South Wind

by Norman Douglas

  “How true that is,” remarked Madame Steynlin.

  “Sheer monotony,” repeated the Count. “And it is the same with their pictorial art. We blame the Orientals for their chill cult of geometric designs, their purely stylistic decoration, their endless repetitions, as opposed to our variety and love of floral, human, or other naturalistic motives. But by this simple means they attain their end—a direct appeal. Their art, like their music, goes straight to the senses; it is not deflected or disturbed by any intervening medium. Colour plays its part; the sombre, throbbing sounds of these instruments—the glowing tints of their carpets and tapestries. Talking of gipsies, do you know whether our friend van Koppen has arrived?”

  “Koppen? A very up-to-date nomad, who takes the whole world for his camping-ground. No, not yet. But he’ll turn up in a day or two.”

  Count Caloveglia was concerned, just then, about Mr. van Koppen. He had a little business to transact with him—he fervently hoped that the millionaire would not forgo his annual visit to Nepenthe.

  “I shall be glad to meet him again,” he remarked carelessly. Then looking up he saw Denis, who moved under the trees alone. Observing that he seemed rather disconsolate, he walked up to him and said in a fatherly tone: “Will you confer a favour, Mr. Denis, on an old man who lives much alone? Will you come and see me, as you promised? My daughter is away just now and will not be back till midsummer. I wish you could have met her. Meanwhile, I am a little solitary. I have also a few antiquities that might interest you.”

  While Denis, slightly embarrassed, was uttering some appropriate words, the bishop suddenly asked:

  “Where is Mrs. Meadows? Wasn’t she coming down to-night?”

  “Of course she was,” said Keith. “Isn’t she here? What can this mean? Your cousin is a particular friend of mine, Heard, though I have not seen her for the last six days or so. Something must be wrong. That baby, I expect.”

  “I missed her once already,” said Heard. “I’ll write and make an appointment, or go up again. By the way, Count—you remember our conversation? Wel, I have thought of an insuperable objection to your Mediterranean theory. The sirocco. You will never change the sirocco. The Elect of the Earth will never endure it all their lives.”

  “I think we can change the sirocco,” replied the Count, meditatively. “We can tame it, at all events. I do not know much about its history; you must ask Mr. Eames—”

  “Who is at home,” interrupted Keith, “closeted with his Perrelli.”

  “What has been, may be,” continued the old man, oracularly. “I question whether the sirocco was as obnoxious in olden days as now, otherwise the ancients, who had absurdly sensitive skins, would have complained of it more frequently. The deforestation of Northern Africa, I suspect, has much to do with it. Frenchmen are now trying to revive those prosperous conditions which Mohammedanism has destroyed. Oh, yes! I don’t despair of muzzling the sirocco, even as we are muzzling that often Mediterranean pest, the malaria.”

  Keith observed:

  “Petronius, I remember, speaks of the North wind being the mistress of the Tyrrhenian. He would not use such language nowadays, unless alluding to its violence rather than its prevalence. Once I thought of translating Petronius. But I discovered certain passages in the book which are almost improper. I don’t think the public ought to be put into possession of such stuff. I am rather sorry; I like Petronius—the poetical fragments, I mean; they make me regret that I was not born under the Roman Empire. People are leaving,” he added. “I have said good-bye to about fifty. I shall be able to get a drink soon.”

  “So you were born out of time and out of place, like many of us,” laughed the Bishop.

  Count Caloveglia said:

  “It is an academic problem, and therefore a problem which does not exist for me, and therefore a problem dear to your own metaphysical heart, to enquire whether a man is ever born at an inopportune moment. We use the phrase. If we took thought we would discard it. For what is the truth of the matter? The truth is that a man, of whom we say this, is born at exactly the right moment; that those with whose customs and aspirations he seems to be in discord have urgent need of him at that particular time. No great man is ever born too soon or too late. When we say that the time is not ripe for this or that celebrity, we confess by implication that this very man, and no other, is required. Was Giordano Bruno, or Edgar Poe, born out of time? Surely no generation needed them more imperiously than their own. Only fools are born out of time. And yet—no; not even they. For where should we be without them?”

