Till we have Faces

1. I

Not many days have passed since I wrote those words No answer, but I must unroll my book again. It would be better to re–write it from the beginning, but I think there’s no time for that. Weakness comes on me fast, and Arnom shakes his head and tells me I must rest. They think I don’t know they have sent a message to Daaran.

Since I cannot mend the book, I must add to it. To leave it as it was would be to die perjured; I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it. What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant. I found I must set down (for I was speaking as before judges and must not lie) passions and thoughts of my own which I had clean forgotten. The past which I wrote down was not the past that I thought I had (all these years) been remembering. I did not, even when I had finished the book, see clearly many things that I see now. The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

Very early in the writing there came also a stroke from without. While I related my first years, when I wrote how Redival and I built mud houses in the garden, a thousand other things came back into my mind, all about those days when there was no Psyche and no Fox; only I and Redival. Catching tadpoles in the brook, hiding from Batta in the hay, waiting at the door of the hall when our father gave a feast and wheedling titbits out of the slaves as they went in and out. And I thought, how terribly she changed. This, all within my own mind. But then the stroke from without. On top of many other hindrances came word of an embassy from the Great King who lives to the South and East.

“Another plague,” said I. And when the strangers came (and there must be hours of talk, and a feast for them afterwards) I liked them none the better for finding that their chief man was a eunuch. Eunuchs are very great men at that court. This one was the fattest man I ever saw, so fat his eyes could hardly see over his cheeks, all shining and reeking with oil, and tricked out with as much doll–finery as one of Ungit’s girls. But as he talked and talked I began to think there was a faint likeness in him to someone I had seen long ago. And, as we do, I chased it and gave it up, and chased it and gave it up again, till suddenly, when I least thought of it, the truth started into my mind and I shouted out, “Tarin!”

“Oh yes, Queen, oh yes,” said he, spiteful–pleased (I thought) and leering. “Oh yes, I was him you called Tarin. Your father did not love me, Queen, did he? But … te–hee, te–hee … he made my fortune. Oh yes, he set me on the right road. With two cuts of a razor. But for him I should not have been the great man I am now.”

I wished him joy of his advancement.

“Thank you, Queen, thank you. It is very good. And to think (te–hee) that but for your father’s temper I might have gone on carrying a shield in the guard of a little barbarous king whose whole kingdom could be put into one corner of my master’s hunting park and never be noticed! You will not be angry, no?”

I said I had always heard that the Great King had an admirable park.

“And your sister, Queen?” said the eunuch. “Ah, she was a pretty little girl … though, te–hee, te–hee, I’ve had finer women through my hands since … is she still alive?”

“She is the Queen of Phars,” said I.

“Ah, so. Phars. I remember. One forgets the names of all these little countries. Yes … a pretty little girl. I took pity on her. She was lonely.”

“Lonely?” said I.

“Oh yes, yes, very lonely. After the other princess, the baby, came. She used to say, ‘First of all Orual loved me much; then the Fox came and she loved me little; then the baby came and she loved me not at all.’ So she was lonely. I was sorry for her … te–hee–hee … Oh, I was a fine young fellow then. Half the girls in Glome were in love with me.” I led him back to our affairs of state.

This was only the first stroke, a light one; the first snowflake of the winter that I was entering, regarded only because it tells us what’s to come. I was by no means sure that Tarin spoke truly. I am sure still that Redival was false and a fool. And for her folly the gods themselves cannot blame me; she had that from her father. But one thing was certain; I had never thought at all how it might be with her when I turned first to the Fox and then to Psyche. For it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill–used one. She had her gold curls, hadn’t she?

So back to my writing. And the continual labour of mind to which it put me began to overflow into my sleep. It was a labour of sifting and sorting, separating motive from motive and both from pretext; and this same sorting went on every night in my dreams, but in a changed fashion. I thought I had before me a huge, hopeless pile of seeds, wheat, barley, poppy, rye, millet, what not? and I must sort them out and make separate piles, each all of one kind. Why I must do it, I did not know; but infinite punishment would fall upon me if I rested a moment from my labour or if, when all was done, a single seed were in the wrong pile. In waking life a man would know the task impossible. The torment of the dream was that, there, it could conceivably be done. There was one chance in ten thousand of finishing the labour in time, and one in a hundred thousand of making no mistake. It was all but certain I should fail, and be punished; but not certain. And so to it: searching, peering, picking up each seed between finger and thumb. Yet not always finger and thumb. For in some dreams, more madly still, I became a little ant, and the seeds were as big as millstones; and labouring with all my might, till my six legs cracked, I carried them to their places; holding them in front of me as ants do, loads bigger than myself.

One thing that shows how wholly the gods kept me to my two labours, the day’s and the night’s, is that all this time I hardly gave Bardia a thought, save to grumble at his absence because it meant that I was more hindered in my writing. While the rage of it lasted nothing seemed to matter a straw except finishing my book. Of Bardia I only said (once and again), “Does he mean to slug abed for the rest of his life?” or, “It’s that wife of his.”

Then there came a day when that last line of the book (they have no answer) was still wet, and I found myself listening to Arnom and understanding, as if for the first time, what his looks and voice meant. “Do you mean,” I cried, “that the Lord Bardia is in danger?”

“He’s very weak, Queen,” said the priest. “I wish the Fox were with us. We are bunglers, we of Glome. It seems to me that Bardia has no strength or spirit to fight the sickness.”

“Good gods,” said I, “why did you not make me understand this before? Ho! Slave! My horse. I will go and see him.”

Arnom was an old and trusted counsellor now. He laid his hand on my arm. “Queen,” he said gently and very gravely, “it would make him the less likely to recover if you now went to him.”

“Do I carry such an infection about me?” said I. “Is there death in my aspect, even through a veil?”

“Bardia is your loyalest and most loving subject,” said Arnom. “To see you would call up all his powers; perhaps crack them. He’d rouse himself to his duty and courtesy. A hundred affairs of state on which he meant to speak to you would crowd into his mind. He’d rack his brains to remember things he has forgotten for these last nine days. It might kill him. Leave him to drowse and dream. It’s his best chance now.”

It was as bitter a truth as I’d ever tasted, but I drank it. Would I not have crouched silent in my own dungeons as long as Arnom bade me if it would add one featherweight to Bardia’s chance of life? Three days I bore it (I, the old fool, with hanging dugs and shrivelled flanks). On the fourth I said, “I can bear it no longer.” On the fifth Arnom came to me, himself weeping, and I knew his tidings without words. And this is a strange folly, that what seemed to me worst of all was that Bardia had died without ever hearing what it would have shamed him to hear. It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, once only, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, “Bardia, I loved you.”

When they laid him on the pyre I could only stand by to honour him. Because I was neither his wife nor kin, I might not wail nor beat the breast for him. Ah, if I could have beaten the breast, I would have put on steel gloves or hedgehog skins to do it.

I waited three days, as the custom is, and then went to comfort (so they call it) his widow. It was not only duty and usage that drove me. Because he had loved her she was, in a way, surely enough, the enemy; yet who else in the whole world could now talk to me?

They brought me into the upper room in her house where she sat at her spinning; very pale, but very calm. Calmer than I. Once I had been surprised that she was so much less beautiful than report had made her. Now, in her later years, she had won a new kind of beauty; it was a proud, still sort of face.

“Lady—Ansit,” I said, taking both her hands (she had not time to get them away from me), “what shall I say to you? How can I speak of him and not say that your loss is indeed without measure? And that’s no comfort. Unless you can think even now that it is better to have had and lost such a husband than to enjoy any man else in the world for ever.”

