The Messiah of the Cylinder

by Victor Rousseau

In the subterranean chapel, lit by rushlights that sent the shadows scurrying and made fantastically unreal the eager faces and the dissolving groups that clustered now around me, now around David, and again gathered about the tall old bishop with his peasant’s face and child’s eyes, David told them my tale, and then in turn told me the legend that I had brought so wonderfully to fulfillment.

The more bewildered I appeared, the stronger grew their faith, for the legend foretold that I was to come unknown to myself, and with no expectation of my own mission. They saw the cylinder, and there was none who doubted.

There were some thirty men and women present, of whom a dozen formed an inner council which had already formulated the plans for the new government. Some were delegates from outlaw bands in the recesses of the forests, some, like David, fugitives from the government bureaux, and three or four, Paul among them, those who had most recently escaped from the defectives’ shops. There were representatives of various trades, who had come from London at imminent risk, intending to return: one from the traffic guild I noticed in particular, a giant of a man with a black beard as crisp as an Assyrian king’s, who said that, at his signal, his guild would rise and fling themselves, to a man, upon the Guard.

It was a touching reunion. Two generations had gone by while men remained in ignorance of all that we and our ancestors had known: popular freedom, public rights, liberty to choose their trades, the sanctity of family life, and, above all, the absence of the galling inquisition and atrocious tyranny of Science run mad.

The elder men remembered with horror the period of the revolutions, in which a man would have given all that he had for life and bread. They regarded the epoch that had preceded this as the dark age of the world, much, I think, as we, in our turn, looked back upon the freer age before the Reformation. They had a misty tradition of a century in which men starved, in which the rich oppressed the poor and the poor dwelled in foul, sunless tenements and dressed in rags.

That tradition was true, and of the Moyen Age, before these things, of course they knew nothing. Now all had bread to eat, and light and air; but they lived in a world with neither hope nor joy, resource nor initiative, nor happiness in labor, in which one cherished the home ties furtively, while over their children always hung the menace of the defectives’ workshops, or the horrors of the Temple. And on them preyed the privileged caste of whites, taking toll of their daughters, lording it as judges and bureau bosses, in the name of Science emanating from a madman’s brain.

I began to gather, to my relief, that only the very ignorant believed that the Messiah would be a supernatural being. There was superstition enough hidden in the hearts of all, for faith, denied, creeps in, in strange guises; but the world awaited, rather, the inevitable leader who must come to set free a people grown over-ripe for freedom. For the horrors of the new civilization had reached the point where men had grown reckless of life. Everywhere was the anticipation of the approaching change, and even Sanson must have seen that neither his Guard nor his great Ray artillery could save his crumbling power. Science had overplayed her part when she had bankrupted human hearts.

Everywhere the deep sense of intolerable wrong was spreading. And although not even the very old remembered the time when Christianity was a living faith, yet the hopes of all hinged on it. There was no other hope for the world but the same Light that lit the darkness in the most shameful days of Rome’s high civilization. So they had enrolled themselves beneath that ancient banner of human freedom; dozens had died under torture rather than disclose the hiding place of their treasured Scriptures—of such parts as had come down to them, rewritten in the new syllabic characters. There was a rich harvest to come from many a martyr’s blood.

So, then, there had filtered down through the years the faith that in 2015, or seven and thirty years after the institution of the new era, a Messiah was to arise and restore freedom to man. It had begun with the discovery of the cylinder that contained Esther’s body, somewhere about the middle of the preceding century, and after the first revolutionary outbreak.

In some manner unknown the cylinder had made its appearance in the world. At first it was believed that it contained only the embalmed body of a woman, within a case fashioned so cunningly that none could open it. But later the rumor spread that at the end of a certain time the case would open of itself, and the woman awaken and come forth.