Lilith

“Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so long?” said Mara gently.

The princess did not answer. Mara put the question again, in the same soft, inviting tone.

Still there was no sign of hearing. She spoke the words a third time.

Then the seeming corpse opened its mouth and answered, its words appearing to frame themselves of something else than sound.—I cannot shape the thing further: sounds they were not, yet they were words to me.

“I will not,” she said. “I will be myself and not another!”

“Alas, you are another now, not yourself! Will you not be your real self?”

“I will be what I mean myself now.”

“If you were restored, would you not make what amends you could for the misery you have caused?”

“I would do after my nature.”

“You do not know it: your nature is good, and you do evil!”

“I will do as my Self pleases—as my Self desires.”

“You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?”

“I will do what I will to do.”

“You have killed your daughter, Lilith!”

“I have killed thousands. She is my own!”

“She was never yours as you are another’s.”

“I am not another’s; I am my own, and my daughter is mine.”

“Then, alas, your hour is come!”

“I care not. I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!”

“You are not the Self you imagine.”

“So long as I feel myself what it pleases me to think myself, I care not. I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!”

“But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are aware of the coming change!”

“No one ever made me. I defy that Power to unmake me from a free woman! You are his slave, and I defy you! You may be able to torture me—I do not know, but you shall not compel me to anything against my will!”

“Such a compulsion would be without value. But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another’s—not the Shadow’s. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!”

“That light shall not enter me: I hate it!—Begone, slave!”

“I am no slave, for I love that light, and will with the deeper will which created mine. There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator. Who is a slave but her who cries, ‘I am free,’ yet cannot cease to exist!”

“You speak foolishness from a cowering heart! You imagine me given over to you: I defy you! I hold myself against you! What I choose to be, you cannot change. I will not be what you think me—what you say I am!”

“I am sorry: you must suffer!”

“But be free!”

“She alone is free who would make free; she loves not freedom who would enslave: she is herself a slave. Every life, every will, every heart that came within your ken, you have sought to subdue: you are the slave of every slave you have made—such a slave that you do not know it!—See your own self!”

She took her hand from the head of the princess, and went two backward paces from her.

A soundless presence as of roaring flame possessed the house—the same, I presume, that was to the children a silent wind. Involuntarily I turned to the hearth: its fire was a still small moveless glow. But I saw the worm-thing come creeping out, white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire. Along the floor it crawled toward the settle, going very slow. Yet more slowly it crept up on it, and laid itself, as unwilling to go further, at the feet of the princess. I rose and stole nearer. Mara stood motionless, as one that waits an event foreknown. The shining thing crawled on to a bare bony foot: it showed no suffering, neither was the settle scorched where the worm had lain. Slowly, very slowly, it crept along her robe until it reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the folds.

The face of the princess lay stonily calm, the eyelids closed as over dead eyes; and for some minutes nothing followed. At length, on the dry, parchment-like skin, began to appear drops as of the finest dew: in a moment they were as large as seed-pearls, ran together, and began to pour down in streams. I darted forward to snatch the worm from the poor withered bosom, and crush it with my foot. But Mara, Mother of Sorrow, stepped between, and drew aside the closed edges of the robe: no serpent was there—no searing trail; the creature had passed in by the centre of the black spot, and was piercing through the joints and marrow to the thoughts and intents of the heart. The princess gave one writhing, contorted shudder, and I knew the worm was in her secret chamber.

“She is seeing herself!” said Mara; and laying her hand on my arm, she drew me three paces from the settle.

Of a sudden the princess bent her body upward in an arch, then sprang to the floor, and stood erect. The horror in her face made me tremble lest her eyes should open, and the sight of them overwhelm me. Her bosom heaved and sank, but no breath issued. Her hair hung and dripped; then it stood out from her head and emitted sparks; again hung down, and poured the sweat of her torture on the floor.

I would have thrown my arms about her, but Mara stopped me.

“You cannot go near her,” she said. “She is far away from us, afar in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is. Do not fear for her; she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her was left. Wait and watch.”

It may have been five minutes or five years that she stood thus—I cannot tell; but at last she flung herself on her face.

Mara went to her, and stood looking down upon her. Large tears fell from her eyes on the woman who had never wept, and would not weep.

“Will you change your way?” she said at length.

