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Title: The Man Who Died
Author: D H Lawrence
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Language:  English
Date first posted: May 2007
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Title: The Man Who Died
Author: D H Lawrence




I


There was a peasant near Jerusalem who acquired a young gamecock which
looked a shabby little thing, but which put on brave feathers as spring
advanced, and was resplendent with arched and orange neck by the time the
fig trees were letting out leaves from their end-tips.

This peasant was poor, he lived in a cottage of mud-brick, and had only a
dirty little inner courtyard with a tough fig tree for all his territory.
He worked hard among the vines and olives and wheat of his master, then
came home to sleep in the mud-brick cottage by the path. But he was proud
of his young rooster. In the shut-in yard were three shabby hens which
laid small eggs, shed the few feathers they had, and made a
disproportionate amount of dirt. There was also, in a corner under a
straw roof, a dull donkey that often went out with the peasant to work,
but sometimes stayed at home. And there was the peasant's wife, a
black-browed youngish woman who did not work too hard. She threw a little
grain, or the remains of the porridge mess, to the fowls, and she cut
green fodder with a sickle for the ass.

The young cock grew to a certain splendour. By some freak of destiny, he
was a dandy rooster, in that dirty little yard with three patchy hens. He
learned to crane his neck and give shrill answers to the crowing of other
cocks, beyond the walls, in a world he knew nothing of. But there was a
special fiery colour to his crow, and the distant calling of the other
cocks roused him to unexpected outbursts.

"How he sings," said the peasant, as he got up and pulled his day-shirt
over his head.

"He is good for twenty hens," said the wife.

The peasant went out and looked with pride at his young rooster. A saucy,
flamboyant bird, that has already made the final acquaintance of the
three tattered hens. But the cockerel was tipping his head, listening to
the challenge of far-off unseen cocks, in the unknown world. Ghost
voices, crowing at him mysteriously out of limbo. He answered with a
ringing defiance, never to be daunted.

"He will surely fly away one of these days," said the peasant's wife.

So they lured him with grain, caught him, though he fought with all his
wings and feet, and they tied a cord round his shank, fastening it
against the spur; and they tied the other end of the cord to the post
that held up the donkey's straw pent-roof.

The young cock, freed, marched with a prancing stride of indignation away
from the humans, came to the end of his string, gave a tug and a hitch of
his tied leg, fell over for a moment, scuffled frantically on the unclean
earthen floor, to the horror of the shabby hens, then with a sickening
lurch, regained his feet, and stood to think. The peasant and the
peasant's wife laughed heartily, and the young cock heard them. And he
knew, with a gloomy, foreboding kind of knowledge that he was tied by the
leg.

He no longer pranced and ruffled and forged his feathers. He walked
within the limits of his tether sombrely. Still he gobbled up the best
bits of food. Still, sometimes, he saved an extra-best bit for his
favourite hen of the moment. Still he pranced with quivering, rocking
fierceness upon such of his harem as came nonchalantly within range, and
gave off the invisible lure. And still he crowed defiance to the
cock-crows that showered up out of limbo, in the dawn.

But there was now a grim voracity in the way he gobbled his food, and a
pinched triumph in the way he seized upon the shabby hens. His voice,
above all, had lost the full gold of its clangour. He was tied by the
leg, and he knew it. Body, soul and spirit were tied by that string.

Underneath, however, the life in him was grimly unbroken. It was the cord
that should break. So one morning, just before the light of dawn, rousing
from his slumbers with a sudden wave of strength, he leaped forward on
his wings, and the string snapped. He gave a wild, strange squawk, rose
in one lift to the top of the wall, and there he crowed a loud and
splitting crow. So loud, it woke the peasant.

At the same time, at the same hour before dawn, on the same morning, a
man awoke from a long sleep in which he was tied up. He woke numb and
cold, inside a carved hole in the rock. Through all the long sleep his
body had been full of hurt, and it was still full of hurt. He did not
open his eyes. Yet he knew that he was awake, and numb, and cold, and
rigid, and full of hurt, and tied up. His face was banded with cold
bands, his legs were bandaged together. Only his hands were loose.

He could move if he wanted: he knew that. But he had no want. Who would
want to come back from the dead? A deep, deep nausea stirred in him, at
the premonition of movement. He resented already the fact of the strange,
incalculable moving that had already taken place in him: the moving back
into consciousness. He had not wished it. He had wanted to stay outside,
in the place where even memory is stone dead.

But now, something had returned to him, like a returned letter, and in
that return he lay overcome with a sense of nausea. Yet suddenly his
hands moved. They lifted up, cold, heavy and sore. Yet they lifted up, to
drag away the cloth from his face, and push at the shoulder-bands. Then
they fell again, cold, heavy, numb, and sick with having moved even so
much, unspeakably unwilling to move further.

With his face cleared and his shoulders free, he lapsed again, and lay
dead, resting on the cold nullity of being dead. It was the most
desirable. And almost, he had it complete: the utter cold nullity of
being outside.

Yet when he was most nearly gone, suddenly, driven by an ache at the
wrists, his hands rose and began pushing at the bandages of his knees,
his feet began to stir, even while his breast lay cold and dead still.

And at last, the eyes opened. On to the dark. The same dark! Yet perhaps
there was a pale chink, of the all-disturbing light, prising open the
pure dark. He could not lift his head. The eyes closed. And again it was
finished.

Then suddenly he leaned up, and the great world reeled. Bandages fell
away. And narrow walls of rock closed upon him, and gave the new anguish
of imprisonment. There were chinks of light. With a wave of strength that
came from revulsion, he leaned forward, in that narrow well of rock, and
leaned frail hands on the rock near the chinks of light.

Strength came from somewhere, from revulsion; there was a crash and a
wave of light, and the dead man was crouching in his lair, facing the
animal onrush of light. Yet it was hardly dawn. And the strange, piercing
keenness of daybreak's sharp breath was on him. It meant full awakening.

Slowly, slowly he crept down from the cell of rock with the caution of
the bitterly wounded. Bandages and linen and perfume fell away, and he
crouched on the ground against the wall of rock, to recover oblivion. But
he saw his hurt feet touching the earth again, with unspeakable pain, the
earth they had meant to touch no more, and he saw his thin legs that had
died, and pain unknowable, pain like utter bodily disillusion, filled him
so full that he stood up, with one torn hand on the ledge of the tomb.

To be back! To be back again, after all that! He saw the linen
swathing-bands fallen round his dead feet, and stooping, he picked them
up, folded them, and laid them back in the rocky cavity from which he had
emerged. Then he took the perfumed linen sheet, wrapped it round him as a
mantle, and turned away, to the wanness of the chill dawn.

He was alone; and having died, was even beyond loneliness.

Filled still with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion, the man
stepped with wincing feet down the rocky slope, past the sleeping
soldiers, who lay wrapped in their woollen mantles under the wild
laurels. Silent, on naked scarred feet, wrapped in a white linen shroud,
he glanced down for a moment on the inert, heap-like bodies of the
soldiers. They were repulsive, a slow squalor of limbs, yet he felt a
certain compassion. He passed on towards the road, lest they should wake.

Having nowhere to go, he turned from the city that stood on her hills. He
slowly followed the road away from the town, past the olives, under which
purple anemones were drooping in the chill of dawn, and rich-green
herbage was pressing thick. The world, the same as ever, the natural
world, thronging with greenness, a nightingale winsomely, wistfully,
coaxingly calling from the bushes beside a runnel of water, in the world,
the natural world of morning and evening, forever undying, from which he
had died.

He went on, on scarred feet, neither of this world nor of the next.
Neither here nor there, neither seeing nor yet sightless, he passed dimly
on, away from the city and its precincts, wondering why he should be
travelling, yet driven by a dim, deep nausea of disillusion, and a
resolution of which he was not even aware.

Advancing in a kind of half-consciousness under the dry stone wall of the
olive orchard, he was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just
near him, a sound which made him shiver as if electricity had touched
him. He saw a black and orange cock on a bough above the road, then
running through the olives of the upper level, a peasant in a grey
woollen shirt-tunic. Leaping out of greenness, came the black and orange
cock with the red comb, his tail-feathers streaming lustrous.

"0, stop him, master!" called the peasant. "My escaped cock!"

The man addressed, with a sudden flicker of smile, opened his great white
wings of a shroud in front of the leaping bird. The cock fell back with a
squawk and a flutter, the peasant jumped forward, there was a terrific
beating of wings and whirring of feathers, then the peasant had the
escaped cock safely under his arm, its wings shut down, its face crazily
craning forward, its round eyes goggling from its white chops.

"It's my escaped cock!" said the peasant, soothing the bird with his left
hand, as he looked perspiringly up into the face of the man wrapped in
white linen.

The peasant changed countenance, and stood transfixed, as he looked into
the dead-white face of the man who had died. That dead-white face, so
still, with the black beard growing on it as if in death; and those
wide-open, black, sombre eyes, that had died! and those washed scars on
the waxy forehead! The slow-blooded man of the field let his jaw drop, in
childish inability to meet the situation.

"Don't be afraid," said the man in the shroud. "I am not dead. They took
me down too soon. So I have risen up. Yet if they discover me, they will
do it all over again..."

He spoke in a voice of old disgust. Humanity! Especially humanity in
authority! There was only one thing it could do. He looked with black,
indifferent eyes into the quick, shifty eyes of the peasant. The peasant
quailed, and was powerless under the look of deathly indifference and
strange, cold resoluteness. He could only say the one thing he was afraid
to say:

"Will you hide in my house, master?"

"I will rest there. But if you tell anyone, you know what will happen.
You will have to go before a judge."

"Me! I shan't speak. Let us be quick!"

The peasant looked round in fear, wondering sulkily why he had let
himself in for this doom. The man with scarred feet climbed painfully up
to the level of the olive garden, and followed the sullen, hurrying
peasant across the green wheat among the olive trees. He felt the cool
silkiness of the young wheat under his feet that had been dead, and the
roughishness of its separate life was apparent to him. At the edges of
rocks, he saw the silky, silvery-haired buds of the scarlet anemone
bending downwards. And they, too, were in another world. In his own world
he was alone, utterly alone. These things around him were in a world that
had never died. But he himself had died, or had been killed from out of
it, and all that remained now was the great void nausea of utter
disillusion.