“The Queen does me great honour,” said Ansit, pulling her hands out of mine so as to stand with them crossed on her breast, her eyes cast down, in the court fashion.

“Oh, dear Lady, un–queen me a little, I beseech you. Is it as if you and I had never met till yesterday? After yours (never think I’d compare them) my loss is greatest. I pray you, your seat again. And your distaff; we shall talk better to that movement. And you will let me sit here beside you?”

She sat down and resumed her spinning; her face at rest and her lips a little pursed, very housewifely. She would give me no help.

“It was very unlooked for,” said I. “Did you at first see any danger in this sickness?”

“Yes.”

“Did you so? To me Arnom said it ought to have been a light matter.”

“He said that to me, Queen. He said it would be a light matter for a man who had all his strength to fight it.”

“Strength? But the Lord Bardia was a strong man.”

“Yes; as a tree that is eaten away within.”

“Eaten away? And with what? I never knew this,”

“I suppose not, Queen. He was tired. He had worked himself out; or been worked. Ten years ago he should have given over and lived as old men do. He was not made of iron or brass, but flesh.”

“He never looked nor spoke like an old man.”

“Perhaps you never saw him, Queen, at the times when a man shows his weariness. You never saw his haggard face in early morning. Nor heard his groan when you (because you had sworn to do it) must shake him and force him to rise. You never saw him come home late from the palace, hungry, yet too tired to eat. How should you, Queen? I was only his wife. He was too well–mannered, you know, to nod and yawn in a Queen’s house.”

“You mean that his work——?”

“Five wars, thirty–one battles, nineteen embassies, taking thought for this and thought for that, speaking a word in one ear, and another, and another, soothing this man and scaring that and flattering a third, devising, consulting, remembering, guessing, forecasting … and the Pillar Room and the Pillar Room. The mines are not the only place where a man can be worked to death.”

This was worse than the worst I had looked for. A flash of anger passed through me, then a horror of misgiving; could it (but that was fantastical) be true? But the misery of that mere suspicion made my own voice almost humble.

“You speak in your sorrow, Lady. But (forgive me) this is mere fantasy. I never spared myself more than him. Do you tell me a strong man’d break under the burden a woman’s bearing still?”

“Who that knows men would doubt it? They’re harder, but we’re tougher. They do not live longer than we. They do not weather a sickness better. Men are brittle. And you, Queen, were the younger.”

My heart shrivelled up cold and abject within me. “If this is true,” said I, “I’ve been deceived. If he had dropped but a word of it, I’d have taken every burden from him; sent him home for ever, loaded with every honour I could give.”

“You know him little, Queen, if you think he’d ever have spoken that word. Oh, you have been a fortunate queen; no prince ever had more loving servants.”

“I know I have had loving servants. Do you grudge me that? Even now in your grief, will your heart serve you to grudge me that? Do you mock me because that is the only sort of love I ever had or could have? No husband; no child. And you—you who have had all——”

“All you left me, Queen.”

“Left you, fool? What mad thought is in your mind?”

“Oh, I know well enough that you were not lovers. You left me that. The divine blood will not mix with subjects’, they say. You left me my share. When you had used him, you would let him steal home to me; until you needed him again. After weeks and months at the wars—you and he night and day together, sharing the councils, the dangers, the victories, the soldiers’ bread, the very jokes—he could come back to me, each time a little thinner and greyer and with a few more scars; and fall asleep before his supper was down; and cry out in his dream, ‘Quick, on the right there. The Queen’s in danger.’ And next morning—the Queen’s a wonderful early riser in Glome—the Pillar Room again. I’ll not deny it; I had what you left of him.”

Her look and voice now were such as no woman could mistake.

“What?” I cried. “Is it possible you’re jealous?”

She said nothing.

I sprang to my feet and pulled aside my veil. “Look, look, you fool!” I cried. “Are you jealous of this?”

She started back from me, gazing, so that for a moment I wondered if my face were a terror to her. But it was not fear that moved her. For the first time that prim mouth of hers twitched. The tears began to gather in her eyes. “Oh,” she gasped, “oh. I never knew … you also … ?”

“What?”

“You loved him. You’ve suffered too. We both … ”

She was weeping; and I. Next moment we were in each other’s arms. It was the strangest thing that our hatred should die out at the very moment she first knew her husband was the man I loved. It would have been far otherwise if he were still alive; but on that desolate island (our blank, un–Bardia’d life) we were the only two castaways. We spoke a language, so to call it, which no one else in the huge heedless world could understand. Yet it was a language only of sobs. We could not even begin to speak of him in words; that would have unsheathed both daggers at once.

The softness did not last. I have seen something like this happen in a battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped our cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face; friends for a moment, and then at once enemies again and for ever. So here.

Presently (I have no memory how it came about) we were apart again; I now resuming my veil; her face hard and cold.

“Well!” I was saying. “You have made me little better than the Lord Bardia’s murderer. It was your aim to torture me. And you chose your torture well. Be content; you are avenged. But tell me this. Did you speak only to wound, or did you believe what you said?”

“Believe? I do not believe. I know, that your queenship drank up his blood year by year and ate out his life.”

“Then why did you not tell me? A word from you would have sufficed. Or are you like the gods who will speak only when it is too late?”

“Tell you?” she said, looking at me with a sort of proud wonder. “Tell you? And so take away from him his work, which was his life (for what’s any woman to a man and a soldier in the end?) and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?”

“And yet—he would have been yours.”

“But I would be his. I was his wife, not his doxy. He was my husband, not my house–dog. He was to live the life he thought best and fittest for a great man; not that which would most pleasure me. You have taken Ilerdia now too. He will turn his back on his mother’s house more and more; he will seek strange lands, and be occupied with matters I don’t understand, and go where I can’t follow, and be daily less mine; more his own and the world’s. Do you think I’d lift up my little finger if lifting it would stop it?”

“And you could—and you can—bear that?”

“You ask that? Oh, Queen Orual, I begin to think you know nothing of love. Or no; I’ll not say that. Yours is Queen’s love, not commoners’. Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods. Like the Shadowbrute. They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don’t they?”

“Woman,” said I, “I saved his life. Thankless fool! You’d have been widowed many a year sooner if I’d not been there one day on the field of Ingarn—and got that wound which still aches at every change of weather. Where are your scars?”

“Where a woman’s are when she has borne eight children. Yes. Saved his life. Why, you had use for it. Thrift, Queen Orual. Too good a sword to throw away. Faugh! You’re full fed. Gorged with other men’s lives; women’s too. Bardia’s; mine; the Fox’s; your sister’s; both your sisters’.”

“It’s enough,” I cried. The air in her room was shot with crimson. It came horribly in my mind that if I ordered her to torture and death no one could save her. Arnom would murmur. Ilerdia would turn rebel. But she’d be twisting (cockchafer–like) on a sharp stake before anyone could help her.

Something (if it was the gods, I bless their name) made me unable to do this. I got somehow to the door. Then I turned and said to her:

“If you had spoken thus to my father, he’d have had your tongue cut out.”

“What? Afraid of it?” said she.

As I rode homeward I said to myself, “She shall have her Ilerdia back. He can go and live on his lands. Turn oaf. Grow fat and mumble between his belches about the price of bullocks. I would have made him a great man. Now he shall be nothing. He may thank his mother. She’ll not have need to say again that I devour her men–folk.”

But I did none of these things to Ilerdia.

And now those divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work. My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in. For it was all true; truer than Ansit could know. I had rejoiced when there was a press of work, had heaped up needless work, to keep him late at the palace; plied him with questions for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice. Anything to put off the moment when he would go and leave me to my emptiness. And I had hated him for going. Punished him too. Men have a hundred ways of mocking a man who’s thought to love his wife too well, and Bardia was defenceless; everyone knew he’d married an undowered girl, and Ansit boasted that she’d no need (like most) to seek out the ugliest girls in the slave market for her household. I never mocked him myself; but I had endless sleights and contrivances (behind my veil) for pushing the talk in such directions as, I knew, would make others mock him. I hated them for doing it, but I had a bittersweet pleasure at his clouded face. Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love can grow to be nine–tenths hatred and still call itself love. One thing’s certain; in my mad midnight fantasies (Ansit dead, or, better still, proved whore, witch, or traitress) when he was at last to be seeking my love, I always had him begin by imploring my forgiveness. Sometimes he had hard work to get it. I would bring him within an ace of killing himself first.

But the result, when all those bitter hours were over, was a strange one. The craving for Bardia was ended. No one will believe this who has not lived long and looked hard, so that he knows how suddenly a passion which has for years been wrapped round the whole heart will dry up and wither. Perhaps in the soul, as in the soil, those growths that show the brightest colours and put forth the most overpowering smell have not always the deepest root. Or perhaps it’s age that does it. But most of all, I think, it was this. My love for Bardia (not Bardia himself) had become to me a sickening thing. I had been dragged up and out on to such heights and precipices of truth, that I came into an air where it could not live. It stank; a gnawing greed for one to whom I could give nothing, of whom I craved all. Heaven knows how we had tormented him, Ansit and I. For it needs no Oedipus to guess that, many and many a night, her jealousy of me had welcomed him home, late from the palace, to a bitter hearth.

But when the craving went, nearly all that I called myself went with it. It was as if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap. And now I thought I had come to the very bottom and that the gods could tell me no worse.

2. II

A few days after I had been with Ansit came the rite of the Year’s birth. This is when the Priest is shut up in the house of Ungit from sunset, and on the following noon fights his way out and is said to be born. But of course, like all these sacred matters, it is and it is not (so that it was easy for the Fox to show its manifold contradictions). For the fight is with wooden swords, and instead of blood wine is poured over the combatants, and though they say he is shut into the house, it’s only the great door to the city and the west that is shut, and the two smaller doors at the other end are open and common worshippers go in and out at will.

When there is a King in Glome he has to go in with the Priest at sunset and remain in the house till the Birth. But it is unlawful for a virgin to be present at the things which are done in the house that night; so I go in, by the north door, only an hour before the Birth. (The others who have to be there are one of the nobles, and one of the elders, and one of the people; chosen in a sacred manner of which I am not allowed to write.)

That year it was a fresh morning, very sweet, with a light wind from the south; and because of that freshness out of doors, I felt it, more than ever, a horrible thing to go into the dark holiness of Ungit’s house. I have (I think) said before that Arnom had made it a little lighter and cleaner. But it was still an imprisoning, smothering sort of place; and especially on the morning of the Birth, when there had been censing and slaughtering, and pouring of wine and pouring of blood, and dancing and feasting and towsing of girls, and burning of fat, all night long. There was as much taint of sweat and foul air as (in a mortal’s house) would have set the laziest slut to opening windows, scouring, and sweeping.

I came and sat on the flat stone which is my place, opposite the sacred stone which is Ungit herself; the new, woman–shaped image a little on my left. Arnom’s seat was on my right. He was in his mask, of course, nodding with weariness. They were beating the drums, but not loud, and otherwise there was silence.

I saw the terrible girls sitting in rows down both sides of the house, each cross–legged at the door of her cell. Thus they sat year after year (and usually barren after a few seasons) till they turned into the toothless crones who were hobbling about the floor, tending fires and sweeping—sometimes, after a swift glance round, stooping as suddenly as a bird to pick up a coin or a half–gnawed bone and hide it in their gowns. And I thought how the seed of men that might have gone to make hardy boys and fruitful girls was drained into that house, and nothing given back; and how the silver that men had earned hard and needed was also drained in there, and nothing given back; and how the girls themselves were devoured and were given nothing back.

Then I looked at Ungit herself. She had not, like most sacred stones, fallen from the sky. The story was that, at the very beginning, she had pushed her way up out of the earth; a foretaste of, or an ambassador from, whatever things may live and work down there, one below the other, all the way down, under the dark and weight and heat. I have said she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces. For she was very uneven, lumpy and furrowed, so that, as when we gaze into a fire, you could always see some face or other. She was now more rugged than ever because of all the blood they had poured over her in the night. In the little clots and chains of it I made out a face; a fancy at one moment, but then, once you had seen it, not to be evaded. A face such as you might see in a loaf, swollen, brooding, infinitely female. It was a little like Batta as I remembered her in certain of her moods. Batta, when we were very small, had her loving moods, even to me. I have run out into the garden to get free—and to get, as it were, freshened and cleansed—from her huge, hot, strong yet flabby–soft embraces, the smothering, engulfing tenacity of her.

“Yes,” I thought, “Ungit is very like Batta today.”

“Arnom,” said I, whispering, “who is Ungit?”

“I think, Queen,” said he (his voice strange out of the mask), “she signifies the earth, which is the womb and mother of all living things.” This was the new way of talking about the gods which Arnom, and others, had learned from the Fox.

“If she is the mother of all things,” said I, “in what way more is she the mother of the god of the Mountain?”

“He is the air and the sky; for we see the clouds coming up from the earth in mists and exhalations.”

“Then why do the stories sometimes say he’s her husband too?”

“That means that the sky by its showers makes the earth fruitful.”

“If that’s all they mean, why do they wrap it up in so strange a fashion?”

“Doubtless,” said Arnom (and I could tell that he was yawning inside the mask, being worn out with his vigil), “doubtless to hide it from the vulgar.”

I would torment him no more, but I said to myself, “It’s very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out (why not hold their tongues?) wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling.”

The drums went on. My back began to ache. Presently the little door on my right opened and a woman, a peasant, came in. You could see she had not come for the Birth feast, but on some more pressing matter of her own. She had done nothing (as even the poorest contrive for that feast) to make herself gay, and the tears were wet on her cheeks. She looked as if she had cried all night, and in her hands she held a live pigeon. One of the lesser priests came forward at once, took the tiny offering from her, slit it open with his stone knife, splashed the little shower of blood over Ungit (where it became like dribble from the mouth of the face I saw in her) and gave the body to one of the temple slaves. The peasant woman sank down on her face at Ungit’s feet. She lay there a very long time, so shaking that anyone could tell how bitterly she wept. But the weeping ceased. She rose up on her knees and put back her hair from her face and took a long breath. Then she rose to go, and as she turned I could look straight into her eyes. She was grave enough; and yet (I was very close to her and could not doubt it) it was as if a sponge had been passed over her. The trouble was soothed. She was calm, patient, able for whatever she had to do.

“Has Ungit comforted you, child?” I asked.

“Oh yes, Queen,” said the woman, her face almost brightening, “oh yes. Ungit has given me great comfort. There’s no goddess like Ungit.”

“Do you always pray to that Ungit,” said I (nodding toward the shapeless stone), “and not to that?” Here I nodded towards our new image, standing tall and straight in her robes and (whatever the Fox might say of it) the loveliest thing our land has ever seen.

“Oh, always this, Queen,” said she. “That other, the Greek Ungit, she wouldn’t understand my speech. She’s only for nobles and learned men. There’s no comfort in her.”

Soon after that it was noon and the sham fight at the western door had to be done and we all came out into the daylight; after Arnom. I had seen often enough before what met us there; the great mob, shouting, “He is born! He is born!” and whirling their rattles, and throwing wheat–seed into the air; all sweaty and struggling and climbing on one another’s backs to get a sight of Arnom and the rest of us. Today it struck me in a new way. It was the joy of the people that amazed me. There they stood, where they had waited for hours, so pressed together they could hardly breathe, each doubtless with a dozen cares and sorrows upon him (who has not?), yet every man and woman and the very children looking as if all the world was well because a man dressed up as a bird had walked out of a door after striking a few blows with a wooden sword. Even those who were knocked down in the press to see us made light of it and indeed laughed louder than the others. I saw two farmers whom I well knew for bitterest enemies (they’d wasted more of my time when I sat in judgement than half the remainder of my people put together) clap hands and cry, “He’s born!”, brothers for the moment.

I went home and into my own chamber to rest, for now that I am old that sitting on the flat stone wearies me cruelly. I sank into deep thought.

“Get up, girl,” said a voice. I opened my eyes. My father stood beside me. And instantly all the long years of my queenship shrank up small like a dream. How could I have believed in them? How could I ever have thought I should escape from the King? I got up from my bed obediently and stood before him. When I made to put on my veil, he said, “None of that folly, do you hear?” and I laid it obediently aside.

“Come with me to the Pillar Room,” he said.

I followed him down the stair (the whole palace was empty) and we went into the Pillar Room. He looked all round him, and I became very afraid because I felt sure he was looking for that mirror of his. But I had given it to Redival when she became Queen of Phars; and what would he do to me when he learned that I had stolen his favourite treasure? But he went to one corner of the room and found there (which were strange things to find in such a place) two pickaxes and a crowbar. “To your work, goblin,” he said, and made me take one of the picks. He began to break up the paved floor in the centre of the room, and I helped him. It was very hard labour because of the pain in my back. When we had lifted four or five of the big stone flags we found a dark hole, like a wide well, beneath them.

“Throw yourself down,” said the King, seizing me by the hand. And however I struggled, I could not free myself, and we both jumped together. When we had fallen a long way we alighted on our feet, nothing hurt by our fall. It was warmer down here and the air was hard to breathe, but it was not so dark that I could not see the place we were in. It was another Pillar Room, exactly like the one we had left, except that it was smaller and all made (floor, walls, and pillars) of raw earth. And here also my father looked about him, and once again I was afraid he would ask what I had done with his mirror. But instead, he went into a corner of the earthen room and there found two spades and put one into my hand and said, “Now, work. Do you mean to slug abed all your life?” So then we had to dig a hole in the centre of the room. And this time the labour was worse than before, for what we dug was all tough, clinging clay, so that you had rather to cut it out in squares with the spade than to dig it. And the place was stifling. But at last we had done so much that another black hole opened beneath us. This time I knew what he meant to do to me, so I tried to keep my hand from his. But he caught it and said:

“Do you begin to set your wits against mine? Throw yourself down.”

“Oh no, no, no; no further down; mercy!” said I.

“There’s no Fox to help you here,” said my father. “We’re far below any dens that foxes can dig. There’s hundreds of tons of earth between you and the deepest of them.” Then we leaped down into the hole, and fell further than before, but again alighted unhurt. It was far darker here, yet I could see that we were in yet another Pillar Room; but this was of living rock, and water trickled down the walls of it. Though it was so like the two shallower rooms, this was far the smallest. And as I looked I could see that it was getting smaller still. The roof was closing in on us. I tried to cry out to him, “If you’re not quick, we shall be buried,” but I was smothering and no voice came from me. Then I thought, “He doesn’t care. It’s nothing for him to be buried, for he’s dead already.”

“Who is Ungit?” said he, still holding my hand.

Then he led me across the floor; and, a long way off before we came to it, I saw that mirror on the wall, just where it always had been. At the sight of it my terror increased, and I fought with all my strength not to go on. But his hand had grown very big now and it was as soft and clinging as Batta’s arms, or as the tough clay we had been digging, or as the dough of a huge loaf. I was not so much dragged as sucked along till we stood right in front of the mirror. And in it I saw him, looking as he had looked that other day when he led me to the mirror long ago.

But my face was the face of Ungit as I had seen it that day in her house.

“Who is Ungit?” asked the King.

“I am Ungit.” My voice came wailing out of me and I found that I was in the cool daylight and in my own chamber. So it had been what we call a dream. But I must give warning that from this time onward they so drenched me with seeings that I cannot well discern dream from waking nor tell which is the truer. This vision, anyway, allowed no denial. Without question it was true. It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that Batta–thing, that all–devouring, womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web; I the swollen spider, squat at its centre, gorged with men’s stolen lives.

“I will not be Ungit,” said I. I got up, shivering as with fever, from my bed, and bolted the door. I took down my old sword, the very same that Bardia had taught me to use, and drew it. It looked such a happy thing (and it was indeed a most true, perfect, fortunate blade) that tears came into my eyes. “Sword,” said I, “you have had a happy life. You killed Argan. You saved Bardia. Now, for your masterpiece.”

It was all foolishness, though. The sword was too heavy for me now. My grip—think of a veined, claw–like hand, skinny knuckles—was childish. I would never be able to strike home; and I had seen enough of wars to know what a feeble thrust would do. This way of ceasing to be Ungit was now too hard for me. I sat down, the cold, small, helpless thing I was, on the edge of my bed, and thought again.

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

Of the things that followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what one only sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and waterspouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

The day passed somehow. All days pass, and that’s great comfort; unless there should be some terrible region in the deadlands where the day never passes. But when the house slept I wrapped myself in a dark cloak and took a stick to lean on; for I think the bodily weakness, which I die of now, must have begun about that time. Then a new thought came to me. My veil was no longer a means to be unknown. It revealed me; all men knew the veiled Queen. My disguise now would be to go bareface; there was hardly anyone who had seen me unveiled. So, for the first time in many years, I went out bareface; showed that face which many had said, more truly than they could know, was too dreadful to be seen. It would have shamed me no more to go buff–naked. For I thought I would look as like Ungit to them as I had seen myself to be in that mirror beneath the earth. As like Ungit? I was Ungit; I in her and she in me. Perhaps if any saw me, they would worship me. I had become what the people, and the old Priest, called holy.

I went out, as often before, by the little eastern doorway that opens on the herb–garden. And thence, with endless weariness, through the sleeping city. I thought they would not sleep so sound if they knew what dark thing hobbled past their windows. Once I heard a child cry; perhaps it had dreamed of me. “If the Shadowbrute begins coming down into the city, the people will be greatly afraid,” said the old Priest. If I were Ungit, I might be the Shadowbrute also. For the gods work in and out of one another as of us.

So at last, fainting with weariness, out beyond the city and down to the river; I myself had made it deep. The old Shennit, as she was before my works, would not, save in spate, have drowned even a crone.

I had to go a little way along the river to a place where I knew that the bank was high, so that I could fling myself down; for I doubted my courage to wade in and feel death first up to my knee, and then to my belly, and then to my neck, and still to go on. When I came to the high bank I took my girdle and tied my ankles together with it, lest, even in my old age, I might save my life, or lengthen my death, by swimming. Then I straightened myself, panting from the labour, and stood footfast, like a prisoner.

I hopped (what blending of misery and buffoonery it would have looked if I could have seen it!)—hopped with my strapped feet a little nearer to the edge.

A voice came from beyond the river: “Do not do it.”

Instantly—I had been freezing cold till now—a wave of fire passed over me; even down to my numb feet. It was the voice of a god. Who should know better than I? A god’s voice had once shattered my whole life. They are not to be mistaken. It may well be that, by trickery of priests, men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a mortal’s.

“Lord, who are you?” said I.

“Do not do it,” said the god. “You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. There is no chance after.”

“Lord, I am Ungit.”

But there was no answer. And that is another thing about the voices of the gods; when once they have ceased, though it is only a heartbeat ago and the bright, hard syllables, the heavy bars or mighty obelisks of sound, are still master in your ears, it is as if they had ceased a thousand years before, and to expect further utterance is like asking for an apple from a tree that fruited the day the world was made.

The voice of the god had not changed in all those years, but I had. There was no rebel in me now. I must not drown and doubtless should not be able to.

I crawled home, troubling the quiet city once more with my dark witch–shape and my tapping stick. And when I laid my head on my pillow it seemed but a moment before my women came to wake me; whether because the whole journey had been a dream or because my weariness (which would be no wonder) threw me into a very fast sleep.

3. III

Then the gods left me for some days to chew the strange bread they had given me. I was Ungit. What did it mean? Do the gods flow in and out of us as they flow in and out of each other? And again, they would not let me die till I had died. I knew there were certain initiations, far away at Eleusis in the Greeklands, whereby a man was said to die and live again before the soul left the body. But how could I go there? Then I remembered that conversation which his friends had with Socrates before he drank the hemlock, and how he said that true wisdom is the skill and practice of death. And I thought Socrates understood such matters better than the Fox, for in the same book he has said how the soul “is dragged back through the fear of the invisible”; so that I even wondered if he had not himself tasted this horror as I had tasted it in Psyche’s valley. But by the death which is wisdom I supposed he meant the death of our passions and desires and vain opinions. And immediately (it is terrible to be a fool) I thought I saw my way clear and not impossible. To say that I was Ungit meant that I was as ugly in soul as she; greedy, blood–gorged. But if I practised true philosophy, as Socrates meant it, I should change my ugly soul into a fair one. And this, the gods helping me, I would do. I would set about it at once.

The gods helping … but would they help? Nevertheless I must begin. And it seemed to me they would not help. I would set out boldly each morning to be just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts; but before they had finished dressing me I would find that I was back (and knew not how long I had been back) in some old rage, resentment, gnawing fantasy, or sullen bitterness. I could not hold out half an hour. And a horrible memory crept into my mind of those days when I had tried to mend the ugliness of my body with new devices in the way I did my hair or the colours I wore. I’d a cold fear that I was at the same work again. I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help?

Babai! A terrible, sheer thought, huge as a cliff, towered up before me; infinitely likely to be true. No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?) the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race, for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world; with it our destiny. How bitter this was, every ill–favoured woman will know. We have all had our dream of some other land, some other world, some other way of giving the prizes, which would bring us in as the conquerors; leave the smooth, rounded limbs, and the little pink and white faces, and the hair like burnished gold, far behind; their day ended, and ours come. But how if it’s not so at all? How if we were made to be dregs and refuse everywhere and everyway?

About this time there came (if you call it so) another dream. But it was not like a dream, for I went into my chamber an hour after noon (none of my women being there) and without lying down, or even sitting down, walked straight into the vision by merely opening the door. I found myself standing on the bank of a bright and great river. And on the further bank I saw a flock; of sheep, I thought. Then I considered them more closely, and I saw that they were all rams, high as horses, mightily horned, and their fleeces such bright gold that I could not look steadily at them. (There was deep, blue sky above them, and the grass was a luminous green like emerald, and there was a pool of very dark shadow, clear–edged, under every tree. The air of that country was sweet as music.) “Now those,” thought I, “are the rams of the gods. If I can steal but one golden flock off their sides, I shall have beauty. Redival’s ringlets were nothing to that wool.” And in my vision I was able to do what I had feared to do at the Shennit; for I went into the cold water, up to my knee, up to my belly, up to my neck, and then lost the bottom and swam and found the bottom again and came up out of the river into the pastures of the gods. And I walked forward over that holy turf with a good and glad heart. But all the golden rams came at me. They drew closer to one another as their onrush brought them closer to me, till it was a solid wall of living gold. And with terrible force their curled horns struck me and knocked me flat and their hooves trampled me. They were not doing it in anger. They rushed over me in their joy; perhaps they did not see me; certainly I was nothing in their minds. I understood it well. They butted and trampled me because their gladness led them on; the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

Yet they did not kill me. When they had gone over me, I lived and knew myself, and presently could stand on my feet. Then I saw that there was another mortal woman with me in the field. She did not seem to see me. She was walking slowly, carefully, along the hedge which bordered that grassland, scanning it like a gleaner, picking something out of it. Then I saw what. Bright gold hung in flecks upon the thorns. Of course! The rams had left some of their golden wool on them as they raced past. This she was gleaning, handful after handful, a rich harvest. What I had sought in vain by meeting the joyous and terrible brutes, she took at her leisure. She won without effort what utmost effort would not win for me.

I now despaired of ever ceasing to be Ungit. Though it was spring without, in me a winter which, I thought, must be everlasting, locked up all my powers. It was as if I were dead already, but not as the god, or Socrates, bade me die. Yet all the time I was able to go about my work, doing and saying whatever was needful, and no one knew that there was anything amiss. Indeed the dooms I gave, sitting on my judgment seat, about this time, were thought to be even wiser and more just than before; it was work on which I spent much pains and I know I did it well. But the prisoners and plaintiffs and witnesses and the rest now seemed to me more like shadows than real men. I did not care a straw (though I still laboured to discern) who had a right to the little field or who had stolen the cheeses.

I had only one comfort left me. However I might have devoured Bardia, I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong. And as a prisoner in a dungeon or a sick man on his bed makes much of any little shred of pleasure he still has, so I made much of this. And one day, when my work had been very wearisome, I took this book, as soon as I was free, and went out into the garden to comfort myself, and gorge myself with comfort, by reading over how I had cared for Psyche and taught her and tried to save her and wounded myself for her sake.

What followed was certainly vision and no dream. For it came upon me before I had sat down or unrolled the book. I walked into the vision with my bodily eyes wide open.

I was walking over burning sands, carrying an empty bowl. I knew well what I had to do. I must find the spring that rises from the river that flows in the deadlands, and fill it with the water of death and bring it back without spilling a drop and give it to Ungit. For in this vision it was not I who was Ungit; I was Ungit’s slave or prisoner and if I did all the tasks she set me perhaps she would let me go free. So I walked in the dry sand up to my ankles, white with sand to my middle, my throat rough with sand; unmitigated noon above me, and the sun so high that I had no shadow. And I longed for the water of death; for however bitter it was, it must surely be cold, coming from the sunless country. I walked for a hundred years. But at last the desert ended at the foot of some great mountains; crags and pinnacles and rotting cliffs that no one could climb. Rocks were loosened and fell from the heights all the time; their booming and clanging, as they bounced from one jag to another, and the thud when they fell on the sand, were the only sounds there. Looking at the waste of rock, I first thought it empty, and that what flickered over its hot surface were the shadows of clouds. But there were no clouds. Then I saw what it really was. Those mountains were alive with innumerable serpents and scorpions that scuttled and slithered over them continually. The place was a huge torture chamber, but the instruments were all living. And I knew that the well I was looking for rose in the very heart of these mountains.

“I can never get up,” said I.

I sat upon the sand gazing up at them, till I felt as if the flesh would be burned off my bones. Then at last there came a shadow. Oh, mercy of the gods, could it be a cloud? I looked up at the sky and was nearly blinded, for the sun was still straight above my head; I had come, it seemed, into that country where the day never passes. Yet at last, though the terrible light seemed to bore through my eyeballs into my brain, I saw something; black against the blue, but far too small for a cloud. Then by its circlings I knew it to be a bird. Then it wheeled and came lower and at last was plainly an eagle; but an eagle from the gods, far greater than those of the highlands in Phars. It lighted on the sand and looked at me. Its face was a little like the old Priest’s, but it was not he; it was a divine creature.

“Woman,” it said, “who are you?”

“Orual, Queen of Glome,” said I.

“Then it is not you that I was sent to help. What is that roll you carry in your hands?”

I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.

“It is my complaint against the gods,” said I.

The eagle clapped his wings and lifted his head and cried out with a loud voice, “She’s come at last. Here is the woman who has a complaint against the gods.”

Immediately a hundred echoes roared from the face of the mountain, “Here is the woman … a complaint against the gods … plaint against the gods.”

“Come,” said the eagle.

“Where?” said I.

“Come into court. Your case is to be heard.” And he called aloud once more, “She’s come. She’s come.” Then from every crack and hole in the mountains there came out dark things like men, so that there was a crowd of them all round me before I could fly. They seized on me and hustled me and passed me on from one to another, each shouting, towards the mountain–face, “Here she comes. Here is the woman”; and voices (as it seemed) from within the mountain answered them, “Bring her in. Bring her into court. Her case is to be heard.” I was dragged and pushed and sometimes lifted, up among the rocks, till at last a great black hole yawned before me. “Bring her in. The court waits,” came the voices. And with a sudden shock of cold I was hurried in out of the burning sunlight into the dark inwards of the mountain, and then further and further in, always in haste, always passed from hand to hand, and always with that din of shouts: “Here she is. She’s come at last. To the judge, to the judge.” Then the voices changed and grew quieter; and now it was, “Let her go. Make her stand up. Silence in the court. Silence for her complaint.”

I was free now from all their hands, alone (as I thought) in silent darkness. Then a sort of grey light came. I stood on a platform or pillar of rock in a cave so great that I could see neither the sides nor the roof of it. All round me, below me, up to the very edges of the stone I stood on, there surged a sort of unquiet darkness. But soon my eyes grew able to see things in that half–light. The darkness was alive. It was a great assembly, all staring upon me, and I uplifted on my perch above their heads. Never in peace or war have I seen so vast a concourse. There were tens of thousands of them, all silent; every face watching me. Among them I saw Batta, and the King my father, and the Fox, and Argan. They were all ghosts. In my foolishness I had not thought before how many dead there must be. The faces, one above the other (for the place was shaped that way) rose and rose and receded in the greyness till the very thought of counting—not the faces, that would be madness—but the mere ranks of them, was tormenting. The endless place was packed full as it could hold. The court had met.

But on the same level with me, though far away, sat the judge. Male or female, who could say? Its face was veiled. It was covered from crown to toe in sweepy black.

“Uncover her,” said the judge.

Hands came from behind me and tore off my veil; after it, every rag I had on. The old crone with her Ungit face stood naked before those countless gazers. No thread to cover me, no bowl in my hand to hold the water of death; only my book.

“Read your complaint,” said the judge.

I looked at the roll in my hand and saw at once that it was not the book I had written. It couldn’t be; it was far too small. And too old—a little, shabby, crumpled thing, nothing like my great book that I had worked on all day, day after day, while Bardia was dying. I thought I would fling it down and trample on it. I’d tell them someone had stolen my complaint and slipped this thing into my hand instead. Yet I found myself unrolling it. It was written all over inside, but the hand was not like mine. It was all a vile scribble; each stroke mean and yet savage, like the snarl of my father’s voice, like the ruinous faces one could make out in the Ungit stone. A great terror and loathing came over me. I said to myself, “Whatever they do to me, I will never read out this stuff. Give me back my Book.” But already I heard myself reading it. And what I read out was like this:

“I know what you’ll say. You will say the real gods are not at all like Ungit, and that I was shown a real god and the house of a real god and ought to know it. Hypocrites! I do know it. As if that would heal my wounds! I could have endured it if you were things like Ungit and the Shadowbrute. You know well that I never really began to hate you until Psyche began talking of her palace and her lover and her husband. Why did you lie to me? You said a brute would devour her. Well, why didn’t it? I’d have wept for her and buried what was left and built her a tomb and … and … But to steal her love from me! Can it be that you really don’t understand? Do you think we mortals will find you gods easier to bear if you’re beautiful? I tell you that if that’s true we’ll find you a thousand times worse. For then (I know what beauty does) you’ll lure and entice. You’ll leave us nothing; nothing that’s worth our keeping or your taking Those we love best—whoever’s most worth loving—those are the very ones you’ll pick out. Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse and worse the more you reveal your beauty; the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can’t follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal. But to steal her love from me, to make her see things I couldn’t see … oh, you’ll say (you’ve been whispering it to me these forty years) that I’d signs enough her palace was real; could have known the truth if I’d wanted. But how could I want to know it? Tell me that. The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away into your dreadful heights? You’ll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche? Not while she was mine. If you’d gone the other way to work—if it was my eyes you had opened—you’d soon have seen how I would have shown her and told her and taught her and led her up to my level. But to hear a chit of a girl who had (or ought to have had) no thought in her head that I’d not put there, setting up for a seer and a prophetess and next thing to a goddess … how could anyone endure it? That’s why I say it makes no difference whether you’re fair or foul. That there should be gods at all, there’s our misery and bitter wrong. There’s no room for you and us in the same world. You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive. We want to be our own. I was my own and Psyche was mine and no one else had any right to her. Oh, you’ll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad of it for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way? It would have been better if I’d seen the Brute tear her in pieces before my eyes. You stole her to make her happy, did you? Why, every wheedling, smiling, catfoot rogue who lures away another man’s wife or slave or dog might say the same. Dog, now. That’s very much to the purpose. I’ll thank you to let me feed my own; it needed no titbits from your table. Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine; do you not know what the word means? Mine! You’re thieves, seducers. That’s my wrong. I’ll not complain (not now) that you’re blood–drinkers and man–eaters. I’m past that….”

“Enough,” said the judge.

There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over; perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it for ever, quick as I could, starting the first word again almost before the last was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice.

There was silence in the dark assembly long enough for me to have read my book out yet again. At last the judge spoke.

“Are you answered?” he said.

“Yes,” said I.

4. IV

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot–like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

“Best leave the girl to me,” said a well–known voice. “I’ll lesson her.” It was the spectre which had been my father.

Then a new voice spoke from beneath me. It was the Fox’s. I thought he too was going to give some terrible evidence against me. But he said, “Oh Minos, or Rhadamanthus, or Persephone, or by whatever name you are called, I am to blame for most of this, and I should bear the punishment. I taught her, as men teach a parrot, to say ‘Lies of poets’, and ‘Ungit’s a false image’. I made her think that ended the question. I never said, too true an image of the demon within. And then the other face of Ungit (she has a thousand) … something live anyway. And the real gods more alive. Neither they nor Ungit mere thoughts or words. I never told her why the old Priest got something from the dark House that I never got from my trim sentences. She never asked me (I was content she shouldn’t ask) why the people got something from the shapeless stone which no one ever got from that painted doll of Arnom’s. Of course, I didn’t know; but I never told her I didn’t know. I don’t know now. Only that the way to the true gods is more like the House of Ungit … oh, it’s unlike too, more unlike than we yet dream, but that’s the easy knowledge, the first lesson; only a fool would stay there, posturing and repeating it. The Priest knew at least that there must be sacrifices. They will have sacrifice; will have man. Yes, and the very heart, centre, ground, roots of a man; dark and strong and costly as blood. Send me away, Minos, even to Tartarus, if Tartarus can cure glibness. I made her think that a prattle of maxims would do, all thin and clear as water. For of course water’s good; and it didn’t cost much, not where I grew up. So I fed her on words.”

