‘I am afraid—no, I am ashamed—to disobey him.’
‘Then, even at the best, look what you make of him! Something worse than our father. Who that loved you could be angry at your breaking so unreasonable a command—and for so good a reason?’
‘Foolishness, Orual,’ she answered, shaking her head. ‘He is a god. He has good grounds for what he does, be sure. How should I know of them? I am only his simple Psyche.’
‘Then you will not do it? You think—you say you think—that you can prove him a god and set me free from the fears that sicken my heart. But you will not do it.’
‘I would if I could, Orual.’
I looked about me. The sun was almost setting behind the saddle. In a little while she would send me away. I rose up.
‘An end of this must be made,’ I said. ‘You shall do it. Psyche, I command you.’
‘Dear Maia, my duty is no longer to you.’
‘Then my life shall end with it,’ said I. I flung back my cloak further, thrust out my bare left arm, and struck the dagger into it till the point pricked out on the other side. Pulling the iron back through the wound was the worse pain; but I can hardly believe now how little I felt it.
‘Orual! Are you mad?’ cried Psyche, leaping up.
‘You’ll find linen in that urn. Tie up my wound,’ said I, sitting down and holding my arm out to let the blood fall on the heather.
I had thought she might scream and wring her hands or faint. But I was deceived. She was pale enough but had all her wits about her. She bound my arm. The blood came seeping through fold after fold, but she staunched it in the end. (My stroke had been lucky enough. If I had known as much then as I do now about the inside of an arm, I might not—who knows?—have had the resolution to do it.)
The bandaging could not be done in a moment. The sun was lower and the air colder when we were able to talk again.
‘Maia,’ said Psyche, ‘what did you do that for?’
‘To show you I’m in earnest, girl. Listen. You have driven me to desperate courses. I give you your choice. Swear on this edge, with my blood still wet on it, that you will this very night do as I have commanded you; or else I’ll first kill you and then myself.’
‘Orual,’ said she, very queen-like, raising her head, ‘you might have spared that threat of killing me. All your power over me lies in the other.’
‘Then swear, girl. You never knew me break my word.’
The look in her face now was one I did not understand. I think a lover—I mean, a man who loved—might look so on a woman who had been false to him. And at last she said, ‘You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture—I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.’
‘Enough of your subtleties,’ said I. ‘Both of us die here, in plainest truth and blood, unless you swear.’
‘If I do,’ said she hotly, ‘it will not be for any doubt of my husband or his love. It will only be because I think better of him than of you. He cannot be cruel like you. I’ll not believe it. He will know how I was tortured into my disobedience. He will forgive me.’
‘He need never know,’ said I.
The look of scorn she gave me flayed my soul. And yet, this very nobleness in her—had I not taught it to her? What was there in her that was not my work? And now she used it to look at me as if I were base beneath all baseness.
‘You thought I would hide it? Thought I would not tell him?’ she said, each word like the rubbing of a file across raw flesh. ‘Well. It’s all of a piece. Let us, as you say, make an end. You grow more and more a stranger to me at each word. And I had loved you so—loved, honoured, trusted, and (while it was fit) obeyed. And now—but I can’t have your blood on my threshold. You chose your threat well. I’ll swear. Where’s your dagger?’
So I had won my victory and my heart was in torment. I had a terrible longing to unsay all my words and beg her forgiveness. But I held out the dagger. (The ‘oath on edge’, as we call it, is our strongest in Glome.)
‘And even now,’ said Psyche, ‘I know what I do. I know that I am betraying the best of lovers and that perhaps, before sunrise, all my happiness may be destroyed forever. This is the price you have put upon your life. Well, I must pay it.’
She took her oath. My tears burst out, and I tried to speak, but she turned her face away.
‘The sun is almost down,’ she said. ‘Go. You have saved your life; go and live it as you can.’
I found I was becoming afraid of her. I made my way back to the stream, crossed it somehow. And the shadow of the saddle leaped across the whole valley as the sun set.
XV
I think I must have fainted when I got to this side of the water, for there seems to be some gap in my memory between the fording and being fully aware again of three things: cold, and the pain in my arm, and thirst. I drank ravenously. Then I wanted food, and now first remembered that I had left it in the urn with the lamp. My soul rose up against calling Gram, who was very irksome to me. I felt (though I saw it to be folly even at the time) that if Bardia had come with me instead, all might have been different and better. And away my thoughts wandered to imagine all he would be doing and saying now if he had, till suddenly I remembered what business had brought me there. I was ashamed that I had thought, even for a moment, of anything else.
