Across the Zodiac (37 page)

"I don't think this is wise, child," I said, turning once more to
Eveena. To my amazement, far from having recovered the effect of her
surprise, she was yet more overcome than at first; crouching among the
cushions with her head bent down over her knees, and covering her face
with her hands. Reclining in the soft pile, I held her in my arms,
overcoming perforce what seemed hysterical reluctance; but when I
would have withdrawn the little hands, she threw herself on my knee,
burying her face in the cushions.

"It is very wicked," she sobbed; "I cannot ask you to forgive me."

"Forgive what, my child? Eveena, you are certainly ill. Calm yourself,
and don't try to talk just now."

"I am not ill, I assure you," she faltered, resisting the arm that
sought to raise her; "but ..."

In my hands, however, she was powerless as an infant; and I would hear
nothing till I held her gathered within my arm and her two hands fast
in my right. Now that I could look into the face she strove to avert,
it was clear that she was neither hysterical nor simply ill; her
agitation, however unreasonable and extravagant, was real.

"What troubles you, my own? I promise you not to say one word of
reproach; I only want to understand with what you so bitterly reproach
yourself."

"But you cannot help being angry," she urged, "if you understand what
I have done. It is the
charny
, which I never tasted till that night,
and never ought to have tasted again. I know you cannot forgive me;
only take my fault for granted, and don't question me."

These incoherent words threw the first glimpse of light on the meaning
of her distress and penitence. I doubt if the best woman in
Christendom would so reproach and abase herself, if convicted of even
a worse sin than the secret use of those stimulants for which the
charny
is a Martial equivalent. No Martialist would dream of
poisoning his blood and besotting his brain with alcohol in any form.
But their opiates affect a race addicted to physical repose, to
sensuous enjoyment rather than to sensual excitement, and to lucid
intellectual contemplation, with a sense of serene delight as
supremely delicious to their temperament as the dreamy illusions of
haschisch to the Turk, the fierce frenzy of bhang to the Malay, or the
wild excitement of brandy or Geneva to the races of Northern Europe.
But as with the luxury of intoxication in Europe, so in Mars
indulgence in these drugs, freely permitted to the one sex, is
strictly forbidden by opinion and domestic rule to the other. A lady
discovered in the use of
charny
is as deeply disgraced as an
European matron detected in the secret enjoyment of spirits and
cigars; and her lord and master takes care to render her sufficiently
conscious of her fault.

And there was something stranger here than a violation of the
artificial restraint of sex. Slightly and seldom as the Golden Circle
touches the lines defining personal or social morality—carefully as
the Founder has abstained from imposing an ethical code of his own, or
attaching to his precepts any rule not directly derived from the
fundamental tenets or necessary to the cohesion of the Order—he had
expressed in strong terms his dread and horror of narcotism; the use
for pleasure's sake, not to relieve pain or nervous excitement, of
drugs which act, as he said, through the brain upon the soul. His
judgment, expressed with unusual directness and severity and enforced
by experience, has become with his followers a tradition not less
imperative than the most binding of their laws. It was so held, above
all, in that household in which Eveena and I had first learnt the
"lore of the Starlight." Esmo, indeed, regarded not merely as an
unscientific superstition, but as blasphemous folly, the rejection of
any means of restoring health or relieving pain which Providence has
placed within human reach. But he abhorred the use for pleasure's sake
of poisons affirmed to reduce the activity and in the long-run to
impair the energies of the mind, and weaken the moral sense and the
will, more intensely than the strictest follower of the Arabian
Prophet abhors the draughts which deprive man of the full use of the
senses, intelligence, and conscience which Allah has bestowed, and
degrade him below the brute, Esmo's children, moreover, were not more
strictly compelled to respect the letter than carefully instructed in
the principle of every command for which he claimed their obedience.

