Idolatry: Chapter 18

Chapter 18

THE HOOPOE AND THE CROCODILE.

"Gnulemah!" she answered, laying a finger on the head of her golden
serpent, and uttering the name as though it were of the only woman in
the world.

But the next moment she found time to realize that something
unprecedented had occurred, and her wonder trembled on the brink of
dismay.

"Speaks in my language!" she exclaimed below her breath; "but is not
Hiero."

Until Balder's arrival, then, Hiero would seem to have been the only
talking animal she had known. The singularity of this did not at first
strike the young man. Gnulemah was the arch-wonder; yet she so fully
justified herself as to seem very nature; and by dint of her magic
reality, what else had been wonderful seemed natural. Balder was in
fairy-land.

He fell easily into the fairy-land humor.

"I am a being like yourself," said he, with a smile; "and not dumb
like your plants and animals."

"Understood!--answered!" exclaimed Gnulemah again, in a tremor. As
morning spreads up the sky, did the sweet blood flow outward to warm
her face and neck. As the blush deepened, her eyelids fell, and she
shielded her beautiful embarrassment with her raised hands. A pathos
in the simple grace of this action drew tears unawares to Balder's
eyes.

What was in her mind? what might she be? Had she lived always in this
enchanted spot, companionless (for poor old Hiero could scarcely serve
her turn) and ignorant perhaps that the world held other beings
endowed like herself with human gifts? Had she vainly sought
throughout nature for some kinship more intimate than nature could
yield her, and thus at length fancied herself a unique, independently
created soul, imperial over all things? Since her whole world was
comprised between the wall and the river, no doubt she believed the
reality of things extended no further.

In Balder she had found a creature like, yet pleasingly unlike
herself, palpable to feeling as to sight, and gifted with that
articulate utterance which till now she had accounted her almost
peculiar faculty. Delightful might be the discovery, but awesome too,
frightening her back by its very tendency to draw her forward.

Whether or not this were the solution of Gnulemah's mystery, Balder
recognized quiet to be his cue towards her. Probably he could not do
better than to get the ear of Doctor Hiero, and establish himself upon
a footing more conventional than the present one. His next step
accordingly was to ask after him by name.

She peeped at the questioner between her fingers, but ventured not
quite to emerge from behind them, as she answered,--her primary
attempt at description,--

"Hiero is--Hiero!"

"And how long have you been here?" inquired Balder with a smile.

Gnulemah forgot her embarrassment in wondering how so remarkable a
creature happened to ask questions whose answers her whole world knew!

"We are always here!" she exclaimed; and added, after a moment's
doubtful scrutiny, "Are you a spirit?"

"An embodied spirit,--yes!" answered he, smiling again.

"One of those I see beyond,"--she pointed towards the cliff,--"that
move and seem to live, but are only shadows in the great picture? No!
for I cannot touch them nor speak with them; they never answer me;
they are shadows." She paused and seemed to struggle with her
bewilderment.

"They are shadows!" repeated Helwyse to himself.

Though no Hermetic philosopher, he was aware of a symbolic truth in
the fanciful dogma. Outside his immediate circle, the world is a
shadow to every man; his fellow-beings are no more than apparitions,
till he grasps them by the hand. So to Gnulemah the cliff and the
garden wall were her limits of real existence. The great picture
outside could be true for her only after she had gone forth and felt
as well as seen it.

Fancy aside, however, was not hers a condition morally and mentally
deplorable? Exquisitely developed in body, must not her mind have
grown rank with weeds,--beautiful perhaps, but poisonous? Herein
Balder fancied he could trace the one-sided influence of his
crack-brained uncle.--Whether his daughter or not, Gnulemah was
evidently a victim of his experimental mania. What particular crotchet
could he have been humoring in this case? Was it an attempt to get
back to the early sense of the human race?

The materials for such an evolution were certainly of tempting
excellence. In point of beauty and apparent natural capacity, Gnulemah
might claim equality with the noblest daughter of the Pharaohs. The
grand primary problem of how to isolate her from all contact with the
outside world was, under the existing circumstances, easy of solution.
Beyond this there needed little positive treatment. Her creed must
arise from her own instinctive and intuitive impressions. Of all
beyond the reach of her hands, she trust to her eyes alone for
information; no marvel, therefore, if her conclusions concerning the
great intangible phenomena of the universe were fantastic as the
veriest heathen myths. The self-evolved feelings and impulses of a
black-eyed nymph like Gnulemah were not likely to be orthodox. She was
probably no better than a worshipper of vain delusions and idols of
the imagination.