My purpose was to sit by the ford, watching till I should see a light (which would be Psyche lighting her lamp). It would vanish when she covered and hid it. Then, most likely far later, there would be a light again; she would be looking at her vile master in its sleep. And after that—very, very soon after it, I hoped—there would be Psyche creeping through the darkness and sending a sort of whispered call (‘Maia, Maia’) across the stream. And I would be half-way over it in an instant. This time it would be I who helped her at the ford. She would be all weeping and dismayed as I folded her in my arms and comforted her; for now she would know who were her true friends, and would love me again, and would thank me, shuddering, for saving her from the thing the lamp had shown. These were dear thoughts to me when they came and while they lasted.
But there were other thoughts too. Try as I would, I could not quite put out of my head the fear that I had been wrong. A real god . . . was it impossible? But I could never dwell on that part of it. What came back and back to my mind was the thought of Psyche herself somehow (I never knew well how) ruined, lost, robbed of all joy, a wailing, wandering shape, for whom I had wrecked everything. More times than I could count that night, I had the wish, tyrannously strong, to re-cross the cold water, to shout out that I forgave her her promise, that she was not to light the lamp, that I had advised her wrongly. But I governed it.
Neither the one sort of thoughts nor the other was more than the surface of my mind. Beneath them, deep as the deep ocean-sea whereof the Fox spoke, was the cold, hopeless abyss of her scorn, her un-love, her very hatred.
How could she hate me, when my arm throbbed and burned with the wound I had given it for her love? ‘Cruel Psyche, cruel Psyche,’ I sobbed. But then I saw that I was falling back to the dreams of my sickness. So I set my wits against it and bestirred myself. Whatever happened I must watch and be sane.
The first light came soon enough; and vanished again. I said to myself (though indeed once I had her oath I never doubted her faith to it), ‘So. All’s well this far.’ It made me wonder, as at a new question, what I meant by well. But the thought passed.
The cold grew bitter. My arm was a bar of fire, the rest of me an icicle, chained to that bar but never melted. I began to see that I was doing a perilous thing. I might die, thus wounded and fasting, or at least get such a chill as would bring m
y death soon after. And out of that seed there grew up, in one moment, a huge, foolish flower of fancies. For at once (leaping over all question of how it should come about) I saw myself laid on the pyre, and Psyche—she knew now, she loved me again now—beating her breast and weeping and repenting all her cruelties. The Fox and Bardia were there too; Bardia wept fast. Everyone loved me once I was dead. But I am ashamed to write all these follies.
What checked them was the next appearing of the light. To my eyes, long swilled with darkness, it seemed brighter than you would have thought possible. Bright and still, a home-like thing in that wild place. And for a time longer than I had expected, it shone and was still, and the whole world was still around it. Then the stillness broke.
The great voice, which rose up from somewhere close to the light, went through my whole body in such a swift wave of terror that it blotted out even the pain in my arm. It was no ugly sound; even in its implacable sternness it was golden. My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things. And after—barely after—the strong soaring of its incomprehensible speech, came the sound of weeping. I think (if those old words have a meaning) my heart broke then. But neither the immortal sound nor the tears of her who wept lasted for more than two heart-beats. Heart-beats, I say; but I think my heart did not beat till they were over.
A great flash laid the valley bare to my eyes. Then it thundered as if the sky broke in two, straight above my head. Lightnings, thick-following one another, pricked the valley, left, right, near and far, everywhere. Each flash showed falling trees; the imagined pillars of Psyche’s house were going down. They seemed to fall silently, for the thunder hid their crashing. But there was another noise it could not hide. Somewhere away on my left the walls of the Mountain itself were breaking. I saw (or I thought I saw) fragments of rock hurled about and striking on other rocks and rising into the air again like a child’s ball that bounces. The river rose, so quickly that I was overtaken by its rush before I could stumble back from it, wet to my middle; but that made little odds, for with the storm there had come a tyrannous pelting rain. Hair and clothes were already a mere sponge.
But, beaten and blinded though I was, I took these things for a good sign. They showed (so it seemed to me) that I was right. Psyche had roused some dreadful thing and these were its ragings. It had waked, she had not hidden her light soon enough; or else—yes, that was most likely—it had only feigned to be sleeping; it might be a thing that never needed sleep. It might, no doubt, destroy both her and me. But she would know. She would, at worst, die undeceived, disenchanted, reconciled to me. Even now, we might escape. Failing that, we could die together. I rose up, bent double under the battery of the rain, to cross the stream.
I believe I could never have crossed it—the deep, foaming death-race it had now become—even if I had been left free to try. I was not left free. There came as if it were a lightning that endured. That is, the look of it was the look of lightning, pale, dazzling, without warmth or comfort, showing each smallest thing with fierce distinctness, but it did not go away. This great light stood over me as still as a candle burning in a curtained and shuttered room. In the centre of the light was something like a man. It is strange that I cannot tell you its size. Its face was far above me, yet memory does not show the shape as a giant’s. And I do not know whether it stood, or seemed to stand, on the far side of the water or on the water itself.
