The Man Who Died (2 page)

And the stranger had compassion on them again, for he knew that they
would respond best to gentleness, giving back a clumsy gentleness again.

"Do not be afraid," he said to them gently. "Let me stay a little while
with you. I shall not stay long. And then I shall go away for ever. But
do not be afraid. No harm will come to you through me."

They believed him at once, yet the fear did not leave them. And they
said:

"Stay, master, while ever you will. Rest! Rest quietly!" But they were
afraid.

So he let them be, and the peasant went away with the ass. The sun had
risen bright, and in the dark house with the door shut, the man was again
as if in the tomb. So he said to the woman: "I would lie in the yard."

And she swept the yard for him, and laid him a mat, and he lay down under
the wall in the morning sun. There he saw the first green leaves spurting
like flames from the ends of the enclosed fig tree, out of the bareness
to the sky of spring above. But the man who had died could not look, he
only lay quite still in the sun, which was not yet too hot, and had no
desire in him, not even to move. But he lay with his thin legs in the
sun, his black, perfumed hair falling into the hollows of his neck, and
his thin, colourless arms utterly inert. As he lay there, the hens
clucked, and scratched, and the escaped cock, caught and tied by the leg
again, cowered in a corner.

The peasant woman was frightened. She came peeping, and, seeing him never
move, feared to have a dead man in the yard. But the sun had grown
stronger, he opened his eyes and looked at her. And now she was
frightened of the man who was alive, but spoke nothing.

He opened his eyes, and saw the world again bright as glass. It was life,
in which he had no share any more. But it shone outside him, blue sky,
and a bare fig tree with little jets of green leaf. Bright as glass, and
he was not of it, for desire had failed.

Yet he was there, and not extinguished. The day passed in a kind of coma,
and at evening he went into the house. The peasant man came home, but he
was frightened, and had nothing to say. The stranger, too, ate of the
mess of beans, a little. Then he washed his hands and turned to the wall,
and was silent. The peasants were silent too. They watched their guest
sleep. Sleep was so near death he could still sleep.

Yet when the sun came up, he went again to lie in the yard. The sun was
the one thing that drew him and swayed him, and he still wanted to feel
the cool air of the morning in his nostrils, see the pale sky overhead.
He still hated to be shut up.

As he came out, the young cock crowed. It was a diminished, pinched cry,
but there was that in the voice of the bird stronger than chagrin. It was
the necessity to live, and even to cry out the triumph of life. The man
who had died stood and watched the cock who had escaped and been caught,
ruffling himself up, rising forward on his toes, throwing up his head,
and parting his beak in another challenge from life to death. The brave
sounds rang out, and though they were diminished by the cord round the
bird's leg, they were not cut off. The man who had died looked nakedly on
life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy
or subtle wave–crests, foam–tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a
black and orange cock or the green flame–tongues out of the extremes of
the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring,
glowing with desire and with assertion. They came like crests of foam,
out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible
sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet
deathless in their coming. The man who had died looked on the great swing
into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer their
tremulous desire to exist and to be. He heard instead their ringing,
ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing.

The man lay still, with eyes that had died now wide open and darkly
still, seeing the everlasting resoluteness of life. And the cock, with
the flat, brilliant glance, glanced back at him, with a bird's
half–seeing look. And always the man who had died saw not the bird alone,
but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest. He
watched the queer, beaky motion of the creature as it gobbled into itself
the scraps of food; its glancing of the eye of life, ever alert and
watchful, over–weening and cautious, and the voice of its life, crowing
triumph and assertion, yet strangled by a cord of circumstance. He seemed
to hear the queer speech of very life, as the cock triumphantly imitated
the clucking of the favourite hen, when she had laid an egg, a clucking
which still had, in the male bird, the hollow chagrin of the cord round
his leg. And when the man threw a bit of bread to the cock, it called
with an extraordinary cooing tenderness, tousling and saving the morsel
for the hens. The hens ran up greedily, and carried the morsel away
beyond the reach of the string.

Then, walking complacently after them, suddenly the male bird's leg would
hitch at the end of his tether, and he would yield with a kind of
collapse. His flag fell, he seemed to diminish, he would huddle in the
shade. And he was young, his tail–feathers, glossy as they were, were not
fully grown. It was not till evening again that the tide of life in him
made him forget. Then when his favourite hen came strolling unconcernedly
near him, emitting the lure, he pounced on her with all his feathers
vibrating. And the man who had died watched the unsteady, rocking
vibration of the bent bird, and it was not the bird he saw, but one
wave–tip of life overlapping for a minute another, in the tide of the
swaying ocean of life. And the destiny of life seemed more fierce and
compulsive to him even than the destiny of death. The doom of death was a
shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of
life.

At twilight the peasant came home with the ass, and he said: "Master! It
is said that the body was stolen from the garden, and the tomb is empty,
and the soldiers are taken away, accursed Romans! And the women are there
to weep."

The man who had died looked at the man who had not died.

"It is well," he said. "Say nothing, and we are safe."

And the peasant was relieved. He looked rather dirty and stupid, and even
as much flaminess as that of the young cock, which he had tied by. the
leg, would never glow in him. He was without fire. But the man who had
died thought to himself:

"Why, then, should he be lifted up? Clods of earth are turned over for
refreshment, they are not to be lifted up. Let the earth remain earthy,
and hold its own against the sky. I was to seek to lift it up. I was
wrong to try to interfere. The ploughshare of devastation will be set in
the soil of Judea, and the life of this peasant will be overturned like
the sods of the field. No man can save the earth from tillage. It is
tillage, not salvation…"

So he saw the man, the peasant, with compassion; but the man who had died
no longer wished to interfere in the soul of the man who had not died,
and who could never die, save to return to earth. Let him return to earth
in his own good hour, and let no one try to interfere when the earth
claims her own.

