South Wind Part 16

Something ancient and fishlike--it's that mouth--"

"He's a beauty!" interrupted Edgar Marten, sniffing with disgust. "Eyes like a boiled haddock. And that thing has the cheek to call itself a Messiah. Thank G.o.d I'm a Jew; it's not business of mine. But if I were a Christian, I'd bash his blooming head in. d.a.m.ned if I wouldn't. The frowsy, fetid, flow-blown fraud. Or what's the matter with the Dog's Home?"

"Come, come," said Mr. Heard, who had taken rather a liking to this violent youngster and was feeling more than usually indulgent that evening. "Come! He can't help his face, I fancy. Have you no room in your heart for an original? And don't you think--quite apart from questions of religion--that we tourists ought to be grateful to these people for diversifying the landscape with their picturesque red blouses and things?"

"I have no eye for landscape, Mr. Heard, save in so far as it indicates strata and faults and other geological points. The picturesque don't interest me. I am full of Old Testamentary strains; I can't help looking at men from the ethical point of view. And what have people's clothes to do with their religion? He can't help his face, you say.

Well, if he can't help that greasy old mackintosh, I'll eat my hat.

Can't a fellow be a Messiah without sporting a pink s.h.i.+rt or fancy dressing-gown or blue pyjamas or something? But there you are! I defy you to name me a single-barrelled crank. If a man is a religious lunatic, or a vegetarian, he is sure to be touched in some other department as well; he will be an anti-vivisectionist, a nutfooder, costume-maniac, stamp-collector, or a spiritualist into the bargain.

Haven't you ever noticed that? And isn't he dirty? Where is the connection between piety and dirt? I suggest they are both relapses into ancestral channels and the one drags the other along with it. When I see a thing like this, I want to hew it in pieces. Agag, Mr. Heard; Agag. I must have another look at this specimen; one does not see such a sight every day. He is a living fossil--post-pleistocene."

He drew off; Keith and the Count, engaged in some deep conversation, had also moved a few paces away.

Mr. Heard stood alone, his back turned to the Master. Moonlight still flooded the earth, the lanterns were flickering and sputtering. Some had gone out, leaving gaps of darkness in the lighted walls. Many of the guests retired without bidding farewell to their host; he liked them to feel at their ease, to take "French leave" whenever so disposed--to depart "A L'ANGLAISE," as the French say. The garden was nearly empty. A great quietude had fallen upon its path and thickets.

From afar resounded the boisterous chorus of a party of revellers loth to quit the scene; it was suddenly broken by a terrific crash and bursts of laughter. Some table had been knocked over.

Standing there, the bishop could not but listen to Keith, who had raised his voice in emphasis and was saying to the Count, in his best Keithean manner:

"I am just coming to that point. A spring-board is what humanity needs.

What better one can be contrived than this pure unadulterated Byzantianism. Cretinism, I call it. Look at the Orthodox Church. A repository of apocalyptic nonsense such as no sane man can take seriously. Nonsense of the right kind, the uncompromising kind. That is my point. The paralysing, sterilizing cult of these people offers a far better spring-board into a clean element of thought than our English Church, whose DEMI-VIERGE concessions to common sense afford seductive resting-places to the intellectually weak-knee'd. Do I make myself clear? I'm getting infernally thirsty."

"I quite agree with you, my friend. The Russians have got a better spring-board than the English. The queer thing is, that the Russians won't jump, whereas the Englishman often does. Well, well! We cannot live without fools."

Mr. Heard was slightly perturbed by these words. A good fellow like Keith! "DEMI-VIERGE concessions to common sense"; what did he mean by that? Did his church really make such concessions?

"I'll think about it to-morrow," he decided.

The Master, when they returned to him, had not budged from his resting-place. The fingers still lay, starfish-wise, upon the folds of that soiled homespun; his eyes still stared out of the leafy bower; his face still wore its mask of placid imbecility.

The gla.s.s was empty.

Slowly, as on a pivot, his head turned in the direction of the bodyguard.

