Part 2

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 But do you not feel that some larger and more enduring power has entered the room and superseded the small, isolated activities of all these helpless folk--helpless now because of drunkenness or sleep, but just as helpless when they are laughing,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

[Illustration: woodcut]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: woodcut]

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

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

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

"Then my feast has been a failure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Chapter Three_

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

[Illustration: woodcut]

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

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

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

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

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

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