I wanted to cry out that it was false, that he had fed me not on words but on love, that he had given, if not to the gods, yet to me, all that was costliest. But I had not time. The trial, it seemed, was over.

“Peace,” said the judge. “The woman is a plaintiff, not a prisoner. It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case. Let her go.”

Which way should I turn, set up on that pillar of rock? I looked on every side. Then, to end it, I flung myself down into the black sea of spectres. But before I reached the floor of the cavern one rushed forward and caught me in strong arms. It was the Fox.

“Grandfather!” I cried. “But you’re real and warm. Homer said one could not embrace the dead … they were only shadows.”

“My child, my beloved,” said the Fox, kissing my eyes and head in the old way. “One thing that I told you was true. The poets are often wrong. But for all the rest—ah, you’ll forgive me?”

“I to forgive you, Grandfather? No, no, I must speak. I knew at the time that all those good reasons you gave for staying in Glome after you were a freeman were only disguises for your love. I knew you stayed only in pity and love for me. I knew you were breaking your heart for the Greeklands. I ought to have sent you away. I lapped up all you gave me like a thirsty animal. Oh, Grandfather, Ansit’s right. I’ve battened on the lives of men. It’s true. Isn’t it true?”

“Why, child, it is. I could almost be glad; it gives me something to forgive. But I’m not your judge. We must go to your true judges now. I am to bring you there.”

“My judges?”

“Why, yes, child. The gods have been accused by you. Now’s their turn.”

“I cannot hope for mercy.”

“Infinite hopes—and fears—may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.”

“Are the gods not just?”

“Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But come and see.”

He was leading me somewhere and the light was strengthening as we went. It was a greenish, summery light. In the end it was sunshine falling through vine leaves. We were in a cool chamber, walls on three sides of us, but on the fourth side only pillars and arches with a vine growing over them on the outside. Beyond, and between, the light pillars and the soft leaves I saw level grass and shining water.

“We must wait here till you are sent for,” said the Fox. “But there is plenty here that’s worth studying.”

I now saw that the walls of the place were all painted with stories. We have little skill with painting in Glome, so that it’s small praise to say they seemed wonderful to me. But I think all mortals would have wondered at these.

“They begin here,” said the Fox, taking me by the hand and leading me to part of the wall. For an instant I was afraid that he was leading me to a mirror as my father had twice done. But before we came near enough to the picture to understand it, the mere beauty of the coloured wall put that out of my head.

Now we were before it and I could see the story it told. I saw a woman coming to the river bank. I mean that by her painted posture I could see it was a picture of one walking. That at first. But no sooner had I understood this than it became alive, and the ripples of the water were moving and the reeds stirred with the water and the grass stirred with the breeze, and the woman moved on and came to the river’s edge. There she stood and stooped down and seemed to be doing something—I could not at first tell what—with her feet. She was tying her ankles together with her girdle. I looked closer at her. She was not I. She was Psyche.

I am too old, and I have no time, to begin to write all over again of her beauty. But nothing less would serve, and no words I have would serve even then, to tell you how beautiful she was. It was as though I had never seen her before. Or had I forgotten … no, I could never have forgotten her beauty, by day or by night, for one heartbeat. But all this was a flash of thought, swallowed up at once in my horror of the thing she had come to that river to do.

“Do not do it. Do not do it,” I cried out; madly, as if she could hear me. Nevertheless she stopped, and untied her ankles and went away. The Fox led me to the next picture. And it too came alive, and there in some dark place, cavern or dungeon, when I looked hard into the murk I could see that what was moving in it was Psyche; Psyche in rags and iron fetters, sorting out the seeds into their proper heaps. But the strangest thing was that I saw in her face no such anguish as I looked for. She was grave; her brow knitted as I have seen it knitted over a hard lesson when she was a child (and that look became her well; what look did not?). Yet I thought there was no despair in it. Then of course I saw why. Ants were helping her. The floor was black with them.

“Grandfather,” said I, “did——”

“Hush,” said the Fox, laying his thick old finger (the very feel of that finger again, after so many years!) on my lips. He led me to the next.

Here we were back in the pasture of the gods. I saw Psyche creeping, cautious as a cat, along the hedgerow; then standing, her finger at her lip, wondering how she could ever get one curl of their golden wool. Yet now again, only more than last time, I marvelled at her face. For though she looked puzzled, it was only as if she were puzzled at some game; as she and I had both been puzzled over the game Poobi used to play with her beads. It was even as if she laughed inwardly a little at her own bewilderment. (And that too I’d seen in her before, when she blundered over her tasks as a child; she was never out of patience with herself, no more than with her teacher.) But she did not puzzle long. For the rams scented some intruder and turned their tails to Psyche and all lifted their terrible heads, and then lowered them again for battle, and all charged away together to the other end of the meadow, drawing nearer to their enemy, so that an unbroken wave or wall of gold overwhelmed her. Then Psyche laughed and clapped her hands and gathered her bright harvest off the hedge at ease.

In the next picture I saw both Psyche and myself; but I was only a shadow. We toiled together over those burning sands, she with her empty bowl, I with the book full of my poison. She did not see me. And though her face was pale with the heat and her lips cracked with thirst, she was no more pitiable than when I have seen her, often pale with heat and thirsty, come back with the Fox and me from a summer day’s ramble on the old hills. She was merry and in good heart. I believe, from the way her lips moved, she was singing. When she came to the foot of the precipices I vanished away. But the eagle came to her, and took her bowl, and brought it back to her brim–full of the water of death.

We had now travelled round two of the three walls and the third remained.

“Child,” said the Fox, “have you understood?”

“But are these pictures true?”

“All here’s true.”

“But how could she—did she really—do such things and go to such places—and not … ? Grandfather, she was all but unscathed. She was almost happy.”

“Another bore nearly all the anguish.”

“I? Is it possible?”

“That was one of the true things I used to say to you. Don’t you remember? We’re all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence, of each other. Men, and gods, flow in and out and mingle.”

“Oh, I give thanks. I bless the gods. Then it was really I——”

“Who bore the anguish. But she achieved the tasks. Would you rather have had justice?”

“Would you mock me, Grandfather? Justice? Oh, I’ve been a queen and I know the people’s cry for justice must be heard. But not my cry. A Batta’s muttering, a Redival’s whining: ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘Why should she?’ ‘It’s not fair.’ And over and over. Faugh!”

“That’s well, daughter. But now, be strong and look upon the third wall.”

We looked and saw Psyche walking alone in a wide way under the earth; a gentle slope, but downwards, always downwards.

“This is the last of the tasks that Ungit has set her. She must——”

“Then there is a real Ungit?”

“All, even Psyche, are born into the house of Ungit. And all must get free from her. Or say that Ungit in each must bear Ungit’s son and die in childbed—or change. And now Psyche must go down into the deadlands to get beauty in a casket from the Queen of the Deadlands, from death herself; and bring it back to give it to Ungit so that Ungit will become beautiful. But this is the law for her journey. If, for any fear or favour or love or pity, she speaks to anyone on the way, then she will never come back to the sunlit lands again. She must keep straight on, in silence, till she stands before the throne of the Queen of Shadows. All’s at stake. Now watch.”

