Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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CHAPTER XXXVI.

DREAMLAND.

It must have been two o'clock in the morning before I reached my lodgings.
Too much exhausted to think, I hurried to my bed. I remember now that I
reeled strangely as I went up-stairs. I lay down, and was asleep in an
instant.

How long I had slept I know not, when I awoke with a strange confusion and
whirling in my brain, and an intolerable weight and pain about my back and
loins. By the light of the gas-lamp I saw a figure standing at the foot of
my bed. I could not discern the face, but I knew instinctively that it was
my mother. I called to her again and again, but she did not answer. She
moved slowly away, and passed out through the wall of the room.

I tried to follow her, but could not. An enormous, unutterable weight
seemed to lie upon me. The bedclothes grew and grew before me, and upon
me, into a vast mountain, millions of miles in height. Then it seemed all
glowing red, like the cone of a volcano. I heard the roaring of the fires
within, the rattling of the cinders down the heaving slope. A river ran
from its summit; and up that river-bed it seemed I was doomed to climb
and climb for ever, millions and millions of miles upwards, against the
rushing stream. The thought was intolerable, and I shrieked aloud. A raging
thirst had seized me. I tried to drink the river-water: but it was boiling
hot--sulphurous--reeking of putrefaction. Suddenly I fancied that I could
pass round the foot of the mountain; and jumbling, as madmen will, the
sublime and the ridiculous, I sprang up to go round the foot of my bed,
which was the mountain.

I recollect lying on the floor. I recollect the people of the house, who
had been awoke by my shriek and my fall, rushing in and calling to me. I
could not rise or answer. I recollect a doctor; and talk about brain fever
and delirium. It was true. I was in a raging fever. And my fancy, long
pent-up and crushed by circumstances, burst out in uncontrollable wildness,
and swept my other faculties with it helpless away over all heaven and
earth, presenting to me, as in a vast kaleidoscope, fantastic symbols of
all I had ever thought, or read, or felt.

That fancy of the mountain returned; but I had climbed it now. I was
wandering along the lower ridge of the Himalaya. On my right the line of
snow peaks showed like a rosy saw against the clear blue morning sky.
Raspberries and cyclamens were peeping through the snow around me. As I
looked down the abysses, I could see far below, through the thin veils of
blue mist that wandered in the glens, the silver spires of giant deodars,
and huge rhododendrons glowing like trees of flame. The longing of my
life to behold that cradle of mankind was satisfied. My eyes revelled in
vastness, as they swept over the broad flat jungle at the mountain foot,
a desolate sheet of dark gigantic grasses, furrowed with the paths of the
buffalo and rhinoceros, with barren sandy water-courses, desolate pools,
and here and there a single tree, stunted with malaria, shattered by
mountain floods; and far beyond, the vast plains of Hindostan, enlaced with
myriad silver rivers and canals, tanks and rice-fields, cities with their
mosques and minarets, gleaming among the stately palm-groves along the
boundless horizon. Above me was a Hindoo temple, cut out of the yellow
sandstone. I climbed up to the higher tier of pillars among monstrous
shapes of gods and fiends, that mouthed and writhed and mocked at me,
struggling to free themselves from their bed of rock. The bull Nundi rose
and tried to gore me; hundred-handed gods brandished quoits and sabres
round my head; and Kali dropped the skull from her gore-dripping jaws, to
clutch me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing the pillars of the
portico, bent them like reeds: an earthquake shook the hills--great sheets
of woodland slid roaring and crashing into the valleys--a tornado swept
through the temple halls, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm:
a crash--a cloud of yellow dust which filled the air--choked me--blinded
me--buried me--

* * * * *

And Eleanor came by, and took my soul in the palm of her hand, as the
angels did Faust's, and carried it to a cavern by the seaside, and dropped
it in; and I fell and fell for ages. And all the velvet mosses, rock
flowers, and sparkling spars and ores, fell with me, round me, in showers
of diamonds, whirlwinds of emerald and ruby, and pattered into the sea that
moaned below, and were quenched; and the light lessened above me to one
small spark, and vanished; and I was in darkness, and turned again to my
dust.

* * * * *

And I was at the lowest point of created life; a madrepore rooted to the
rock, fathoms below the tide-mark; and worst of all, my individuality was
gone. I was not one thing, but many things--a crowd of innumerable polypi;
and I grew and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and multiplied
thousand and ten thousandfold. If I could have thought, I should have gone
mad at it; but I could only feel.

And I heard Eleanor and Lillian talking, as they floated past me through
the deep, for they were two angels; and Lillian said, "When will he be one
again?"

And Eleanor said, "He who falls from the golden ladder must climb through
ages to its top. He who tears himself in pieces by his lusts, ages only can
make him one again. The madrepore shall become a shell, and the shell a
fish, and the fish a bird, and the bird a beast; and then he shall become a
man again, and see the glory of the latter days."

* * * * *

And I was a soft crab, under a stone on the sea-shore. With infinite
starvation, and struggling, and kicking, I had got rid of my armour, shield
by shield, and joint by joint, and cowered, naked and pitiable, in the
dark, among dead shells and ooze. Suddenly the stone was turned up; and
there was my cousin's hated face laughing at me, and pointing me out
to Lillian. She laughed too, as I looked up, sneaking, ashamed, and
defenceless, and squared up at him with my soft useless claws. Why should
she not laugh? Are not crabs, and toads, and monkeys, and a hundred other
strange forms of animal life, jests of nature--embodiments of a divine
humour, at which men are meant to laugh and be merry? But, alas! my cousin,
as he turned away, thrust the stone back with his foot, and squelched me
flat.

* * * * *

And I was a remora, weak and helpless, till I could attach myself to some
living thing; and then I had power to stop the largest ship. And Lillian
was a flying fish, and skimmed over the crests of the waves on gauzy wings.
And my cousin was a huge shark, rushing after her, greedy and open-mouthed;
and I saw her danger, and clung to him, and held him back; and just as I
had stopped him, she turned and swam back into his open jaws.

* * * * *

Sand--sand--nothing but sand! The air was full of sand drifting over
granite temples, and painted kings and triumphs, and the skulls of a former
world; and I was an ostrich, flying madly before the simoon wind, and the
giant sand pillars, which stalked across the plains, hunting me down. And
Lillian was an Amazon queen, beautiful, and cold, and cruel; and she rode
upon a charmed horse, and carried behind her on her saddle a spotted ounce,
which, was my cousin; and, when I came near her, she made him leap down
and course me. And we ran for miles and for days through the interminable
sand, till he sprung on me, and dragged me down. And as I lay quivering
and dying, she reined in her horse above me, and looked down at me with
beautiful, pitiless eyes; and a wild Arab tore the plumes from my wings,
and she took them and wreathed them in her golden hair. The broad and
blood-red sun sank down beneath the sand, and the horse and the Amazon and
the ostrich plumes shone blood-red in his lurid rays.

* * * * *

I was a mylodon among South American forests--a vast sleepy mass, my
elephantine limbs and yard-long talons contrasting strangely with the
little meek rabbit's head, furnished with a poor dozen of clumsy grinders,
and a very small kernel of brains, whose highest consciousness was the
enjoyment of muscular strength. Where I had picked up the sensation which
my dreams realized for me, I know not: my waking life, alas! had never
given me experience of it. Has the mind power of creating sensations for
itself? Surely it does so, in those delicious dreams about flying which
haunt us poor wingless mortals, which would seem to give my namesake's
philosophy the lie. However that may be, intense and new was the animal
delight, to plant my hinder claws at some tree-foot deep into the black
rotting vegetable-mould which steamed rich gases up wherever it was
pierced, and clasp my huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern;
and then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear upon it, till
the stem bent like a withe, and the laced bark cracked, and the fibres
groaned and shrieked, and the roots sprung up out of the soil; and then,
with a slow circular wrench, the whole tree was twisted bodily out of the
ground, and the maddening tension of my muscles suddenly relaxed, and I
sank sleepily down upon the turf, to browse upon the crisp tart foliage,
and fall asleep in the glare of sunshine which streamed through the new
gap in the green forest roof. Much as I had envied the strong, I had never
before suspected the delight of mere physical exertion. I now understood
the wild gambols of the dog, and the madness which makes the horse gallop
and strain onwards till he drops and dies. They fulfil their nature, as I
was doing, and in that is always happiness.

But I did more--whether from mere animal destructiveness, or from the
spark of humanity which was slowly rekindling in me, I began to delight in
tearing up trees for its own sake. I tried my strength daily on thicker and
thicker boles. I crawled up to the high palm-tops, and bowed them down by
my weight. My path through the forest was marked, like that of a tornado,
by snapped and prostrate stems and withering branches. Had I been a few
degrees more human, I might have expected a retribution for my sin. I had
fractured my own skull three or four times already. I used often to pass
the carcases of my race, killed, as geologists now find them, by the fall
of the trees they had overthrown; but still I went on, more and more
reckless, a slave, like many a so-called man, to the mere sense of power.