They came to a clay cottage, and the peasant waited dejectedly for the
other man to pass.

"Pass!" he said. "Pass! We have not been seen."

The man in white linen entered the earthen room, taking with him the
aroma of strange perfumes. The peasant closed the door, and passed
through the inner doorway into the yard, where the ass stood within the
high walls, safe from being stolen. There the peasant, in great
disquietude, tied up the cock. The man with the waxen face sat down on a
mat near the hearth, for he was spent and barely conscious. Yet he heard
outside the whispering of the peasant to his wife, for the woman had been
watching from the roof.

Presently they came in, and the woman hid her face. She poured water, and
put bread and dried figs on a wooden platter.

"Eat, master!" said the peasant. "Eat! No one has seen."

But the stranger had no desire for food. Yet he moistened a little bread
in the water, and ate it, since life must be. But desire was dead in him,
even for food and drink. He had risen without desire, without even the
desire to live, empty save for the all-overwhelming disillusion that lay
like nausea where his life had been. Yet perhaps, deeper even than
disillusion, was a desireless resoluteness, deeper even than
consciousness.

The peasant and his wife stood near the door, watching. They saw with
terror the livid wounds on the thin, waxy hands and the thin feet of the
stranger, and the small lacerations in the still dead forehead. They
smelled with terror the scent of rich perfumes that came from him, from
his body. And they looked at the fine, snowy, costly linen. Perhaps
really he was a dead king, from the region of terrors. And he was still
cold and remote in the region of death, with perfumes coming from his
transparent body as if from some strange flower.

Having with difficulty swallowed some, the moistened bread, he lifted his
eyes to them. He saw them as they were: limited, meagre in their life,
without any splendour of gesture and of courage. But they were what they
were, slow, inevitable parts of the natural world. They had no nobility,
but fear made them compassionate.

And the stranger had compassion on them again, for he knew that they
would respond best to gentleness, giving back a clumsy gentleness again.

"Do not be afraid," he said to them gently. "Let me stay a little while
with you. I shall not stay long. And then I shall go away for ever. But
do not be afraid. No harm will come to you through me."

They believed him at once, yet the fear did not leave them. And they
said:

"Stay, master, while ever you will. Rest! Rest quietly!" But they were
afraid.

So he let them be, and the peasant went away with the ass. The sun had
risen bright, and in the dark house with the door shut, the man was again
as if in the tomb. So he said to the woman: "I would lie in the yard."

And she swept the yard for him, and laid him a mat, and he lay down under
the wall in the morning sun. There he saw the first green leaves spurting
like flames from the ends of the enclosed fig tree, out of the bareness
to the sky of spring above. But the man who had died could not look, he
only lay quite still in the sun, which was not yet too hot, and had no
desire in him, not even to move. But he lay with his thin legs in the
sun, his black, perfumed hair falling into the hollows of his neck, and
his thin, colourless arms utterly inert. As he lay there, the hens
clucked, and scratched, and the escaped cock, caught and tied by the leg
again, cowered in a corner.

The peasant woman was frightened. She came peeping, and, seeing him never
move, feared to have a dead man in the yard. But the sun had grown
stronger, he opened his eyes and looked at her. And now she was
frightened of the man who was alive, but spoke nothing.

He opened his eyes, and saw the world again bright as glass. It was life,
in which he had no share any more. But it shone outside him, blue sky,
and a bare fig tree with little jets of green leaf. Bright as glass, and
he was not of it, for desire had failed.

Yet he was there, and not extinguished. The day passed in a kind of coma,
and at evening he went into the house. The peasant man came home, but he
was frightened, and had nothing to say. The stranger, too, ate of the
mess of beans, a little. Then he washed his hands and turned to the wall,
and was silent. The peasants were silent too. They watched their guest
sleep. Sleep was so near death he could still sleep.

Yet when the sun came up, he went again to lie in the yard. The sun was
the one thing that drew him and swayed him, and he still wanted to feel
the cool air of the morning in his nostrils, see the pale sky overhead.
He still hated to be shut up.

As he came out, the young cock crowed. It was a diminished, pinched cry,
but there was that in the voice of the bird stronger than chagrin. It was
the necessity to live, and even to cry out the triumph of life. The man
who had died stood and watched the cock who had escaped and been caught,
ruffling himself up, rising forward on his toes, throwing up his head,
and parting his beak in another challenge from life to death. The brave
sounds rang out, and though they were diminished by the cord round the
bird's leg, they were not cut off. The man who had died looked nakedly on
life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy
or subtle wave-crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a
black and orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of
the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring,
glowing with desire and with assertion. They came like crests of foam,
out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible
sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet
deathless in their coming. The man who had died looked on the great swing
into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer their
tremulous desire to exist and to be. He heard instead their ringing,
ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing.

The man lay still, with eyes that had died now wide open and darkly
still, seeing the everlasting resoluteness of life. And the cock, with
the flat, brilliant glance, glanced back at him, with a bird's
half-seeing look. And always the man who had died saw not the bird alone,
but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest. He
watched the queer, beaky motion of the creature as it gobbled into itself
the scraps of food; its glancing of the eye of life, ever alert and
watchful, over-weening and cautious, and the voice of its life, crowing
triumph and assertion, yet strangled by a cord of circumstance. He seemed
to hear the queer speech of very life, as the cock triumphantly imitated
the clucking of the favourite hen, when she had laid an egg, a clucking
which still had, in the male bird, the hollow chagrin of the cord round
his leg. And when the man threw a bit of bread to the cock, it called
with an extraordinary cooing tenderness, tousling and saving the morsel
for the hens. The hens ran up greedily, and carried the morsel away
beyond the reach of the string.

Then, walking complacently after them, suddenly the male bird's leg would
hitch at the end of his tether, and he would yield with a kind of
collapse. His flag fell, he seemed to diminish, he would huddle in the
shade. And he was young, his tail-feathers, glossy as they were, were not
fully grown. It was not till evening again that the tide of life in him
made him forget. Then when his favourite hen came strolling unconcernedly
near him, emitting the lure, he pounced on her with all his feathers
vibrating. And the man who had died watched the unsteady, rocking
vibration of the bent bird, and it was not the bird he saw, but one
wave-tip of life overlapping for a minute another, in the tide of the
swaying ocean of life. And the destiny of life seemed more fierce and
compulsive to him even than the destiny of death. The doom of death was a
shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of
life.

At twilight the peasant came home with the ass, and he said: "Master! It
is said that the body was stolen from the garden, and the tomb is empty,
and the soldiers are taken away, accursed Romans! And the women are there
to weep."

The man who had died looked at the man who had not died.

"It is well," he said. "Say nothing, and we are safe."

And the peasant was relieved. He looked rather dirty and stupid, and even
as much flaminess as that of the young cock, which he had tied by. the
leg, would never glow in him. He was without fire. But the man who had
died thought to himself:

"Why, then, should he be lifted up? Clods of earth are turned over for
refreshment, they are not to be lifted up. Let the earth remain earthy,
and hold its own against the sky. I was to seek to lift it up. I was
wrong to try to interfere. The ploughshare of devastation will be set in
the soil of Judea, and the life of this peasant will be overturned like
the sods of the field. No man can save the earth from tillage. It is
tillage, not salvation..."

So he saw the man, the peasant, with compassion; but the man who had died
no longer wished to interfere in the soul of the man who had not died,
and who could never die, save to return to earth. Let him return to earth
in his own good hour, and let no one try to interfere when the earth
claims her own.

So the man with scars let the peasant go from him, for the peasant had no
rebirth in him. Yet the man who had died said to himself: "He is my
host."

And at dawn, when he was better, the man who had died rose up, and on
slow, sore feet retraced his way to the garden. For he had been betrayed
in a garden, and buried in a garden. And as he turned round the screen of
laurels, near the rock-face, he saw a woman hovering by the tomb, a woman
in blue and yellow. She peeped again into the mouth of the hole, that was
like a deep cupboard. But still there was nothing. And she wrung her
hands and wept. And as she turned away, she saw the man in white,
standing by the laurels, and she gave a cry, thinking it might be a spy,
and she said:

"They have taken him away!"

So he said to her:

"Madeleine!"

Then she reeled as if she would fall, for she knew him. And he said to
her:

"Madeleine! Do not be afraid. I am alive. They took me down too soon, so
I came back to life. Then I was sheltered in a house."

She did not know what to say, but fell at his feet to kiss them.

"Don't touch me, Madeleine," he said. "Not yet! I am not yet healed and
in touch with men."

So she wept because she did not know what to do. And he said:

"Let us go aside, among the bushes, where we can speak unseen."

So in her blue mantle and her yellow robe, she followed him among the
trees, and he sat down under a myrtle bush. And he said:

"I am not yet quite come to. Madeleine, what is to be done next?"

"Master!" she said. "Oh, we have wept for you! And will you come back to
us?"

"What is finished is finished, and for me the end is past," he said. "The
stream will run till no more rains fill it, then it will dry up. For me,
that life is over."

"And will you give up your triumph?" she said sadly.

"My triumph," he said, "is that I am not dead. I have outlived my mission
and know no more of it. It is my triumph. I have survived the day and the
death of my interference, and am still a man. I am young still,
Madeleine, not even come to middle age. I am glad all that is over. It
had to be. But now I am glad it is over, and the day of my interference
is done. The teacher and the saviour are dead in me; now I can go about
my business, into my own single life."

She heard him, and did not fully understand. But what he said made her
feel disappointed.

"But you will come back to us?" she said, insisting.

