The Man Who Died (7 page)

The woman, silent now, but quivering, laid oil in her hand and put her
palm over the wound in his right side. He winced, and the wound absorbed
his life again, as thousands of times before. And in the dark, wild pain
and panic of his consciousness rang only one cry: "Oh, how can she take
this death out of me? She can never know! She can never understand! She
can never equal it!…"

In silence, she softly rhythmically chafed the scar with oil. Absorbed
now in her priestess's task, softly, softly gathering power, while the
vitals of the man howled in panic. But as she gradually gathered power,
and passed in a girdle round him to the opposite scar, gradually warmth
began to take the place of the cold terror, and he felt: 'I am going to
be Warm again, and I am going to be whole! I shall be warm like the
morning. I shall be a man. It doesn't need understanding. It needs
newness. She brings me newness—'

And he listened to the faint, ceaseless wail of distress of his wounds,
sounding as if for ever under the horizons of his consciousness. But the
wail was growing dim, more dim.

He thought of the woman toiling over him: 'She does not know! She does
not realise the death in me. But she has another consciousness. She comes
to me from the opposite end of the night.'

Having chafed all his lower body with oil, having worked with her slow
intensity of a priestess, so that the sound of his wounds grew dimmer and
dimmer, suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side,
and her arms round him, folding over the wound in his right side, and she
pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a
river. And the wailing died out altogether, and there was a stillness,
and darkness in his soul, unbroken, dark stillness, wholeness.

Then slowly, slowly, in the perfect darkness of his inner man, he felt
the stir of something coming. A dawn, a new sun. A new sun was coming up
in him, in the perfect inner darkness of himself. He waited for it
breathless, quivering with a fearful hope…"Now I am not myself. I am
something new…"

And as it rose, he felt, with a cold breath of disappointment, the girdle
of the living woman slip down from him, the warmth and the glow slipped
from him, leaving him stark. She crouched, spent, at the feet of the
goddess, hiding her face.

Stooping, he laid his hand softly on her warm, bright shoulder, and the
shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered
if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.

Now all his consciousness was there in the crouching, hidden woman. He
stooped beside her and caressed her softly, blindly, murmuring
inarticulate things. And his death and his passion of sacrifice were all
as nothing to him now, he knew only the crouching fullness of the woman
there, the soft white rock of life…"On this rock I built my life." The
deep–folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her
face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn.

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power
rise up in his loins, magnificent.

"I am risen!"

Magnificent, blazing indomitable in the depths of his loins, his own sun
dawned, and sent its fire running along his limbs, so that his face shone
unconsciously.

He untied the string on the linen tunic and slipped the garment down,
till he saw the white glow of her white–gold breasts. And he touched
them, and he felt his life go molten. "Father!" he said, "why did you
hide this from me?" And he touched her with the poignancy of wonder, and
the marvellous piercing transcendence of desire. "Lo!" he said, "this is
beyond prayer." It was the deep, interfolded warmth, warmth living and
penetrable, the woman, the heart of the rose! My mansion is the intricate
warm rose, my joy is this blossom!

She looked up at him suddenly, her face like a lifted light, wistful,
tender, her eyes like many wet flowers. And he drew her to his breast
with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire, and the last thought:
'My hour is upon me, I am taken unawares—'

So he knew her, and was one with her.

Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his sides
with her finger–tips, and said:

"But they no longer hurt?"

"They are suns!" he said. "They shine from your torch. They are my
atonement with you."

And when they left the temple, it was the coldness before dawn. As he
closed the door, he looked again at the goddess, and he said: "Lo, Isis
is a kindly goddess; and full of tenderness. Great gods are warm–hearted,
and have tender goddesses."

The woman wrapped herself in her mantle and went home in silence,
sightless, brooding like the lotus softly shutting again, with its gold
core full of fresh life. She saw nothing, for her own petals were a
sheath to her. Only she thought: 'I am full of Osiris. I am full of the
risen Osiris!

But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to
the sea, and the dog–star green towards the sea's rim. And he thought:
'How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose
of dark–petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness!
How full it is, and great beyond all gods. How it leans around me, and I
am part of it, the great rose of Space. I am like a grain of its perfume,
and the woman is a grain of its beauty. Now the world is one flower of
many petalled darknesses, and I am in its perfume as in a touch.'

So, in the absolute stillness and fullness of touch, he slept in his cave
while the dawn came. And after the dawn, the wind rose and brought a
storm, with cold rain. So he stayed in his cave in the peace and the
delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on
the earth, and to see one white–and–gold narcissus bowing wet, and still
wet. And he said: "This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The
grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the
invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one."