“Why did he make me such?” gasped Lilith. “I would have made myself—oh, so different! I am glad it was he that made me and not I myself! He alone is to blame for what I am! Never would I have made such a worthless thing! He meant me such that I might know it and be miserable! I will not be made any longer!”

“Unmake yourself, then,” said Mara.

“Alas, I cannot! You know it, and mock me! How often have I not agonised to cease, but the tyrant keeps me being! I curse him!—Now let him kill me!”

The words came in jets as from a dying fountain.

“Had he not made you,” said Mara, gently and slowly, “you could not even hate him. But he did not make you such. You have made yourself what you are.—Be of better cheer: he can remake you.”

“I will not be remade!”

“He will not change you; he will only restore you to what you were.”

“I will not be aught of his making.”

“Are you not willing to have that set right which you have set wrong?”

She lay silent; her suffering seemed abated.

“If you are willing, put yourself again on the settle.”

“I will not,” she answered, forcing the words through her clenched teeth.

A wind seemed to wake inside the house, blowing without sound or impact; and a water began to rise that had no lap in its ripples, no sob in its swell. It was cold, but it did not benumb. Unseen and noiseless it came. It smote no sense in me, yet I knew it rising. I saw it lift at last and float her. Gently it bore her, unable to resist, and left rather than laid her on the settle. Then it sank swiftly away.

The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture of pure interpenetrating inward light. She began to moan, and sigh deep sighs, then murmur as holding colloquy with a dividual self: her queendom was no longer whole; it was divided against itself. One moment she would exult as over her worst enemy, and weep; the next she would writhe as in the embrace of a friend whom her soul hated, and laugh like a demon. At length she began what seemed a tale about herself, in a language so strange, and in forms so shadowy, that I could but here and there understand a little. Yet the language seemed the primeval shape of one I knew well, and the forms to belong to dreams which had once been mine, but refused to be recalled. The tale appeared now and then to touch upon things that Adam had read from the disparted manuscript, and often to make allusion to influences and forces—vices too, I could not help suspecting—with which I was unacquainted.

She ceased, and again came the horror in her hair, the sparkling and flowing alternate. I sent a beseeching look to Mara.

“Those, alas, are not the tears of repentance!” she said. “The true tears gather in the eyes. Those are far more bitter, and not so good. Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account. It will be so with her.”

She went nearer and said,

“Will you restore that which you have wrongfully taken?”

“I have taken nothing,” answered the princess, forcing out the words in spite of pain, “that I had not the right to take. My power to take manifested my right.”

Mara left her.

Gradually my soul grew aware of an invisible darkness, a something more terrible than aught that had yet made itself felt. A horrible Nothingness, a Negation positive infolded her; the border of its being that was yet no being, touched me, and for one ghastly instant I seemed alone with Death Absolute! It was not the absence of everything I felt, but the presence of Nothing. The princess dashed herself from the settle to the floor with an exceeding great and bitter cry. It was the recoil of Being from Annihilation.

“For pity’s sake,” she shrieked, “tear my heart out, but let me live!”

With that there fell upon her, and upon us also who watched with her, the perfect calm as of a summer night. Suffering had all but reached the brim of her life’s cup, and a hand had emptied it! She raised her head, half rose, and looked around her. A moment more, and she stood erect, with the air of a conqueror: she had won the battle! Dareful she had met her spiritual foes; they had withdrawn defeated! She raised her withered arm above her head, a pæan of unholy triumph in her throat—when suddenly her eyes fixed in a ghastly stare.—What was she seeing?

I looked, and saw: before her, cast from unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty, She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one what God had intended her to be, the other what she had made herself.

The rest of the night she lay motionless altogether.

With the gray dawn growing in the room, she rose, turned to Mara, and said, in prideful humility, “You have conquered. Let me go into the wilderness and bewail myself.”

Mara saw that her submission was not feigned, neither was it real. She looked at her a moment, and returned:

“Begin, then, and set right in the place of wrong.”

“I know not how,” she replied—with the look of one who foresaw and feared the answer.

“Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go.”

A fierce refusal seemed to struggle for passage, but she kept it prisoned.

“I cannot,” she said. “I have no longer the power. Open it for me.”

She held out the offending hand. It was more a paw than a hand. It seemed to me plain that she could not open it.

Mara did not even look at it.

“You must open it yourself,” she said quietly.

“I have told you I cannot!”

