The Child of the Dawn Part 10

Presently the man rose wearily to his feet, and began to pace up and down round the walls, with the mechanical movements of a caged animal, avoiding the posts of the shelter without seeming to see them, and then cast himself down again upon the stones in a paroxysm of melancholy. He seemed to have no desire to escape, no energy, except to suffer. There was no hope about it all, no suggestion of prayer, nothing but blank and unadulterated suffering.

Amroth drew me back into the tower, and motioned me to the next balcony. Again I went out. The sight that I saw was almost more terrible than the first, because the prisoner here, penned in a similar enclosure, was more restless, and seemed to suffer more acutely. This was a younger man, who walked swiftly and vaguely about, casting glances up at the wall which enclosed him. Sometimes he stopped, and seemed to be pursuing some dreadful train of solitary thought; he gesticulated, and even broke out into mutterings and cries--the cries that I had heard from without. I could not bear to look at this sight, and coming back, besought Amroth to lead me away. Amroth, who was himself, I perceived, deeply moved, and stood with lips compressed, nodded in token of a.s.sent.

We went quickly down the stairway, and took our way up the hill among the stones, in silence. The shapes of similar enclosures were to be seen everywhere, and the indescribable blankness and grimness of the scene struck a chill to my heart.

From the top of the ridge we could see the same bare valleys stretching in all directions, as far as the eye could see. The only other building in sight was a great circular tower of stone, far down in the valley, from which beat the pulse of some heavy machinery, which gave the sense, I do not know how, of a ghastly and watchful life at the centre of all.

"That is the Tower of Pain," said Amroth, "and I will spare you the inner sight of that. Only our very bravest and strongest can enter there and preserve any hope. But it is well for you to know it is there, and that souls have to enter it. It is thence that all the pain of countless worlds emanates and vibrates, and the governor of the place is the most tried and bravest of all the servants of G.o.d. Thither we must go, for you shall have sight of him, though you shall not enter."

We went down the hill with all the speed we might, and, I will confess it, with the darkest dismay I have ever experienced tugging at my heart.

We were soon at the foot of the enormous structure. Amroth knocked at the gate, a low door, adorned with some vague and ghastly sculptures, things like worms and huddled forms drearily intertwined. The door opened, and revealed a fiery and smouldering light within. High up in the tower a great wheel whizzed and s.h.i.+vered, and moving shadows crossed and recrossed the firelit walls.

But the figure that came out to us--how shall I describe him? It was the most beautiful and gracious sight of all that I saw in my pilgrimage. He was a man of tall stature, with snow-white, silvery hair and beard, dressed in a dark cloak with a gleaming clasp of gold. But for all his age he had a look of immortal youth. His clear and piercing eye had a glance of infinite tenderness, such as I had never conceived. There were many lines upon his brow and round his eyes, but his complexion was as fresh as that of a child, and he stepped as briskly as a youth. We bowed low to him, and he reached out his hands, taking Amroth's hand and mine in each of his. His touch had a curious thrill, the hand that held mine being firm and smooth and wonderfully warm.

"Well, my children," he said in a clear, youthful voice, "I am glad to see you, because there are few who come hither willingly; and the old and weary are cheered by the sight of those that are young and strong.

Amroth I know. But who are you, my child? You have not been among us long. Have you found your work and place here yet?" I told him my story in a few words, and he smiled indulgently. "There is nothing like being at work," he said. "Even my business here, which seems sad enough to most people, must be done; and I do it very willingly. Do not be frightened, my child," he said to me suddenly, drawing me nearer to him, and folding my arm beneath his own. "It is only on earth that we are frightened of pain; it spoils our poor plans, it makes us fretful and miserable, it brings us into the shadow of death. But for all that, as Amroth knows, it is the best and most fruitful of all the works that the Father does for man, and the thing dearest to His heart. We cannot prosper till we suffer, and suffering leads us very swiftly into joy and peace. Indeed this Tower of Pain, as it is called, is in fact nothing but the Tower of Love. Not until love is touched with pain does it become beautiful, and the joy that comes through pain is the only real thing in the world. Of course, when my great engine here sends a thrill into a careless life, it comes as a dark surprise; but then follow courage and patience and wonder, and all the dear tendance of Love. I have borne it all myself a hundred times, and I shall bear it again if the Father wills it. But when you leave me here, do not think of me as of one who works, grim and indifferent, wrecking lives and destroying homes. It is but the burning of the weeds of life; and it is as needful as the suns.h.i.+ne and the rain. Pain does not wander aimlessly, smiting down by mischance and by accident; it comes as the close and dear intention of the Father's heart, and is to a man as a trumpet-call from the land of life, not as a knell from the land of death. And now, dear children, you must leave me, for I have much to do. And I will give you," he added, turning to me, "a gift which shall be your comfort, and a token that you have been here, and seen the worst and the best that there is to see."

