Strange words he both understood and did not understand. Her voice, low and silvery, was that of a gentle, cultured woman, but command rang through it with a clang of metal, terrible behind the sweetness. She moved a little closer, standing erect before him in the moonlight, her figure borrowing something of the great tree"s majesty behind her. It was incongruous, this gentle and yet sinister air she wore. Whence came, in this calm peaceful spot, the suggestion of a wild and savage background to her? Why were there tumult and oppression in his heart, pain, horror, tenderness and mercy, mixed beyond disentanglement? Why did he think already, but helplessly, of escape, yet at the same time burn to stay? Whence came again, too, a certain queenly touch he felt in her?
"The G.o.ds have brought you," broke across his turmoil in a half whisper whose breath almost touched his face. "You belong to us."
The deeps rose in him. Seduced by the sweetness and the power, the warring divisions in his being drew together. His under-self more and more obtained the mastery she willed. Then something in the French she used flickered across his mind with a faint reminder of normal things again.
"Belgian----" he began, and then stopped short, as her instant rejoinder broke in upon his halting speech and petrified him. In her voice sang that triumphant tenderness that only the feminine powers of the Universe may compa.s.s: it seemed the sky sang with her, the mating birds, wild flowers, the south wind and the running streams. All these, even the silver birches, lent their fluid, feminine undertones to the two pregnant words with which she interrupted him and completed his own unfinished sentence:
"---- and mother."
With the dreadful calm of an absolute a.s.surance, she stood and watched him.
His understanding already showed signs of clearing. She stretched her hands out with a pa.s.sionate appeal, a yearning gesture, the eloquence of which should explain all that remained unspoken. He saw their grace and symmetry, exquisite in the moonlight, then watched them fold together in an att.i.tude of prayer. Beautiful mother hands they were; hands made to smooth the pillows of the world, to comfort, bless, caress, hands that little children everywhere must lean upon and love-perfect symbol of protective, self-forgetful motherhood.
This tenderness he noted; he noted next--the strength. In the folded hands he divined the expression of another great world-power, fulfilling the implacable resolution of the mouth and eyes. He was aware of relentless purpose, more--of merciless revenge, as by a protective motherhood outraged beyond endurance. Moreover, the gesture held appeal; these hands, so close that their actual perfume reached him, sought his own in help. The power in himself as man, as male, as father--this was required of him in the fulfillment of the unknown purpose to which this woman summoned him. His understanding cleared still more.
The couple faced one another, staring fixedly beneath the giant beech that overarched them. In the dark of his eyes, he knew, lay growing terror. He shivered, and the shiver pa.s.sed down his spine, making his whole body tremble. There stirred in him an excitement he loathed, yet welcomed, as the primitive male in him, answering the summons, reared up with instinctive, dreadful glee to shatter the bars that civilization had so confidently set upon its freedom. A primal emotion of his under-being, ancient l.u.s.t that had too long gone hungry and unfed, leaped towards some possible satisfaction. It was incredible; it was, of course, a dream. But judgment wavered; increasing terror ate his will away. Violence and sweetness, relief and degradation, fought in his soul, as he trembled before a power that now slowly mastered him. This glee and loathing formed their ghastly partnership. He could have strangled the woman where she stood. Equally, he could have knelt and kissed her feet.
The vehemence of the conflict paralysed him.
"A mother"s hands ..." he murmured at length, the words escaping like bubbles that rose to the surface of a seething cauldron and then burst.
And the woman smiled as though she read his mind and saw his little trembling. The smile crept down from the eyes towards the mouth; he saw her lips part slightly; he saw her teeth.
But her reply once more transfixed him. Two syllables she uttered in a voice of iron:
"Louvain."
The sound acted upon him like a Word of Power in some Eastern fairy tale. It knit the present to a past that he now recognized could never die. Humanity had _not_ advanced. The hidden source of his secret joy began to glow. For this woman focused in him pa.s.sions that life had hitherto denied, pretending they were atrophied, and the primitive male, the naked savage rose up, with glee in its l.u.s.tful eyes and blood upon its lips. Acquired civilization, a pitiful mockery, split through its thin veneer and fled.
"Belgian ... Louvain ... Mother ..." he whispered, yet astonished at the volume of sound that now left his mouth. His voice had a sudden fullness. It seemed a cave-man roared the words.
She touched his hand, and he knew a sudden intensification of life within him; immense energy poured through his veins; a mediaeval spirit used his eyes; great pagan instincts strained and urged against his heart, against his very muscles. He longed for action.
And he cried aloud: "I am with you, with you to the end!"
Her spell had vivified beyond all possible resistance that primitive consciousness which is ever the bed-rock of the human animal.
A racial memory, inset against the forest scenery, flashed suddenly through the depths laid bare. Below a sinking moon dark figures flew in streaming lines and groups; tormented cries went down the wind; he saw torn, blasted trees that swayed and rocked; there was a leaping fire, a gleaming knife, an altar. He saw a sacrifice.
It flashed away and vanished. In its place the woman stood, with shining eyes fixed on his face, one arm outstretched, one hand upon his flesh.
