Part 3

At last it was ended; but with nothing more to distract and anger him, he found himself face to face again with the awful emptiness of his life. A sudden bitterness, like a poisonous spring, flooded his soul at the thought that there was no longer any motive for this careful cleansing and beautifying. In the old days, this moment of the completion of his toilet had been full of delightful anticipation. Refreshed and invigorated by sleep and with the heaviness of sleep dispelled and body and mind warm and tingling from the touch of warm water and the unguents with which he had been rubbed, he had contemplated the day that lay before him with an ever renewed sense of adventure. During the last two years his love affair with Helena had raised this daily pleasure to an ecstasy, for then he had known that each day held for him the delicious and almost magical renewal of their love. It was some months ago that he had first become aware of a change in their relations. In what the change consisted he could not exactly have said: a faint, indefinable discord had sounded through the perfect harmony of their love. From that moment their ardor had declined until Helena's feeling for him had passed from indifference to something not far from hatred. How had it started? Malchus did not know. But of this, at least, he was sure--it had not started with him. No sooner had he asserted this than a doubt rang a small silver bell in his mind and he became conscious of things which he had not admitted to himself before--of little failures, disappointments, wearinesses which had begun, some months ago, to creep into his rapture. Their passion, formerly so triumphantly effortless, had, it seemed, reached a limit which could not be passed, and from that moment it was no longer a wonderful still-renewed adventure, but a desperate reiteration of the physical. And with this flagging of their passion he had begun to be aware of a sense of stress, failure, emptiness, for which the union of their minds could not compensate. Weariness of the flesh had begun to assail him. But he had never confessed these things to Helena, for he could not have expressed them in words; and, even if he had been able to, he would not have dared, for, in spite of them, he still desired her. His desire possessed him like a hunger, undiminished, and as he watched her gradually receding from him the hunger only became the more fierce. No, his love had not diminished; it was hers that had failed them. And as he again came round to the unendurable thought that Helena no longer loved him, bitterness overwhelmed him and he sat staring again at the empty desolation of his life. By degrees he came to feel that all love of women was a hateful thing, a thing of feverish and restless longing whose brief fulfillment always fell short of the hoped-for ecstasy. Perhaps the weak and clumsy body was incapable of achieving that passion of which the soul dreamed. He thought of older loves in the days before he had met Helena, and he told himself now, in his cold, clear-sighted mood, that his love for Helena was not the supreme passion of his life. It was merely one of many. Each of his loves in turn he had proclaimed to be the supreme passion; that was the illusion by which the fancy always strove to cheat the soul into a disregard of the sure disappointment. Each, as he saw it now, had begun with this parade of flattering delusions, this intoxication which turned a girl into a creature of more than mortal perfection and a brief quickening of the pulses into an undying ecstasy, and he recalled the heartache of that first moment when his eyes met the cold eyes of disillusion, the sickening weariness of the attempt to pretend that all was still as wonderful as it had been before. Yes, it was hateful and vile, this itch for the impossible which no experience could cure. Yet even if the dream were realized, what would it be worth? An ecstasy of sensation made permanent would be an agony, a destruction for both body and soul; it would be a thing more terrible than this disillusionment and disgust which tortured him now....

It was the hour when he had been in the habit of listening to music or the reading of poetry or philosophy, and now his musicians and the Greek who was his reader approached to receive his orders. He sent the musicians away, for he could not have endured the emotional excitement of even the most sober music, but he retained his reader, who began to unroll the epic poem from which, during the last week, he had been reading to Malchus every morning. But Malchus waved it away.

"Not poetry to-day, Chalchas," he said. "Read me rather some philosophy; but not at length, for I cannot attend to arguments to-day. Read me fragments--passages which will soothe me and help to banish thought. I cannot choose. Choose, yourself, what you think best."

The slave went out and returned with two or three books and a stool, and seating himself near Malchus's chair, he unrolled one of the books and began to read. At first Malchus understood nothing. He could not detach his attention from the pulsing nerve of his misery and he heard only the gentle inflexions of the reading voice and the flights of words which dispersed like flocks of sparrows, uncontrolled by any connecting sense. Then with an effort he forced himself to focus his attention and gradually the sounds wove themselves into meaning.

"What is it you are reading about, Chalchas?" he asked.

Chalchas looked up from the scroll. "About eternity, sir," he said.

