CHAPTER V.
THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION.
It might be about seven o'clock in the evening. The wind was nowdiminishing--a sign, however, of a violent recurrence impending. Thechild was on the table-land at the extreme south point of Portland.
Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsulais, and was ignorant even of the name of Portland. He knew but onething, which is, that one can walk until one drops down. An idea is aguide; he had no idea. They had brought him there and left him there._They_ and _there_--these two enigmas represented his doom. _They_ werehumankind. _There_ was the universe. For him in all creation there wasabsolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of groundwhere he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet. In thegreat twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child?Nothing.
He walked towards this Nothing. Around him was the vastness of humandesertion.
He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third. Atthe extremity of each plateau the child came upon a break in the ground.The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plainsof Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other. The southside seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side rises overthe next one; these made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly.From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself.The night was becoming very dark. His radius of sight was contracting.He now only saw a few steps before him.
All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and with an almostimperceptible nod of satisfaction turned quickly and directed his stepstowards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on hisright, at the point of the plain nearest the cliff. There was on theeminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree. The child hadjust heard a noise in this direction, which was the noise neither of thewind nor of the sea, nor was it the cry of animals. He thought that someone was there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.
In truth, some one was there.
That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was nowvisible. It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of theground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger,supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; thearm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky. At thepoint of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb therewas a line, from which hung something black and shapeless. The linemoving in the wind sounded like a chain. This was the noise the childhad heard. Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, achain--a single chain cable.
By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causesappearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, themournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to theeffect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.
The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard. Itwas swaddled like a child and long like a man. There was a round thingat its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbardwas riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out betweenthe rents.
A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayedgently. The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space. It was anobject to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportionseverything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was acondensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above andwithin the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight andmoonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, theclouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into thecomposition of this visible nothing. The species of log hanging in thewind partook of the impersonality diffused far over sea and sky, and thedarkness completed this phase of the _thing_ which had once been a man.
It was that which is no longer.
To be naught but a remainder! Such a thing is beyond the power oflanguage to express. To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in theabyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble--thereis a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality. Thencecomes the inexpressible. This being--was it a being? This black witnesswas a remainder, and an awful remainder--a remainder of what? Of naturefirst, and then of society. Naught, and yet total.
The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deepoblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances;it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what itwilled. It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (thatghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.
The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent the horrible outrageof rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was nopeace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust,in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should haveits reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowedputrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offendsall the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory,the grave.
This dead thing had been stripped. To strip one alreadystripped--relentless act! His marrow was no longer in his bones; hisentrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat.A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties. If heever had a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this wasfearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains--canone imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?
Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, whichseem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesissnatches. Conjecture has its _compelle intrare_. In passing by certainplaces and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey todreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible thereare dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man withoutmeditating.
In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had hadblood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which hadbeen stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat fromhim. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegrationwas a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of nighthad rifled the dead.
He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of thedarkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and _he was not_. He waspalpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After thedisappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became inlugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increasedthe gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars. The unutterable which isin the desert was condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, hecommingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in hismystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.
About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths. Certainty andconfidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of thebrushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which aconscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the wholelandscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of aspectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.
He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.Perpetual shuddering made him terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to bea centre in space, with something immense leaning on him. Who can tell?Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcendshuman justice. There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance ofmen and his own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and thewaste. He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremblebefore the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul. Fordead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit. Hedenounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven. Placed there by man, hethere awaited God. Above him floated, blended with all the vaguedistortions
of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.
Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? Theillimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by,was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us--whenHeaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent--then itis we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed.When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gatebehind.