Some are bright with heavenly radiance,
And others shine out through our tears.
They arise, too, like mystical flowers,
All different and all the same—
As they lie on my heart like a garland
That is wreathed around Mary’s name,”
“Good morning and a blessing, comrade.” It was the greeting of the Jew to the knight who lay asleep under a palm the day after the flight. The sleeper slowly rising, murmured:
“I’m half vexed at thee, Ichabod; thou hast dissolved a dream filled with sights of home and mother.”
“I’ve brought lentils, barley, and grape-clusters; they are better than dreams when the sun is up.”
“To those sad when awake, joyful dreams are welcome.”
“There are real joys just before us.”
“Real joys, just before us? Grim sarcasm; a sorry jest, Jew!”
“No; oh, no. I’m telling thee the smiling, clean-faced[114] truth. We’ll be safe at Jabbock’s city by sun set!”
“Safe? safe? I’m unused to that word; almost afraid of it. What does it mean in this country?”
“Oh, these cavalrymen! always on the charge; now here, now there. Thy thoughts go by habit, sometimes racing forward, sometimes retreating. A while ago thou wert as full of faith as Gideon, now thou art as timorous as Canaan’s spies.”
“My habits have grown fat by feeding on piebald experiences.”
“Experience is a lying prophet, when it counts without reckoning God.”
“I can not see a step ahead. That’s certainty to me, though thou callest it doubt. I know not how to hang rainbows upon the ghostly brows of the future when I’ve no power to lay hand on the ghostly form and have no rainbows.”
“He that lifted the burdens of the past from off us holds the changing winds of the future in His fists. One second of life goes ever with only one second of care. I learned this of Sir Charleroy long ago. Now he forgets his own teachings. Shall I call him Reuben, never excelling because unstable as water?”
“Call me slave: Uncertainty’s slave! Thou didst waken me from a dream of home, to the shock of remembering again that I was homeless, dead to all that once made life worth living. The gorgeous hopes of thy fertile mind are mocked by stern present facts.”
“Odd talk from one just dreaming of his mother; a good woman didst say? then very hopeful; all good women are. Then remember how thou didst lift me[115] to the very gates of heaven yesterday. Thou canst not see a step ahead? Well, then look back; miles; years. Was not our God in thy battles in the thickets; in the mountains; in Jordan? My poor reasoning tells me that He has wrought too much for us to drop us now. He must get His reward in keeping us to the end.”
“Some of the past makes me shudder, Ichabod.”
“Pick out the best, not the worst. We escaped the very Gehenna at Jericho, following murderers, the storm, slavery; now free, fed, rested, the eastern air washed and sunned to a tonic. I’m drinking lotus balm out of it.”
“There it is; the sun’s in thy brain, poet-preacher.”
“No, I’m only giving thee back some of thine own sermons. I draw from my own heart no monster memories. If I’ve fought hard battles it sufficeth that I have fought them once. I’ll not recall their bloody sweat and tears for the sake of refighting them. No, I’m going back to the sweet, happy hours of babyhood; for I tell thee, knight, there is a world of joy to a man, scorched by stern experience, to forget himself sometimes back to the lullabys and warblings of the days of his innocence.”
“I can’t do it.”
“I can’t help doing it, especially in this place! My whole being feeds on a present scent of home.”
“Thou knowest the country hereabouts?”
“My soul laughs in friendly converse with these crocuses, pinks, and asphodels, turning the velvet, grassy plains to palace carpets. I’m saying to myself these blossoms must know me, their bowing heads[116] and offered odors being my reward for nursing their mothers when I was a boy.”
“Well, flowers are sincere friends; they never change and are all charitable. That’s why they are deemed fit presents to those in prison, or proper offering to be laid on the breast of the dead Magdalene.”
“Ah, dead Magdalene; for even the symbol of a broken promise; born to be a queen of love, by perverted love dethroned! Woman, man’s ward, by man betrayed; the guide star setting in black night; the savior of human purity befouling all purity! Given the power by which Eve was to crush the serpent’s head and using it to breed all serpentine ills. This is Eve turning a volcano upon Eden. Put flowers upon her once passionate, now dead, heart, in awful contrast! Nature at her worst is intensified anguish; at her best an ocean of joy, an universe of light and song. So I learn of nature under man. Listen to nature’s perfumed throb now: these thousands of feathered songsters, millions of lesser creatures, whose melody is larger than themselves and more perceptible. Hear the humming, thrumming, buzzing, trumpetings. Oh, this is life as the All-Saving tuned it to utter joy! It widens, deepens, thickens; getting sweeter, louder, happier all the way. A tempest, set to music, knight. I’m caught in its whirl and join in its praisings. It comes over me as an insight of what nature really is. God cares for it all and made it thus, to throb and exult!” Ichabod paused in transport. “But I sometimes think there’s a great waste of these things; there is so much in places where there is no human ear or eye to hear or see.”