"'_Hence it hastens to be in futurity_'"--Malchus repeated the last phrase which still echoed in his memory. "What is it that hastens?"

"The universe, sir."

"Good. Read on from there."

_Hence_, read Chalchas, _it hastens to be in futurity, and is not willing to stop, since it attracts existence to itself, in performing another and another thing, and is moved in a circle through a certain desire of essence. So that we have found what existence is in such natures as these, and also what the cause is of a motion which thus hastens to be perpetually in the future periods of time. But in first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future; for they are now the whole, and whatever of life they ought to possess, they wholly possess, so that they do not seek after anything, because there is not anything which can be added to them in futurity._

The voice read on, but Malchus had ceased to listen. A phrase had caught his attention and he repeated it to himself, feeling somehow a vague consolation in it. In first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future. Surely it was just in that desire of the future, the desire to continue his possession of Helena, that his present misery consisted. If only he could achieve a state of stability such as the philosopher seemed to be trying to define--a state of peaceful being instead of this endless craving for the unfulfilled. Again he focused his attention on the reading.

_What then, if some one should never depart from the contemplation of eternity, but should incessantly persevere in admiring its nature, and should be able to do this through the possession of an unwearied nature; such a one, perhaps, running to eternity, would there stop and never decline from it, in order that he might become similar to it and eternal, surveying eternity, and the eternal by that which is eternal in himself._

Malchus closed his eyes. The words and ideas, only half comprehended by his reason, brought comfort to his heart. He withdrew his mind from Helena and from the pain which obsessed him and concentrated it within upon the pure awareness of being, the eternal in himself. But soon, by no will of his own, his mind had escaped and was clamoring again at the doors behind which Helena had withdrawn herself. How could philosophy help a pain like his? It was beyond the control of will. This beautiful system of thought in which mind broke from the bonds of reason and flowered into ecstasy was accessible only to untroubled minds.

_We must think of the soul_, Chalchas was reading, _as not receiving in the body irrational desires and angers and other passions, but as abolishing all these and as having, as far as possible, no communion with the body._

Chalchas looked up and seeing that Malchus was listening attentively he unrolled more of the scroll and chose another passage.

_It is not by running after external things that the soul beholds temperance and justice, but she perceives them in contemplation of herself and of that which she formerly was, and views them like statues set up in herself which time has covered with rust. Then she purifies them, even as if gold had taken unto itself life and, because it was encrusted with earth, perceived not that it was gold and knew not itself; but afterward, shaking off the earth which clung to it, had been filled with wonder to behold itself pure and alone._

As if struck by a sudden thought, Chalchas laid down the book and took up one of the others. As he unrolled it and began to search for the passage he had thought of, Malchus's eyes wandered into the court where a slim fountain leaped from a little grove of flowering plants. The fountain, he thought, was a symbol of that pure being, always vividly alive, yet always unchanging and self-sufficing, which the philosopher vainly tried to define when he wrote of eternity and the soul. Its clear watery music soothed his sense as the voice of Chalchas had done; and as he listened the voice rose, gentle and unobtrusive, again, the words it spoke mixing with the voice of the water. _Dissimilar Natures ... The Immortal and the mortal ... The spiritual and that which is deprived of spirit ... The indivisible and that which is broken by division_,--the phrases danced like bubbles on the surface of Chalchas's speech, and then Malchus was once again listening attentively. _For by reason of all these things there comes upon the soul mighty tumult and labor in the realms of generation, since we pursue a flying mockery which is ever in motion. And the soul, declining to a material life, kindles a light in her dark tenement the body, but she herself is lodged in obscurity; but by giving life to the body she destroys herself and her own spirit in as great a degree as these can suffer destruction. For thus the mortal nature participates in spirit, but the spiritual nature in death, and the whole becomes a prodigy, as Plato beautifully observes in his Laws, composed of the mortal and immortal, of the spiritual, and that which is deprived of the spirit. For the physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life but giver of life to the mortal body._

Malchus raised his hand as a sign that the reading should cease, and the Greek, taking up the books and the stool on which he had been sitting, retired across the court.

[Illustration: woodcut]

_Chapter Four_

Malchus remained wrapped in thought till he was roused by the sound of approaching footsteps, and, raising his eyes, saw one of his slaves coming toward him, carrying a long palm-leaf mat which he spread before Malchus saying:

"There is a hermit at the door, sir, with mats and baskets for sale." He stood waiting for Malchus to speak and inspecting the mat critically; and, believing that Malchus was debating whether he should buy the mat or not, he added, "The weaving is unusually good, sir."