He drew from under his cloak a ring, a circlet of gold holding a red stone with a flaming heart, and put it on my finger. There pierced through me a pang intenser than any I had ever experienced, in which all the love and sorrow I had ever known seemed to be suddenly mingled, and which left behind it a perfect and intense sense of joy.

"There, that is my gift," he said, "and you shall have an old man's loving blessing too, for it is that, after all, that I live for." He drew me to him and kissed me on the brow, and in a moment he was gone.

We walked away in silence, and for my part with an elation of spirit which I could hardly control, a desire to love and suffer, and do and be all that the mind of man could conceive. But my heart was too full to speak.

"Come," said Amroth presently, "you are not as grateful as I had hoped--you are outgrowing me! Come down to my poor level for an instant, and beware of spiritual pride!" Then altering his tone he said, "Ah, yes, dear friend, I understand. There is nothing in the world like it, and you were most graciously and tenderly received--but the end is not yet."

"Amroth," I said, "I am like one intoxicated with joy. I feel that I could endure anything and never make question of anything again. How infinitely good he was to me--like a dear father!"

"Yes," said Amroth, "he is very like the Father "--and he smiled at me a mysterious smile.

"Amroth," I said, bewildered, "you cannot mean--?"

"No, I mean nothing," said Amroth, "but you have to-day looked very far into the truth, farther than is given to many so soon; but you are a child of fortune, and seem to please every one. I declare that a little more would make me jealous."

Presently, catching sight of one of the enclosures hard by, I said to Amroth, "But there are some questions I must ask. What has just happened had put it mostly out of my head. Those poor suffering souls that we saw just now--it is well, with them, I am sure, so near the Master of the Tower--he does not forget them, I am sure--but who are they, and what have they done to suffer so?"

"I will tell you," said Amroth, "for it is a dark business. Those two that you have seen--well, you will know one of them by name and fame, and of the other you may have heard. The first, that old s.h.a.ggy-haired man, who lay upon the stones, that was ----"

He mentioned a name that was notorious in Europe at the time of my life on earth, though he was then long dead; a ruthless and ambitious conqueror, who poured a cataract of life away, in wars, for his own aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. Then he mentioned another name, a statesman who pursued a policy of terrorism and oppression, enriched himself by barbarous cruelty exercised in colonial possessions, and was famous for the calculated libertinism of his private life.

"They were great sinners," said Amroth, "and the sorrows they made and flung so carelessly about them, beat back upon them now in a surge of pain. These men were strangely affected, each of them, by the smallest sight or sound of suffering--a tortured animal, a crying child; and yet they were utterly ruthless of the pain that they did not see. It was a lack, no doubt, of the imagination of which I spoke, and which makes all the difference. And now they have to contemplate the pain which they could not imagine; and they have to learn submission and humility. It is a terrible business in a way--the loneliness of it! There used to be an old saying that the strongest man was the man that was most alone. But it was just because these men practised loneliness on earth that they have to suffer so. They used others as counters in a game, they had neither friend nor beloved, except for their own pleasure. They depended upon no one, needed no one, desired no one. But there are many others here who did the same on a small scale--selfish fathers and mothers who made homes miserable; boys who were bullies at school and tyrants in the world, in offices, and places of authority. This is the place of discipline for all base selfishness and vile authority, for all who have oppressed and victimised mankind."

"But," I said, "here is my difficulty. I understand the case of the oppressors well enough; but about the oppressed, what is the justice of that? Is there not a fortuitous element there, an interruption of the Divine plan? Take the case of the thousands of lives wasted by some brutal conqueror. Are souls sent into the world for that, to be driven in gangs, made to fight, let us say, for some abominable cause, and then recklessly dismissed from life?"