"I don't know what I shall do," he said. "When I am healed, I shall know
better. But my mission is over, and my teaching is finished, and death
has saved me from my own salvation. Oh, Madeleine, I want to take my
single way in life, which is my portion. My public life is over, the life
of my self-importance. Now I can wait on life, and say nothing, and have
no one betray me. I wanted to be greater than the limits of my hands and
feet, so I brought betrayal on myself. And I know I wronged Judas, my
poor Judas. For I have died, and now I know my own limits. Now I can live
without striving to sway others any more. For my reach ends in my
fingertips, and my stride is no longer than the ends of my toes. Yet I
would embrace multitudes, I who have never truly embraced even one. But
Judas and the high priests saved me from my own salvation, and soon I can
turn to my destiny like a bather in the sea at dawn, who has just come
down to the shore alone."

"Do you want to be alone henceforward?" she asked. "And was your mission
nothing? Was it all untrue?"

"Nay!" he said. "Neither were your lovers in the past nothing. They were
much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for
salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to
excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So
Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation.
Don't run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another
death."

She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and
she could not bear to be denied.

"And will you not come back to us?" she said. "Have you risen for
yourself alone?"

He heard the sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her beautiful face which
still was dense with excessive need for salvation from the woman she had
been, the female who had caught men at her will. The cloud of necessity
was on her, to be saved from the old, wilful Eve, who had embraced many
men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She
wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the
warm body.

"I have not risen from the dead in order to seek death again," he said.

She glanced up at him, and saw the weariness settling again on his waxy
face, and the vast disillusion in his dark eyes, and the underlying
indifference. He felt her glance, and said to himself:

"Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen
up different from their expectation."

"But you will come to us, to see us, us who love you?" she said.

He laughed a little and said:

"Ah, yes." Then he added: "Have you a little money? Will you give me a
little money? I owe it."

She had not much, but it pleased her to give it to him.

"Do you think," he said to her, "that I might come and live with you in
your house?"

She looked up at him with large blue eyes, that gleamed strangely.

"Now?" she said with peculiar triumph.

And he, who shrank now from triumph of any sort, his own or another's,
said:

"Not now! Later, when I am healed, and...and I am in touch with the
flesh."

The words faltered in him. And in his heart he knew he would never go to
live in her house. For the flicker of triumph had gleamed in her eyes;
the greed of giving. But she murmured in a humming rapture:

"Ah, you know I would give up everything to you."

"Nay!" he said. "I didn't ask that."

A revulsion from all the life he had known came over him again, the great
nausea of disillusion, and the spear-thrust through his bowels. He
crouched under the myrtle bushes, without strength. Yet his eyes were
open. And she looked at him again, and she saw that it was not the
Messiah. The Messiah had not risen. The enthusiasm and the burning purity
were gone, and the rapt youth. His youth was dead. This man was
middle-aged and disillusioned, with a certain terrible indifference, and
a resoluteness which love would never conquer. This was not the Master
she had so adored, the young, flamy, unphysical exalter of her soul. This
was nearer to the lovers she had known of old, but with a greater
indifference to the personal issue, and a lesser susceptibility.

She was thrown out of the balance of her rapturous, anguished adoration.
This risen man was the death of her dream.

"You should go now," he said to her. "Do not touch me, I am in death. I
shall come again here, on the third day. Come if you will, at dawn. And
we will speak again."

She went away, perturbed and shattered. Yet as she went, her mind
discarded the bitterness of the reality, and she conjured up rapture and
wonder, that the Master was risen and was not dead. He was risen, the
Saviour, the exalter, the wonder-worker! He was risen, but not as man; as
pure God, who should not be touched by flesh, and who should be rapt away
into Heaven. It was the most glorious and most ghostly of the miracles.

Meanwhile the man who had died gathered himself together at last, and
slowly made his way to the peasant's house. He was glad to go back to
them, and away from Madeleine and his own associates. For the peasants
had the inertia of earth and would let him rest, and as yet, would put
no compulsion on him.

The woman was on the roof, looking for him. She was afraid that he had
gone away. His presence in the house had become like gentle wine to her.
She hastened to the door, to him.

"Where have you been?" she said. "Why did you go away?"

"I have been to walk in a garden, and I have seen a friend, who gave me a
little money. It is for you."

He held out his thin hand, with the small amount of money, all that
Madeleine could give him. The peasant's wife's eyes glistened, for money
was scarce, and she said:

"Oh, master! And is it truly mine?"

"Take it!" he said. "It buys bread, and bread brings life."

So he lay down in the yard again, sick with relief at being alone again.
For with the peasants he could be alone, but his own friends would never
let him be alone. And in the safety of the yard, the young cock was dear
to him, as it shouted in the helpless zest of life, and finished in the
helpless humiliation of being tied by the leg. This day the ass stood
swishing her tail under the shed. The man who had died lay down and
turned utterly away from life, in the sickness of death in life.

But the woman brought wine and water, and sweetened cakes, and roused
him, so that he ate a little, to please her. The day was hot, and as she
crouched to serve him, he saw her breasts sway from her humble body,
under her smock. He knew she wished he would desire her, and she was
youngish, and not unpleasant. And he, who had never known a woman, would
have desired her if he could. But he could not want her, though he felt
gently towards her soft, crouching, humble body. But it was her thoughts,
her consciousness, he could not mingle with. She was pleased with the
money, and now she wanted to take more from him. She wanted the embrace
of his body. But her little soul was hard, and short-sighted, and
grasping, her body had its little greed, and no gentle reverence of the
return gift. So he spoke a quiet, pleasant word to her and turned away.
He could not touch the little, personal body, the little, personal life
of this woman, nor in any other. He turned away from it without
hesitation.

Risen from the dead, he had realised at last that the body, too, has its
little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was virgin, in recoil
from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity
is a form of greed; and that the body rises again to give and to take, to
take and to give, ungreedily. Now he knew that he had risen for the
woman, or women, who knew the greater life of the body, not greedy to
give, not greedy to take, and with whom he could mingle his body. But
having died, he was patient, knowing there was time, an eternity of time.
And he was driven by no greedy desire, either to give himself to others,
or to grasp anything for himself. For he had died.

The peasant came home from work and said:

"Master, I thank you for the money. But we did not want it. And all I
have is yours."

But the man who had died was sad, because the peasant stood there in the
little, personal body, and his eyes were cunning and sparkling with the
hope of greater rewards in money later on. True, the peasant had taken
him in free, and had risked getting no reward. But the hope was cunning
in him. Yet even this was as men are made. So when the peasant would have
helped him to rise, for night had fallen, the man who had died said:

"Don't touch me, brother. I am not yet risen to the Father."

The sun burned with greater splendour, and burnished the young cock
brighter. But the peasant kept the string renewed, and the bird was a
prisoner. Yet the flame of life burned up to a sharp point in the cock,
so that it eyed askance and haughtily the man who had died. And the man
smiled and held the bird dear, and he said to it:

"Surely thou art risen to the Father, among birds." And the young cock,
answering, crowed.

When at dawn on the third morning the man went to the garden, he was
absorbed, thinking of the greater life of the body, beyond the little,
narrow, personal life. So he came through the thick screen of laurel and
myrtle bushes, near the rock, suddenly, and he saw three women near the
tomb. One was Madeleine, and one was the woman who had been his mother,
and the third was a woman he knew, called Joan. He looked up, and saw
them all, and they saw him, and they were all afraid.

He stood arrested in the distance, knowing they were there to claim him
back, bodily. But he would in no wise return to them. Pallid, in the
shadow of a grey morning that was blowing to rain, he saw them, and
turned away. But Madeleine hastened towards him.

"I did not bring them," she said. "They have come of themselves. See, I
have brought you money!...Will you not speak to them?"

She offered him some gold pieces, and he took them, saying:

"May I have this money? I shall need it. I cannot speak to them, for I am
not yet ascended to the Father. And I must leave you now."

"Ah! Where will you go?" she cried.

He looked at her, and saw she was clutching for the man in him who had
died and was dead, the man of his youth and his mission, of his chastity
and his fear, of his little life, his giving without taking.

"I must go to my Father!" he said.

"And you will leave us? There is your mother!" she cried, turning round
with the old anguish, which yet was sweet to her.

"But now I must ascend to my Father," he said, and he drew back into the
bushes, and so turned quickly, and went away, saying to himself:

"Now I belong to no one and have no connection, and mission or gospel is
gone from me. Lo! I cannot make even my own life, and what have I to
save?...I can learn to be alone."

So he went back to the peasants' house, to the yard where the young cock
was tied by the leg with a string. And he wanted no one, for it was best
to be alone; for the presence of people made him lonely. The sun and the
subtle salve of spring healed his wounds, even the gaping wound of
disillusion through his bowels was closing up. And his need of men and
women, his fever to have them and to be saved by them, this too was
healing in him. Whatever came of touch between himself and the race of
men, henceforth, should come without trespass or compulsion. For he said
to himself:

"I tried to compel them to live, so they compelled me to, die. It is
always so, with compulsion. The recoil kills the advance. Now is my time
to be alone."

Therefore he went no more to the garden, but lay still and saw the sun,
or walked at dusk across the olive slopes, among the green wheat, that
rose a palm-breadth higher every sunny day. And always he thought to
himself:

'How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and to be beyond it. Now I
can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig tree may be
barren if it will, and the rich may be rich. My way is my own alone.'

So the green jets of leaves unspread on the fig tree, with the bright,
translucent, green blood of the tree. And the young cock grew brighter,
more lustrous with the sun's burnishing; yet always tied by the leg with
a string. And the sun went down more and more in pomp, out of the gold
and red-flushed air. The man who had died was aware of it all, and he
thought:

'The Word is but the midge that bites at evening. Man is tormented with
words like midges, and they follow him right into the tomb. But beyond
the tomb they cannot go. Now I have passed the place where words can bite
no more and the air is clear, and there is nothing to say, and I am alone
within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain.'

So he healed of his wounds, and enjoyed his immortality of being alive
without fret. For in the tomb he had slipped that noose which we call
care. For in the tomb he had left his striving self, which cares and
asserts itself. Now his uncaring self healed and became whole within his
skin, and he smiled to himself with pure aloneness, which is one sort of
immortality.