He waited at the temple for the woman, and she came in the rain. But she
said to him:

"Let me sit awhile with Isis. And come to me, will you come to me, in the
second hour of night?"

So he went back to the cave and lay in stillness and in the joy of being
in touch, waiting for the woman who would come with the night, and
consummate again the contact. Then when night came the woman came, and
came gladly, for her great yearning, too, was upon her, to be in touch,
to be in touch with him, nearer.

So the days came, and the nights came, and days came again, and the
contact was perfected and fulfilled. And he said: "I will ask her
nothing, not even her name, for a name would set her apart."

And she said to herself: "He is Osiris. I wish to know no more."

Plum blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past,
anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean–field was
in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its petals
and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact
was established, the man and the woman were fulfilled of one another, and
departure was in the air.

One day he met her under the trees, when the morning sun was hot, and the
pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pear blossom was
scattering. She came slowly towards him, and in her gentle lingering, her
tender hanging back from him, he knew a change in her.

"Hast thou conceived?" he asked her.

"Why?" she said.

"Thou art like a tree whose green leaves follow the blossom, full of sap.
And there is a withdrawing about thee."

"It is so," she said. "I am with young by thee. Is it good?"

"Yea!" he said. "How should it not be good? So the nightingale calls no
more from the valley–bed. But where wilt thou bear the child, for I am
naked of all but life?"

"We will stay here," she said.

"But the lady, your mother?"

A shadow crossed her brow. She did not answer.

"What when she knows?" he said.

"She begins to know."

"And would she hurt you?"

"Ah, not me! What I have is all my own. And I shall be big with
Osiris…But thou, do you watch her slaves."

She looked at him, and the peace of her maternity was troubled by
anxiety.

"Let not your heart be troubled!" he said. "I have died the death once."

So he knew the time was come again for him to depart. He would go alone,
with his destiny. Yet not alone, for the touch would be upon him, even as
he left his touch on her. And invisible suns would go with him.

Yet he must go. For here on the bay the little life of jealousy and
property was resuming sway again, as the suns of passionate fecundity
relaxed their sway. In the name of property, the widow and her slaves
would seek to be revenged on him for the bread he had eaten, and the
living touch he had established, the woman he had delighted in. But he
said: "Not twice! They shall not now profane the touch in me. My wits
against theirs."

So he watched. And he knew they plotted. So he moved from the little cave
and found another shelter, a tiny cove of sand by the sea, dry and secret
under the rocks.

He said to the woman:

"I must go now soon. Trouble is coming to me from the slaves. But I am a
man, and the world is open. But what is between us is good, and is
established. Be at peace. And when the nightingale calls again from your
valley–bed, I shall come again, sure as spring."

She said: "0, don't go! Stay with me on half the island, and I will build
a house for you and me under the pine trees by the temple, where we can
live apart."

Yet she knew that he would go. And even she wanted the coolness of her
own air around her, and the release from anxiety.

"If I stay," he said, "they will betray me to the Romans and to their
justice. But I will never be betrayed again. So when I am gone, live in
peace with the growing child. And I shall come again: all is good between
us, near or apart. The suns come back in their seasons: and I shall come
again."

"Do not go yet," she said. "I have set a slave to watch at the neck of
the peninsula. Do not go yet, till the harm shows."

But as he lay in his little cove, on a calm, still night, he heard the
soft knock of oars, and the bump of a boat against the rock. So he crept
out to listen. And he heard the Roman overseer say:

"Lead softly to the goat's den. And Lysippus shall throw the net over the
malefactor while he sleeps, and we will bring him before justice, and the
Lady of Isis shall know nothing of it…"

The man who had died caught a whiff of flesh from the oiled and naked
slaves as they crept up, then the faint perfume of the Roman. He crept
nearer to the sea. The slave who sat in the boat sat motionless, holding
the oars, for the sea was quite still. And the man who had died knew him.

So out of the deep cleft of a rock he said, in a clear voice:

"Art thou not that slave who possessed the maiden under the eyes of Isis?
Art thou not the youth? Speak!"

The youth stood up in the boat in terror. His movement sent the boat
bumping against the rock. The slave sprang out in wild fear, and fled up
the rocks. The man who had died quickly seized the boat and stepped in,
and pushed off. The oars were yet warm with the unpleasant warmth of the
hands of the slaves. But the man pulled slowly out, to get into the
current which set down the coast, and would carry him in silence. The
high coast was utterly dark against the starry night. There was no
glimmer from the peninsula: the priestess came no more at night. The man
who had died rowed slowly on, with the current, and laughed to himself:
"I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch
forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfume in my
flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being.
But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the
root of my tree."

"So let the boat carry me. To–morrow is another day."

THE END