CHAPTER XXXVII
NOOLA
AFTER many difficulties and delays I reached the garrison on the western shore of Broolyi, where it faced Kayoss. I delivered my pass to the commandant, and was accommodated with shelter and food. The soldiers were not communicative; but after a few days I encountered in my wanderings on the beach one of the strangest men that I had ever seen, and he opened up vistas into the history of the islands. He was short in stature, but so light and springy was he in his gait and tread, I almost thought that he never touched the earth; he seemed to skim along its surface. He had a broad chest and great muscular development of the shoulders that singularly contrasted with his bird-like progress. His head was large for the body, but finely proportioned. It was the face, however, that most attracted me. It seemed almost to speak to me as I passed; it carried the soul in the depths of the eyes and in the whole expression. This soul, I felt after one glance, was a beautiful thing, marred only by some deep sorrow that draped it in everlasting melancholy. There was a heaven of pity and regret doming the nature, one could see in the sheen of the eyes and the strange translucence of the features. I was drawn magnetically to this new type of manhood; and yet I shrank from speech with him, his nature seemed so majestic and overawing.
I asked in the garrison concerning him, but all I could find out was that he was an exile from the city, and that he was kept under surveillance. It had been at his own request that he had been settled opposite the Isle of Anarchy. Finding that there would be nothing done to prevent my speaking to him and that he knew Aleofanian, I addressed him in reverent words the next time I met him, and we were soon fast friends. We met daily and wandered on the shore, and both of us seemed to find unfailing consolation in the ever-varying music of the sea, as it tided along the beach, and answered to the moods of sky and wind and current like a sensitive instrument. To me it had ever been a thing of life that sang and quivered to my every impulse and change of spirit. To be away from it was to be forlorn and widowed, and out of the reach of pity and sympathy. To him it seemed to fill the same large space in life. His thoughts were stimulated and made sublime by its rhythm; his whole existence was fuller and more musical in that wider sense of the word which applies it to the movements of the worlds on the face of night. I soon discovered that he was the engineer who had centralised and mechanised their religion for the Broolyians, and set them on the way of fulfilling the object of their existence and of establishing universal peace by universally annihilative war. He confessed that he had not been sorry to leave the capital and give up the petty ambitions with which he had been fired for a time. It would have meant but little effort on his part to perfect his explosive and master the whole island for his own purposes; but a look into the future had shown him how absurd was the ideal the Broolyians pretended to hold up to themselves, how impossible it would be by any homœopathic means, such as they proposed, to cure humanity of its everlasting feuds. He fell into despair and let the new king do as he would; and now in his solitude and meditation the love of his older past had come back on him, and he longed to see his native land, his paradise, again.
He had asked to be exiled to the garrison that watched Kayoss, in order that the sight of that wretched community might keep his ambitions down. There on the island opposite (and he pointed across the strait) lived the anarchic exiles from the islands of the archipelago. As he uttered the word “live” he smiled wearily. They lived but a few days after they were landed, for they came to violent feud, and strife and bloodshed ended the tragedy of trying to exist without government before the animal was dead in man. He raised his eyes suddenly, and he pointed to the opposite shore. On it moved a human being. That was the survivor of the last shipment to Kayoss. The garrison had never had any trouble. Within twenty-four hours after the anarchists were out of their fetters and free on shore they had found weapons against one another. They divided up into conspiracies and fought, and before many days were over, two or three remained too maimed and wounded to fight. When they recovered, they fought for the mastery, and one remained sorely stricken, often to die, sometimes to recover only to become a maniac. Such was the state of the wretch whom we now saw gesticulating on the beach. There never could be anarchism on this earth till the wild beast had died out of the human breast, and man was ready for flight to purer spheres. It was but poison in the existing state of mankind. A little of it did not do much harm. Its best cure was to give it full scope, for it soon killed off all existences within its reach and itself with them.