Then he said to himself: "I will wander the earth, and say nothing. For
nothing is so marvellous as to be alone in the phenomenal world, which is
raging, and yet apart. And I have not seen it, I was too much blinded by
my confusion within it. Now I will wander among the stirring of the
phenomenal world, for it is the stirring of all things among themselves
which leaves me purely alone."

So he communed with himself, and decided to be a physician. Because the
power was still in him to heal any man or child who touched his
compassion. Therefore he cut his hair and his beard after the right
fashion, and smiled to himself. And he bought himself shoes, and the
right mantle, and put the right cloth over his head, hiding all the
little scars. And the peasant said:

"Master, will you go forth from us?"

"Yes, for the time is come for me to return to men."

So he gave the peasant a piece of money, and said to him:

"Give me the cock that escaped and is now tied by the leg. For he
shall go forth with me."

So for a piece of money the peasant gave the cock to the man who had
died, and at dawn the man who had died set out into the phenomenal world,
to be fulfilled in his own loneliness in the midst of it. For previously
he had been too much mixed up in it. Then he had died. Now he must come
back, to be alone in the midst. Yet even now he did not go quite alone,
for under his arm, as he went, he carried the cock, whose tail fluttered
gaily behind, and who craned his head excitedly, for he too was
adventuring out for the first time into the wider phenomenal world, which
is the stirring of the body of cocks also. And the peasant woman shed a
few tears, but then went indoors, being a peasant, to look again at the
pieces of money. And it seemed to her, a gleam came out of the pieces of
money, wonderful.

The man who had died wandered on, and it was a sunny day. He looked
around as he went, and stood aside as the pack-train passed by, towards
the city. And he said to himself:

"Strange is the phenomenal world, dirty and clean together! And I am the
same. Yet I am apart! And life bubbles variously. Why should I have
wanted it to bubble all alike? What a pity I preached to them! A sermon
is so much more likely to cake into mud, and to close the fountains, than
is a psalm or a song. I made a mistake. I understand that they executed
me for preaching to them. Yet they could not finally execute me, for now
I am risen in my own aloneness, and inherit the earth, since I lay no
claim on it. And I will be alone in the seethe of all things; first and
foremost, for ever, I shall be alone. But I must toss this bird into the
seethe of phenomena, for he must ride his wave. How hot he is with life!
Soon, in some place, I shall leave him among the hens. And perhaps one
evening I shall meet a woman who can lure my risen body, yet leave me my
aloneness. For the body of my desire has died, and I am not in touch
anywhere. Yet how do I know! All at least is life. And this cock gleams
with bright aloneness, though he answers the lure of hens. And I shall
hasten on to that village on the hill ahead of me; already I am tired and
weak, and want to close my eyes to everything."

Hastening a little with the desire to have finished going, he overtook
two men going slowly, and talking. And being soft-footed, he heard they
were speaking of himself. And he remembered them, for he had known them
in his life, the life of his mission. So he greeted them, but did not
disclose himself in the dusk, and they did not know him. He said to them:

"What then of him who would be king, and was put to death for it?"

They answered suspiciously: "Why ask you of him?"

"I have known him, and thought much about him," he said.

So they replied: "He has risen."

"Yea! And where is he, and how does he live?"

"We know not, for it is not revealed. Yet he is risen, and in a little
while will ascend unto the Father."

"Yea! And where then is his Father?"

"Know ye not? You are then of the Gentiles! The Father is in Heaven,
above the cloud and the firmament."

"Truly? Then how will he ascend?"

"As Elijah the Prophet, he shall go up in a glory."

"Even into the sky."

"Into the sky."

"Then is he not risen in the flesh?"

"He is risen in the flesh."

"And will he take flesh up into the sky?"

"The Father in Heaven will take him up."

The man who had died said no more, for his say was over, and words beget
words, even as gnats. But the man asked him: "Why do you carry a cock?"

"I am a healer," he said, "and the bird hath virtue."

"You are not a believer?"

"Yea! I believe the bird is full of life and virtue."

They walked on in silence after this, and he felt they disliked his
answer. So he smiled to himself, for a dangerous phenomenon in the world
is a man of narrow belief, who denies the right of his neighbour to be
alone. And as they came to the outskirts of the village, the man who had
died stood still in the gloaming and said in his old voice:

"Know ye me not?"

And they cried in fear: "Master!"

"Yea!" he said, laughing softly. And he turned suddenly away, down a side
lane, and was gone under the wall before they knew.

So he came to an inn where the asses stood in the yard. And he called for
fritters, and they were made for him. So he slept under a shed. But in
the morning he was wakened by a loud crowing, and his cock's voice
ringing in his ears. So he saw the rooster of the inn walking forth to
battle, with his hens, a goodly number, behind him. Then the cock of the
man who had died sprang forth, and a battle began between the birds. The
man of the inn ran to save his rooster, but the man who had died said:

"If my bird wins I will give him thee. And if he lose, thou shalt eat
him."

So the birds fought savagely, and the cock of the man who had died killed
the common cock of the yard. Then the man who had died said to his young
cock:

"Thou at least hast found thy kingdom, and the females to thy body. Thy
aloneness can take on splendour, polished by the lure of thy hens."

And he left his bird there, and went on deeper into the phenomenal world,
which is a vast complexity of entanglements and allurements. And he asked
himself a last question:

"From what, and to what, could this infinite whirl be saved?"

So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past
belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance
and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion.
It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he
must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours wound the strangling of
their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for
all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him,
and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and
societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For
men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own
nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay
the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him.
For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a
compulsion. And already he had been compelled even into death. The nausea
of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with
repulsion, dreading its mean contacts.


II


The wind came cold and strong from inland, from the invisible snows of
Lebanon. But the temple, facing south and west, towards Egypt, faced the
splendid sun of winter as he curved down towards the sea, the warmth and
radiance flooded in between the pillars of painted wood. But the sea was
invisible, because of the trees, though its dashing sounded among the hum
of pines. The air was turning golden to afternoon. The woman who served
Isis stood in her yellow robe, and looked up at the steep slopes coming
down to the sea, where the olive trees silvered under the wind like water
splashing. She was alone save for the goddess. And in the winter
afternoon the light stood erect and magnificent off the invisible sea,
filling the hills of the coast. She went towards the sun, through the
grove of Mediterranean pine trees and evergreen oaks, in the midst of
which the temple stood, on a little, tree-covered tongue of land between
two bays.

It was only a very little way, and then she stood among the dry trunks of
the outermost pines, on the rocks under which the sea smote and sucked,
facing the open where the bright sun gloried in winter. The sea was dark,
almost indigo, running away from the land, and crested with white. The
hand of the wind brushed it strangely with shadow, as it brushed the
olives of the slopes with silver. And there was no boat out.

The three boats were drawn high up on the steep shingle of the little
bay, by the small grey tower. Along the edge of the shingle ran a high
wall, inside which was a garden occupying the brief flat of the bay,
then rising in terraces up the steep slope of the coast. And there, some
little way up, within another wall, stood the low white villa, white and
alone as the coast, overlooking the sea. But higher, much higher up,
where the olives had given way to pine trees again, ran the coast road,
keeping to the height to be above the gullies that came down to the bays.

Upon it all poured the royal sunshine of the January afternoon. Or
rather, all was part of the great sun, glow and substance and immaculate
loneliness of the sea, and pure brightness.

Crouching in the rocks above the dark water, which only swung up and
down, two slaves, half naked, were dressing pigeons for the evening meal.
They pierced the throat of a blue, live bird, and let the drops of blood
fall into the heaving sea, with curious concentration. They were
performing some sacrifice, or working some incantation. The woman of the
temple, yellow and white and alone like a winter narcissus stood between
the pines of the small, humped peninsula where the temple secretly hid,
and watched.

A black-and-white pigeon, vividly white, like a ghost escaped over the
low dark sea, sped out, caught the wind, tilted, rode, soared and swept
over the pine trees, and wheeled away, a speck, inland. It had escaped.
The priestess heard the cry of the boy slave, a garden slave of about
seventeen. He raised his arms to heaven in anger as the pigeon wheeled
away, naked and angry and young he held out his arms. Then he turned and
seized the girl in an access of rage, and beat her with his fist that was
stained with pigeon's blood. And she lay down with her face hidden,
passive and quivering. The woman who owned them watched. And as she
watched, she saw another onlooker, a stranger, in a low, broad hat, and a
cloak of grey homespun, a dark bearded man standing on the little
causeway of a rock that was the neck of her temple peninsula. By the
blowing of his dark-grey cloak she saw him. And he saw her, on the rocks
like a white-and-yellow narcissus, because of the flutter of her white
linen tunic, below the yellow mantle of wool. And both of them watched
the two slaves.

The boy suddenly left off beating the girl. He crouched over her,
touching her, trying to make her speak. But she lay quite inert, face
down on the smoothed rock. And he put his arms round her and lifted her,
but she slipped back to earth like one dead, yet far too quickly for
anything dead. The boy, desperate, caught her by the hips and hugged her
to him, turning her over there. There she seemed inert, all her fight was
in her shoulders. He twisted her over, intent and unconscious, and pushed
his hands between her thighs, to push them apart. And in an instant he
was covering her in the blind, frightened frenzy of a boy's first
passion. Quick and frenzied his young body quivered naked on hers, blind,
for a minute. Then it lay quite still, as if dead.

And then, in terror, he peeped up. He peeped round, and drew slowly to
his feet, adjusting his loin-rag. He saw the stranger, and then he saw,
on the rocks beyond, the lady of Isis, his mistress. And as he saw her,
his whole body shrank and cowed, and with a strange cringing motion he
scuttled lamely towards the door in the wall.

The girl sat up and looked after him. When she had seen him disappear,
she too looked round. And she saw the stranger and the priestess. Then
with a sullen movement she turned away, as if she had seen nothing, to
the four dead pigeons and the knife, which lay there on the rock. And she
began to strip the small feathers, so that they rose on the wind like
dust.

