“Israel, thou climbest the sun-ladder to rhapsody!”
“Whether soaring, climbing, or creeping, I know not; but this I know, I’m tasting in these wanderings God’s kisses. They are in the flowers; my spirit rests on His as my body on the balm of the fresh breezes. Then, animate nature seems so contented and happy! Why, I’ve been ravished by the songsters; as I’ve said to myself, they echo the angelic anthem of heaven, peace. Had any such doubt as haunts thee, come to me, since passing Jordan, it would have been sung out of countenance by the winged warblers or dragged from my heart captive in floral fetters by Him that hath two staves, beauty and bands.”
“Oh, Ichabod, do not pause. Go on, I pray thee.”
“Then thou art glad to hear that nature is not a beautiful widow mourning her dead bridegroom through the ages?”
“I love to listen to thee.”
“Listen to a wiser. See those stately heliotropes. They stand above all of their kind with shining faces; great in aspiration, great in devotion. All day they turn toward the sun and when their blossoms fade they leave a hardy seed. The winter may bury it, but it springs forth in vernal days, strong in the life it won by loving the summer sun.”
“Ichabod, I’m charmed! Let’s abide here always amid these joys of nature.”
“What, be hermits?”
“Yes; life’s troubles are made by its people; the fewer people the fewer troubles.”
“While sharing their troubles may we not lessen them. No man may live to himself; we’re wedded to each other.”
“Yes, wedded to life. A royal phrase; since I’ve been constantly either hating or loving it; fearing to live and then fearing to die. Wedded! ah, ha, ha; the wedded are those who most madly love and then most bitterly hate.”
“Say sometimes; then thou’lt be like the stopped horologue, telling the true time once in twenty-four hours, at least.”
“Thy poetry runs into caustic quality. What hast thou been lunching on since morn?”
“At least not on Dead Sea apples, fair without, ashes within. My poetry, if I have any, always sings in accord with the company it keeps.”
“How many more arrows in thy quiver, hast thou?”
“Only one, and that a question; does my master intend to foreswear marriage himself? He ridicules it.”
“I have already done so.”
“Well, ’tis well thou didst not live in Rome, for its citizens that dared to live amid the temptations and soul-crampings of voluntary bachelorhood were highly taxed for their disregard of the claims of society and the state.”
“Yet even the Romans ever deemed bachelorhood a blessing. In this opinion royal Claudius decreed that the sailors who brought to Rome a ship loaded from the wheat granaries of Egypt in the time of Agabus’s famine, should be as a reward permitted to remain unmarried. If I were a Roman and a sailor I’d pray for a famine and a Claudius.”
“A world without wives? What a world!”
So saying Ichabod caught up a stick and began marking on the earth.
“How now, Israel; some sorcery?”
“No—yet, may be, yes. I’ll picture a world without women.”
The Jew outlined the Egyptian deity, “Kneph.”
“What have we, man or beast?”
“Truly, I think partly both. The knight has described his Elysium and I have here pictured a fit king for it. Behold thy god, sworn celibate. Egypt’s adored Kneph. Is this hideous enough?”
“A god! well he’s not handsome; a ram’s head; four horns; two up, two down; armed as both ram and goat?”
“Both were sacred to him in Egypt; also the horned snake with which Cleopatra put out her life; poor, unfortunate man-wrecked beauty.”
“But, Jew, thou dost dawdle! What of this play?”
“Oh, nothing, only Kneph would do well for a sailor, at Rome, under Claudius, in famine time!”
“My poet wanders, but yet stings.”
“So? Kneph was a god that boasted, or rather his spokesmen did, that he was the father of his mother. What economy! No need to be grateful to or love a mother; no need to wear a wife on the heart. The folly of a dark age by folly darkened in the mad attempt to lift up man without his purer better part.”
“How strange, Jew, whenever we touch a new belief, or an old one, new to us, we find peoples following an idea or ideal. There has been a crying through the world ever for a some one for pilgrim man to follow. How passing strange; our century wails the self-same cry; and somehow it always happens that this matter has something to do with woman. See; ‘Kneph’ was the monstrous birth of those who thought man superlative, and greatness to be by being all man. How sharply the devotion to the Madonna cuts across this! She was mother of the noblest, and man in the begetting left out. Oh, my head’s full of thoughts, but they tumble along toward my lips without system or leader. I talk like a madman, though I think like a Seraph.”
“I think, Sir Charleroy, that a healthy son of Adam sneering at all women, publicly, reproaches himself as being one who never knew a true one.”
“More javelins! I’d swear, anyhow, that if I’d been Adam, no winged serpent of gaudy colors and honey tongue could have lured me from Paradise, Eve or no Eve!”
“If thou hadst been there thou wouldst have been lonesome with the speechless herds; finding the new woman, would have loved her like the boy who mates just to see how it seems.”
“Oh, likely!”
“Then if thy ward or angel attempted to elope with the devil thou wouldst have gone along, too, from curiosity, as lad to a hippodrome, just to see the finish; or as thousands of men since Adam, tied to wayward women, have gone down with them to darkness, preferring hell with their idols to heaven without.”
“I suppose so. Oh, how strangely are the fates of men and women interwoven.”
“Then thou dost not now elect to live a hermit, without the companionship of the frail, fair and faithful sex which are said to double our joys?”
“Yes and multiply our sorrows!”
“I suspect thou’lt change thy late creed very soon.”
“Why so?”
“I expect ere long that we’ll meet some living blossoms.”
“By my token, that’s good news, Ichabod.”
“So, then, thou art ready to recant?”
Evening came, and the pilgrims supped on the meager meat they were able to procure in the fields.
“Now poet of the Palm Land mellow my dreams by possessing me of thy meditations. What fixes thy gaze?”
“The monarch of the sky; after a day such as this has been, he seems to me to take his departure with a peculiar sort of triumphal sweep of his trailing splendors.”
“Horus exulting over prostrate Set.”
“But night, not the green-colored son of Osiris, conquers now, master.”
“Night never conquers. It merely lives by sufferance; often routed by the invincible spears of the sun. Darkness creeps forth here because the golden charger in masterful strategy has gone elsewhere to rout other armies of the dark kingdom. Lay this to thy heart, good Jew.”