robe until it
reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the folds.
The face of the princess lay stonily calm, the eyelids closed as
over dead eyes; and for some minutes nothing followed. At length,
on the dry, parchment-like skin, began to appear drops as of the
finest dew: in a moment they were as large as seed-pearls, ran
together, and began to pour down in streams. I darted forward to
snatch the worm from the poor withered bosom, and crush it with my
foot. But Mara, Mother of Sorrow, stepped between, and drew aside
the closed edges of the robe: no serpent was there--no searing trail;
the creature had passed in by the centre of the black spot, and was
piercing through the joints and marrow to the thoughts and intents
of the heart. The princess gave one writhing, contorted shudder,
and I knew the worm was in her secret chamber.
"She is seeing herself!" said Mara; and laying her hand on my arm,
she drew me three paces from the settle.
Of a sudden the princess bent her body upward in an arch, then
sprang to the floor, and stood erect. The horror in her face made
me tremble lest her eyes should open, and the sight of them overwhelm
me. Her bosom heaved and sank, but no breath issued. Her hair hung
and dripped; then it stood out from her head and emitted sparks;
again hung down, and poured the sweat of her torture on the floor.
I would have thrown my arms about her, but Mara stopped me.
"You cannot go near her," she said. "She is far away from us, afar
in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the
universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the
knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not,
the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which
she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the
heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is. Do
not fear for her; she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her
was left. Wait and watch."
It may have been five minutes or five years that she stood thus--I
cannot tell; but at last she flung herself on her face.
Mara went to her, and stood looking down upon her. Large tears
fell from her eyes on the woman who had never wept, and would not
weep.
"Will you change your way?" she said at length.
"Why did he make me such?" gasped Lilith. "I would have made
myself--oh, so different! I am glad it was he that made me and not
I myself! He alone is to blame for what I am! Never would I have
made such a worthless thing! He meant me such that I might know it
and be miserable! I will not be made any longer!"
"Unmake yourself, then," said Mara.
"Alas, I cannot! You know it, and mock me! How often have I not
agonised to cease, but the tyrant keeps me being! I curse him!--Now
let him kill me!"
The words came in jets as from a dying fountain.
"Had he not made you," said Mara, gently and slowly, "you could not
even hate him. But he did not make you such. You have made
yourself what you are.--Be of better cheer: he can remake you."
"I will not be remade!"
"He will not change you; he will only restore you to what you were."
"I will not be aught of his making."
"Are you not willing to have that set right which you have set
wrong?"
She lay silent; her suffering seemed abated.
"If you are willing, put yourself again on the settle."
"I will not," she answered, forcing the words through her clenched
teeth.
A wind seemed to wake inside the house, blowing without sound or
impact; and a water began to rise that had no lap in its ripples,
no sob in its swell. It was cold, but it did not benumb. Unseen
and noiseless it came. It smote no sense in me, yet I knew it
rising. I saw it lift at last and float her. Gently it bore her,
unable to resist, and left rather than laid her on the settle. Then
it sank swiftly away.
The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and
gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture
of pure interpenetrating inward light. She began to moan, and sigh
deep sighs, then murmur as holding colloquy with a dividual self:
her queendom was no longer whole; it was divided against itself.
One moment she would exult as over her worst enemy, and weep; the
next she would writhe as in the embrace of a friend whom her soul
hated, and laugh like a demon. At length she began what seemed a
tale about herself, in a language so strange, and in forms so
shadowy, that I could but here and there understand a little. Yet
the language seemed the primeval shape of one I knew well, and the
forms to belong to dreams which had once been mine, but refused to
be recalled. The tale appeared now and then to touch upon things
that Adam had read from the disparted manuscript, and often to make
allusion to influences and forces--vices too, I could not help
suspecting--with which I was unacquainted.
She ceased, and again came the horror in her hair, the sparkling
and flowing alternate. I sent a beseeching look to Mara.
"Those, alas, are not the tears of repentance!" she said. "The
true tears gather in the eyes. Those are far more bitter, and not
so good. Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks
a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal
forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to
himself of no more account. It will be so with her."
She went nearer and said,
"Will you restore that which you have wrongfully taken?"
"I have taken nothing," answered the princess, forcing out the words
in spite of pain, "that I had not the right to take. My power to
take manifested my right."
Mara left her.
Gradually my soul grew aware of an invisible darkness, a something
more terrible than aught that had yet made itself felt. A horrible
Nothingness, a Negation positive infolded her; the border of its
being that was yet no being, touched me, and for one ghastly instant
I seemed alone with Death Absolute! It was not the absence of
everything I felt, but the presence of Nothing. The princess dashed
herself from the settle to the floor with an exceeding great and
bitter cry. It was the recoil of Being from Annihilation.
"For pity's sake," she shrieked, "tear my heart out, but let me
live!"
