In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens

“Not always.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps some day you will,” she answered.

Into her eyes there had come a strange look of withdrawal.

At that moment the atmosphere in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an atmosphere. He felt separated from Rosamund by a gulf, perhaps very narrow, but probably very deep.

Over Elis the twilight was falling, a green twilight sylvan and very ethereal, tremulous in its delicate beauty. It stole through the green doors, and down through the murmuring pine trees; it crossed the shallow river, and made its way to the garden of ruins where once the Hermes had stood between Doric Columns in the Heraeon. Through the colonnade of the echoes it passed, and under the arch of the Athletes. Over the crude and almost terrible strength of the ruins of the temple of Zeus it let its green garments trail down, as it felt its way softly but surely to the buried Stadium where once a boy of twelve had won the crown of wild olive. The sheep-bells were ringing softly; the flocks were going homeward from pasture. They were making their way up the valley now at the base of the Kronos Hill, and the chime of their little bells mingled with the wide whispering of the eternities among the summits of the pine trees. Music of earth mingled with the music from a distance that knew what the twilight knew.

The tall oblong of the Museum doorway on the hill framed a tiny picture of Elis, bathed in green and tremulous light; a small section of hillside, a fragment of empty, poetic country—Pan’s world rather hinted at than revealed—a suggestion of evening sky, remote, with infinity lost in its distance. But there was no branch of wild olive flickering across the picture.

Rosamund missed it as she looked from the room of the Hermes out to the whispering evening and the quiet vale of Olympia. But she did not say so to Dion. He thought of it too, as he looked at her, and he tried to forget it. The picture framed by the doorway strangely grew dimmer and yet more full of greenish light; the country of Pan was fading in light. Presently details were entirely lost. Only an oblong of green, now almost emerald, light showed from the chamber of the Hermes. And in that chamber the two marble figures were gradually fading; the athletic, yet miraculously graceful, messenger of the gods with the winged sandals, the tiny child clinging to his shoulder with one little arm stretched out in an enchanting gesture of desire. Still the child nestled against Hermes, and still Hermes contemplated the child, with a celestial benignity, a half-smiling calmness of other worlds than this.

In the vestibule of the Emperors the guardian waited patiently. He was not accustomed to visitors who lingered on like these two English, when the light was failing, and surely it must be difficult, if not impossible, to see the statues properly. But Rosamund, with her usual lack of all effort, had captivated him. He had grown accustomed to her visits; he was even flattered by them. It pleased him subtly to have in his care a treasure such as the Hermes, to see which beautiful women, the Rosamunds of the world, traveled from far-off countries. Rosamund’s perpetual, and prolonged, visits had made him feel more important than he had ever succeeded in feeling before. Let the night come, she might stay on there, if she chose. He took very little account of Dion. But Rosamund was beginning to assume a certain vital importance in his quiet life.

The green light faded into a very dim primrose; the music of the sheep-bells drew near and died away among the small houses of the hamlet at the foot of the hill of Drouva; Elis withdrew itself into the obscurity that would last till the late coming of the waning moon. Of Hermes and Dionysos now only the attitudes could be seen faintly. But even they told of a golden age, an age from which everything ugly, everything violent, everything unseemly, everything insincere, everything cruel was blotted out—an age of serenity of body and soul, the age of the long peace.