The priestess turned away. Slaves! Let the overseer watch them. She was
not interested. She went slowly through the pines again, back to the
temple, which stood in the sun in a small clearing at the centre of the
tongue of land. It was a small temple of wood, painted all pink and white
and blue, having at the front four wooden pillars rising like stems to
the swollen lotus-bud of Egypt at the top, supporting the roof and open,
spiky lotus-flowers of the outer frieze, which went round under the
eaves. Two low steps of stone led up to the platform before the pillars,
and the chamber behind the pillars was open. There a low stone altar
stood, with a few embers in its hollow, and the dark stain of blood in
its end groove.

She knew her temple so well, for she had built it at her own expense, and
tended it for seven years. There it stood, pink and white, like a flower
in the little clearing, backed by blackish evergreen oaks; and the shadow
of afternoon was already washing over its pillar bases.

She entered slowly, passing through to the dark inner chamber, lighted by
a perfumed oil-flame. And once more she pushed shut the door, and once
more she threw a few grains of incense on a brazier before the goddess,
and once more she sat down before her goddess, in the almost-darkness, to
muse, to go away into the dreams of the goddess.

It was Isis; but not Isis, Mother of Horus. It was Isis Bereaved, Isis in
Search. The goddess, in painted marble, lifted her face and strode, one
thigh forward, through the frail fluting of her robe, in the anguish of
bereavement and of search. She was looking for the fragments of the dead
Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in
fragments over the wide world. And she must find his hands and his feet,
his heart, his thighs, his head, his belly, she must gather him together
and fold her arms round the re-assembled body till it became warm again,
and roused to life, and could embrace her, and could fecundate her womb.
And the strange rapture and anguish of search went on through the years,
as she lifted her throat and her hollowed eyes looked inward, in the
tormented ecstasy of seeking, and the delicate navel of her bud-like
belly showed through the frail, girdled robe with the eternal asking,
asking, of her search. And through the years she found him bit by bit,
heart and head and limbs and body. And yet she had not found the last
reality, the final clue to him, that alone could bring him really back to
her. For she was Isis of the subtle lotus, the womb which waits submerged
and in bud, waits for the touch of that other inward sun that streams its
rays from the loins of the male Osiris.

This was the mystery the woman had served alone for seven years, since
she was twenty, till now she was twenty-seven. Before, when she was
young, she had lived in the world, in Rome, in Ephesus, in Egypt. For her
father had been one of Anthony's captains and comrades, had fought with
Anthony and had stood with him when Caesar was murdered, and through to
the days of shame. Then he had come again across to Asia, out of favour
with Rome, and had been killed in the mountains beyond Lebanon. The
widow, having no favour to hope for from Octavius, had retired to her
small property on the coast under Lebanon, taking her daughter from the
world, a girl of nineteen, beautiful but unmarried.

When she was young the girl had known Caesar, and had shrunk from his
eagle-like rapacity. The golden Anthony had sat with her many a
half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood, and
talked with her of the philosophies and the gods. For he was fascinated
as a child by the gods, though he mocked at them, and forgot them in his
own vanity. But he said to her:

"I have sacrificed two doves for you, to Venus, for I am afraid you make
no offering to the sweet goddess. Beware you will offend her. Come, why
is the flower of you so cool within? Does never a ray nor a glance find
its way through? Ah, come, a maid should open to the sun, when the sun
leans towards her to caress her."

And the big, bright eyes of Anthony laughed down on her, bathing her in
his glow. And she felt the lovely glow of his male beauty and his
amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body. But it was as he said: the
very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow
of frost, for all the flooding of his sunshine. So Anthony, respecting
her father, who loved her, had left her.

And it had always been the same. She saw many men, young and old. And on
the whole, she liked the old ones best, for they talked to her still and
sincere, and did not expect her to open like a flower to the sun of their
maleness. Once she asked a philosopher: "Are all women born to be given
to men?" To which the old man answered slowly:

"Rare women wait for the re-born man. For the lotus, as you know, will
not answer to all the bright heat of the sun. But she curves her dark,
hidden head in the depths, and stirs not. Till, in the night, one of
these rare, invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more, rises
among the stars in unseen purple, and like the violet, sends its rare
purple rays out into the night. To these the lotus stirs as to a caress,
and rises upwards through the flood, and lifts up her bent head, and
opens with an expansion such as no other flower knows, and spreads her
sharp rays of bliss, and offers her soft, gold depths such as no other
flower possesses, to the penetration of the flooding, violet-dark sun
that has died and risen and makes no show. But for the golden brief
day-suns of show such as Anthony, and for the hard winter suns of power,
such as Caesar, the lotus stirs not, nor will ever stir. Those will only
tear open the bud. Ah, I tell you, wait for the re-born and wait for the
bud to stir."

So she had waited. For all the men were soldiers or politicians in the
Roman spell, assertive, manly, splendid apparently but of an inward
meanness, an inadequacy. And Rome and Egypt alike had left her alone,
unroused. And she was a woman to herself, she would not give herself for
a surface glow, nor marry for reasons. She would wait for the lotus to
stir.

And then, in Egypt, she had found Isis, in whom she spelled her mystery.
She had brought Isis to the shores of Sidon, and lived with her in the
mystery of search; whilst her mother, who loved affairs, controlled the
small estate and the slaves with a free hand.

When the woman had roused from her muse and risen to perform the last
brief ritual to Isis, she replenished the lamp and left the sanctuary,
locking the door. In the outer world, the sun had already set, and
twilight was chill among the humming trees, which hummed still, though
the wind was abating.

A stranger in a dark, broad hat rose from the corner of the temple steps,
holding his hat in the wind. He was dark-faced, with a black pointed
beard. "Oh, madam, whose shelter may I implore?" he said to the woman,
who stood in her yellow mantle on a step above him, beside a
pink-and-white painted pillar. Her face was rather long and pale, her
dusky blonde hair was held under a thin gold net. She looked down on the
vagabond with indifference. It was the same she had seen watching the
slaves.

"Why come you down from the road?" she asked.

"I saw the temple like a pale flower on the coast, and would rest among
the trees of the precincts, if the lady of the goddess permits."

"It is Isis in Search," she said, answering his first question. "The
goddess is great," he replied.

She looked at him still with mistrust. There was a faint, remote smile in
the dark eyes lifted to her, though the face was hollow with suffering.
The vagabond divined her hesitation, and was mocking her.

"Stay here upon the steps," she said. "A slave will show you the
shelter."

"The lady of Egypt is gracious."

She went down the rocky path of the humped peninsula in her gilded
sandals. Beautiful were her ivory feet, beneath the white tunic, and
above the saffron mantle her dusky-blonde head bent as with endless
musings. A woman entangled in her own dream. The man smiled a little,
half bitterly, and sat again on the step to wait, drawing his mantle
round him, in the cold twilight.

At length a slave appeared, also in hodden grey.

"Seek ye the shelter of our lady?" he said insolently. "Even so."

"Then come."

With the brusque insolence of a slave waiting on a vagabond, the young
fellow led through the trees and down into a little gully in the rock,
where, almost in darkness, was a small cave, with a litter of the tall
heaths that grew on the waste places of the coast, under the stone-pines.
The place was dark, but absolutely silent from the wind. There was still
a faint odour of goats.

"Here sleep!" said the slave. "For the goats come no more on this
half-island. And there is water." He pointed to a little basin of rock
where the maidenhair fern fringed a dripping mouthful of water.

Having scornfully bestowed his patronage, the slave departed. The man who
had died climbed out to the tip of the peninsula, where the wave
thrashed. It was rapidly getting dark, and the stars were coming out. The
wind was abating for the night. Inland, the steep grooved up-slope was
dark to the long wavering outline of the crest against the translucent
sky. Only now and then a lantern flickered towards the villa.

The man who had died went back to the shelter. There he took bread from
his leather pouch, dipped it in the water of the tiny spring, and slowly
ate. Having eaten and washed his mouth, he looked once more at the bright
stars in the pure windy sky, then settled the heath for his bed. Having
laid his hat and his sandals aside, and put his pouch under his cheek for
a pillow, he slept, for he was very tired. Yet during the night the cold
woke him pinching wearily through his weariness. Outside was brilliantly
starry, and still windy. He sat and hugged himself in a sort of coma, and
towards dawn went to sleep again.

In the morning the coast was still chill in shadow, though the sun was up
behind the hills, when the woman came down from the villa towards the
goddess. The sea was fair and pale blue, lovely in newness, and at last
the wind was still. Yet the waves broke white in the many rocks, and tore
in the shingle of the little bay. The woman came slowly towards her
dream. Yet she was aware of an interruption.

As she followed the little neck of rock on to her peninsula, and climbed
the slope between the trees to the temple, a slave came down and stood,
making his obeisance. There was a faint insolence in his humility.
"Speak!" she said.

"Lady, the man is there, he still sleeps. Lady, may I speak?"

"Speak!" she said, repelled by the fellow.

"Lady, the man is an escaped malefactor."

The slave seemed to triumph in imparting the unpleasant news.

"By what sign?"

"Behold his hands and feet! Will the lady look on him?"

"Lead on!"

The slave led quickly over the mound of the hill down to the tiny ravine.
There he stood aside, and the woman went into the crack towards the cave.
Her heart beat a little. Above all, she must preserve her temple
inviolate.

The vagabond was asleep with his cheek on his scrip, his mantle wrapped
round him, but his bare, soiled feet curling side by side, to keep each
other warm, and his hand lying clenched in sleep. And in the pale skin of
his feet usually covered by sandal-straps, she saw the scars, and in the
palm of the loose hand.

She had no interest in men, particularly in the servile class. Yet she
looked at the sleeping face. It was worn, hollow, and rather ugly. But,
'a true priestess, she saw the other kind of beauty in it, the sheer
stillness of the deeper life. There was even a sort of majesty in the
dark brows, over the still, hollow cheeks. She saw that his black hair,
left long, in contrast to the Roman fashion, was touched with grey at the
temples, and the black pointed beard had threads of grey. But that must
be suffering or misfortune, for the man was young. His dusky skin had the
silvery glisten of youth still.