“You can if you will—not indeed at once, but by persistent effort. What you have done, you do not yet wish undone—do not yet intend to undo!”

“You think so, I dare say,” rejoined the princess with a flash of insolence, “but I KNOW that I cannot open my hand!”

“I know you better than you know yourself, and I know you can. You have often opened it a little way. Without trouble and pain you cannot open it quite, but you CAN open it. At worst you could beat it open! I pray you, gather your strength, and open it wide.”

“I will not try what I know impossible. It would be the part of a fool!”

“Which you have been playing all your life! Oh, you are hard to teach!”

Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back on Mara, saying, “I know what you have been tormenting me for! You have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me stronger than you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have always known myself—queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds!”

Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE IN DEATH—life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with her until now.

She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to Lilith.

Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was in it! We were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely apart. The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.

Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she knew to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.

She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on the face of one who knew existence but not love—knew nor life, nor joy, nor good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death! She knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing. She had killed her life, and was dead—and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever! She had tried her hardest to unmake herself, and could not! she was a dead life! she could not cease! she must BE! In her face I saw and read beyond its misery—saw in its dismay that the dismay behind it was more than it could manifest. It sent out a livid gloom; the light that was in her was darkness, and after its kind it shone. She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw now what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was as a conscious corpse, whose coffin would never come to pieces, never set her free! Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into the heart of horror essential—her own indestructible evil. Her right hand also was now clenched—upon existent Nothing—her inheritance!

But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!

Without change of look, without sign of purpose, Lilith walked toward Mara. She felt her coming, and rose to meet her.

“I yield,” said the princess. “I cannot hold out. I am defeated.—Not the less, I cannot open my hand.”

“Have you tried?”

“I am trying now with all my might.”

“I will take you to my father. You have wronged him worst of the created, therefore he best of the created can help you.”

“How can HE help me?”

“He will forgive you.”

“Ah, if he would but help me to cease! Not even that am I capable of! I have no power over myself; I am a slave! I acknowledge it. Let me die.”

“A slave thou art that shall one day be a child!” answered Mara.—“Verily, thou shalt die, but not as thou thinkest. Thou shalt die out of death into life. Now is the Life for, that never was against thee!”

Like her mother, in whom lay the motherhood of all the world, Mara put her arms around Lilith, and kissed her on the forehead. The fiery-cold misery went out of her eyes, and their fountains filled. She lifted, and bore her to her own bed in a corner of the room, laid her softly upon it, and closed her eyes with caressing hands.

Lilith lay and wept. The Lady of Sorrow went to the door and opened it.

Morn, with the Spring in her arms, waited outside. Softly they stole in at the opened door, with a gentle wind in the skirts of their garments. It flowed and flowed about Lilith, rippling the unknown, upwaking sea of her life eternal; rippling and to ripple it, until at length she who had been but as a weed cast on the dry sandy shore to wither, should know herself an inlet of the everlasting ocean, henceforth to flow into her for ever, and ebb no more. She answered the morning wind with reviving breath, and began to listen. For in the skirts of the wind had come the rain—the soft rain that heals the mown, the many-wounded grass—soothing it with the sweetness of all music, the hush that lives between music and silence. It bedewed the desert places around the cottage, and the sands of Lilith’s heart heard it, and drank it in. When Mara returned to sit by her bed, her tears were flowing softer than the rain, and soon she was fast asleep.

CHAPTER XL. THE HOUSE OF DEATH

The Mother of Sorrows rose, muffled her face, and went to call the Little Ones. They slept as if all the night they had not moved, but the moment she spoke they sprang to their feet, fresh as if new-made. Merrily down the stair they followed her, and she brought them where the princess lay, her tears yet flowing as she slept. Their glad faces grew grave. They looked from the princess out on the rain, then back at the princess.

“The sky is falling!” said one.

“The white juice is running out of the princess!” cried another, with an awed look.

“Is it rivers?” asked Odu, gazing at the little streams that flowed adown her hollow cheeks.

“Yes,” answered Mara, “—the most wonderful of all rivers.”

“I thought rivers was bigger, and rushed, like a lot of Little Ones, making loud noises!” he returned, looking at me, from whom alone he had heard of rivers.

“Look at the rivers of the sky!” said Mara. “See how they come down to wake up the waters under the earth! Soon will the rivers be flowing everywhere, merry and loud, like thousands and thousands of happy children. Oh, how glad they will make you, Little Ones! You have never seen any, and do not know how lovely is the water!”