Forthwith some favourite disciple--not Krasnojabkin, who happened to be escorting Madame Steynlin to her villa just then--darted to his side; with the help of two lady-apostles known, respectively, as the "goldfinch" and the "red apple," they conveyed him out of that shelter into the deserted, moonlit garden. He leaned heavily on the arm of the youth; peevish sounds, quasi-human, proceeded from his colourless lips.

And now he was almost speaking; desirous, it seemed, of formulating some truth too deep for human utterance.

"I bet I know what he is saying," whispered Keith. "It's something about the Man-G.o.d."

CHAPTER XI

The Russian Government is notoriously tender-hearted. But even the worm will turn....

Scholars who have treated the life of the ex-monk Bazhakuloff divide it into five clearly marked periods: the probationary, dialectical, political, illumined and expiatory.

The first began in youth when, being driven from his father's house by reason of his vagrant habits and other incorrigible vices, he entered a monastery near Kasan. Despite occasional lapses prompted by the hot blood of his years and punished with harsh disciplinary measures, he seems to have performed his monkish duties with sufficient zeal. It was observed, however, that with increasing years he became unduly interested in questions of dogma. He talked too freely; he was always arguing. Being unable to read or write, he developed an astonis.h.i.+ng memory for things he had heard and faces he had seen; he brought them up at inconvenient moments. He grew factious, obstreperous, declaring that there was much in the const.i.tution of the Holy Russian Church which ought to be amended and brought up to date. What people wanted, he said, was a New Jerusalem. A violent altercation with his Superior touching the attributes of the Holy Ghost ended in a broken jaw-bone on the part of the older man, and the expulsion of the younger. The dialectical period had set in. The convent inmates, on the whole, were glad to see the last of him--particularly the Father Superior.

We next find him living in a large barn about fifteen miles from Moscow. The Superior being unwilling to publish the true facts of the broken jaw-bone, a certain fame, the fame of an earnest but misunderstood religious innovator, had preceded him. Adherents, barely twenty at first, gathered to his side. These disciples, humble a.n.a.lphabetics like himself, have left us no word of what pa.s.sed at those long discussions. Certain it is that he now began to formulate the rules of his Revised Church. They were to live on charity, to go bare-headed, and to wear red blouses--like the Christians of old. The charm of these simple regulations spread abroad, and gained him fresh recruits. There were now some cultured folk among them, who collected his saying into the GOLDEN BOOK. He decided to limit his disciples to the "Sacred Number 63," and to call them "Little White Cows." Asked why he chose this t.i.tle, he answered that cows were pure and useful animals without which humanity could not live; even so were his disciples. The innate good sense of this speech increased his reputation. About this time, too, he would sometimes prophesy, and undergo long periods of motionless self-abstraction. At the end of one of these latter, after tasting no food or drink for three and a half hours, he gave utterance to what was afterwards known as the First Revelation. It ran to this effect: "The Man-G.o.d is the Man-G.o.d, and not the G.o.d-Man." Asked how he arrived at so stupendous an aphorism, he answered that it just came to him. There were troubles in the neighbourhood over the audacity of this utterance; some called it a divine inspiration, to the majority it was known as the Unnamable Heresy. For a brief while the town was formed into two camps, and the Chief of Police, a prudent official, was at his wit's end what to do with these inflammable elements, seeing that the ex-monk's followers had now swelled to several hundreds and contained not a few of the more influential aristocrats of the city. In this dilemma, he applied for instruction to the Procurator of the Holy Synod. That gentleman, having considered the case, rashly decided that a visionary of this stamp might be useful for furthering certain projects of his own. He hoped, by placing under an obligation, to fas.h.i.+on out of the young reformer an amenable instrument--a miscalculation which he lived (though not for long) to repent. Under the Procurator's aegis, Bazhakuloff was summoned to the Capital. The political period was beginning. Moscow, on the whole, was glad to see the last of him--particularly the Chief of Police.