But Malchus had not been considering the mat. The news that a hermit selling palm-leaf mats was at his door had strengthened rather than interrupted the train of thought which had occupied him since Chalchas had ceased reading. Malchus knew from the fact the hermit was selling mats and baskets that he must be one of the Christian hermits from the desert. They were familiar figures in Alexandria, for many of them, having tramped across the burning sands till they reached the Nile or the southern bank of Lake Mareotis and having there taken ship, appeared at rare intervals in the city to sell the work of their hands and so earn enough to buy for themselves the bare necessities of life.

Malchus himself, like most of his friends, had been born a Christian and had been christened, for his parents were of orthodox faith. As a child, like many children, he had taken religion very seriously. The ceremonies of the church delighted him: he used to imitate them very accurately in his nursery, repeating portions of the services by heart to the astonishment of his nurse. Later he became a great student of the Scriptures and was much taken up with his own religious experiences and his successful or unsuccessful encounters with sin. The priest who had charge of him predicted a pious future. Then, quite suddenly, at the age of eighteen he changed. Christianity, he discovered, was fit only for children and women. He discarded it and proclaimed himself, with Diocles and the other cultured young men who were his friends, a free thinker with a sympathy for Greek classicism. They formed an exquisite society of their own which, helped by Diocles's growing reputation as a poet, became notorious for its artistic intellectualism, its refined licentiousness, and the extreme elegance of its feasts. But no man can change his nature, and in Malchus there was an impulsiveness, a violence, which was much more in accordance with Christianity than with Greece; and, though he would have been the last to admit it, he retained in his attitude to life the mental habit of a Christian.

But the Christianity of Alexandria, with its endless bickerings and riots, was a very different thing from the Christianity of the desert. Everyone in Alexandria had heard of those strenuous desert monasteries, buried in waterless wastes or high pitched on barren hills, and of the hermits who fled from even that strict and primitive existence and led solitary lives of incredible asceticism in cells built by themselves in the sand-swept wastes of Nitria or far south in the Thebaid. It was not so many years since Saint Anthony himself, the greatest of the hermits, had died at a great age and had been buried in an unknown desert grave, bequeathing his leather tunic and the coverlet of his bed to the bishop Athanasius; and the stories which were still told of his lonely battles against evil spirits and those gnawing temptations which lay hold on men living in solitude, held a strange and profound fascination for the earnest, unquiet, and fanatical heart of Malchus.

The philosophers whom Chalchas had just been reading to him, reduced life to mere thought and contemplation. In spite of the comforting ideas which he had received from them, he had realized, as he reflected on their words, that they could not help him, for his only hope lay in strenuous action, while all they could offer him was thought. The idea of a life of thought, of bodily passivity, terrified Malchus. For one of his violent nature, passivity meant despair; for passivity, he knew, would leave him at the mercy of his misery and his desires. For him action was imperative. He must do, not think, if ever he was to escape from himself and from Helena. He longed to hand over the control of himself to some directing discipline, to slave-drive his body, to tire himself out in some austere bodily labor which should have an arbitrary but supreme significance....

It was thoughts such as these that had leaped, like a sudden light, into his mind when the slave had told him that a hermit stood at his door, and it was for this reason that he roused himself and ordered the slave to invite the hermit to enter.

The slave, leaving the mat where he had laid it, went off to obey, and a few minutes later Malchus, raising his eyes, saw the hermit standing in the court, immovable as a vision. He was an old man, upright and gaunt. The small, sharply defined features and bright eyes, looking out from a thicket of gray hair and short, thick beard, gave an ingenuous, bird-like look to the sun-tanned face. Over his right shoulder several long mats were slung, like the one the slave had brought for Malchus to see, and strung on a rope which crossed the same shoulder and was grasped in his right hand he carried on his back a great bunch of palm-leaf baskets which rose above the height of his shoulders on each side of his face. In his left hand he held a staff.

After Malchus had beckoned to him twice the old man moved and began slowly to approach.

"Come, my friend," said Malchus. "I should like to buy some of your mats and baskets. Throw them down here and sit down yourself. My slave will spread out each mat so that I can examine it."