Her attire--a style of costume such as might have been the fashion in
the days of Cheops or Tuthmosis--showed a carrying out of the Doctor's
whim,--a matching of the external to the internal conditions of the
age he aimed to reproduce. The project seemed, on the whole, to have
been well conceived and consistently prosecuted. It was seldom that
Uncle Hiero achieved so harmonious a piece of work; but the idea
showed greater moral obliquity than Balder would have looked for in
the old gentleman.

But there was no deep sincerity in the young man's strictures. There
before him stood the woman Gnulemah,--purple, white, and gold; a
vivid, breathing, warm-hued life; a soul and body rich with Oriental
splendor. There she stood, her hair flowing dark and silky from
beneath her twisted turban, her eyes,--black melted loadstones; the
broad Egyptian pendants gleaming and glowing from temple to shoulder.
The golden serpent seemed to writhe on her bosom, informed from its
wearer with a subtile vitality. Through all dominated a grand repose,
like the calm of nature, which storms may prove but not disthrone!

There she stood,--enchanted princess, witch, goddess,--woman at all
events, palpable and undeniable. She must be accepted for what she
was, civilized or uncivilized, heathen or Christian. She was a
perfected achievement,--vain to argue how she might have been made
better. Who says that an evening cloud, gorgeous in purple and
heavenly gold, were more usefully employed fertilizing a garden-patch?

Balder Helwyse, moreover, was not a simple utilitarian; he was almost
ready to make a religion of beauty. If he blamed his uncle for
shutting up this superb creature within herself, he failed not to
admire the result of the imprisonment. He knew he was beholding as
rare a spectacle as ever man's eyes were blessed withal; nor was he
slow to perceive the psychological interest of the situation. To a
student of mankind, if to no one else, Gnulemah was beyond estimation
precious. But had Balder forgotten what fruit his tree of philosophy
had already yielded him?

At all events, he forbore to press his question as to the whereabouts
of Uncle Hiero, who would turn up sooner or later. It was enough for
the present to know that he still existed. Meanwhile he would sound
the depths of this fresh nature, undisturbed.

The hoopoe (who had played an important part in promoting the
acquaintance thus far) forsook his perch above Balder's head, and
after hovering for a moment in mid-air, as if to select the best spot,
he alighted on the mossy cushion at the foot of the twin palm-trees.
Such a couch might Adam and Eve have rejoiced to find in Paradise.
Balder took the hint, and without more ado threw himself down there,
while Gnulemah half knelt, half sat beside him, propped on her arm,
her warm fingers buried in the cool moss. The little master-of-ceremonies
remained, with a fine sense of propriety, between the two, preening
and fluttering his brilliant feathers and casting diamond glances
sidelong.

"You remember nothing before coming to this place, Gnulemah?"

"Only dream-memories, that grow dimmer. Before this, I was a spirit in
the great picture, and when my lamp goes out I shall return thither."

"Your lamp, Gnulemah?--what lamp?"

"How can you understand me and yet not know what I know? My lamp is
the light of my life; it burns always in the temple yonder; when it
goes out my life will become a darkness, for I am Gnulemah, the
daughter of fire!"

"I knew not that my uncle was a poet," muttered Balder to himself. "A
daughter of fire,--yes, there is lightning in her eyes!" Aloud he
said, secretly alluding to the manner of his descent into the
garden,--

"I dropped from the sky into your world, Gnulemah. Though we can talk
together, whatever we tell each other will be new."

She caught the idea of a lifetime spent instructing this delightful
being, and receiving in return instruction from him. She entered at
once the charming vista.

"Tell me," she began, bending towards him in her earnestness, "are
there others like you?--are they bright and beautiful as you are?--or
do they look like Hiero?"

Balder laughed, and flushed, and his heart warmed pleasurably. Here
was a compliment from the very soul of nature. And albeit the lovely
flatterer's experience of men was avowedly most limited, yet her taste
was unvitiated as her sincerity, and her judgment may therefore have
been more valuable than that of the most practised belle of fashion.
But he answered modestly,--

"Hiero and I are both men, and there are as many men as stars in
heaven, and as many women as men, myriads of men and women, Gnulemah!"