But in such measure as Eveena's distress became intelligible, the
fault of which she accused herself became incredible. I could not
believe that she could be wilfully disloyal to me—still less that she
could have suddenly broken through the fixed ideas of her whole life,
the principles engraved on her mind by education more stringently than
the maxims of the Koran or the Levitical Law on the children of
Ishmael or of Israel; and this while the impressive rites of
Initiation, the imprecation at which I myself had shuddered, were
fresh in her memory—their impression infinitely deepened, moreover,
by the awful mystery of that Vision of which even yet we were half
afraid to speak to one another. While I hesitated to reply, gathering
up as well as I could the thread of these thoughts as they passed in a
few seconds through my mind, my left hand touched an object hidden in
my bride's zone. I drew out a tiny crystal phial three parts full,
taken, as I saw, from the medicine-chest Esmo had carefully stocked
and as carefully fastened. As, holding this, I turned again to her,
Eveena repeated: "Punish, but don't question me!"

"My own," I said, "you are far more punished already than you deserve
or I can bear to see. How did you get this?"

Releasing her hands, she drew from the folds of her robe the electric
keys, which, by a separate combination, would unlock each of my
cases;—without which it was impossible to open or force them.

"Yes, I remember; and you were surprised that I trusted them to you.
And now you expect me to believe that you have abused that trust,
deceived me, broken a rule which in your father's house and by all our
Order is held sacred as the rings of the Signet, for a drug which
twelve days ago you disliked as much as I?"

"It is true."

The words were spoken with downcast eyes, in the low faltering tone
natural to a confession of disgrace.

"It is not true, Eveena; or if true in form, false in matter. If it
were possible that you could wish to deceive me, you knew it could not
be for long."

"I meant to be found out," she interrupted, "only not yet."

She had betrayed herself, stung by words that seemed to express the
one doubt she could not nerve herself to endure—doubt of her loyalty
to me. Before I could speak, she looked up hastily, and began to
retract. I stopped her.

"I see—when you had done with it. But, Eveena, why conceal it? Do you
think I would not have given this or all the contents of the chest
into your hands, and asked no question?"

"Do you mean it? Could you have so trusted me?"

"My child! is it difficult to trust where I know there is no
temptation to wrong? Do you think that to-day I have doubted or
suspected you, even while you have accused yourself? I cannot guess at
your motive, but I am as sure as ever of your loyalty. Take these
things,"—forcing back upon her the phial and the magnets,—"yes, and
the test-stone." ... She burst into passionate tears.

"I cannot endure this. If I had dreamed your patience would have borne
with me half so far, I would never have tried it so, even for your own
sake. I meant to be found out and accept the consequences in silence.
But you trust me so, that I must tell you what I wanted to conceal.
When you kept on the surface it made me so ill"—

"But, Eveena, if the remedy be not worse than the sickness, why not
ask for it openly?"

"It was not that. Don't you understand? Of course, I would bear any
suffering rather than have done this; but then you would have found me
out at once. I wanted to conceal my suffering, not to escape it."

"My child! my child! how could you put us both to all this pain?"

"You know you would not have given me the draught; you would have left
the surface at once; and I cannot bear to be always in the way, always
hindering your pleasures, and even your discoveries. You came across a
distance that makes a bigger world than this look less than that
light, through solitude and dangers and horrors I cannot bear to think
of, to see and examine this world of ours. And then you leave things
unseen or half-seen, you spoil your work, because a girl is seasick!
You ran great risk of death and got badly hurt to see what our hunting
was like, and you will not let my head ache that you may find out what
our sea-storms and currents are! How can I bear to be such a burden
upon you? You trust me, and, I believe," (she added, colouring), "you
love me, twelvefold more than I deserve; yet you think me unwilling or
unworthy to take ever so small an interest in your work, to bear a few
hours' discomfort for it and for you. And yet," she went on
passionately, "I may sit trembling and heart-sick for a whole day
alone that you may carry out your purpose. I may receive the only real
sting your lips have given, because I could not bear that pain without
crying. And so with everything. It is not that I must not suffer pain,
but that the pain must not come from without. Your lips would punish a
fault with words that shame and sting for a day, a summer, a year;
your hand must never inflict a sting that may smart for ten minutes.
And it is not only that you do this, but you pride yourself on it.
Why? It is not that you think the pain of the body so much worse than
that of the spirit:—you that smiled at me when you were too badly
bruised and torn to stand, yet could scarcely keep back your tears
just now, when you thought that I had suffered half an hour of sorrow
I did not quite deserve. Why then? Do you think that women feel so
differently? Have the women of your Earth hearts so much harder and
skins so much softer than ours?"