There was a beauty of much suffering, and the strange calm candour of
finer life in the whole delicate ugliness of the face. For the first
time, she was touched on the quick at the sight of a man, as if the tip
of a fine flame of living had touched her. It was the first time. Men had
roused all kinds of feeling in her, but never had touched her with the
flame-tip of life.

She went back under the rock to where the slave waited.

"Know!" she said. "This is no malefactor, but a free citizen of the east.
Do not disturb him. But when he comes forth, bring him to me; tell him I
would speak with him."

She spoke coldly, for she found slaves invariably repellent, a little
repulsive. They were so embedded in the lesser life, and their appetites
and their small consciousness were a little disgusting. So she wrapped
her dream round her and went to the temple, where a slave girl brought
winter roses and jasmine for the altar. But to-day, even in her
ministrations, she was disturbed.

The sun rose over the hill, sparkling, the light fell triumphantly on the
little pine-covered peninsula of the coast, and on the pink temple, in
the pristine newness. The man who had died woke up, and put on his
sandals. He put on his hat too, slung his scrip under his mantle, and
went out, to see the morning in all its blue and its new gold. He glanced
at the little yellow-and-white narcissus sparkling gaily in the rocks.
And he saw the slave waiting for him like a menace.

"Master!" said the slave. "Our lady would speak with you at the house of
Isis."

"It is well," said the wanderer.

He went slowly, staying to look at the pale blue sea like a flower in
unruffled bloom, and the white fringes among the rocks, like white
rock-flowers, the hollow slopes sheering up high from the shore, grey
with olive trees and green with bright young wheat, and set with the
white, small villa. All fair and pure in the January morning.

The sun fell on the corner of the temple, he sat down on the step in the
sunshine, in the infinite patience of waiting. He had come back to life,
but not the same life that he had left, the life of little people and the
little day. Re-born, he was in the other life, the greater day of the
human consciousness. And he was alone and apart from the little day, and
out of contact with the daily people. Not yet had he accepted the
irrevocable nail me tangere which separates the re-born from the vulgar.
The separation was absolute, as yet here at the temple he felt peace, the
hard, bright pagan peace with hostility of slaves beneath.

The woman came into the dark inner doorway of the temple from the shrine,
and stood there, hesitating. She could see the dark figure of the man,
sitting in that terrible stillness that was portentous to her, had
something almost menacing in its patience.

She advanced across the outer chamber of the temple, and the man,
becoming aware of her, stood up. She addressed him in Greek, but he said:

"Madam, my Greek is limited. Allow me to speak vulgar Syrian."

"Whence come you? Whither go you?" she asked, with a hurried
preoccupation of a priestess.

"From the east beyond Damascus--and I go west as the road goes," he
replied slowly.

She glanced at him with sudden anxiety and shyness.

"But why do you have the marks of a malefactor?" she asked abruptly.

"Did the Lady of Isis spy upon me in my sleep?" he asked, with a grey
weariness.

"The slave warned me--your hands and feet--" she said. He looked at her.
Then he said:

"Will the Lady of Isis allow me to bid her farewell, and go up to the
road?"

The wind came in a sudden puff, lifting his mantle and his hat. He put up
his hand to hold the brim, and she saw again the thin brown hand with its
scar.

"See! The scar!" she said, pointing.

"Even so!" he said. "But farewell, and to Isis my homage and my thanks
for sleep."

He was going. But she looked up at him with her wondering blue eyes.

"Will you not look at Isis?" she said, with sudden impulse. And something
stirred in him, like pain.

"Where then?" he said.

"Come!"

He followed her into the inner shrine, into the almost-darkness. When his
eyes got used to the faint glow of the lamp, he saw the goddess striding
like a ship, eager in the swirl of her gown, and he made his obeisance.

"Great is Isis!" he said. "In her search she is greater than death.
Wonderful is such walking in a woman, wonderful the goal. All men praise
thee, Isis, thou greater than the mother unto man."

The woman of Isis heard, and threw incense on the brazier. Then she
looked at the man.

"Is it well with thee here?" she asked him. "Has Isis brought thee home
to herself?"

He looked at the priestess in wonder and trouble. "I know not," he said.

But the woman was pondering that this was the lost Osiris. She felt it in
the quick of her soul. And her agitation was intense.

He would not stay in the close, dark, perfumed shrine. He went out again
to the morning, to the cold air. He felt something approaching to touch
him, and all his flesh was still woven with pain and the wild
commandment: _Noli me tangere!_ Touch me not! Oh, don't touch me!

The woman followed into the open with timid eagerness. He was moving
away.

"Oh, stranger, do not go! Oh, stay a while with Isis!"

He looked at her, at her face open like a flower, as if a sun had risen
in her soul. And again his loins stirred.

"Would you detain me, girl of Isis?" he said.

"Stay! I am sure you are Osiris!" she said.

He laughed suddenly. "Not yet!" he said. Then he looked at her wistful
face. "But I will sleep another night in the cave of the goats, if Isis
wills it," he added.

She put her hands together with a priestess's childish happiness.

"Ah! Isis will be glad!" she said.

So he went down to the shore in great trouble, saying to himself: "Shall
I give myself into this touch? Shall I give myself into this touch Men
have tortured me to death with their touch. Yet this girl of Isis is a
tender flame of healing. I am a physician, yet I have no healing like the
flame of this tender girl. The flame of this tender girl! Like the first
pale crocus of the spring. How could I have been blind to the healing and
the bliss in the crocus-like body of a tender woman! Ah, tenderness! More
terrible and lovely than the death I died--"

He pried small shell-fish from the rocks, and ate them with relish and
wonder for the simple taste of the sea. And inwardly he was tremulous,
thinking: "Dare I come into touch? For this is farther than death. I have
dared to let them lay hands on me and put me to death. But dare I come
into this tender touch of life? Oh, this is harder--"

But the woman went into the shrine again, and sat rapt in pure muse,
through the long hours, watching the swirling stride of the yearning
goddess, and the navel of the bud-like belly, like a seal on the virgin
urge of the search. And she gave herself to the woman-flow and to the
urge of Isis in Search.

Towards sundown she went on the peninsula to look for him. And she found
him gone towards the sun, as she had gone the day before, and sitting on
the pine-needles at the foot of the tree, where she had stood when first
she saw him. Now she approached tremulously and slowly, afraid, lest he
did not want her. She stood near him unseen, till suddenly he glanced up
at her from under his broad hat, and saw the westering sun on her netted
hair. He was startled, yet he expected her.

"Is that your home?" he said, pointing to the white, low villa on the
slope of olives.

"It is my mother's house. She is a widow, and I am her only child."

"And are these all her slaves?"

"Except those that are mine."

Their eyes met for a moment.

"Will you too sit to see the sun go down?" he said.

He had not risen to speak to her. He had known too much pain. So she sat
on the dry brown pine-needles, gathering her saffron mantle round her
knees. A boat was coming in, out of the open glow into the shadow of the
bay, and slaves were lifting small nets, their babble coming off the
surface of the water.

"And this is home to you," he said.

"But I serve Isis in Search," she replied.

He looked at her. She was like a soft, musing cloud, somehow remote. His
soul smote him with passion and compassion.

"Mayst thou find thy desire, maiden," he said, with sudden earnestness.

"And art thou not Osiris?" she asked.

He flushed suddenly.

"Yes, if thou wilt heal me!" he said. "For the death aloofness is still
upon me, and I cannot escape it."

She looked at him for a moment in fear from the soft blue sun of her
eyes. Then she lowered her head, and they sat in silence in the warmth
and glow of the western sun: the man who had died, and the woman of the
pure search.

The sun was curving down to the sea, in grand winter splendour. It fell
on the twinkling, naked bodies of the slaves, with their ruddy broad hams
and their small black heads, as they ran spreading the nets on the pebble
beach. The all-tolerant Pan watched over them. All-tolerant Pan should be
their god for ever.

The woman rose as the sun's rim dipped, saying:

"If you will stay, I shall send down victual and covering."

"The lady your mother, what will she say?"

The woman of Isis looked at him strangely, but with a tinge of misgiving.

"It is my own," she said.

"It is good," he said, smiling faintly and foreseeing difficulties.

He watched her go, with her absorbed, strange motion of the
self-dedicate. Her dun head was a little bent, the white linen swung
about her ivory ankles. And he saw the naked slaves stand to look at her,
with a certain wonder, and even a certain mischief. But she passed intent
through the door in the wall, on the bay.

The man who had died sat on at the foot of the tree overlooking the
strand, for on the little shore everything happened. At the small stream
which ran in round the corner of the property wall, women slaves were
still washing linen, and now and again came the hollow chock! chock!
chock! as they beat it against the smooth stones in the dark little
hollow of the pool. There was a smell of olive refuse on the air; and
sometimes still the faint rumble of the grindstone that was milling the
olives, inside the garden, and the sound of the slave calling to the ass
at the mill. Then through the doorway a woman stepped, a grey-haired
woman in a mantle of whitish wool, and there followed her a bare-headed
man in a toga, a Roman: probably her steward or overseer. They stood on
the high shingle above the sea, and cast round a rapid glance. The
broad-hammed, ruddy-bodied slaves bent absorbed and abject over the nets,
picking them clean, the women washing linen thrust their palms with
energy down on the wash, the old slave bent absorbed at the water's edge,
washing the fish and the polyps of the catch. And the woman and the
overseer saw it all in one glance. They also saw, seated at the foot of
the tree on the rocks of the peninsula, the strange man silent and alone.
And the man who had died saw that they spoke of him. Out of the little
sacred world of the peninsula he looked on the common world, and saw it
still hostile.

The sun was touching the sea, across the tiny bay stretched the shadow of
the opposite humped headland. Over the shingle, now blue and cold in
shadow, the elderly woman trod heavily, in shadow too, to look at the
fish spread in the flat basket of the old man crouching at the water's
edge: a naked old slave with fat hips and shoulders, on whose soft,
fairish-orange body the last sun twinkled, then died. The old slave
continued cleaning the fish absorbedly, not looking up: as if the lady
were the shadow of twilight falling on him.