The hermit flung down his load as if glad to be eased of it, and Malchus saw that he was dressed in a rough tunic of untanned goatskin. He wore it with the hair turned inward against his body; a fringe of hair showed along the rough edges about his throat and round each thigh. His arms and legs were bare and he was shod with sandals. He ignored the couch which Malchus had ordered to be brought for him and sat down on the sample mat, spreading his bent knees outward and crossing his ankles. Malchus noticed the sharp shinbones and the extraordinary thinness and brownness of the legs. On their hairy, sun-parched skin patches of dry scurf showed white through the black hairs like salt on a brick. He sat immovable, with hanging head and fixed gaze, and there came from him the pungent animal smell of stale sweat. Once the smell would have sickened Malchus, but now it had no repulsion for him, for it savored of a simple and primitive life free from the luxuries and refinements against which his whole soul was in revolt.

"Before we attend to business," he said, "you must have some food and wine."

The hermit slowly raised his head. "I should be glad of a handful of dates and a cup of water," he said in a small, clear, tranquil voice.

"Wine would be better," answered Malchus. "You are exhausted. A little wine will act as a tonic."

The old man shook his head. "To give a tonic to the body," he said, "is to offer a weapon to the Enemy."

A slave brought him what he had asked for and he sat silently munching the dates and sometimes taking a little bird-like sip from the cup. There was something strangely touching in the spectacle of him sitting there, quietly ministering to the bare need of his frail body. For Malchus, in his present state of mind, he was a being from another world--a world of liberation and new powers, mysterious, peaceful, and ecstatic. In his attitude and his still gaze there was the limitless serenity of the desert. Malchus longed to talk to him intimately and frankly, and after a moment's thought he sent away the slaves and, leaving his couch, sat down on the floor near the hermit.

"Listen to me, my father," he said. "I will buy all your mats and baskets so that you will not need to wander from house to house, because I want you to stay here and help me with your advice."

The old man's voice came clear and calm: "Why should you ask a foolish man for advice?"

"You are not foolish, my father."

"I am foolish according to the wisdom of this world."

"I am not seeking for the wisdom of this world. I know that you are wise in the wisdom that I desire."

"If you truly believed that I am wise, you would not want to ask me questions. You would follow my example."

"But there are many ways of living wisely--different ways for different men. Of late, my father, I have been in great trouble and bewilderment and I cannot see my way. I desire the perfect life but I do not know how to find it. Recently I have read some of the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and I have found much that is good and beautiful in them. When they write of becoming one with the Divine my soul is drawn to their philosophy, but I am afraid of a life of thought because I know that I shall not find peace in thought alone. I hoped that you might explain to me a better way."

"I can explain nothing. We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning, because we have the faith which is made perfect through the love of the Lord Jesus."

"Is reason, then, of no value?"

"I will ask you a question. Which comes first, reason or mind? Is reason the source of mind, or the mind of reason?"

"I should say that the mind was the source of reason, because reasoning is an activity of the mind."

The old man nodded his head. "Then is not a bright and illumined mind greater than reason? Faith is the divine reason and deeds are truer and sharper than words."

"Tell me this, at least, my father. If I become a Christian and a hermit shall I escape from the love of women and the desires of the flesh?"

"No. They will assail you more fiercely in the desert than ever they did in the city."

Malchus sat silent. He was accustomed to the impassioned arguments of the town and was surprised that this old man, who had devoted his whole life to his faith, should have no desire to convert others to it. On the contrary, the replies he had given to Malchus's questions seemed intended to repulse rather than to draw him toward the hermit life. And yet, in the small, calm voice there had been no repulsion. It was unclouded by violence or stress, more like the sound of running water, or the murmur of the wind about walls and roofs. And turning his eyes to the old man now, he saw that he had relapsed into his attitude of contemplation, his head bent slightly forward and his eyes gazing steadfastly before him; and as Malchus watched him he raised his right arm without stirring his body and, reaching over his left shoulder, drew over his head a linen cowl which Malchus had not noticed before. It hung to his breast, covering his face, and when he had dropped his hand to the ground again he remained immovable in that attitude, like an idol carved out of wood.

Malchus rose and sat silent on his couch, occupied with his troubles and vague desires and afraid to disturb the hermit. But after an hour of immobility the old man rose, threw back his head cloth, and began to walk toward the door. He had forgotten his mats and baskets, but Malchus followed him and, touching his arm, offered him a handful of money. He stopped and took the money with a nod of the head, and was on the point of moving again, when Malchus spoke: