In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens

If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death? He imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with a message: “The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just killed himself. What is to be done with the body?” What would Mrs. Clarke say? What would she look like? What would she do? He remembered the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge. With that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities. Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?

If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief. And doubtless she would offer up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned. Women who loved God were always ready with a prayer. If it came too late, never mind! It was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.

But Mrs. Clarke? Certainly she would not pray about it. Dion had a feeling that she would be angry. He had never seen her angry, but he felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way. If he died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design. For she had some purpose in connexion with him. She had willed him to come to this place; she was willing him to remain in it. Apparently she wished to raise him out of the dust. He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking beside him on the dusty road. She had seemed very much at home in the dust. But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of dust falling upon the robe of her ideals. What was Mrs. Clarke’s purpose in connexion with him? He did not pursue that question, but dismissed it, incurious still in his misery, which had become more active since his strength had stirred out of sleep. If he did not die how was he going to live? He had lived by the affections. Could he live by the lusts? He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to energy; he was not in love with himself. Suddenly he realized the value of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really not an egoist by nature. If he had been, if he were, perhaps things would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now. But he had lived not to himself but to another.

He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly. At any rate he would never do that again. But the unselfishness of love had become a habit with him. Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as possible ready when the moment for giving came.

If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification. He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life, not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst of his passion. Self-control—what a reward Dion had received for the self-control of his youth!

If he lived he would cast it away.

He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia were visible under a clear and delicate sky. He leaned out and felt the atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight. Could he begin again? It seemed impossible. Yet now he felt he could not deprive himself of life. Suicide is a cowardly act, even though a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison. Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that courage. Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis, as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God. But he was conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though he did not know why he could not. The capacity for suicide evidently was not contained in his nature. He rejected the worm of Izrail; he rejected, too, the other death. He must, then, live.

He washed and lay down on his bed. And directly he lay down he wondered why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question. For in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir Carey Ingleton. When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have decided. That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life, the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations with his kind. He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it. In paying it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form of life.

He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window. A gust of wind came to him from the sea. It seemed to hint at a land that was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he was, or trouble about the past events of his life. There before him was Asia rising out of the dawn. He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him. So he had thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at Marseilles. But he had not crossed to Africa.

The wind died away. It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering guest of the morning. Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings. The wind had been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, “Come with me!”