One day I wandered to the margin of the woods, and climbing a tree,
surveyed a prospect new to me. For miles and miles, away to the white
line of the smoking Cordillera, stretched a low rolling plain; one vast
thistle-bed, the down of which flew in grey gauzy clouds before a soft
fitful breeze; innumerable finches fluttered and pecked above it, and bent
the countless flower-heads. Far away, one tall tree rose above the level
thistle-ocean. A strange longing seized me to go and tear it down. The
forest leaves seemed tasteless; my stomach sickened at them; nothing but
that tree would satisfy me; and descending, I slowly brushed my way, with
half-shut eyes, through the tall thistles which buried even my bulk.

At last, after days of painful crawling, I dragged my unwieldiness to the
tree-foot. Around it the plain was bare, and scored by burrows and heaps
of earth, among which gold, some in dust, some in great knots and ingots,
sparkled everywhere in the sun, in fearful contrast to the skulls and bones
which lay bleaching round. Some were human, some were those of vast and
monstrous beasts. I knew (one knows everything in dreams) that they had
been slain by the winged ants, as large as panthers, who snuffed and
watched around over the magic treasure. Of them I felt no fear; and they
seemed not to perceive me, as I crawled, with greedy, hunger-sharpened
eyes, up to the foot of the tree. It seemed miles in height. Its stem was
bare and polished like a palm's, and above a vast feathery crown of dark
green velvet slept in the still sunlight. But wonders of wonders! from
among the branches hung great sea-green lilies, and, nestled in the heart
of each of them, the bust of a beautiful girl. Their white bosoms and
shoulders gleamed rosy-white against the emerald petals, like conch-shells
half-hidden among sea-weeds, while their delicate waists melted
mysteriously into the central sanctuary of the flower. Their long arms
and golden tresses waved languishingly downward in the breeze; their eyes
glittered like diamonds; their breaths perfumed the air. A blind ecstasy
seized me--I awoke again to humanity, and fiercely clasping the tree,
shook and tore at it, in the blind hope of bringing nearer to me the magic
beauties above: for I knew that I was in the famous land of Wak-Wak, from
which the Eastern merchants used to pluck those flower-born beauties, and
bring them home to fill the harems of the Indian kings. Suddenly I heard
a rustling in the thistles behind me, and looking round saw again that
dreaded face--my cousin!

He was dressed--strange jumble that dreams are!--like an American
backwoodsman. He carried the same revolver and bowie-knife which he had
showed me the fatal night that he intruded on the Chartist club. I shook
with terror; but he, too, did not see me. He threw himself on his knees,
and began fiercely digging and scraping for the gold.

The winged ants rushed on him, but he looked up, and "held them with his
glittering eye," and they shrank back abashed into the thistle covert;
while I strained and tugged on, and the faces of the dryads above grew
sadder and older, and their tears fell on me like a fragrant rain.

Suddenly the tree-bole cracked--it was tottering. I looked round, and saw
that my cousin knelt directly in the path of its fall. I tried to call
to him to move; but how could a poor edentate like myself articulate a
word? I tried to catch his attention by signs--he would not see. I tried,
convulsively, to hold the tree up, but it was too late; a sudden gust of
air swept by, and down it rushed, with a roar like a whirlwind, and leaving
my cousin untouched, struck me full across the loins, broke my backbone,
and pinned me to the ground in mortal agony. I heard one wild shriek rise
from the flower fairies, as they fell each from the lily cup, no longer of
full human size, but withered, shrivelled, diminished a thousand-fold, and
lay on the bare sand, like little rosy humming-birds' eggs, all crushed and
dead.

The great blue heaven above me spoke, and cried, "Selfish and sense-bound!
thou hast murdered beauty!"

The sighing thistle-ocean answered, and murmured, "Discontented! thou hast
murdered beauty!"

One flower fairy alone lifted up her tiny cheek from the gold-strewn sand,
and cried, "Presumptuous! thou hast murdered beauty!"