[117]
“Reuben is narrow-viewed just now. Man is not all! God makes happiness because He is so full of goodness He must. Our rabbis call Him ‘The Fountain.’ There is no waste! He makes these things for His own joy, and, methinks, looks down from the circle of the heavens to say to what is in the desert or wilderness, ‘Very good.’ Then, beyond this, I’ve sometimes thought He kept the processions of joy and beauty moving along; coming, going, dying, living, ending and beginning again, as a sort of practice; by action keeping all fresh and new. He causes things of beauty and power to pass through His divine alchemy from one glory to another, as the general causes his squadrons to move through the evolutions of the battle before the conflict. The Father is awaiting man’s hour, man’s return from sinning; the time for millennial advent; then all delights, as if fresh born, all goods newly harvested, will appear to be multiplied, intensified, transfigured. That will be the beginning of hereafter.”
“Oh, Israel, the sun is in thy brain. I forget all logic of contention, charmed out of words, by feasting on thy orisons, Go on, Jew.”
“Then I’ll say ’twas God, not chance, nor fate, that brought us to wander alone with nature. Read well nature’s book that lies open in the lap of the Great Teacher! Only stand close to Him and He will hold the torch, turn the pages and give the sure interpretations of the sweetness that feeds quiet, the picturesqueness which evokes smiles and the stately grandeurs which beget faith.”
“Israel, thou climbest the sun-ladder to rhapsody!”
“Whether soaring, climbing, or creeping, I know[118] not; but this I know, I’m tasting in these wanderings God’s kisses. They are in the flowers; my spirit rests on His as my body on the balm of the fresh breezes. Then, animate nature seems so contented and happy! Why, I’ve been ravished by the songsters; as I’ve said to myself, they echo the angelic anthem of heaven, peace. Had any such doubt as haunts thee, come to me, since passing Jordan, it would have been sung out of countenance by the winged warblers or dragged from my heart captive in floral fetters by Him that hath two staves, beauty and bands.”
“Oh, Ichabod, do not pause. Go on, I pray thee.”
“Then thou art glad to hear that nature is not a beautiful widow mourning her dead bridegroom through the ages?”
“I love to listen to thee.”
“Listen to a wiser. See those stately heliotropes. They stand above all of their kind with shining faces; great in aspiration, great in devotion. All day they turn toward the sun and when their blossoms fade they leave a hardy seed. The winter may bury it, but it springs forth in vernal days, strong in the life it won by loving the summer sun.”
“Ichabod, I’m charmed! Let’s abide here always amid these joys of nature.”
“What, be hermits?”
“Yes; life’s troubles are made by its people; the fewer people the fewer troubles.”
“While sharing their troubles may we not lessen them. No man may live to himself; we’re wedded to each other.”
“Yes, wedded to life. A royal phrase; since I’ve[119] been constantly either hating or loving it; fearing to live and then fearing to die. Wedded! ah, ha, ha; the wedded are those who most madly love and then most bitterly hate.”
“Say sometimes; then thou’lt be like the stopped horologue, telling the true time once in twenty-four hours, at least.”
“Thy poetry runs into caustic quality. What hast thou been lunching on since morn?”
“At least not on Dead Sea apples, fair without, ashes within. My poetry, if I have any, always sings in accord with the company it keeps.”
“How many more arrows in thy quiver, hast thou?”
“Only one, and that a question; does my master intend to foreswear marriage himself? He ridicules it.”
“I have already done so.”
“Well, ’tis well thou didst not live in Rome, for its citizens that dared to live amid the temptations and soul-crampings of voluntary bachelorhood were highly taxed for their disregard of the claims of society and the state.”
“Yet even the Romans ever deemed bachelorhood a blessing. In this opinion royal Claudius decreed that the sailors who brought to Rome a ship loaded from the wheat granaries of Egypt in the time of Agabus’s famine, should be as a reward permitted to remain unmarried. If I were a Roman and a sailor I’d pray for a famine and a Claudius.”
“A world without wives? What a world!”
So saying Ichabod caught up a stick and began marking on the earth.
“How now, Israel; some sorcery?”
[120]
“No—yet, may be, yes. I’ll picture a world without women.”
The Jew outlined the Egyptian deity, “Kneph.”
“What have we, man or beast?”
“Truly, I think partly both. The knight has described his Elysium and I have here pictured a fit king for it. Behold thy god, sworn celibate. Egypt’s adored Kneph. Is this hideous enough?”
“A god! well he’s not handsome; a ram’s head; four horns; two up, two down; armed as both ram and goat?”
“Both were sacred to him in Egypt; also the horned snake with which Cleopatra put out her life; poor, unfortunate man-wrecked beauty.”