So the man with scars let the peasant go from him, for the peasant had no
rebirth in him. Yet the man who had died said to himself: "He is my
host."

And at dawn, when he was better, the man who had died rose up, and on
slow, sore feet retraced his way to the garden. For he had been betrayed
in a garden, and buried in a garden. And as he turned round the screen of
laurels, near the rock–face, he saw a woman hovering by the tomb, a woman
in blue and yellow. She peeped again into the mouth of the hole, that was
like a deep cupboard. But still there was nothing. And she wrung her
hands and wept. And as she turned away, she saw the man in white,
standing by the laurels, and she gave a cry, thinking it might be a spy,
and she said:

"They have taken him away!"

So he said to her:

"Madeleine!"

Then she reeled as if she would fall, for she knew him. And he said to
her:

"Madeleine! Do not be afraid. I am alive. They took me down too soon, so
I came back to life. Then I was sheltered in a house."

She did not know what to say, but fell at his feet to kiss them.

"Don't touch me, Madeleine," he said. "Not yet! I am not yet healed and
in touch with men."

So she wept because she did not know what to do. And he said:

"Let us go aside, among the bushes, where we can speak unseen."

So in her blue mantle and her yellow robe, she followed him among the
trees, and he sat down under a myrtle bush. And he said:

"I am not yet quite come to. Madeleine, what is to be done next?"

"Master!" she said. "Oh, we have wept for you! And will you come back to
us?"

"What is finished is finished, and for me the end is past," he said. "The
stream will run till no more rains fill it, then it will dry up. For me,
that life is over."

"And will you give up your triumph?" she said sadly.

"My triumph," he said, "is that I am not dead. I have outlived my mission
and know no more of it. It is my triumph. I have survived the day and the
death of my interference, and am still a man. I am young still,
Madeleine, not even come to middle age. I am glad all that is over. It
had to be. But now I am glad it is over, and the day of my interference
is done. The teacher and the saviour are dead in me; now I can go about
my business, into my own single life."

She heard him, and did not fully understand. But what he said made her
feel disappointed.

"But you will come back to us?" she said, insisting.

"I don't know what I shall do," he said. "When I am healed, I shall know
better. But my mission is over, and my teaching is finished, and death
has saved me from my own salvation. Oh, Madeleine, I want to take my
single way in life, which is my portion. My public life is over, the life
of my self–importance. Now I can wait on life, and say nothing, and have
no one betray me. I wanted to be greater than the limits of my hands and
feet, so I brought betrayal on myself. And I know I wronged Judas, my
poor Judas. For I have died, and now I know my own limits. Now I can live
without striving to sway others any more. For my reach ends in my
fingertips, and my stride is no longer than the ends of my toes. Yet I
would embrace multitudes, I who have never truly embraced even one. But
Judas and the high priests saved me from my own salvation, and soon I can
turn to my destiny like a bather in the sea at dawn, who has just come
down to the shore alone."

"Do you want to be alone henceforward?" she asked. "And was your mission
nothing? Was it all untrue?"

"Nay!" he said. "Neither were your lovers in the past nothing. They were
much to you, but you took more than you gave. Then you came to me for
salvation from your own excess. And I, in my mission, I too ran to
excess. I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So
Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation.
Don't run to excess now in living, Madeleine. It only means another
death."

She pondered bitterly, for the need for excessive giving was in her, and
she could not bear to be denied.

"And will you not come back to us?" she said. "Have you risen for
yourself alone?"

He heard the sarcasm in her voice, and looked at her beautiful face which
still was dense with excessive need for salvation from the woman she had
been, the female who had caught men at her will. The cloud of necessity
was on her, to be saved from the old, wilful Eve, who had embraced many
men and taken more than she gave. Now the other doom was on her. She
wanted to give without taking. And that, too, is hard, and cruel to the
warm body.

"I have not risen from the dead in order to seek death again," he said.

She glanced up at him, and saw the weariness settling again on his waxy
face, and the vast disillusion in his dark eyes, and the underlying
indifference. He felt her glance, and said to himself:

"Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen
up different from their expectation."

"But you will come to us, to see us, us who love you?" she said.

He laughed a little and said:

"Ah, yes." Then he added: "Have you a little money? Will you give me a
little money? I owe it."

She had not much, but it pleased her to give it to him.

"Do you think," he said to her, "that I might come and live with you in
your house?"

She looked up at him with large blue eyes, that gleamed strangely.

"Now?" she said with peculiar triumph.

And he, who shrank now from triumph of any sort, his own or another's,
said:

"Not now! Later, when I am healed, and…and I am in touch with the
flesh."

The words faltered in him. And in his heart he knew he would never go to
live in her house. For the flicker of triumph had gleamed in her eyes;
the greed of giving. But she murmured in a humming rapture:

"Ah, you know I would give up everything to you."

"Nay!" he said. "I didn't ask that."

A revulsion from all the life he had known came over him again, the great
nausea of disillusion, and the spear–thrust through his bowels. He
crouched under the myrtle bushes, without strength. Yet his eyes were
open. And she looked at him again, and she saw that it was not the
Messiah. The Messiah had not risen. The enthusiasm and the burning purity
were gone, and the rapt youth. His youth was dead. This man was
middle–aged and disillusioned, with a certain terrible indifference, and
a resoluteness which love would never conquer. This was not the Master
she had so adored, the young, flamy, unphysical exalter of her soul. This
was nearer to the lovers she had known of old, but with a greater
indifference to the personal issue, and a lesser susceptibility.