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The Miller Of Old Church, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 2. The Cross-Roads - Chapter 15. Gay Discovers Himself |
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_ BOOK II. THE CROSS-ROADS CHAPTER XV. GAY DISCOVERS HIMSELF As Gay passed rapidly down the Haunt's Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there, listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps. At the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, "Blossom! Are you there, Blossom?" The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes. "Damn you!" said a voice almost in a whisper. The next instant a shot rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its load into the air. His first confused impression was that he had knocked against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side. Then, as a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise, "I'm shot. By Jove, that's what it means--I'm shot." At the instant, underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him. But while the wonder was still engrossing him--in that same instant, which seemed to cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting. "It's ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me," he thought, while the little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud obscured it. A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke in the cloudless blue. He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond, he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something--at anything--that would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this current--which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side, and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the graveyard--this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther away from the thing to which he was clinging--from this thing he could not let go because it was himself--because it had separated and distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe. "I've always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a multitude. There are at least a million of me--and any one of them might have crowded out all the others if he'd got a chance." A swift and joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never suspected. "Why didn't I know this before?" he asked, like one who stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of nature. "All this has been in me all the time, but nobody told me. I might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I am." The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer frightened him. "It's only the hum of bees in the meadow," he said after a minute, "and yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle. And now I've forgotten what I was thinking about. It was very important, but I shall never remember it." He closed his eyes, while the ghostly fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud to envelop him. Something brushed his face like the touch of wings, and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a bough of the great poplar above him. He had never seen anything in his life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil spread over something that was shining beyond it. "I wonder if I'm dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead, it really doesn't matter--an idiot could see through anything so thin as this." Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered feeling the same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him--that he was in the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath. And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, "It isn't really my fault that I couldn't change things"; and then the faces of women he had seen but once, or passed in the street and remembered; and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . . "I wish they'd leave me alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, "I wish they'd keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out--that he might even remember the important things he had forgotten. "Abner Revercomb shot me," he said aloud. "I don't know much. I don't know whether I am alive or dead. All I am certain of is that it doesn't matter in the least--that it's too small a fact to make any fuss about. It's all so small--the blamed thing isn't any more important than those bees humming out there in the meadow. And I might as well have developed into any one of my other selves. What were all those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything? Why, I might have been a hero--it was in me all the time--I might even have been a god." Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something outside of himself--something that had been tacked on to him. He felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs--that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his brain. "I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning." A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting. "Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man. Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a stranger's--repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?" "Did you see who shot you?" said the voice. And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?" "Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice. He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner Revercomb or one of his own multitude of selves that had shot him. It made no difference--nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable sense of approaching discovery which he had lost. "Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly. He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer. "It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous." It was there again--the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him. _ |
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