"Ah," said Amroth, "you make too much of the dignity of life! You do not know how small a thing a single life is, not as regards the life of mankind, but in the life of one individual. Of course if a man had but one single life on earth, it would be an intolerable injustice; and that is the factor which sets all straight, the factor which most of us, in our time of bodily self-importance, overlook. These oppressors have no power over other lives except what G.o.d allows, and bewildered humanity concedes. Not only is the great plan whole in the mind of G.o.d, but every single minutest life is considered as well. In the very case you spoke of, the little conscript, torn from his home to fight a tyrant's battles, hectored and ill-treated, and then shot down upon some crowded battle-field, that is precisely the discipline which at that point of time his soul needs, and the blessedness of which he afterwards perceives; sometimes discipline is swift and urgent, sometimes it is slow and lingering: but all experience is exactly apportioned to the quality of which each soul is in need. The only reason why there seems to be an element of chance in it, is that the whole thing is so inconceivably vast and prolonged; and our happiness and our progress alike depend upon our realising at every moment that the smallest joy and the most trifling pleasure, as well as the tiniest ailment or the most subtle sorrow, are just the pieces of experience which we are meant at that moment to use and make our own. No one, not even G.o.d, can force us to understand this; we have to perceive it for ourselves, and to live in the knowledge of it."

"Yes," I said, "it is true, all that. My heart tells me so; but it is very wonderful and mysterious, all the same. But, Amroth, I have seen and heard enough. My spirit desires with all its might to be at its own work, hastening on the mighty end. Now, I can hold no more of wonders.

Let me return."

"Yes," said Amroth, "you are right! These wonders are so familiar to me that I forget, perhaps, the shock with which they come to minds unused to them. Yet there are other things which you must a.s.suredly see, when the time comes; but I must not let you bite off a larger piece than you can swallow."

He took me by the hand; the breeze pa.s.sed through my hair; and in an instant we were back at the fortress-gate, and I entered the beloved shelter, with a grateful sense that I was returning home.

XXV

I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to my work; but that serenity did not last long. What I had seen with Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness, and a yearning for I knew not what. I plunged into my studies with determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the most difficult problem of all--the exact limits of individual responsibility. I had many conversations on the point with one of my teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar emotional sympathy. He told me once that it was the best outfit for the scientific study of these problems, when the heart antic.i.p.ated the slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional inferences.

I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question of responsibility, which I will here give.

"The mistake," I said to him, "of human moralists seems to me to be, that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral responsibility. How often," I added, "have I heard a school preacher tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of all. Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the power of surveying and judging one's own moral progress, and the power of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me faculties, like other faculties. Indeed, it appears to me," I said, "that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality at all."

"Yes," he said, "you are quite right. The moral sense is in reality a high artistic sense. It is a power of discerning and being attracted by the beauty of moral action, just as the artist is attracted by form and colour, and the musician by delicate combinations of harmonies and the exquisite balance of sound. You know," he said, "what a suspension is in music--it is a chord which in itself is a discord, but which depends for its beauty on some impending resolution. It is just so with moral choice. The imagination plays a great part in it. The man whose morality is high and profound sees instinctively the approaching contingency, and his act of self-denial or self-forgetfulness depends for its force upon the way in which it will ultimately combine with other issues involved, even though at the moment that act may seem to be unnecessary and even perverse."

"But," I said, "there are a good many people who attain to a sensible, well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a purely prudential motive. What is the worth of that?"

"Very small indeed," said my teacher. "In fact, the prudential morality, based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life--a desperate love-affair, a pa.s.sion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity--are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming influence on the soul. One has to remember how terribly the heavenly values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires; and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the hardest thing to overcome."

"But," I said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to make of that?"

"It is a difficult matter," he replied; "one does indeed, in the lives of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all proportion to their real value. But for all that, it is better to be on the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke.

Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and desirable that they are constrained to practise them. While controversy, bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of them."

"But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic, so irresistible."

"If he discerns his lack," said my teacher with a smile, "he is probably not so very far from the truth. The germ of the sense of moral beauty is there, and it only wants patience and endeavour to make it grow. But it cannot be all done in any single life, of course; that is where the human faith fails, in its limitations of a man's possibilities to a single life."

"But what is the reason," I said, "why the morality, the high austerity of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so utterly discouraging and even repellent?"