There began the most brilliant epoch of his life. By steps which it is needless to trace, he fought and wormed his way into the favour of the Court. A good deal of his worldly success may well have been due, as his enemies a.s.sert, to an incredible mixture of cringing, astuteness, and impudence. It stands to reason, however, that a man of this type must have possessed sterling qualities of his own to be found occupying--all this was years and years ago--a suite of apartments in the Palace, where he lived in splendour, a Power behind the Throne, the Confidental Adviser of the Highest Circles. His monkish garb was soon encrusted with orders and decorations, no State function was complete without his presence, no official appointment, from the highest and lowest sphere of government, was held to be valid without his sanction.

Red blouses, one of several keys to his favour, could be counted by thousands. He crushed opposition with an iron hand. He wrought a miracle or two; but what chiefly accounted for the almost divine veneration in which he was held was a succession of lucky prophecies--none luckier than that wherein, during one of his moments of inspired self-abstraction, he foretold the early and violent death of the former protector, the man to whom he owed this rise to the pinnacles of fame. For even so it fell out. Not many days later the Procurator of the Holy Synod was found murdered in bed by an unknown hand. A certain journalist, writing from Switzerland, boldly states that the Procurator was murdered at the instigation of Bazhakuloff and claims to have heard, from an eye-witness whom he does not name, of a bitter quarrel between the two on the subject of a certain lady as to whose ident.i.ty we are also left in doubt. It may be true; such things have happened ere now. This particular writer's credibility, however, is none of the best; he has been convicted over and over again of forcing the note in his diatribes against what he calls "retrogression into idolatry." There was certainly a good deal of unrest in the country during the period of the ex-monk's ascendency; no less than 13,783 persons had been banished to Siberia, and 3,756 executed at his orders. Yet nothing, it seemed, could shatter his position when, with appalling suddenness, a thunderbolt descended. n.o.body knows to this day what took place. It was something Russian; some scandal in the Highest Spheres which may see the light of day, centuries hence, when the Imperial Archives are disclosed as musty court history to the eyes of students curious in such matters. At this crisis, when 44,323 persons, mostly liberals, were awaiting trial in the prisons of the Capital, the ex-monk would doubtless have been quietly removed after the fas.h.i.+on of court favourites, not by his adherents, now numbering many hundred thousands, threatened a revolution. A secret compromise was effected.

He was banished, with every outward mark of disgrace, to a monastery in the remote and inhospitable region of Viatka, there to meditate upon the instability of human affairs. The illumined period was drawing nigh. The Capital, on the whole, was glad to see the last of him--particuarly the prisoners awaiting trial.

The diet and discipline nearly killed him at first. He was consoled by knowing that his fame had spread far and wide. The Court being unwilling to publish the true facts of his disgrace, he was regarded as a martyr, a victim of political intrigue, an injured saint. Disciples multiplied. The GOLDEN BOOK was filled with priceless sayings--wise and salutary maxims which echoed from end to end of the country. The New Jerusalem took on a definite shape; the nucleus of the movement, the initiated among his followers, were retained as the "Sacred 63"; he called them his apostles and himself their Messiah, which some people thought rather presumptuous of him. His reputation for sanct.i.ty became such that he was once more a power to be reckoned with; the Court, in fact, was on the verge of receiving him into favour again, when the Second Revelation was announced. It ran to this effect: Flesh and blood of warm-blooded beasts is Abomination to the Little White Cows. Asked how he contrived to formulate so novel and tremendous a proposition, he answered that it just came to him. His followers--there were about three million of them now--instantly refused to touch the Unclean Thing, and all would have gone well but for the fact that the Army was tinctured with the New Faith, and that the Grand Dukes had recently become involved in extensive and lucrative contracts for supplying the troops with mean. The soldiery refusing to eat either beef or mutton or pork, percentages declined. These leaders took up a firm patriotic att.i.tude.

The health and morale of the entire Army, they declared, was dependent upon a sound nutritive diet obtainable only through the operation of certain radioactive oxydised magneto-carbon-hydrates which exist nowhere save in the muscular tissue of animals. This new heresy endangered the very foundations of Empire! They were not people to compromise where questions of national prosperity were concerned. They suggested, privately, that he should cancel his Revelation. He refused.