  He smiles suavely, as though some pleasant thought was passing through his mind.

  “At any rate a good many people die too soon or too late,” said Mr. Edgar Marten who, after doing full justice to the food and drinks, had suddenly appeared on the scene. “Often too late,” he added.

  Keith, despite his professions of sanity and reason, had an inexplicable, invincible horror of death; he quailed at the mere mention of the black phantom. The subject being not at all to his taste, he promptly remarked:

  “The scholar Grosseteste was unquestionably born too soon. And I know one man who is born too late. Who? Yourself, Count. You were made for the Periclean epoch.”

  “Thank you,” said that gentleman with a gracious wave of his hand. “But forgive me for disagreeing with you. Had I lived in that age, I should be lacking in reverence for what it accomplished. I should be too near to its life; unable, as you say, to see the forest for the trees. I should be like Thucydides, a most sensible person who, if I recollect aright, barely mentions Ictinus and the rest of them. How came it about? This admirable writer imagined they were building a temple for Greece; he lacked the interval of centuries which has allowed mankind to see their work in its true perspective. He possessed traditional moral standards whereby to judge the actions of historical contemporaries; he could praise or blame his politicians with a good conscience. For the Parthenon creators he had no sure norm. The standards were not yet evolved. Pheidias was a talented fellow-citizen—a hewer in stone by profession: what could he know of the relations of Pheidias to posterity? Great things can only be seen at a proper distance. Pheidias, to him, may have been little more than an amateur, struggling with brute material in the infancy of his trade or calling. No, my friend! I am glad not to be coeval with Pericles. I am glad to recognize Hellenic achievements at their true worth. I am glad to profit by that wedge of time which has enabled me to reverence things fair and eternal.”

  “Things fair and eternal,” echoed Keith, who was getting too thirsty and restless to discuss art-matters. “Come with me! I will show you things fair and eternal.”

  He led the way to a distant arbour, overhung with a canopy of blood-red passion-flowers and girt about by design dangled from the clustering foliage in its roof. Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition—a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master never stirred. He sat there to be looked at—accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane. Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat. The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, stared into vacuity; his snub nose grew out of a flattened face whose pallor was accentuated by the reflection of the glittering leaves—it looked faded and sodden, like blotting-paper that has been left out all night in the rain. Spo
radic greenish-grey hairs were scattered about his chin. The mouth was agape.

  On Mr. Keith’s appearance he made no sign of recognition. Presently, however, his lips seemed to get out of control. They moved; they began to chatter and to mumble, in childish fashion, the inarticulate yearnings of eld. Keith said, as though displaying some museum curiosity:

  “Mine is the only house on Nepenthe which the Master still deigns to enter. I’m afraid he has grown very groggy on his pins of late; if he sat on any by a straight-backed chair they would never get him up again. To think that was once a pretty little boy…. Poor old fellow! I know what he wants. They’ve been neglecting him, those young idiots.”

  He departed, and soon returned with a tumbler full of raw whisky which he placed on the table within reach of the arm. A flaccid, unwholesome-looking hand was raised slowly, in a kind of deprecatory gesture; then allowed to fall again upon the belly where it lay, with the five fingers, round and chalky-white, extended like the rays of a starfish. Nothing more happened.

  “We must go away for a while,” said Keith, “or else he won’t touch it. He does not object to alcohol, you know. Whisky has not come out of a warm-blooded beast. But it’s going into one. A kind of Asiatic Socrates, don’t you think?”

  “A Buddha,” suggested the Count. “A Buddha in second-rate alabaster. A Chinese Buddha of a bad, realistic period.”

  “It’s odd,” remarked Mr. Heard. “He reminds me of a dead fish. 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 God I’m a Jew; it’s not business of mine. But if I were a Christian, I’d bash his blooming head in. Damned 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 shirt 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 glass 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-God.”

  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 astonishing 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 constitution 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 analphabetics like himself
, have left us no word of what passed 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 title, 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-God is the Man-God, and not the God-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 fashion 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.