"Ah," he said, "there you touch on a great truth. The reason of that is that these have but a sterile sort of connoisseur-s.h.i.+p in virtue. Virtue cannot be attained in solitude, nor can it be made a matter of private enjoyment. The point is, of course, that it is not enough for a man to be himself; he must also give himself; and if a man is moral because of the delicate pleasure it brings him--and the artistic pleasure of asceticism is a very high one--he is apt to find himself here in very strange and distasteful company. In this, as in everything, the only safe motive is the motive of love. The man who takes pleasure in using influence, or setting a lofty example, is just as arid a dilettante as the musician who plays, or the artist who paints, for the sake of the applause and the admiration he wins; he is only regarding others as so many instruments for registering his own level of complacency. Every one, even the least complicated of mankind, must know the exquisite pleasure that comes from doing the simplest and humblest service to one whom he loves; how such love converts the most menial office into a luxurious joy; and the higher that a man goes, the more does he discern in every single human being with whom he is brought into contact a soul whom he can love and serve. Of course it is but an elementary pleasure to enjoy pleasing those whom we regard with some pa.s.sion of affection, wife or child or friend, because, after all, one gains something oneself by that. But the purest morality of all discerns the infinitely lovable quality which is in the depth of every human soul, and lavishes its tenderness and its grace upon it, with a compa.s.sion that grows and increases, the more unthankful and clumsy and brutish is the soul which it sets out to serve."

"But," I said, "beautiful as that thought is--and I see and recognise its beauty--it does limit the individual responsibility very greatly.

Surely a prudential morality, the morality which is just because it fears reprisal, and is kind because it antic.i.p.ates kindness, is better than none at all? The morality of which you speak can only belong to the n.o.blest human creatures."

"Only to the n.o.blest," he said; "and I must repeat what I said before, that the prudential morality is useless, because it begins at the wrong end, and is set upon self throughout. I must say deliberately that the soul which loves unreasonably and unwisely, which even yields itself to the pa.s.sion of others for the pleasure it gives rather than for the pleasure it receives--the thriftless, lavish, good-natured, affectionate people, who are said to make such a mess of their lives--are far higher in the scale of hope than the cautiously respectable, the prudently kind, the selfishly pure. There must be no mistake about this. One must somehow or other give one's heart away, and it is better to do it in error and disaster than to treasure it for oneself. Of course there are many lives on earth--and an increasing number as the world develops--which are generous and n.o.ble and unselfish, without any sacrifice of purity or self-respect. But the essence of morality is giving, and not receiving, or even practising; the point is free choice, and not compulsion; and if one cannot give _because_ one loves, one must give _until_ one loves."

XXVI

But all my speculations were cut short by a strange event which happened about this time. One day, without any warning, the thought of Cynthia darted urgently and irresistibly into my mind. Her image came between me and all my tasks; I saw her in innumerable positions and guises, but always with her eyes bent on me in a pitiful entreaty. After endeavouring to resist the thought for a little as some kind of fantasy, I became suddenly convinced that she was in need of me, and in urgent need. I asked for an interview with our Master, and told him the story; he heard me gravely, and then said that I might go in search of her; but I was not sure that he was wholly pleased, and he bent his eyes upon me with a very inquiring look. I hesitated whether or not to call Amroth to my aid, but decided that I had better not do so at first. The question was how to find her; the great crags lay between me and the land of delight; and when I hurried out of the college, the thought of the descent and its dangers fairly unmanned me. I knew, however, of no other way. But what was my surprise when, on arriving at the top, not far from the point where Amroth had greeted me after the ascent, I saw a little steep path, which wound itself down into the gulleys and chimneys of the black rocks. I took it without hesitation, and though again and again it seemed to come to an end in front of me, I found that it could be traced and followed without serious difficulty. The descent was accomplished with a singular rapidity, and I marvelled to find myself at the crag-base in so brief a time, considering the intolerable tedium of the ascent. I rapidly crossed the intervening valley, and was very soon at the gate of the careless land. To my intense joy, and not at all to my surprise, I found Cynthia at the gate itself, waiting for me with a look of expectancy. She came forwards, and threw herself pa.s.sionately into my arms, murmuring words of delight and welcome, like a child.

"I knew you would come," she said. "I am frightened--all sorts of dreadful things have happened. I have found out where I am--and I seem to have lost all my friends. Charmides is gone, and Lucius is cruel to me--he tells me that I have lost my spirits and my good looks, and am tiresome company."

I looked at her--she was paler and frailer-looking than when I left her; and she was habited very differently, in simpler and graver dress. But she was to my eyes infinitely more beautiful and dearer, and I told her so. She smiled at that, but half tearfully; and we seated ourselves on a bench hard by, looking over the garden, which was strangely and luxuriantly beautiful.