They then sent him a confidential messenger offering the choice of a.s.sa.s.sination or deportation within the s.p.a.ce of three hours. He inclined to the latter alternative, and was straightway conveyed to the frontier by special train with as many rouble notes in his pocket as he had been able to sc.r.a.pe together in the flurry of departure. Some disturbances broke out when the news of his banishment became known; a few whiffs of grape-shot worked wonders. The majority of his adherents abjured their error; the rest of them, aided by charitable contributions from a secret committee of enthusiasts, found their way abroad to dwell under the shadow of the banished Messiah. The expiatory period was approaching. Russia, on the whole, was glad to see the last of him--particularly the Grand Ducal party.

A broken man, he decided to establish himself on Nepenthe, drawn thither partly on account of the climate but chiefly by the report of its abounding lobsters and fishes, an article of diet of which he was inordinately fond. Disciples followed singly, and in batches. Their scarlet blouses became a familiar object in the streets of the place; good-natured and harmless folks for the most part who, if they ran up bills with the local trades-people which they failed to pay, did so not out of natural dishonesty but because they had no money. They used to bathe, in summertime, at a certain little cove near the foot of the promontory on which Madame Steynlin's villa was situated. She watched their naked antics at first with disapproval--what could you expect, she would say, from Russians? Then she observed them eating raw crabs and things. It struck her that they must be hungry. Being a lady of the sentimental type, childless, and never so happy as when feeding or mothering somebody, she took to sending them down baskets of food, or carrying it herself. They were so poor, so far from their homes, so picturesque in those red s.h.i.+rts and leathern belts!

Of late years Madame Steynlin had given up marrying, having at last, after many broken hopes, definitely convinced herself that husbands were only after her money. Rightly or wrongly, she wanted to be loved for herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul. Even as the fires of Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a varnish of conventionality--the crust was not so thick in her case--a nature throbbing with pa.s.sion. She was everlastingly unappeased, because incurably romantic. All life, she truly declared, is a search for a friend. Unfortunately she sought with her eyes open, having never grasped the elementary truth that to find a friend one must close one eye: to keep him--two. She always attributed to men qualities which, she afterwards discovered, they did not possess. Her life since the marrying period had been a breathless succession of love affairs, each more eternal than the last.

In matters such as these, Madame Steynlin was the reverse of the d.u.c.h.ess. True to her ideal of La Pompadour, that lady did not mind how many men danced attendance on her--the more the merrier. Nor did she bother about their ages; for all she cared, they might be, and often were, the veriest crocks. She was rather particular, however, about stiff collars and things; the appearance and conversation of her retinue, she avowed, should be of the kind to pa.s.s muster in good society. Madame Steynlin liked to have not more than one man escorting her at a time, and he should be young, healthy-looking, and full of life. In regard to minor matters she preferred, if anything, Byronic collars to starched ones; troubling little, for the rest, what costume her cavalier was wearing or what opinions he expressed. In fact, she liked youngsters to be frank, impetuous, extravagant in their views and out of the common rut. The two ladies had been likened to Divine and Earthly Love, or to Venus Urania and Venus Pandemos--a comparison which was manifestly unfair to both of them.

It was during this summer bathing that Madame Steynlin had made acquaintance of what was, at the time, the Master's favourite disciple.

His name happened to be Peter--Peter a.r.s.enievitch Krasnojabkin. He was a fine son of earth--a strapping young giant who threw himself into eating, drinking, and other joys of life with enviable barbaric zest.

There was not an ounce of piety in his composition. He had donned the scarlet blouse because he wanted to see Nepenthe and, like the Christians of old, had no money. Driven by that roving spirit which is the Muscovite's heritage and by the desire of all sensible men to taste new lands, new wine, new women, he professed himself a Little White Cow. It was quite the regular thing to do. It brought you to the notice of that secret committee of enthusiasts who paid your travel expenses; it gave you a free trip to the sunny south. Everyone wondered how he had managed to rise so rapidly in the Master's graces. Madame Steynlin now stepped between them. She grew fond of Peter, and marked him for her own. He fulfilled every one of her conditions as to age, costume and opinions. Besides, he was always so gloriously hungry! She invited him to take luncheon once or twice and then began to take Russian lessons from him. "He is only a boy," she would say.

