towards the road, lest they should wake.
Having nowhere to go, he turned from the city that stood on her hills. He
slowly followed the road away from the town, past the olives, under which
purple anemones were drooping in the chill of dawn, and rich–green
herbage was pressing thick. The world, the same as ever, the natural
world, thronging with greenness, a nightingale winsomely, wistfully,
coaxingly calling from the bushes beside a runnel of water, in the world,
the natural world of morning and evening, forever undying, from which he
had died.
He went on, on scarred feet, neither of this world nor of the next.
Neither here nor there, neither seeing nor yet sightless, he passed dimly
on, away from the city and its precincts, wondering why he should be
travelling, yet driven by a dim, deep nausea of disillusion, and a
resolution of which he was not even aware.
Advancing in a kind of half–consciousness under the dry stone wall of the
olive orchard, he was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just
near him, a sound which made him shiver as if electricity had touched
him. He saw a black and orange cock on a bough above the road, then
running through the olives of the upper level, a peasant in a grey
woollen shirt–tunic. Leaping out of greenness, came the black and orange
cock with the red comb, his tail–feathers streaming lustrous.
"0, stop him, master!" called the peasant. "My escaped cock!"
The man addressed, with a sudden flicker of smile, opened his great white
wings of a shroud in front of the leaping bird. The cock fell back with a
squawk and a flutter, the peasant jumped forward, there was a terrific
beating of wings and whirring of feathers, then the peasant had the
escaped cock safely under his arm, its wings shut down, its face crazily
craning forward, its round eyes goggling from its white chops.
"It's my escaped cock!" said the peasant, soothing the bird with his left
hand, as he looked perspiringly up into the face of the man wrapped in
white linen.
The peasant changed countenance, and stood transfixed, as he looked into
the dead–white face of the man who had died. That dead–white face, so
still, with the black beard growing on it as if in death; and those
wide–open, black, sombre eyes, that had died! and those washed scars on
the waxy forehead! The slow–blooded man of the field let his jaw drop, in
childish inability to meet the situation.
"Don't be afraid," said the man in the shroud. "I am not dead. They took
me down too soon. So I have risen up. Yet if they discover me, they will
do it all over again…"
He spoke in a voice of old disgust. Humanity! Especially humanity in
authority! There was only one thing it could do. He looked with black,
indifferent eyes into the quick, shifty eyes of the peasant. The peasant
quailed, and was powerless under the look of deathly indifference and
strange, cold resoluteness. He could only say the one thing he was afraid
to say:
"Will you hide in my house, master?"
"I will rest there. But if you tell anyone, you know what will happen.
You will have to go before a judge."
"Me! I shan't speak. Let us be quick!"
The peasant looked round in fear, wondering sulkily why he had let
himself in for this doom. The man with scarred feet climbed painfully up
to the level of the olive garden, and followed the sullen, hurrying
peasant across the green wheat among the olive trees. He felt the cool
silkiness of the young wheat under his feet that had been dead, and the
roughishness of its separate life was apparent to him. At the edges of
rocks, he saw the silky, silvery–haired buds of the scarlet anemone
bending downwards. And they, too, were in another world. In his own world
he was alone, utterly alone. These things around him were in a world that
had never died. But he himself had died, or had been killed from out of
it, and all that remained now was the great void nausea of utter
disillusion.
They came to a clay cottage, and the peasant waited
Having nowhere to go, he turned from the city that stood on her hills. He
slowly followed the road away from the town, past the olives, under which
purple anemones were drooping in the chill of dawn, and rich–green
herbage was pressing thick. The world, the same as ever, the natural
world, thronging with greenness, a nightingale winsomely, wistfully,
coaxingly calling from the bushes beside a runnel of water, in the world,
the natural world of morning and evening, forever undying, from which he
had died.
He went on, on scarred feet, neither of this world nor of the next.
Neither here nor there, neither seeing nor yet sightless, he passed dimly
on, away from the city and its precincts, wondering why he should be
travelling, yet driven by a dim, deep nausea of disillusion, and a
resolution of which he was not even aware.
Advancing in a kind of half–consciousness under the dry stone wall of the
olive orchard, he was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just
near him, a sound which made him shiver as if electricity had touched
him. He saw a black and orange cock on a bough above the road, then
running through the olives of the upper level, a peasant in a grey
woollen shirt–tunic. Leaping out of greenness, came the black and orange
cock with the red comb, his tail–feathers streaming lustrous.
"0, stop him, master!" called the peasant. "My escaped cock!"
The man addressed, with a sudden flicker of smile, opened his great white
wings of a shroud in front of the leaping bird. The cock fell back with a
squawk and a flutter, the peasant jumped forward, there was a terrific
beating of wings and whirring of feathers, then the peasant had the
escaped cock safely under his arm, its wings shut down, its face crazily
craning forward, its round eyes goggling from its white chops.
"It's my escaped cock!" said the peasant, soothing the bird with his left
hand, as he looked perspiringly up into the face of the man wrapped in
white linen.
The peasant changed countenance, and stood transfixed, as he looked into
the dead–white face of the man who had died. That dead–white face, so
still, with the black beard growing on it as if in death; and those
wide–open, black, sombre eyes, that had died! and those washed scars on
the waxy forehead! The slow–blooded man of the field let his jaw drop, in
childish inability to meet the situation.
"Don't be afraid," said the man in the shroud. "I am not dead. They took
me down too soon. So I have risen up. Yet if they discover me, they will
do it all over again…"
He spoke in a voice of old disgust. Humanity! Especially humanity in
authority! There was only one thing it could do. He looked with black,
indifferent eyes into the quick, shifty eyes of the peasant. The peasant
quailed, and was powerless under the look of deathly indifference and
strange, cold resoluteness. He could only say the one thing he was afraid
to say:
"Will you hide in my house, master?"
"I will rest there. But if you tell anyone, you know what will happen.
You will have to go before a judge."
"Me! I shan't speak. Let us be quick!"
The peasant looked round in fear, wondering sulkily why he had let
himself in for this doom. The man with scarred feet climbed painfully up
to the level of the olive garden, and followed the sullen, hurrying
peasant across the green wheat among the olive trees. He felt the cool
silkiness of the young wheat under his feet that had been dead, and the
roughishness of its separate life was apparent to him. At the edges of
rocks, he saw the silky, silvery–haired buds of the scarlet anemone
bending downwards. And they, too, were in another world. In his own world
he was alone, utterly alone. These things around him were in a world that
had never died. But he himself had died, or had been killed from out of
it, and all that remained now was the great void nausea of utter
disillusion.
They came to a clay cottage, and the peasant waited
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