He needed not to tell me that. We both watched. Psyche went on and on, deeper into the earth; colder, deeper, darker. But at last there came a chilly light on one side of her way, and there (I think) the great tunnel or gallery in which she journeyed opened out. For there, in that cold light, stood a great crowd of rabble. Their speech and clothes showed me at once that they were people of Glome. I saw the faces of some I knew.

“Istra! Princess! Ungit!” they called out, stretching their hands towards her. “Stay with us. Be our goddess. Rule us. Speak oracles to us. Receive our sacrifices. Be our goddess.”

Psyche walked on and never looked at them.

“Whoever the enemy is,” said I, “he’s not very clever if he thinks she would falter for that.”

“Wait,” said the Fox.

Psyche, her eyes fixed straight ahead, went further on and further down, and again, on the left side of her road, there came a light. One figure rose up in it. I was startled at this one, and looked to my side. The Fox was with me still; but he who rose up in the cold light to meet Psyche by the wayside was also the Fox—but older, greyer, paler than the Fox who was with me.

“O Psyche, Psyche,” said the Fox in the picture (say, in that other world; it was no painted thing), “what folly is this? What are you doing, wandering through a tunnel beneath the earth? What? You think it is the way to the Deadlands? You think the gods have sent you there? All lies of priests and poets, child. It is only a cave or a disused mine. There are no deadlands such as you dream of, and no such gods. Has all my teaching taught you no more than this? The god within you is the god you should obey; reason, calmness, self–discipline. Fie, child, do you want to be a barbarian all your days? I would have given you a clear, Greek, full–grown soul. But there’s still time. Come to me and I’ll lead you out of all this darkness; back to the grass plot behind the pear trees, where all was clear, hard, limited, and simple.”

But Psyche walked on and never looked at him. And presently she came to a third place where there was a little light on the left of the dark road. Amid that light something like a woman rose up; its face was unknown to me. When I looked at it I felt a pity that nearly killed my heart. It was not weeping, but you could see from its eyes that it had already wept them dry. Despair, humiliation, entreaty, endless reproach: all these were in it. And now I trembled for Psyche. I knew the thing was there only to entrap her and turn her from her path. But did she know it? And if she did, could she, so loving and so full of pity, pass it by? It was too hard a test. Her eyes looked straight forward; but of course she had seen it out of the corner of her eye. A quiver ran through her. Her lip twitched, threatened with sobbing. She set her teeth in the lip to keep it straight. “O great gods, defend her,” I said to myself. “Hurry, hurry her past.”

The woman held out her hands to Psyche, and I saw that her left arm dripped with blood. Then came her voice, and what a voice it was! So deep, yet so womanlike, so full of passion, it would have moved you even if it spoke happy or careless things. But now (who could resist it?) it would have broken a heart of iron.

“Oh, Psyche,” it wailed. “Oh, my own child, my only love. Come back. Come back. Back to the old world where we were happy together. Come back to Maia.”

Psyche bit her lip till the blood came and wept bitterly. I thought she felt more grief than that wailing Orual. But that Orual had only to suffer; Psyche had to keep on her way as well. She kept on; went on out of sight, journeying always further into death. That was the last of the pictures.

The Fox and I were alone again.

“Did we really do these things to her?” I asked.

“Yes. All here’s true.”

“And we said we loved her.”

“And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us. And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.”

“And Psyche, in that old terrible time when I thought her cruel … she suffered more than I, perhaps?”

“She bore much for you then. You have borne something for her since.”

“And will the gods one day grow thus beautiful, Grandfather?”

“They say … but even I, who am dead, do not understand more than a few broken words of their language. Only this I know. This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.”

But as he said this many voices from without, sweet and to be feared, took up the cry, “She comes. Our lady returns to her house; the goddess Psyche, back from the lands of the dead, bringing the casket of beauty from the Queen of Shadows.”

“Come,” said the Fox. I think I had no will in me at all. He took my hand and led me out between the pillars (the vine leaves brushed my hair) into the warm sunlight. We stood in a fair, grassy court, with blue, fresh sky above us; mountain sky. In the centre of the court was a bath of clear water in which many could have swum and sported together. Then there was a moving and rustling of invisible people, and more voices (now somewhat hushed). Next moment I was flat on my face; for Psyche had come and I was kissing her feet.

“Oh, Psyche, oh, goddess,” I said. “Never again will I call you mine; but all there is of me shall be yours. Alas, you know now what’s it’s worth. I never wished you well, never had one selfless thought of you. I was a craver.”

She bent over me to lift me up. Then, when I would not rise, she said. “But Maia, dear Maia, you must stand up. I have not given you the casket. You know I went a long journey to fetch the beauty that will make Ungit beautiful.”

I stood up then; all wet in a kind of tears that do not flow in this country. She stood before me, holding out something for me to take. Now I knew that she was a goddess indeed. Her hands burned me (a painless burning) when they met mine. The air that came from her clothes and limbs and hair was wild and sweet; youth seemed to come into my breast as I breathed it. And yet (this is hard to say) with all this, even because of all this, she was the old Psyche still; a thousand times more her very self than she had been before the Offering. For all that had then but flashed out in a glance or a gesture, all that one meant most when one spoke her name, was now wholly present, not to be gathered up from hints nor in shreds, not some of it in one moment and some in another. Goddess? I had never seen a real woman before.

“Did I not tell you, Maia,” she said, “that a day was coming when you and I would meet in my house and no cloud between us?”

Joy silenced me. And I thought I had now come to the highest, and to the utmost fullness of being which the human soul can contain. But now, what was this? You have seen the torches grow pale when men open the shutters and broad summer morning shines in on the feasting–hall? So now. Suddenly, from a strange look in Psyche’s face (I could see she knew something she had not spoken of), or from a glorious and awful deepening of the blue sky above us, or from a deep breath like a sigh uttered all round us by invisible lips, or from a deep, doubtful, quaking and surmise in my own heart, I knew that all this had been only a preparation. Some far greater matter was upon us. The voices spoke again; but not loud this time. They were awed and trembled. “He is coming,” they said. “The god is coming into his house. The god comes to judge Orual.”

If Psyche had not held me by the hand I should have sunk down. She had brought me now to the very edge of the pool. The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one. But that’s little to say; rather, Psyche herself was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would once have thought it impossible to love; would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.

Two figures, reflections, their feet to Psyche’s feet and mine, stood head downward in the water. But whose were they? Two Psyches, the one clothed, the other naked? Yes, both Psyches, both beautiful (if that mattered now) beyond all imagining, yet not exactly the same.

“You also are Psyche,” came a great voice. I looked up then, and it’s strange that I dared. But I saw no god, no pillared court. I was in the palace gardens, my foolish book in my hand. The vision to the eye had, I think, faded one moment before the oracle to the ear. For the words were still sounding.

That was four days ago. They found me lying on the grass, and I had no speech for many hours. The old body will not stand many more such seeings; perhaps (but who can tell?) the soul will not need them. I have got the truth out of Arnom; he thinks I am very near my death now. It’s strange he should weep; and my women too. What have I ever done to please them? I ought to have had Daaran here and learned to love him and taught him, if I could, to love them.

I ended my first book with the words No answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might——

(I, Arnom, priest of Aphrodite, saved this roll and put it in the temple. From the other markings after the word might, we think the Queen’s head must have fallen forward on them as she died and we cannot read them. This book was all written by Queen Orual of Glome, who was the most wise, just, valiant, fortunate, and merciful of all the princes known in our parts of the world. If any stranger who intends the journey to Greece finds this book let him take it to Greece with him, for that is what she seems mostly to have desired. The Priest who comes after me has it in charge to give up the book to any stranger who will take an oath to bring it into Greece.)