Though this light stood motionless, my glimpse of the face was as swift as a true flash of lightning. I could not bear it for longer. Not my eyes only, but my heart and blood and very brain were too weak for that. A monster—the Shadowbrute that I and all Glome had imagined—would have subdued me less than the beauty this face wore. And I think anger (what men call anger) would have been more supportable than the passionless and measureless rejection with which it looked upon me. Though my body crouched where I could almost have touched his feet, his eyes seemed to send me from him to an endless distance. He rejected, denied, answered, and (worst of all) he knew, all I had thought, done or been. A Greek verse says that even the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessings, debatings, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my own eyes by myself. You, who read my book, judge. Was it so? Or, at least, had it been so in the very past, before this god changed the past? And if they can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?
The thunder had ceased, I think, the moment the still light came. There was great silence when the god spoke to me. And as there was no anger (what men call anger) in his face, so there was none in his voice. It was unmoved and sweet; like a bird singing on the branch above a hanged man.
‘Now Psyche goes out in exile. Now she must hunger and thirst and tread hard roads. Those against whom I cannot fight must do their will upon her. You, woman, shall know yourself and your work. You also shall be Psyche.’
The voice and the light both ended together as if one knife had cut them short. Then, in the silence, I heard again the noise of the weeping.
I never heard weeping like that before or after, not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.
I rose to go to her. But already the weeping was further away. She went wailing far off to my right, down to the end of the valley where I had never been, where doubtless it fell away or dropped in sheer cliffs towards the south. And I could not cross the stream. It would not even drown me. It would bruise and freeze and bemire me, but somehow whenever I grasped a rock—earth was no use now, for great slabs of the bank were slipping into the current every moment—I found I was still on this side. Sometimes I could not even find the river—I was so bewildered in the dark, and all the ground was now little better than a swamp, so that pools and new-formed brooks lured me now this way, now that.
I cannot remember more of that night. When day began to break, I could see what the god’s anger had done to the valley. It was all bare rock, raw earth, and foul water; trees, bushes, sheep, and here and there a deer, floated in it. If I could have crossed the first river in the night it would not have profited me; I should have reached only the narrow bank of mud between it and the next. Even now I could not help calling out Psyche’s name, calling till my voice was gone, but I knew it was foolishness. I had heard her leaving the valley. She had already gone into the exile which the god foretold. She had begun to wander, weeping, from land to land; weeping for her lover, not (I mustn’t so cheat myself) for me.
I went and found Gram; a wet, shivering wretch he was, who gave one scared glance at my bandaged arm, and no more, and asked no questions. We ate food from the saddle-bags and began our journey. The weather was fair enough.
I looked on the things about me with a new eye. Now that I’d proved for certain that the gods are and that they hated me, it seemed that I had nothing to do but to wait for my punishment. I wondered on which dangerous edge the horse would slip and fling us down a few hundred feet into a gulley; or what tree would drop a branch on my neck as we rode under it; or whether my wound would corrupt and I should die that way. Often, remembering that it is sometimes the gods’ way to turn us into beasts, I put my hand up under my veil to see if I could feel cat’s fur, or dog’s muzzle, or hog’s tusks beginning to grow there. Yet with it all I was not afraid, never less. It is a strange, yet somehow a quiet and steady thing, to look round on earth and grass and the sky and say in one’s heart to each, ‘You are all my enemies now. None of you will ever do me good again. I see now only executioners.’
But I thought it most likely those words You also shall be Psyche meant that i
f she went into exile and wandering, I must do the same. And this, I had thought before, might very easily come about, if the men of Glome had no will to be ruled by a woman. But the god had been wide of the mark—so then they don’t know all things?—if he thought he could grieve me most by making my punishment the same as Psyche’s. If I could have borne hers as well as my own . . . but next best was to share. And with this I felt a sort of hard and cheerless strength rising in me. I would make a good beggarwoman. I was ugly; and Bardia had taught me how to fight.
Bardia . . . that set me thinking how much of my story I would tell him. Then, how much I would tell the Fox. I had not thought of this at all.
XVI
I crept in by the back parts of the palace and soon learned that my father had not yet come home from the hunting. But I went as soft and slinking to my place as if he had. When it became clear to my own mind (it did not at first) that I was hiding now not from the King but from the Fox, it was a trouble to me. Always before he had been my refuge and comforter.
Poobi cried over my wound and when she had the bandage off—that part was bad—laid good dressings on it. That was hardly done, and I was eating (hungrily enough) when the Fox came.
‘Daughter, daughter,’ he said. ‘Praise the gods who have sent you back. I have been in pain for you all day. Where have you been?’
‘To the Mountain, grandfather,’ said I, keeping my left arm out of sight. This was the first of my difficulties. I could not tell him of the self-wounding. I knew, now I saw him (I had not thought of it before), that he would rebuke me for putting that kind of force upon Psyche. One of his maxims was that if we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content ‘and not bring a mercenary army to our aid.’ (He meant passions.)