She lifted her face and hand in eloquent astonishment.

"O, what a world!" she exclaimed in her low-toned way. "But are the
women all like me?"

"There is not one like you," answered Balder, with the quiet emphasis
of conviction. How refreshing was it thus to set aside conventionalism!
Her ingenuousness brought forth the like from him.

"Have you never wished to go beyond the wall?" he asked her.

"Yes, often!" she said, fingering the golden serpent thoughtfully.
"But that could not be unless I put out the lamp. Sometimes I get
tired of this world,--it has changed since I first came to it."

"Is it less beautiful?"

"It is smaller than it used to be," said Gnulemah, pensively. "Once
the house was so high, it seemed to touch heaven;--see how it has
dwindled since then! And so with other things that are on earth. The
stars and the sun and clouds, they have not changed!"

"That is a consolation, is it not?" observed Balder, between a smile
and a sigh. Gnulemah was not the first to charge upon the world the
alterations in the individual; nor the first, either, to find comfort
in the constancy of Heaven.

She went on, won to further confidence by her listener's sympathy,--

"I used to hope the wall would one day become so low that I might pass
over it. But it has ceased to change, and is still too high. Shall I
ever see the other side?"

"It can be broken down if need be. But you might go far before
finding a world so fair as this. Perhaps it would be better to stand
on the cliff, and only look forth across the river."

"I cannot stay always here," returned Gnulemah, shaking her turbaned
head, with its gleaming bandeau and rattling pendants. "But no wall is
between me and the sky; the flame of my lamp goes upward, and why
should not Gnulemah?"

"A friend is the only world one does not tire of," he replied after a
pause. "You have lacked companions."

Gnulemah glanced down at the hoopoe, who forthwith warbled aloud and
fluttered up to her shoulder. The bird was her companion, and so,
likewise, were the plants and flowers. Gnulemah could converse with
them in their own language. Nature was her friend and confidant, and
intimately communed with her.

All this was conveyed to Balder's apprehension, not by words, but by
some subtile expressiveness of eye and gesture. Gnulemah could give
voiceless utterances in a manner pregnant and felicitous almost beyond
belief.

"I meet also a beautiful maiden in the looking-glass," she added; "her
face and motion are always the same as my own. But though she seems to
speak, her voice never reaches me; and she smiles, but only when I
smile; and mourns only when I mourn. We can never reach each other;
but there is more in her than in my birds and flowers."

"She is the shadow of yourself; no reality, Gnulemah."

"Are we shadows of each other, then? is she weary of her world, as I
of mine? shall we both escape to some other,--or only pass each into
the other's, and be separated as before?"

Balder, like wise men before him, was at some loss how to bring his
wisdom to bear here. He could not in one sentence explain the
complicated phenomena in question. Fortunately, however, Gnulemah (who
had apparently not yet learned to appeal from her own to another's
judgment) seemed hardly to expect a solution to problems upon which
she had expended much private thought.

"I have come to look on her as though she were myself, and she tells
me secrets which no one else can know. Some things she tells me that I
do not care to hear, but they are always true. I can see changes in;
her face that I feel in my own heart."

"Does she teach you that you grow every day more beautiful?" He was
willing to prove whether Gnulemah could thus be disconcerted. Many a
woman had he known, surprisingly innocent until a chance word or
glance betrayed profoundest depths.

"Our beauty is like the garden, which is beautiful every day, though
no day is just like another. But the changes I mean are in the spirit
that looks back at me from her eyes, when I enter deeply into them."

What connection could, after all, subsist between beauty and vanity in
one who neither had rivals nor aught to rival for? Doubtless she
enjoyed her beauty,--the more, as her taste was pure of conventional
falsities. How much of worldly experience would it take to vitiate
that integrity in her? Would it not be better to leave her to end her
life, restricted to the same innocent and lovely companionship which
had been hers thus far? Here the hoopoe, startled at some movement
that Balder made, abandoned his perch on his mistress's shoulder, and
flew to the top of the palm-tree. Had the day when such friends would
suffice her needs gone by?