Then from the gateway stepped two slave-girls with flat baskets on their
heads, and from one basket the terra-cotta wine-jar and the oil-jar poked
up, leaning slightly. Over the massive shingle, under the wall, came the
girls, and the woman of Isis in her saffron mantle stepped in twilight
after them. Out at sea, the sun still shone. Here was shadow. The mother
with grey head stood at the sea's edge and watched the daughter, all
yellow and white, with dun blonde head, swinging unseeing and unheeding
after the slave-girls, towards the neck of rock of the peninsula; the
daughter, travelling in her absorbed other-world. And not moving from her
place, the elderly mother watched that procession of three file up the
rise of the headland, between the trees, and disappear, shut in by trees.
No slave had lifted a head to look. The grey-haired woman still watched
the trees where her daughter had disappeared. Then she glanced again at
the foot of the tree, where the man who had died was still sitting,
inconspicuous now, for the sun had left him; and only the far blade of
the sea shone bright. It was evening. Patience! Let destiny move!

The mother plodded with a stamping stride up the shingle: not long and
swinging and rapt, like the daughter, but short and determined. Then down
the rocks opposite came two naked slaves trotting with huge bundles of
dark green on their shoulders, so their broad, naked legs twinkled
underneath like insects' legs, and their heads were hidden. They came
trotting across the shingle, heedless and intent on their way, when
suddenly the man, the Roman-looking overseer, addressed them, and they
stopped dead. They stood invisible under their loads, as if they might
disappear altogether, now they were arrested. Then a hand came out and
pointed to the peninsula. Then the two green-heaped slaves trotted on,
towards the temple precincts. The grey-haired woman joined the man, and
slowly the two passed through the door again, from the shingle of the sea
to the property of the villa. Then the old, fat-shouldered slave rose,
pallid in the shadow, with his tray of fish from the sea, and the woman
rose from the pool, dusky and alive, piling the wet linen in a heap on to
the flat baskets, and the slaves who had cleaned the net gathered its
whitish folds together. And the old slave with the fish-basket on his
shoulder, and the women slaves with the heaped baskets of wet linen on
their heads, and the two slaves with the folded net, and the slave with
oars on his shoulders, and the boy with the folded sail on his arm,
gathered in a naked group near the door, and the man who had died heard
the low buzz of their chatter. Then as the wind wafted cold; they began
to pass through the door.

It was the life of the little day, the life of little people. And the man
who had died said to himself: "Unless we encompass it in the greater day,
and set the little life in the circle of the greater life, all is
disaster."

Even the tops of the hills were in shadow. Only the sky was still
upwardly radiant. The sea was a vast milky shadow. The man who had died
rose a little stiffly and turned into the grove.

There was no one at the temple. He went on to his lair in the rock.
There, the slave-men had carried out the old heath of the bedding, swept
the rock floor, and were spreading with nice art the myrtle, then the
rougher heath, then the soft, bushy heath-tips on top, for a bed. Over it
all they put a well-tanned white ox-skin. The maids had laid folded
woollen covers at the head of the cave, and the wine-jar, the oil-jar, a
terra-cotta drinking-cup and a basket containing bread, salt, cheese,
dried figs and eggs stood neatly arranged. There was also a little
brazier of charcoal. The cave was suddenly full, and a dwelling-place.

The woman of Isis stood in the hollow by the tiny spring.

Only one slave at a time could pass. The girl-slaves waited at the
entrance to the narrow place. When the man who had died appeared, the
woman sent the girls away. The men-slaves still arranged the bed, making
the job as long as possible. But the woman of Isis dismissed them too.
And the man who had died came to look at his house.

"Is it well?" the woman asked him.

"It is very well," the man replied. "But the lady, your mother, and he
who is no doubt the steward, watched while the slaves brought the goods.
Will they not oppose you?"

"I have my own portion! Can I not give of my own? Who is going to oppose
me and the gods?" she said, with a certain soft fury, touched with
exasperation. So that he knew that her mother would oppose her, and that
the spirit of the little life would fight against the spirit of the
greater. And he thought: 'Why did the woman of Isis relinquish her
portion in the daily world? She should have kept her goods fiercely!'

"Will you eat and drink?" she said. "On the ashes are warm eggs. And I
will go up to the meal at the villa. But in the second hour of the night
I shall come down to the temple. 0, then, will you come too to Isis?" She
looked at him, and a queer glow dilated her eyes. This was her dream, and
it was greater than herself. He could not bear to thwart her or hurt her
in the least thing now. She was in the full glow of her woman's mystery.

"Shall I wait at the temple?" he said.

"0, wait at the second hour and I shall come." He heard the humming
supplication in her voice and his fibres quivered. "But the lady, your
mother?" he said gently.

The woman looked at him, startled.

"She will not thwart me!" she said.

So he knew that the mother would thwart the daughter, for the daughter
had left her goods in the hands of her mother, who would hold fast to
this power.

But she went, and the man who had died lay reclining on his couch, and
ate the eggs from the ashes, and dipped his bread in oil, and ate it, for
his flesh was dry: and he mixed wine and water, and drank. And so he lay
still, and the lamp made a small bud of light.

He was absorbed and enmeshed in new sensations. The woman of Isis was
lovely to him, not so much in form as in the wonderful womanly glow of
her. Suns beyond suns had dipped her in mysterious fire, the mysterious
fire of a potent woman, and to touch her was like touching the sun. Best
of all was her tender desire for him, like sunshine, so soft and still.

"She is like sunshine upon me," he said to himself, stretching his limbs.
"I have never before stretched my limbs in such sunshine, as her desire
for me. The greatest of all gods granted me this."

At the same time he was haunted by the fear of the outer world. "If they
can, they will kill us," he said to himself. "But there is a law of the
sun which protects us."

And again he said to himself: "I have risen naked and branded. But if I
am naked enough for this contact, I have not died in vain. Before I was
clogged."

He rose and went out. The night was chill and starry, and of a great
wintry splendour. "There are destinies of splendour," he said to the
night, "after all our doom of littleness and meanness and pain."

So he went up silently to the temple, and waited in darkness against the
inner wall, looking out on a grey darkness, stars, and rims of trees. And
he said again to himself: "There are destinies of splendour, and there is
a greater power."

So at last he saw the light of her silk lanthorn swinging, coming
intermittent between the trees, yet coming swiftly. She was alone, and
near, the light softly swishing on her mantle-hem. And he trembled with
fear and with joy, saying to himself: "I am almost more afraid of this
touch than I was of death. For I am more nakedly exposed to it."

"I am here, Lady of Isis," he said softly out of the dark. "Ah!" she
cried, in fear also, yet in rapture. For she was given to her dream.

She unlocked the door of the shrine, and he followed after her. Then she
latched the door shut again. The air inside was warm and close and
perfumed. The man who had died stood by the closed door and watched the
woman. She had come first to the goddess. And dim-lit, the goddess-statue
stood surging forward, a little fearsome like a great woman-presence
urging.

The priestess did not look at him. She took off her saffron mantle and
laid it on a low couch. In the dim light she was bare-armed, in her
girdled white tunic. But she was still hiding herself away from him. He
stood back in shadow and watched her softly fan the brazier and fling on
incense. Faint clouds of sweet aroma arose on the air. She turned to the
statue in the ritual of approach, softly swaying forward with a slight
lurch, like a moored boat, tipping towards the goddess.

He watched the strange rapt woman, and he said to himself: "I must leave
her alone in her rapture, her female mysteries." So she tipped in her
strange forward-swaying rhythm before the goddess. Then she broke into a
murmur of Greek, which he could not understand. And, as she murmured, her
swaying softly subsided, like a boat on a sea that grows still. And as he
watched her, he saw her soul in its aloneness, and its female difference.
He said to himself: "How different she is from me, how strangely
different! She is afraid of me, and my male difference. She is getting
herself naked and clear of her fear. How sensitive and softly alive she
is, with a life so different from mine! How beautiful with a soft,
strange courage, of life, so different from my courage of death! What a
beautiful thing, like the heart of a rose, like the core of a flame. She
is making herself completely penetrable. Ah! how terrible to fail her,
or to trespass on her!"

She turned to him, her face glowing from the goddess. "You are Osiris,
aren't you?" she said naively.

"If you will," he said.

"Will you let Isis discover you? Will you not take off your things?"

He looked at the woman, and lost his breath. And his wounds, and
especially the death-wound through his belly, began to cry again.

"It has hurt so much!" he said. "You must forgive me if I am still held
back."

But he took off his cloak and his tunic and went naked towards the idol,
his breast panting with the sudden terror of overwhelming pain, memory of
overwhelming pain, and grief too bitter.

"They did me to death!" he said in excuse of himself, turning his face to
her for a moment.

And she saw the ghost of the death in him as he stood there thin and
stark before her, and suddenly she was terrified, and she felt robbed.
She felt the shadow of the grey, grisly wing of death triumphant.

"Ah, Goddess," he said to the idol in the vernacular. "I would be so glad
to live, if you would give me my clue again."

For her again he felt desperate, faced by the demand of life, and
burdened still by his death.

"Let me anoint you!" the woman said to him softly. "Let me anoint the
scars! Show me, and let me anoint them!"

He forgot his nakedness in this re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of
the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand.
And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the
cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness.
The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his
death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: "What was torn becomes a
new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life; this scar is the eye
of the violet."

And he could not help smiling at her, in her naïve priestess's
absorption. This was her dream, and he was only a dream-object to her.
She would never know or understand what he was. Especially she would
never know the death that was gone before in him. But what did it matter?
She was different. She was woman: her life and her death were different
from him. Only she was good to him.

When she chafed his feet with oil and tender, tender healing, he could
not refrain from saying to her:

"Once a woman washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with her hair,
and poured on precious ointment."

The woman of Isis looked up at him from her earnest work, interrupted
again.

"Were they hurt then?" she said. "Your feet?"