It was Lillian's face--Lillian's voice! My cousin heard it too, and turned
eagerly; and as my eyes closed in the last death-shiver, I saw him coolly
pick up the little beautiful figure, which looked like a fragment of some
exquisite cameo, and deliberately put it away in his cigar-case, as he said
to himself, "A charming tit-bit for me, when I return from the diggings"!

* * * * *

When I awoke again, I was a baby-ape in Bornean forests, perched among
fragrant trailers and fantastic orchis flowers; and as I looked down,
beneath the green roof, into the clear waters paved with unknown
water-lilies on which the sun had never shone, I saw my face reflected
in the pool--a melancholy, thoughtful countenance, with large projecting
brow--it might have been a negro child's. And I felt stirring in me, germs
of a new and higher consciousness--yearnings of love towards the mother
ape, who fed me and carried me from tree to tree. But I grew and grew; and
then the weight of my destiny fell upon me. I saw year by year my brow
recede, my neck enlarge, my jaw protrude; my teeth became tusks; skinny
wattles grew from my cheeks--the animal faculties in me were swallowing
up the intellectual. I watched in myself, with stupid self-disgust, the
fearful degradation which goes on from youth to age in all the monkey
race, especially in those which approach nearest to the human form. Long
melancholy mopings, fruitless stragglings to think, were periodically
succeeded by wild frenzies, agonies of lust and aimless ferocity. I flew
upon my brother apes, and was driven off with wounds. I rushed howling down
into the village gardens, destroying everything I met. I caught the birds
and insects, and tore them to pieces with savage glee. One day, as I sat
among the boughs, I saw Lillian coming along a flowery path--decked as Eve
might have been, the day she turned from Paradise. The skins of gorgeous
birds were round her waist; her hair was wreathed with fragrant tropic
flowers. On her bosom lay a baby--it was my cousin's. I knew her, and
hated her. The madness came upon me. I longed to leap from the bough and
tear her limb from limb; but brutal terror, the dread of man which is the
doom of beasts, kept me rooted to my place. Then my cousin came--a hunter
missionary; and I heard him talk to her with pride of the new world of
civilization and Christianity which he was organizing in that tropic
wilderness. I listened with a dim jealous understanding--not of the words,
but of the facts. I saw them instinctively, as in a dream. She pointed up
to me in terror and disgust, as I sat gnashing and gibbering overhead. He
threw up the muzzle of his rifle carelessly, and fired--I fell dead, but
conscious still. I knew that my carcase was carried to the settlement; and
I watched while a smirking, chuckling surgeon dissected me, bone by bone,
and nerve by nerve. And as he was fingering at my heart, and discoursing
sneeringly about Van Helmont's dreams of the Archæus, and the animal
spirit which dwells within the solar plexus, Eleanor glided by again, like
an angel, and drew my soul out of the knot of nerves, with one velvet
finger-tip.

* * * * *

Child-dreams--more vague and fragmentary than my animal ones; and yet more
calm, and simple, and gradually, as they led me onward through a new life,
ripening into detail, coherence, and reflection. Dreams of a hut among
the valleys of Thibet--the young of forest animals, wild cats, and dogs,
and fowls, brought home to be my playmates, and grow up tame around me.
Snow-peaks which glittered white against the nightly sky, barring in the
horizon of the narrow valley, and yet seeming to beckon upwards, outwards.
Strange unspoken aspirations; instincts which pointed to unfulfilled
powers, a mighty destiny. A sense, awful and yet cheering, of a wonder
and a majesty, a presence and a voice around, in the cliffs and the pine
forests, and the great blue rainless heaven. The music of loving voices,
the sacred names of child and father, mother, brother, sister, first of all
inspirations.--Had we not an All-Father, whose eyes looked down upon us
from among those stars above; whose hand upheld the mountain roots below
us? Did He not love us, too, even as we loved each other?

* * * * *

The noise of wheels crushing slowly through meadows of tall marigolds and
asters, orchises and fragrant lilies. I lay, a child, upon a woman's bosom.
Was she my mother, or Eleanor, or Lillian? Or was she neither, and yet
all--some ideal of the great Arian tribe, containing in herself all future
types of European women? So I slept and woke, and slept again, day after
day, week after week, in the lazy bullock-waggon, among herds of grey
cattle, guarded by huge lop-eared mastiffs; among shaggy white horses,
heavy-horned sheep, and silky goats; among tall, bare-limbed men, with
stone axes on their shoulders, and horn bows at their backs. Westward,
through the boundless steppes, whither or why we knew not; but that the
All-Father had sent us forth. And behind us the rosy snow-peaks died into
ghastly grey, lower and lower as every evening came; and before us the
plains spread infinite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and ever fresh tribes
of gaudy flowers. Behind us dark lines of living beings streamed down
the mountain slopes; around us dark lines crawled along the plains--all
westward, westward ever.--The tribes of the Holy Mountain poured out like
water to replenish the earth and subdue it--lava-streams from the crater
of that great soul-volcano--Titan babies, dumb angels of God, bearing with
them in their unconscious pregnancy the law, the freedom, the science, the
poetry, the Christianity of Europe and the world.