Yes, it was now too late. No one who has beheld the sun can
thenceforth dispense with it. Balder had shone across the beautiful
recluse's path, and linked her to outside realities by a chain which,
whether he went or stayed, would never break. Flowers, birds, shadows
in the mirror,--less than nothing would these things be to her from
this hour on.

Heretofore the intercourse between the two had been tentative and
incoherent,--a doubtful, aimless grappling with strange conditions
which seemed delightful, but might mask unknown dangers. No solid
basis of mutual acquaintanceship had been even approached. Balder,
accustomed though he was to woman's society, knew not how to apply his
experience here; while Gnulemah had not yet perhaps decided whether
her visitor were natural or supernatural. The man was probably the
less at ease of the two, finding himself in a pass through which
tradition nor culture could pilot him. Gnulemah, being used to daily
communion with things mysterious to her understanding, would scarcely
have altered her demeanor had Balder turned out to be a genie!

But the first step towards fixing the relations between them was
already taken. The young man's abrupt movement of his hand to his face
(probably with purpose to stroke the beard no longer growing there)
had not only scared away the hoopoe, but had flashed on Gnulemah a ray
from the diamond ring.

She rose to her feet suddenly, yet easily as a startled serpent rears
erect its body. Vivid emotion lightened in her face. Balder knew not
what to make of the look she gleamed at him.

"What are you?" she asked, her voice sunk to almost a whisper.
"Hiero?--are you Hiero?"

Balder stared confounded,--partly inclined to smile!

"Come back,--transfigured!" she went on, her eyes deepening with awe.
What did it mean? Somewhat disturbed, Balder got also on his feet. As
he did so, Gnulemah crouched before him, holding out her hands like a
suppliant. An on-looker might have fancied that the would-be God had
found his worshipper at last!

"My name is Balder," his Deityship managed to say. As he spoke, the
sun rounded the corner of the house, and the light fell brightly on
him, Gnulemah kneeling in shadow. The glory of his splendid youth
seemed to have shone out from within him in sudden effulgence.

"Balder!" she slowly repeated, still gazing up at him.

"There is a relationship between us," said he, a vague uneasiness
urging him to take refuge behind the quaint fantasy, "You are the
daughter of fire, and I the descendant of the sun!"

He spoke the unpremeditated notion which the sunburst had created in
his brain,--spoke not seriously nor yet lightly. He had as much right
to his genealogy as she to hers.

But what a strange effect his words wrought on her! She clasped her
hands together quickly in a kind of ecstasy.

"The sun,--Balder! I have prayed to him,--he as come to me,--Balder,
my God!" With how divine an accent did her full low voice give him the
name to which he had dared aspire! He was God--and her God!

He perhaps divined one part of the process through which her mind must
have gone; but he could not find a word to answer, whether of
acceptance or disclaimer. He turned pale,--his heart sick. Had the
recognition of his Godhood been too tardy? Gnulemah fancied he
repulsed her, and her passion kindled,--only religious passion, but it
seared him!

"Do not be cold to me, Balder!"--his name as she uttered it moved him
as a blasphemy. "In my lonely kneelings I have felt you! my eyes
close, my hands grow together, my breath flutters, every breath is joy
and fear! I think 'He is with me,--the Being I adore!' but when I
opened my eyes, He was gone,--Balder!"

Still motionless and seeming-deaf stood the Divinity, bathed in
mocking sunlight. He was powerless to stop her from unveiling to him,
as to a visible God the sacred places of her maiden heart. That
sublime office whose reversion he had boldly courted, in the
possession shrivelled his soul to nothing and left him dead. It was
not easy to be God,--even over one human being!

But Gnulemah, in her mighty earnestness, knelt nearer, so that the
edge of Balder's sunlight smote the golden ornaments that clung round
her outstretched arms. She almost touched him, but though his spirit
recoiled, the doltish flesh would not be moved.

"It was not to be always so," she continued, an appealing vehemence
quivering through her tones. "Some day I was to see Him and know Him
more clearly. Shine on me, Balder! am not I your priestess? in the
morning do not I worship you, and at noon, and in the evening? At
night do not I kneel at your altar and pray you to care for me while I
sleep? Hear me, Balder! I see you in all things,--they are your
thoughts and meet again in you! The sun himself is but your shadow! Do
not I know you, my Balder? Be not clouded from your servant! Leave me
not,--take me with you where you go!"