With that there fell upon her, and upon us also who watched with
her, the perfect calm as of a summer night. Suffering had all but
reached the brim of her life's cup, and a hand had emptied it! She
raised her head, half rose, and looked around her. A moment more,
and she stood erect, with the air of a conqueror: she had won the
battle! Dareful she had met her spiritual foes; they had withdrawn
defeated! She raised her withered arm above her head, a pćan of
unholy triumph in her throat--when suddenly her eyes fixed in a
ghastly stare.--What was she seeing?
I looked, and saw: before her, cast from unseen heavenly mirror,
stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent
beauty, She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She
knew the one what God had intended her to be, the other what she
had made herself.
The rest of the night she lay motionless altogether.
With the gray dawn growing in the room, she rose, turned to Mara,
and said, in prideful humility, "You have conquered. Let me go into
the wilderness and bewail myself."
Mara saw that her submission was not feigned, neither was it real.
She looked at her a moment, and returned:
"Begin, then, and set right in the place of wrong."
"I know not how," she replied--with the look of one who foresaw and
feared the answer.
"Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go."
A fierce refusal seemed to struggle for passage, but she kept it
prisoned.
"I cannot," she said. "I have no longer the power. Open it for
me."
She held out the offending hand. It was more a paw than a hand. It
seemed to me plain that she could not open it.
Mara did not even look at it.
"You must open it yourself," she said quietly.
"I have told you I cannot!"
"You can if you will--not indeed at once, but by persistent effort.
What you have done, you do not yet wish undone--do not yet intend
to undo!"
"You think so, I dare say," rejoined the princess with a flash of
insolence, "but I KNOW that I cannot open my hand!"
"I know you better than you know yourself, and I know you can. You
have often opened it a little way. Without trouble and pain you
cannot open it quite, but you CAN open it. At worst you could beat
it open! I pray you, gather your strength, and open it wide."
"I will not try what I know impossible. It would be the part of a
fool!"
"Which you have been playing all your life! Oh, you are hard to
teach!"
Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back
on Mara, saying, "I know what you have been tormenting me for! You
have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me
stronger than you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am
still what I have always known myself--queen of Hell, and mistress
of the worlds!"
Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it
was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it
came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE
IN DEATH--life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had
glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with
her until now.
She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire.
Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again
by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold,
yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being,
and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying
together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness
that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far,
and my thought went back to Lilith.
Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew
we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the
misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its
reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she
was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was in it! We
were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been
WITH her; we should have been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely
apart. The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the
light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil
and understands it.
Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she
knew to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The
source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of
conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.
She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on
the face of one who knew existence but not love--knew nor life,
nor joy, nor good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death!
She knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her,
death lived. It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but
that she was consciously a dead thing. She had killed her life,
and was dead--and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever!
She had tried her hardest to unmake herself, and could not! she was
a dead life! she could not cease! she must BE! In her face I saw
and read beyond its misery--saw in its dismay that the dismay behind
it was more than it could manifest. It sent out a livid gloom;
the light that was in her was darkness, and after its kind it shone.
She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond
her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw
now what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was as a
conscious corpse, whose coffin would never come to pieces, never
set her free! Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into
the heart of horror essential--her own indestructible evil. Her
right hand also was now clenched--upon existent Nothing--her
inheritance!
But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!
Without change of look, without sign of purpose, Lilith walked
toward Mara. She felt her coming, and rose to meet her.
"I yield," said the princess. "I cannot hold out. I am defeated.
--Not the less, I cannot open my hand."
"Have you tried?"
"I am trying now with all my might."
"I will take you to my father. You have wronged him worst of the
created, therefore he best of the created can help you."
"How can HE help me?"
"He will forgive you."
"Ah, if he would but help me to cease! Not even that am I capable
of! I have no power over myself; I am a slave! I acknowledge it.
Let me die."
"A slave thou art that shall one day be a child!" answered
Mara.--"Verily, thou shalt die, but not as thou thinkest. Thou
shalt die out of death into life. Now is the Life for, that never
was against thee!"
Like her mother, in whom lay the motherhood of all the world, Mara
put her arms around Lilith, and kissed her on the forehead. The
fiery-cold misery went out of her eyes, and their fountains filled.
She lifted, and bore her to her own bed in a corner of the room,
laid her softly upon it, and closed her eyes with caressing hands.
Lilith lay and wept. The Lady of Sorrow went to the door and opened
it.
Morn, with the Spring in her arms, waited outside. Softly they
stole in at the opened door, with a gentle wind in the skirts of
their garments. It flowed and flowed about Lilith, rippling the
unknown, upwaking sea of her life eternal; rippling and to ripple
it, until at length she who had been but as a weed cast on the
dry sandy shore to wither, should know herself an inlet of the
everlasting ocean, henceforth to flow into her for ever, and ebb
no more. She answered the morning wind with reviving breath,
and began to listen. For in the skirts of the wind had come the
rain--the soft rain that heals the mown, the many-wounded
grass--soothing it with the sweetness of all music, the hush that
lives between music and silence. It bedewed the desert places
around the cottage, and the sands of Lilith's heart heard it, and
drank it in. When Mara returned to sit by her bed, her tears were
flowing softer than the rain, and soon she was fast asleep.
