The Purple Cloud
Page 34
thesignificance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity ofthose saffron cheeks. I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence forthis man; but I had it, certainly. Many of the others, it is clear, hadfled: but not he: and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross,holding one real as the other--he alone among many. For Christianity wasan _elite_ religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differingfrom Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all withintheir reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's,it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.
It was my way to plant at the portal the big, carved chair from thechancel on the hot days, and rest my soul, refusing to think ofanything, drowsing and smoking for hours. All down there in the plainwaved gardens of delicious fruit about the prolonged silver thread ofthe river Isle, whose course winds loitering quite near the foot of themonastery-slope. This slope dominates a tract of distance that is notonly vast, but looks immense, although the horizon is bounded by asemicircle of low hills, rather too stiff and uniform for perfectbeauty; the interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed landswhich were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed byvividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne,orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, allembowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through thevillage-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have playedthere a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand orfoot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the riverdivides, and takes the shape of a heart; and very far away are visiblethe grey banks of the Gironde. On the semicircle of hills, when therewas little distance-mist, I saw the ruins of some seigneurial chateau,for the seigneurs, too, knew where to build; and to my left, between aclump of oaks and an avenue of poplars, the bell-tower of thevillage--church of Saint Martial d'Artenset--a very ancient type oftower, I believe, and common in France, rather ponderous, consisting ofa square mass with a smaller square mass stuck on, the latter havinglarge Gothic windows; and behind me the west face of themonastery-church, over the door being the statue of Saint Bruno.
Well, one morning after four months, I opened my eyes in my cell to thepiercing consciousness that I had burned Monpont over-night: and soovercome was I with regret for this poor inoffensive little place, thatfor two days, hardly eating, I paced between the oak and walnut pews ofthe nave, massive stalls they are, separated by grooved Corinthianpilasters, wondering what was to become of me, and if I was not alreadymad; and there are some little angels with extraordinarily humanGreuze-like faces, supporting the nerves of the apse, which, after atime, every time I passed them, seemed conscious of me and my existencethere; and the wood-work which ornaments the length of the nave, and ofthe choir also, elaborate with carved marguerites and roses, here andthere took in my eyes significant forms from certain points of view; andthere is a partition--for the nave is divided into two chapels, one forthe brothers and one for the fathers, I conclude--and in this partitiona massive door, which yet looks quite light and graceful, carved withoak and acanthus leaves, and every time I passed through I had theimpression that the door was a sentient thing, subconscious of me; andthe delicate Italian-Renaissance brick vault which springs from the vastnave seemed to look upon me with a gloomy knowledge of me, and of theheart within me; and at about four in the afternoon of the second day,after pacing the church for hours, I fell down at one of the two altarsnear that carved door of the screen, praying God to have mercy upon mysoul; and in the very midst of my praying, I was up and away, the devilin me, and I got into the motor, and did not come back to Vauclaire foranother month, and came leaving great tracts of burned desolation behindme, towns and forests, Bordeaux burned, Lebourne burned, Bergeracburned.
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I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there Iexperienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before myMaker. And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of themonastery-gate, something said to me: 'You will never be a good man, norpermanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life,devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exactall your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modernthings, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand:otherwise you are bound to succumb. Do this, therefore, beginning, notto-morrow nor this afternoon, but now: for though no man will see yourwork, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in Hisway: and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan: and perhaps,seeing, He may have mercy upon you.'
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In this way arose the idea of the Palace--an idea, indeed, which hadentered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcomeof my raving moods: now, however, in a very different way, soberly, andsoon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations,and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which,one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, over-borne bythe vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessedme. After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes: and I said: Iwill build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: thefirst human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palaceworthy the King of Earth.
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After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a verydifferent man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble,making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole,drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and therule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at alittle over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weightand bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the _sort_, deciding as tothe size and structure of the crane, forge, and work-shop, and thenecessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list ofover 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departurefrom Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the wholeearth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.
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I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewnstreets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults,etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris,and then lying in the _Speranza_ at Dover; nor had I sufficientfamiliarity with French industries and methods to find, even with theaid of _Bottins_, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had nowcatalogued. My ship was the _Speranza_, which brought me from Havre, forat Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for allpurposes, the _Speranza_ being an American yacht, very palatiallyfitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interactingtanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables meto lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoistingair-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tonsonly of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days' workat the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw outher dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train onthe quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and thehalf-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence toCanterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store ofdynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London:meaning to make Dover my _depot_, and the London rails my thoroughfarefrom all parts of the country.
Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: aharrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains fromthe path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals aswell, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: forthe labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them downsidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake.However, all's well that ends well, though if I had it to go throughagain, certainly I should n
ot. The _Speranza_ is now lying seven milesoff Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th ofJune at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and Ipretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was sucha fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my goodGod, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to thedevil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When thethirty-three ...
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Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeenyears since--long years--seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea towhat they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin ofthe _Speranza_, and