As he rose to this climax, his transparent face began to cloud and grow turbid. There was not that clearness of depth in the eyes which had so drawn me to him. His nature seemed to become shallow and tempestuous, more like the men of Broolyi and those I had known in the old western world. But it was not for long; he drew himself up with a sharp gesture of self-scorn, and then there settled upon him a silence and a melancholy that resisted my efforts to overcome. He grew quite unconscious of what I said, and, walking back towards his hut, left me. It was useless to attempt intercourse with such self-inwrapt thoughts.
For days I saw how purposeless would be all speech; his figure was bowed, his face was bent with grief, his eyes were fixed on the earth. I had never witnessed such tearless sorrow in human form. I persevered in my silent reverence for him, and at last the cloud lifted. He stood erect one day in the sunshine, and on my approach, he smiled answer to my greeting. All the dark and troubled appearance of his face had vanished, and his eyes and his complexion seemed to show the depths of his nature again with perfect limpidity. I was soon in sympathetic converse with him. There still rang through his utterances a note of sadness and regret. It reminded me of the undertones of so many folk-songs that wail with the reminiscence of lost ideals. How wearily it sounded, as it echoed through the depths of his meaning! It was as if his words fell from the stars quivering with the emotion and thought of the spheres in their everlasting rhythm. Out of infinity into infinity their wisdom seemed to pass. There was no limit to their depth of suggestion.
From his words there gradually developed the story of his life, with reservations that I could by no questioning or interest penetrate.
“Many leaden-footed years ago,—brief in the tale of my own life, long and slow taken by themselves,—I drifted on to the eastern shores of Broolyi, and fell into the hands of Nunaresha, one of the most powerful and ambitious nobles in the country, who was then endeavouring to get the ruling monarch dethroned and to have himself elected in his place. He saw before many moons had fruited and died that he had in me a godsend for his designs. Oh, the misery of it! I listened to his flattering proposals, and supplied him with the instruments to carry them out.” The thought overcame him; the words died away on his lips, and his consciousness seemed to ebb into unknown depths of sorrow. I kept a reverent silence, and the thought of his broken story tided upwards again into words. “Ah me! the memory of my atavistic folly weighs my whole being down, when it comes upon me. Out of my warlike forefathers of hundreds of generations before had come into my nature some taint of their military passions and ambitions. For several hundreds of years it lay dormant. The wise observers of my country had seen it in me from my birth, and had surrounded me with such conditions as would keep it in abeyance, if not deprive it of all living force. Unhappily the profession of chemist and engineer, for which I was found on examination of all my faculties to be best fitted, opened up to me a vista into the destructive forces that permeate the universe, and the marvellous power over them that our own chemical knowledge gave. This and my growing acquaintance with the myriads that inhabit the earth and with the consequent scope for military ambition roused the sleeping devil in me. I passed my time in the analysis of the destructive elements in nature, in the manufacture of explosives, and in devising plans for their concentration against an enemy, although it was a fundamental maxim of our commonwealth that no member of it should ever harbour evil thought against the life of a fellow-being. Innumerable gentle and indirect methods were applied for my cure; but it was all in vain. My ancestral passion was roused like an unquenchable fire. I could see the sorrow over me in the faces of the community. At last, without their ever having come to formal resolve, I was placed in a boat with my share of the wealth of the island in precious metals, and blown far out to sea in the direction of Broolyi.
“Doubtless by the help of the forces my countrymen have control of, I drifted towards this island, and came to be received by Nunaresha. He almost at once raised me to the position of trusted adviser. He accepted every device I invented for his purposes, and supplied me with the material I required. I gave him such power over explosives that he felt himself almost invincible. He subdued his quarrelsome baronial neighbours with the greatest ease, and by the help of his explosive catapults made his friends throughout the island supreme over their districts. His influence was soon predominant, and the feeble intriguing monarch was deposed and Nunaresha chosen in his stead. He spared neither friend nor foe in order to attain to unquestioned despotism. The baronial castles were demolished by the new force, and all were drawn into his court by its attractions and its concentration of power. The barons became the mere parasites and flatterers of the new king.