It was at this moment that the young man's mind, stumbling stupidly
hither and thither, chanced to encounter that picture of the
courtesan, leaning from the open window in the city street, beckoning
him to come. She took Gnulemah's place, beckoning, making a hateful
parody of Gnulemah's expression and gestures. Could a devil take the
consecrated place of angels? or was the angel a worse devil in
disguise? In the same day, to him the same man, could two such voices
speak,--such faces look? And could the germ of Godhead abide in a soul
liable to the irony of such vicarious solicitation?

Speech or motion was still denied him. His priestess, strengthened by
religious passion, was bold to touch with hers his divine hand, on the
finger of which demoniacally glittered the murder-token. The hand was
so cold and lax that even the smooth warmth of her soft fingers failed
to put life in it.

"You have taken Hiero to yourself,--take me also! be my God as well as
his, for I shall be alone now he is gone. This ring which he always
wore--"

Balder roughly snatched back his hand.

"Hiero's ring?"

"Why do you look so?--is it not a sign to me from him?"

"Hiero's ring?--tell me, Gnulemah, is this Hiero's ring?--Stop--stand
up! No--call me Satan!--Hiero's ring!"

"Where is Hiero, then?" demanded Gnulemah, rising and dilating. "You
wear his ring,--what have you done with him?--Is there no God?"

The words came riding on the waves of deep-drawn breaths, for her soul
was in a tumult. Her life had thus far been like a quiet sequestered
pool, reflecting only the sky, and the ferns and flowers that bent
above its margin; ignorant, moreover, of its own depth and nature.
Now, invaded by storm, God and nature seemed swept away and lost, and
a terror of loneliness darkened over it.

"Is there no Balder?" reiterated Gnulemah. But all at once the
fierceness in her eyes melted, as lightning is followed by summer
rain. She came so near,--he standing dulled with horror of his
discovery,--came so near that her breath touched him, and he could
hear the faint rustling of the white byssus on her bosom, and the soft
tinkle of the broad pendants that glowed against her black hair; and
could see how profoundly real her beauty was. Mighty and beneficent
must be the force or the law which could combine the rude elements
into such a form of life as this!

"Let me live for you and serve you! Though the world has no Balder,
may not I have mine? You shall be everything to me! Without you I
cannot be; but I want no other God if I have my Balder!"

This was another matter! Nevertheless,--so subtle is the boundary
between love human and divine,--Gnulemah in these first passionate
moments may easily have deemed the one no less sublime than the other.

But there was no danger of Balder's falling into such an error. The
distinction was clear to him. Yet with remorse and abasement strove
the defiant impulse to pluck and eat--forgetful of this world and the
next the royal fruit so fairly held to his lips! For herein fails the
divinity of nature,--she can minister as well to man's depravity as to
his exaltation; which could not happen were she one with God. Nay,
man had need be strong with Divine inspiration, before communing
unharmed with nature's dangerous loveliness.

His hand in Gnulemah's was now neither cold nor lax. She raised it in
impetuous homage to her forehead. The diamond left a mark there; first
white, then red. For a breath or two, their eyes saw depths in each
other beyond words' fathoming....

A door was closed above; and the echo stole down stairs and crept with
a hollow whisper into the conservatory. The little lord chamberlain
fluttered down from his lofty perch and hovered between the two faces,
his penetrating note sounding like a warning, Gnulemah drew back, and
a swift blush let fall its rosy veil from the golden gleam of her
jewelled forehead-band to below the head of the serpent which twisted
round her neck.

One parting look she gave Balder, pregnant of new wonder, fear, and
joy. Then she turned and glided with quick ophidian grace to the
doorway from which she had first appeared, and was eclipsed by the
curtain. The inner door shut; she was gone. Dull, dull and colorless
was the conservatory. The hoopoe had flown out through the hall to the
open air. Only the crocodile continued to keep Balder company.

After standing a few moments, he once more threw himself down on the
moss couch beneath the palm-trees. There he reclined as before,
supported on his elbow, and turned the diamond ring this way and that
on his finger in moody preoccupation.

Was the crocodile asleep, or stealthily watching him?

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