She spoke with most unusual impetuosity, and with that absolute
simplicity and sincerity which marked her every look and word, which
gave them, for me at least, an unspeakable charm, and for all who
heard her a characteristic individuality unlike the speech or manner
of any other woman. As soon suspect an infant of elaborate sarcasm as
Eveena of affectation, irony, or conscious paradox. Nay, while her
voice was in my ears, I never could feel that her views
were
paradoxical. The direct straightforwardness and simple structure of
the Martial language enhanced this peculiar effect of her speech; and
much that seems infantine in translation was all but eloquent as she
spoke it. Often, as on this occasion, I felt guilty of insincerity, of
a verbal fencing unworthy of her unalloyed good faith and earnestness,
as I endeavoured to parry thrusts that went to the very heart of all
those instinctive doctrines which I could the less defend on the
moment, because I had never before dreamed that they could be doubted.

"At any rate," I said at last, "your sex gain by my heresy, since they
are as richly gifted in stinging words as we in physical force."

"So much the worse for them, surely," she answered simply, "if it be
right that men should rule and women obey?"

"That is the received doctrine on Earth," I answered. "In practice,
men command and women disobey them; men bully and women lie. But in
truth, Eveena, having a wife only too loyal and too loving, I don't
care to canvass the deserts of ordinary women or the discipline of
other households. I own that it was wrong to scold you. Do not insist
on making me say that it would have been a little less wrong to beat
you!"

She laughed—her low, sweet, silvery laugh, the like of which I have
hardly heard among Earthly women, even of the simpler, more child-like
races of the East and South; a laugh still stranger in a world where
childhood is seldom bright and womanhood mostly sad and fretful. Of
the very few satisfactory memories I bore away from that world, the
sweetest is the recollection of that laugh, which I heard for the
first time on the morrow of our bridals, and for the last time on the
day before we parted. I cherish it as evidence that, despite many and
bitter troubles, my bride's short married life was not wholly unhappy.
By this time she had found out that we had left the surface, and began
to remonstrate.

"Nay, I have seen all I care to see, my own. I confess the justice of
your claim, as the partner of my life, to be the partner of its
paramount purpose. You are more precious to me than all the
discoveries of which I ever dreamed, and I will not for any purpose
whatsoever expose you to real peril or serious pain. But henceforth I
will ask you to bear discomfort and inconvenience when the object is
worth it, and to help me wherever your help can avail."

"I can help you?"

"Much, and in many ways, my Eveena. You will soon learn to understand
what I wish to examine and the use of the instruments I employ; and
then you will be the most useful of assistants, as you are the best
and most welcome of companions."

As I spoke a soft colour suffused her face, and her eyes brightened
with a joy and contentment such as no promise of pleasure or
indulgence could have inspired. To be the partner of adventure and
hardship, the drudge in toil and sentinel in peril, was the boon she
claimed, the best guerdon I could promise. If but the promise might
have been better fulfilled!

It was not till in latitude 9° S. we emerged into the open ocean, and
presently found ourselves free from the currents of the narrow waters,
that, in order to see the remarkable island of which I had caught
sight in my descent, I requested Ergimo to remain for some hours above
the surface. The island rises directly out of the sea, and is
absolutely unascendible. Balloons, however, render access possible,
both to its summit and to its cave-pierced sides. It is the home of
enormous flocks of white birds, which resemble in form the heron
rather than the eider duck, but which, like the latter, line with down
drawn from their own breasts the nests which, counted by millions,
occupy every nook and cranny of the crystalline walls, about ten miles
in circumference. Each of the nests is nearly as large as that of the
stork. They are made of a jelly digested from the bones of the fish
upon which the birds prey, and are almost as white in colour as the
birds themselves. Freshly formed nest dissolved in hot water makes
dishes as much to the taste of Martialists as the famous bird-nest
soup to that of the Chinese. Both down and nests, therefore, are
largely plundered; but the birds are never injured, and care is taken
in robbing them to leave enough of the outer portion of the nest to
constitute a bed for the eggs, and encourage the creatures to rebuild
and reline it.