Westward ever--who could stand against us? We met the wild asses on the
steppe, and tamed them, and made them our slaves. We slew the bison herds,
and swam broad rivers on their skins. The Python snake lay across our
path; the wolves and the wild dogs snarled at us out of their coverts;
we slew them and went on. The forest rose in black tangled barriers: we
hewed our way through them and went on. Strange giant tribes met us, and
eagle-visaged hordes, fierce and foolish; we smote them hip and thigh, and
went on, westward ever. Days and weeks and months rolled on, and our wheels
rolled on with them. New alps rose up before us; we climbed and climbed
them, till, in lonely glens, the mountain walls stood up, and barred our
path.

Then one arose and said, "Rocks are strong, but the All-Father is stronger.
Let us pray to Him to send the earthquakes, and blast the mountains
asunder."

So we sat down and prayed, but the earthquake did not come.

Then another arose and said, "Rocks are strong, but the All-Father is
stronger. If we are the children of the All-Father, we, too, are stronger
than the rocks. Let us portion out the valley, to every man an equal plot
of ground; and bring out the sacred seeds, and sow, and build, and come up
with me and bore the mountain."

And all said, "It is the voice of God. We will go up with thee, and bore
the mountain; and thou shalt be our king, for thou art wisest, and the
spirit of the All-Father is on thee; and whosoever will not go up with thee
shall die as a coward and an idler."

So we went up; and in the morning we bored the mountain, and at night we
came down and tilled the ground, and sowed wheat and barley, and planted
orchards. And in the upper glens we met the mining dwarfs, and saw their
tools of iron and copper, and their rock-houses and forges, and envied
them. But they would give us none of them: then our king said--

"The All-Father has given all things and all wisdom. Woe to him who keeps
them to himself: we will teach you to sow the sacred seeds; and do you
teach us your smith-work or you die."

Then the dwarf's taught us smith-work; and we loved them, for they were
wise; and they married our sons and daughters; and we went on boring the
mountain.

Then some of us arose and said, "We are stronger than our brethren, and
can till more ground than they. Give us a greater portion of land, to each
according to his power."

But the king said, "Wherefore? that ye may eat and drink more than your
brethren? Have you larger stomachs, as well as stronger arms? As much as
a man needs for himself, that he may do for himself. The rest is the gift
of the All-Father, and we must do His work therewith. For the sake of the
women and the children, for the sake of the sick and the aged, let him that
is stronger go up and work the harder at the mountain." And all men said,
"It is well spoken."

So we were all equal--for none took more than he needed; and we were all
free, because we loved to obey the king by whom the spirit spoke; and
we were all brothers, because we had one work, and one hope, and one
All-Father.

But I grew up to be a man; and twenty years were past, and the mountain
was not bored through; and the king grew old, and men began to love their
flocks and herds better than quarrying, and they gave up boring through the
mountain. And the strong and the cunning said, "What can we do with all
this might of ours?" So, because they had no other way of employing it,
they turned it against each other, and swallowed up the heritage of the
weak: and a few grew rich, and many poor; and the valley was filled with
sorrow, for the land became too narrow for them.

Then I arose and said, "How is this?" And they said, "We must make
provision for our children."

And I answered, "The All-Father meant neither you nor your children to
devour your brethren. Why do you not break up more waste ground? Why do you
not try to grow more corn in your fields?"

And they answered, "We till the ground as our forefathers did: we will keep
to the old traditions."

And I answered, "Oh ye hypocrites! have ye not forgotten the old
traditions, that each man should have his equal share of ground, and that
we should go on working at the mountain, for the sake of the weak and the
children, the fatherless and the widow?"

And they answered nought for a while.

Then one said, "Are we not better off as we are? We buy the poor man's
ground for a price, and we pay him his wages for tilling it for us--and we
know better how to manage it than he."