“That will be the glad of the ground that the princess is grown good,” said Odu. “See the glad of the sky!”

“Are the rivers the glad of the princess?” asked Luva. “They are not her juice, for they are not red!”

“They are the juice inside the juice,” answered Mara.

Odu put one finger to his eye, looked at it, and shook his head.

“Princess will not bite now!” said Luva.

“No; she will never do that again,” replied Mara. “—But now we must take her nearer home.”

“Is that a nest?” asked Sozo.

“Yes; a very big nest. But we must take her to another place first.”

“What is that?”

“It is the biggest room in all this world.—But I think it is going to be pulled down: it will soon be too full of little nests.—Go and get your clumsies.”

“Please are there any cats in it?”

“Not one. The nests are too full of lovely dreams for one cat to get in.”

“We shall be ready in a minute,” said Odu, and ran out, followed by all except Luva.

Lilith was now awake, and listening with a sad smile.

“But her rivers are running so fast!” said Luva, who stood by her side and seemed unable to take her eyes from her face. “Her robe is all—I don’t know what. Clumsies won’t like it!”

“They won’t mind it,” answered Mara. “Those rivers are so clean that they make the whole world clean.”

I had fallen asleep by the fire, but for some time had been awake and listening, and now rose.

“It is time to mount, Mr. Vane,” said our hostess.

“Tell me, please,” I said, “is there not a way by which to avoid the channels and the den of monsters?”

“There is an easy way across the river-bed, which I will show you,” she answered; “but you must pass once more through the monsters.”

“I fear for the children,” I said.

“Fear will not once come nigh them,” she rejoined.

We left the cottage. The beasts stood waiting about the door. Odu was already on the neck of one of the two that were to carry the princess. I mounted Lona’s horse; Mara brought her body, and gave it me in my arms. When she came out again with the princess, a cry of delight arose from the children: she was no longer muffled! Gazing at her, and entranced with her loveliness, the boys forgot to receive the princess from her; but the elephants took Lilith tenderly with their trunks, one round her body and one round her knees, and, Mara helping, laid her along between them.

“Why does the princess want to go?” asked a small boy. “She would keep good if she staid here!”

“She wants to go, and she does not want to go: we are helping her,” answered Mara. “She will not keep good here.”

“What are you helping her to do?” he went on.

“To go where she will get more help—help to open her hand, which has been closed for a thousand years.”

“So long? Then she has learned to do without it: why should she open it now?”

“Because it is shut upon something that is not hers.”

“Please, lady Mara, may we have some of your very dry bread before we go?” said Luva.

Mara smiled, and brought them four loaves and a great jug of water.

“We will eat as we go,” they said. But they drank the water with delight.

“I think,” remarked one of them, “it must be elephant-juice! It makes me so strong!”

We set out, the Lady of Sorrow walking with us, more beautiful than the sun, and the white leopardess following her. I thought she meant but to put us in the path across the channels, but I soon found she was going with us all the way. Then I would have dismounted that she might ride, but she would not let me.

“I have no burden to carry,” she said. “The children and I will walk together.”

It was the loveliest of mornings; the sun shone his brightest, and the wind blew his sweetest, but they did not comfort the desert, for it had no water.

We crossed the channels without difficulty, the children gamboling about Mara all the way, but did not reach the top of the ridge over the bad burrow until the sun was already in the act of disappearing. Then I made the Little Ones mount their elephants, for the moon might be late, and I could not help some anxiety about them.

The Lady of Sorrow now led the way by my side; the elephants followed—the two that bore the princess in the centre; the leopardess brought up the rear; and just as we reached the frightful margin, the moon looked up and showed the shallow basin lying before us untroubled. Mara stepped into it; not a movement answered her tread or the feet of my horse. But the moment that the elephants carrying the princess touched it, the seemingly solid earth began to heave and boil, and the whole dread brood of the hellish nest was commoved. Monsters uprose on all sides, every neck at full length, every beak and claw outstretched, every mouth agape. Long-billed heads, horribly jawed faces, knotty tentacles innumerable, went out after Lilith. She lay in an agony of fear, nor dared stir a finger. Whether the hideous things even saw the children, I doubt; certainly not one of them touched a child; not one loathly member passed the live rampart of her body-guard, to lay hold of her.