Conversing, as best she could, with this child of nature, it dawned upon her that she had hitherto been mistaken in her estimate of the Russian character. She began to understand the inward sense of that brotherly love, that apostolic spirit, which binds together every cla.s.s of the immense Empire--to revere their simplicity of soul and calm G.o.d-like faith. She revised her former narrow Lutheran views and openly confessed that she was quite wrong in declaring, as she once did, that what the Little White Cows needed was "more soap and less salvation."

The magic of love! It softened, not for the first time, her heart towards all humanity and in particular, on this occasion, towards the rest of the saintly band; were they not her brothers and sisters? She even knitted six pairs of warm woollen socks and sent them with a polite message to the Master--a message which was left unanswered, though the socks were never returned. As to Peter--she called him her Little Peter or, in his more expansive moments, Peter the Great. Soon he was always coming to the villa at meal-times and staying for hours afterwards, while they wrestled with the complexities of Russian genders. He made no secret of the pleasure he derived from filling his healthy young stomach at her expense; everything supplementary to that prime condition he took as a gift from the G.o.ds. If he had not been so simple-minded he could have wheedled any amount of money out of her.

The affair had now been going on for four month--quite a long while, as such affairs went.

Not for the first time did Madame Steynlin experience the drawbacks of her house, as regards natural situation. It was, as Don Francesco often pointed out, "the most unstrategic villa on Nepenthe." Ah, that peninsula, that isthmus, or whatever you called the thing--what on earth had attracted her to the place? What demon had tempted her to buy it?

How she envied the other people--Keith, for example, who, if he had been a man of that kind, could have allowed any visitor, in the broadest daylight, to creep in or out of his mouldy old gateway in the wall without a soul being any the wiser! High-priced horticultural experts had been consulted as to the best means of thickening the vegetation and screening the approaches to the house. They had met with scanty success. The soil was of the most sterile, intractable rock; those few wind-blown olives were dreadfully diaphanous, and Peter's blouse visible from afar--even from the market-place. Everything got about on Nepenthe. People began to twit her about the progress of those "Russian lessons." It became quite a scandal. Signor Malipizzo was more annoyed than any one else. He hated the whole brood of Russians, and had formed various projects for uprooting the a.s.sociation from the island. His friend the Commissioner thoroughly endorsed these views. Often he declared that something must be done about it.

The Master, despite his seclusion, had heard of the affair. He was grieved, but not unduly so; he had other disciples to choose from.

Every new arrival from Holy Russia, regardless of s.e.x or age, spent some hours or days, as the case might be, alone with the Master in his apartment, in order to be initiated into the Law and impregnated with its full signification: such was the way of the New Jerusalem. By this system of spiritual control he could be sure of finding a successor sooner or later. Besides, the defection of this favourite disciple was only a drop in the ocean of his griefs. What secretly preyed upon his mind was that, on the verge of returning to his former state of worldly prosperity, he had been inspired to issue that Second Revelation regarding warm-blooded beasts. He ought to have known about the Grand Dukes, and what a sacrilegious hot-tempered clique they were! "This comes," he would say, "of placing the service of G.o.d above that of my earthly masters." It kept him in exile on this island--the deadlock in the matter of that Second Revelation. The expiatory period was not yet over, though Nepenthe, on the whole, would have been glad to see the last of him--particularly Signor Malipizzo.

Meanwhile, the Little White Cows lived on: the richer in houses, sleeping fifteen or twenty in one room after the happy style of patriarchal Russia--the humbler folk in old ruins, sheds, cellars, or even caverns of the rock. You could do that sort of thing in a climate like Nepenthe, if you were not fastidious in the matter of owls, bats, lizards, toads, earwigs, centipedes, and an occasional scorpion.

CHAPTER XII

No Russians dwelt within the Cave of Mercury. It was inconveniently remote; it was difficult of approach; moreover, it was haunted.

Dreadful rites had been performed there, in olden times. The walls had dripped with human gore. Death-groans of victims slain by the priestly knife resounded in its hollow entrails. Such had been the legend in the days of those monkish chroniclers in whose credulous pages Monsignor Perrelli, incredulous himself, had discovered a mine of curious information.