She shifted slightly, and her cloak swung open. He saw clinging skins wound closely about her figure; leaves, flowers and trailing green hung from her shoulders, fluttering down the lines of her triumphant physical beauty. There was a perfume of wild roses, incense, ivy bloom, whose subtle intoxication drowned his senses. He saw a sparkling girdle round the waist, a knife thrust through it tight against the hip. And his secret joy, the glee, the pleasure of some unlawful and unholy l.u.s.t leaped through his blood towards the abandonment of satisfaction.
The moon revealed a glimpse, no more. An instant he saw her thus, half savage and half sweet, symbol of primitive justice entering the present through the door of vanished centuries.
The cloak swung back again, the outstretched hand withdrew, but from a world he knew had altered.
To-day sank out of sight. The moon shone pale with terror and delight on Yesterday.
7
Across this altered world a faint new sound now reached his ears, as though a human wail of anguished terror trembled and changed into the cry of some captured helpless animal. He thought of a wolf apart from the comfort of its pack, savage yet abject. The despair of a last appeal was in the sound. It floated past, it died away. The woman moved closer suddenly.
"All is prepared," she said, in the same low, silvery voice; "we must not tarry. The equinox is come, the tide of power flows. The sacrifice is here; we hold him fast. We only awaited you." Her shining eyes were raised to his. "Your soul is with us now?" she whispered.
"My soul is with you."
"And midnight," she continued, "is at hand. We use, of course, their methods. Henceforth the G.o.ds--their old-world G.o.ds--shall work on our side. They demand a sacrifice, and justice has provided one."
His understanding cleared still more then; the last veil of confusion was drawing from his mind. The old, old names went thundering through his consciousness--Odin, Wotan, Moloch--accessible ever to invocation and worship of the rightful kind. It seemed as natural as though he read in his pulpit the prayer for rain, or gave out the hymn for those at sea. That was merely an empty form, whereas this was real. Sea, storm and earthquake, all natural activities, lay under the direction of those elemental powers called the G.o.ds. Names changed, the principle remained.
"Their weather shall be ours," he cried, with sudden pa.s.sion, as a memory of unhallowed usages he had thought erased from life burned in him; while, stranger still, resentment stirred--revolt--against the system, against the very deity he had worshipped hitherto. For these had never once interfered to help the cause of right; their feebleness was now laid bare before his eyes. And a two-fold l.u.s.t rose in him.
"Vengeance is ours!" he cried in a louder voice, through which this sudden loathing of the cross poured hatred. "Vengeance and justice! Now bind the victim! Bring on the sacrifice!"
"He is already bound." And as the woman moved a little, the curious erection behind her caught his eye--the piled brushwood he had imagined was the work of woodmen, picnickers, or playing children. He realized its true meaning.
It now delighted and appalled him. Awe deepened in him, a wind of ice pa.s.sed over him. Civilization made one more fluttering effort. He gasped, he shivered; he tried to speak. But no words came. A thin cry, as of a frightened child, escaped him.
"It is the only way," the woman whispered softly. "We steal from them the power of their own deities." Her head flung back with a marvellous gesture of grace and power; she stood before him a figure of perfect womanhood, gentle and tender, yet at the same time alive and cruel with the pa.s.sions of an ignorant and savage past. Her folded hands were clasped, her face turned heavenwards. "I am a mother," she added, with amazing pa.s.sion, her eyes glistening in the moonlight with unshed tears.
"We all"--she glanced towards the forest, her voice rising to a wild and poignant cry--"all, all of us are mothers!"
It was then the final clearing of his understanding happened, and he realized his own part in what would follow. Yet before the realization he felt himself not merely ineffective, but powerless. The struggling forces in him were so evenly matched that paralysis of the will resulted. His dry lips contrived merely a few words of confused and feeble protest.
"Me!" he faltered. "My help----?"
"Justice," she answered; and though softly uttered, it was as though the mediaeval towers clanged their bells. That secret, ghastly joy again rose in him; admiration, wonder, desire followed instantly. A fugitive memory of Joan of Arc flashed by, as with armoured wings, upon the moonlight.
Some power similarly heroic, some purpose similarly inflexible, emanated from this woman, the savour of whose physical enchantment, whose very breath, rose to his brain like incense. Again he shuddered. The spasm of secret pleasure shocked him. He sighed. He felt alert, yet stunned.
Her words went down the wind between them:
"You are so weak, you English," he heard her terrible whisper, "so n.o.bly forgiving, so fine, yet so forgetful. You refuse the weapon _they_ place within your hands." Her face thrust closer, the great eyes blazed upon him. "If we would save the children"--the voice rose and fell like wind--"we must worship where they worship, we must sacrifice to their savage deities...."
The stream of her words flowed over him with this nightmare magic that seemed natural, without surprise. He listened, he trembled, and again he sighed. Yet in his blood there was sudden roaring.
"... Louvain ... the hands of little children ... we have the proof," he heard, oddly intermingled with another set of words that clamoured vainly in his brain for utterance; "the diary in his own handwriting, his gloating pleasure ... the little, innocent hands...."
"Justice is mine!" rang through some fading region of his now fainting soul, but found no audible utterance.
"... Mist, rain and wind ... the G.o.ds of German Weather.... We all ...
are mothers...."
"I will repay," came forth in actual words, yet so low he hardly heard the sound. But the woman heard.
"_We!_" she cried fiercely, "_we_ will repay!"...
"G.o.d!" The voice seemed torn from his throat. "Oh G.o.d--_my_ G.o.d!"