The Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869)/Chapter 7
CHAPTER V.
THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION.
IT was about seven o'clock in the evening. The wind was diminishing,—a sign, however, of a violent recurrence later on. The child was on the table-land at the extreme south end of Portland.
Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula was, and had never even heard the name of Portland. He knew only one thing; that was that one could walk until one drops. An idea is a guide; but he had no idea. They had brought him there, and left him there. They and there. These two enigmas represented his doom. They were humankind; there was the universe. For him in all creation there was absolutely no basis to rest upon but the little piece of hard, frozen ground where he set his naked feet. In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for him? Nothing. Around him was the vastness of human desertion.
The child crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third. At the end of each plateau the child came to a break in the ground. The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains of Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping one another. The south side seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side laps over the next one; this made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly. From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself. The night was becoming very dark; his radius of sight was contracting. He could now see only a few steps before him. Suddenly he stopped and listened for an instant; then with an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction he turned quickly and directed his steps towards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his right, at the end of the plain nearest the cliff. There was on the eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree. The child had just heard a noise in this direction, which was neither the noise of the wind nor of the sea; nor was it the cry of an animal. He thought that some one was there, and a few strides brought him to the foot of the hillock.
Some one was there. That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now plainly visible. It looked something like a great arm thrust straight out of the ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger, supported from beneath by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the arm, the thumb, and the forefinger formed a triangle against the sky. At the point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless. The line moving in the wind sounded like a chain.
This was the noise the child had heard. Seen closely, the line proved to be that which the sound indicated,—a chain; a single chain cable. By that mysterious law which throughout Nature causes appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the mournful sea, the angry clouds on the distant horizon, added to the effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous. The mass appended to the chain presented the appearance of a huge scabbard. There was a round knot at the top, about which the end of the chain was fastened. The scabbard was riven asunder at the lower end, and long shreds hung between the rents. A faint breeze stirred the chain, and that which was appended to it swayed gently to and fro.
It was altogether an object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything, increased its dimensions, without changing its shape. It was a condensation of darkness into a definite form. Twilight and moon-rise, stars setting behind the cliff, the clouds and winds, seemed to have entered into the composition of this visible nonentity. The sort of log hanging in the wind partook of the impersonality diffused over sea and sky, and the darkness completed this phase of the thing which had once been man. It was that no longer.
To be naught but a remainder!—such a thing it is beyond the power of language to express. To exist no more, yet to persist in existing; to be in the dread abyss, yet out of it; to reappear after death as if indissoluble,—all this makes it inexpressible. There is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such a reality. This being,—was it a being? This black witness was a remainder, and an awful remainder. A remainder of what? Of Nature first, and then of society; zero, and yet total. The wild inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep oblivion of solitude environed it. It was given up to unknown chances; it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it willed. It was forever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it. The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent the horrible outrage of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was no peace for it even in annihilation; in the summer it fell away into dust, in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should have its reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed putrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory, the grave.
This dead thing had been stripped. To strip one already stripped,—relentless act! His marrow was no longer in his bones; his entrails were no longer in his body; his voice was no longer in his throat. A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out, and empties. If he ever was an I, where was that I? There still, perchance; and this was fearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains,—can one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?
Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis snatches. Conjecture has its compelle intrare. In passing by certain places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping,—a prey to dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without meditating. In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron, rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration was a toll paid to all,—a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain, to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night had rifled the dead. He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant,—a tenant of the darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and he was not; he was palpable, yet vanished; he was a shadow accruing to the night. After the disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in lugubrious accord with all around him; by his mere presence he increased the gloom of the tempest and the calm of the stars. The unutterable which is in the desert was condensed in him; waif of an unknown fate, he commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in his mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas; about him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths; certainty and confidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of the brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of a spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.
This spectre was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable. Perpetual shuddering made him terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to be a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him,—perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends human justice. There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of men and his own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and the waste; he was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul. For dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit. He denounced the law of earth to the law of heaven. Placed there by man, he there awaited God. Above him floated, blended with all the vague distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.
Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The illimitable circumscribed by naught—nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by—was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us, when heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent, then it is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed. When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate behind.