“But, Jew, thou dost dawdle! What of this play?”
“Oh, nothing, only Kneph would do well for a sailor, at Rome, under Claudius, in famine time!”
“My poet wanders, but yet stings.”
“So? Kneph was a god that boasted, or rather his spokesmen did, that he was the father of his mother. What economy! No need to be grateful to or love a mother; no need to wear a wife on the heart. The folly of a dark age by folly darkened in the mad attempt to lift up man without his purer better part.”
“How strange, Jew, whenever we touch a new belief, or an old one, new to us, we find peoples following an idea or ideal. There has been a crying through the world ever for a some one for pilgrim man to follow. How passing strange; our century wails the self-same cry; and somehow it always happens that this matter has something to do with woman. See; ‘Kneph’ was the monstrous birth of those who[121] thought man superlative, and greatness to be by being all man. How sharply the devotion to the Madonna cuts across this! She was mother of the noblest, and man in the begetting left out. Oh, my head’s full of thoughts, but they tumble along toward my lips without system or leader. I talk like a madman, though I think like a Seraph.”
“I think, Sir Charleroy, that a healthy son of Adam sneering at all women, publicly, reproaches himself as being one who never knew a true one.”
“More javelins! I’d swear, anyhow, that if I’d been Adam, no winged serpent of gaudy colors and honey tongue could have lured me from Paradise, Eve or no Eve!”
“If thou hadst been there thou wouldst have been lonesome with the speechless herds; finding the new woman, would have loved her like the boy who mates just to see how it seems.”
“Oh, likely!”
“Then if thy ward or angel attempted to elope with the devil thou wouldst have gone along, too, from curiosity, as lad to a hippodrome, just to see the finish; or as thousands of men since Adam, tied to wayward women, have gone down with them to darkness, preferring hell with their idols to heaven without.”
“I suppose so. Oh, how strangely are the fates of men and women interwoven.”
“Then thou dost not now elect to live a hermit, without the companionship of the frail, fair and faithful sex which are said to double our joys?”
“Yes and multiply our sorrows!”
[122]
“I suspect thou’lt change thy late creed very soon.”
“Why so?”
“I expect ere long that we’ll meet some living blossoms.”
“By my token, that’s good news, Ichabod.”
“So, then, thou art ready to recant?”
Evening came, and the pilgrims supped on the meager meat they were able to procure in the fields.
“Now poet of the Palm Land mellow my dreams by possessing me of thy meditations. What fixes thy gaze?”
“The monarch of the sky; after a day such as this has been, he seems to me to take his departure with a peculiar sort of triumphal sweep of his trailing splendors.”
“Horus exulting over prostrate Set.”
“But night, not the green-colored son of Osiris, conquers now, master.”
“Night never conquers. It merely lives by sufferance; often routed by the invincible spears of the sun. Darkness creeps forth here because the golden charger in masterful strategy has gone elsewhere to rout other armies of the dark kingdom. Lay this to thy heart, good Jew.”
“I do, as precious ointment to a blister. Enlarge me.”
“There, Jew; see the fleecy clouds over Jordan. How grand!”
“Yea, as I’ve often seen them; some like alabaster thrones, and others like ships on fire, while others are like silver castles, banded with cornelian and gold, with here and there hyacinthian shields hung on their battlements, all fresh as the stones in heaven’s foundation[123] walls! How they career and float along the empurpled ocean of the west! I forget myself even now into their midst. Oh, knight, such pictures, such visions make my soul shout in peals of holy laughter.”
“My Israel, the sun which woos the earth into making love to him with flowers never sets in thy brain; thou livest in the poet’s constant noon.”
“But we both are changing. Even the knight gets mellow. Hardship, the sun and faith are working in us both for good.”
“Getting to be? No; thou wert and art poet, painter and singer; all in one. If the world does not hear thee the Seraphim will, by and by.”
“I’ve noticed that souls unbent from some long, twisting pain, run, aspire and play. It is mercy’s rest, reward.”
“God fits some especially to catch passing joys, Ichabod.”
“Yea, and it all comes from a serene faith that all is very good as He made it. I’m just opening to the Sun Eternal, at whose right hand are pleasures evermore. I love thy wakening touch, my guide.”
“Ah, I’m a bungling player on the harp of thy soul, but I love thy melody. Child of nature, speak more and more to me.”
“I can but ill tell all. I’m dumb amid the waves of peace which enhalo, the hopes that thrill, the views of truth that fill my being.”
“I believe thee on my soul, Jew. I’d stop now to remember a little, perhaps to sleep, since so I can follow dreams that would craze me to contemplate awake; but if we now sleep, pray God our day-dreams go on and on.[124] I think we are pilgrims following spiritual truths. They’ll lead us on high; let’s not miss their direction.”
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