"No, no! It was while they were whole."

"And did you love her?"

"Love had passed in her. She only warned to serve," he replied. "She had
been a prostitute."

"And did you let her serve you?" she asked.

"Yea."

"Did you let her serve you with the corpse of her love?"

"Ay!"

Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse
of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love.
This is my body--take and eat--my corpse--

A vivid shame went through him. 'After all,' he thought, 'I wanted them
to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps
he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the
flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of
love--'

There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch,
and which is full of delight. "And I told them, blessed are they that
mourn," he said to himself. "Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now
I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live.
Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more
to me now than all my words. For I want to live--"

"Go then to the goddess!" she said softly, gently pushing him towards
Isis. And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing, he heard
the woman murmuring to the goddess, murmuring, murmuring with a plaintive
appeal. She was stooping now, looking at the scar in the soft flesh of
the socket of his side, a scar deep and like an eye sore with endless
weeping, just in the soft socket above the hip. It was here that his
blood had left him, and his essential seed. The woman was trembling
softly and murmuring in Greek. And he in the recurring dismay of having
died, and in the anguished perplexity of having tried to force life,
felt his wounds crying aloud, and the deep places of the body howling
again: "I have been murdered, and I lent myself to murder. They murdered
me, but I lent myself to murder--"

The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her
palm over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed
his life again, as thousands of times before. And in the dark, wild pain
and panic of his consciousness rang only one cry: "Oh, how can she take
this death out of me? She can never know! She can never understand! She
can never equal it!..."

In silence, she softly rhythmically chafed the scar with oil. Absorbed
now in her priestess's task, softly, softly gathering power, while the
vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power,
and passed in a girdle round him to the opposite scar, gradually warmth
began to take the place of the cold terror, and he felt: 'I am going to
be Warm again, and I am going to be whole! I shall be warm like the
morning. I shall be a man. It doesn't need understanding. It needs
newness. She brings me newness--'

And he listened to the faint, ceaseless wail of distress of his wounds,
sounding as if for ever under the horizons of his consciousness. But the
wail was growing dim, more dim.

He thought of the woman toiling over him: 'She does not know! She does
not realise the death in me. But she has another consciousness. She comes
to me from the opposite end of the night.'

Having chafed all his lower body with oil, having worked with her slow
intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and
dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side,
and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she
pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a
river. And the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness,
and darkness in his soul, unbroken, dark stillness, wholeness.

Then slowly, slowly, in the perfect darkness of his inner man, he felt
the stir of something coming. A dawn, a new sun. A new sun was coming up
in him, in the perfect inner darkness of himself. He waited for it
breathless, quivering with a fearful hope..."Now I am not myself. I am
something new..."

And as it rose, he felt, with a cold breath of disappointment, the girdle
of the living woman slip down from him, the warmth and the glow slipped
from him, leaving him stark. She crouched, spent, at the feet of the
goddess, hiding her face.

Stooping, he laid his hand softly on her warm, bright shoulder, and the
shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered
if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.

Now all his consciousness was there in the crouching, hidden woman. He
stooped beside her and caressed her softly, blindly, murmuring
inarticulate things. And his death and his passion of sacrifice were all
as nothing to him now, he knew only the crouching fullness of the woman
there, the soft white rock of life..."On this rock I built my life." The
deep-folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her
face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn.

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power
rise up in his loins, magnificent.

"I am risen!"

Magnificent, blazing indomitable in the depths of his loins, his own sun
dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone
unconsciously.

He untied the string on the linen tunic and slipped the garment down,
till he saw the white glow of her white-gold breasts. And he touched
them, and he felt his life go molten. "Father!" he said, "why did you
hide this from me?" And he touched her with the poignancy of wonder, and
the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire. "Lo!" he said, "this is
beyond prayer." It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and
penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose! My mansion is the intricate
warm rose, my joy is this blossom!

She looked up at him suddenly, her face like a lifted light, wistful,
tender, her eyes like many wet flowers. And he drew her to his breast
with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire, and the last thought:
'My hour is upon me, I am taken unawares--'

So he knew her, and was one with her.

Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his sides
with her finger-tips, and said:

"But they no longer hurt?"

"They are suns!" he said. "They shine from your torch. They are my
atonement with you."

And when they left the temple, it was the coldness before dawn. As he
closed the door, he looked again at the goddess, and he said: "Lo, Isis
is a kindly goddess; and full of tenderness. Great gods are warm-hearted,
and have tender goddesses."

The woman wrapped herself in her mantle and went home in silence,
sightless, brooding like the lotus softly shutting again, with its gold
core full of fresh life. She saw nothing, for her own petals were a
sheath to her. Only she thought: 'I am full of Osiris. I am full of the
risen Osiris!

But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to
the sea, and the dog-star green towards the sea's rim. And he thought:
'How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose
of dark-petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness!
How full it is, and great beyond all gods. How it leans around me, and I
am part of it, the great rose of Space. I am like a grain of its perfume,
and the woman is a grain of its beauty. Now the world is one flower of
many petalled darknesses, and I am in its perfume as in a touch.'

So, in the absolute stillness and fullness of touch, he slept in his cave
while the dawn came. And after the dawn, the wind rose and brought a
storm, with cold rain. So he stayed in his cave in the peace and the
delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on
the earth, and to see one white-and-gold narcissus bowing wet, and still
wet. And he said: "This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The
grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the
invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one."

He waited at the temple for the woman, and she came in the rain. But she
said to him:

"Let me sit awhile with Isis. And come to me, will you come to me, in the
second hour of night?"

So he went back to the cave and lay in stillness and in the joy of being
in touch, waiting for the woman who would come with the night, and
consummate again the contact. Then when night came the woman came, and
came gladly, for her great yearning, too, was upon her, to be in touch,
to be in touch with him, nearer.

So the days came, and the nights came, and days came again, and the
contact was perfected and fulfilled. And he said: "I will ask her
nothing, not even her name, for a name would set her apart."

And she said to herself: "He is Osiris. I wish to know no more."

Plum blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past,
anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean-field was
in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its petals
and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact
was established, the man and the woman were fulfilled of one another, and
departure was in the air.

One day he met her under the trees, when the morning sun was hot, and the
pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pear blossom was
scattering. She came slowly towards him, and in her gentle lingering, her
tender hanging back from him, he knew a change in her.

"Hast thou conceived?" he asked her.

"Why?" she said.

"Thou art like a tree whose green leaves follow the blossom, full of sap.
And there is a withdrawing about thee."

"It is so," she said. "I am with young by thee. Is it good?"

"Yea!" he said. "How should it not be good? So the nightingale calls no
more from the valley-bed. But where wilt thou bear the child, for I am
naked of all but life?"

"We will stay here," she said.

"But the lady, your mother?"

A shadow crossed her brow. She did not answer.

"What when she knows?" he said.

"She begins to know."

"And would she hurt you?"

"Ah, not me! What I have is all my own. And I shall be big with
Osiris...But thou, do you watch her slaves."

She looked at him, and the peace of her maternity was troubled by
anxiety.

"Let not your heart be troubled!" he said. "I have died the death once."

So he knew the time was come again for him to depart. He would go alone,
with his destiny. Yet not alone, for the touch would be upon him, even as
he left his touch on her. And invisible suns would go with him.

Yet he must go. For here on the bay the little life of jealousy and
property was resuming sway again, as the suns of passionate fecundity
relaxed their sway. In the name of property, the widow and her slaves
would seek to be revenged on him for the bread he had eaten, and the
living touch he had established, the woman he had delighted in. But he
said: "Not twice! They shall not now profane the touch in me. My wits
against theirs."

So he watched. And he knew they plotted. So he moved from the little cave
and found another shelter, a tiny cove of sand by the sea, dry and secret
under the rocks.

He said to the woman:

"I must go now soon. Trouble is coming to me from the slaves. But I am a
man, and the world is open. But what is between us is good, and is
established. Be at peace. And when the nightingale calls again from your
valley-bed, I shall come again, sure as spring."

She said: "0, don't go! Stay with me on half the island, and I will build
a house for you and me under the pine trees by the temple, where we can
live apart."

Yet she knew that he would go. And even she wanted the coolness of her
own air around her, and the release from anxiety.

"If I stay," he said, "they will betray me to the Romans and to their
justice. But I will never be betrayed again. So when I am gone, live in
peace with the growing child. And I shall come again: all is good between
us, near or apart. The suns come back in their seasons: and I shall come
again."

"Do not go yet," she said. "I have set a slave to watch at the neck of
the peninsula. Do not go yet, till the harm shows."

But as he lay in his little cove, on a calm, still night, he heard the
soft knock of oars, and the bump of a boat against the rock. So he crept
out to listen. And he heard the Roman overseer say:

"Lead softly to the goat's den. And Lysippus shall throw the net over the
malefactor while he sleeps, and we will bring him before justice, and the
Lady of Isis shall know nothing of it..."

The man who had died caught a whiff of flesh from the oiled and naked
slaves as they crept up, then the faint perfume of the Roman. He crept
nearer to the sea. The slave who sat in the boat sat motionless, holding
the oars, for the sea was quite still. And the man who had died knew him.

So out of the deep cleft of a rock he said, in a clear voice:

"Art thou not that slave who possessed the maiden under the eyes of Isis?
Art thou not the youth? Speak!"

The youth stood up in the boat in terror. His movement sent the boat
bumping against the rock. The slave sprang out in wild fear, and fled up
the rocks. The man who had died quickly seized the boat and stepped in,
and pushed off. The oars were yet warm with the unpleasant warmth of the
hands of the slaves. But the man pulled slowly out, to get into the
current which set down the coast, and would carry him in silence. The
high coast was utterly dark against the starry night. There was no
glimmer from the peninsula: the priestess came no more at night. The man
who had died rowed slowly on, with the current, and laughed to himself:
"I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch
forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfume in my
flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being.
But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the
root of my tree."

"So let the boat carry me. To-morrow is another day."



THE END




Project Gutenberg Australia