FROM AN INKWELL

Southland Times, Issue 20014, 30 October 1926, Page 13

FROM AN INKWELL

THE PRAYER.

(By

“Brunnhilde.”)

“God, what is this Love that stains men’s eyes, chafing my shamed body with its rough ardour? Why do I shroud my face before it, as before something repulsive and unclean ? What power does it impart to men, making young girls shrink, avoiding them, and old women follow dumbly, in aching resignation ? I would know the thing I fear, Lord of all things. I would pit my youth against it, and my knowledge. Grant me that knowledge that I may recognise the crawling secret in then’s eyes. I would have wisdom —let me see.” And the prayer, heavy with unborn desires, and swelling hatred imprisoning them, fell into gaping darkness, where only the spirit may follow.

The clotted darkness broke before sharp flashes of lightning, driving the vague, shadowy forms deeper into the black. Truth was constantly fleeing from some indefinite shape, leaving it strangely empty, strangely futile, and the shudders that writhed in their shapelessness were not part of them, but left there by the screaming wind as it tore through them. Rain fell in chiselled outbursts; but it was not rain which formed the seething scales clinging to their fleshless bodies, lifted by the wind to reveal layer upon layer beneath. “Those are the scales of disillusionment,” said the Lord of the darkness, “the disillusion that man Is forever losing, the disillusion he will forever find. Pluck them off—they are easy to move, brittle and callous as the bodies on which they grow. But each, as it is loosened, falls on to another place, it is accepted as something new and real. There is nothing new, there is nothing real, only the shudder left by the wind, and the acrid flavour of man’s desire. In the feverish pursuit of reality, man loses himself, and what he is pursuing is his own shrivelled wraith. It was ever so; but the truth will not be acknowledged, because it reveals only his own loathly body steeped in decay, and his eyes will not believe they see clearly. The wind is crazy with the strength of his denials, and in sharp, sudden flashes the lash of his tongue blinds only himself with the chilled fury that is in him.”

On a swollen cloud above the foetid blackness, there was a garden blooming. All the beauty of the universe was there, in the lilac clustering against its green; in the amorous flame of the rhododendron and the tiny auriculas kneeling adoring beneath ; in the languid paleness of the glory pea, and the passionate crimson of the bleeding heart; beauty in the rich, dark peony roses, and the royal coolness of hyacinths and columbine; in the placid trust of the sweet scented stock and the flaunting daring of the red and yellow broom; in the warm japonica and pansies and timid daisies and fragile anemones sheltering beside a group of sturdy wallflowers. And all about them was the freshness of the heaven-sent green—the soft and tender green of the lilac, the deep, mysterious green of the starry lauristinus, the changing, dancing green of the rosebushes and the new season’s plants. Against a wall of ivy two people gazed deep, each into the eyes of the other, and saw reflected there the colours of the garden. But they mistook these for the beauty of a divine soul, and on their lips were the ecstasies loosened from their hearts. Caresses hung from their drooping lashes, so that all else was lost to them but the exquisite lilting of their hearts. They did not see that the lilac was no longer fresh, nor the rhododendrons flaming. They did not see that the tender green had lost its softness, and the mystery was being charged with suspense. They did not know that the cloud on which they stood was becoming puffed and bulbous with the force of their desires. They saw only themselves, and were content. - The lilac dropped, and all the flowers were dead. From the deadly green around them, a dark vapour crept upwards, till it reached their eyes and hair, and in the heart of each was a sudden fear. Their heavy eye-lids closed, to shut out the foul thing that had come to them. But the stench of its pitiless poison invaded their nostrils and their ears The cloud burst, and all that remained were their charred bodies writhing in the wreckage. • * * • The place was the same; but what had been a cloud had taken more definite substance, heart-shaped, and more solid. Green shoots were appearing on the trees, and they could be discovered not dead, but sleeping. In the dank earth life slumbered and awoke, bringing the sweetness of living with it. The air lost its harshness and was clean, so that somewhere a bird found its first, feeble note. And only then could the rosy child be seen, gurgling with laughter beneath the new tender green of the lilac bush.