Octopus — Book II, Chapter 3, Part 3

The nights passed.

The spring grew warmer.

In the daytime intermittent rains freshened all the earth.

The flowers of the Seed ranch grew rapidly.

Bud after bud burst forth, while those already opened expanded to full maturity.

The colour of the Seed ranch deepened.

One night, after hours of waiting, Vanamee felt upon his cheek the touch of a prolonged puff of warm wind, breathing across the little valley from out the east.

It reached the Mission garden and stirred the branches of the pear trees.

It seemed veritably to be compounded of the very essence of the flowers.

Never had the aroma been so sweet, so pervasive.

It passed and faded, leaving in its wake an absolute silence.

Then, at length, the silence of the night, that silence to which Vanamee had so long appealed, was broken by a tiny sound.

Alert, half-risen from the ground, he listened; for now, at length, he heard something.

The sound repeated itself.

It came from near at hand, from the thick shadow at the foot of the hill.

What it was, he could not tell, but it did not belong to a single one of the infinite similar noises of the place with which he was so familiar.

It was neither the rustle of a leaf, the snap of a parted twig, the drone of an insect, the dropping of a magnolia blossom.

It was a vibration merely, faint, elusive, impossible of definition; a minute notch in the fine, keen edge of stillness.

Again the nights passed.

The summer stars became brighter.

The warmth increased.

The flowers of the Seed ranch grew still more.

The five hundred acres of the ranch were carpeted with them.

At length, upon a certain midnight, a new light began to spread in the sky.

The thin scimitar of the moon rose, veiled and dim behind the earth-mists.

The light increased.

Distant objects, until now hidden, came into view, and as the radiance brightened, Vanamee, looking down upon the little valley, saw a spectacle of incomparable beauty.

All the buds of the Seed ranch had opened.

The faint tints of the flowers had deepened, had asserted themselves.

They challenged the eye.

Pink became a royal red.

Blue rose into purple.

Yellow flamed into orange.

Orange glowed golden and brilliant.

The earth disappeared under great bands and fields of resplendent colour.

Then, at length, the moon abruptly soared zenithward from out the veiling mist, passing from one filmy haze to another.

For a moment there was a gleam of a golden light, and Vanamee, his eyes searching the shade at the foot of the hill, felt his heart suddenly leap, and then hang poised, refusing to beat.

In that instant of passing light, something had caught his eye.

Something that moved, down there, half in and half out of the shadow, at the hill's foot.

It had come and gone in an instant.

The haze once more screened the moonlight.

The shade again engulfed the vision.

What was it he had seen?

He did not know.

So brief had been that movement, the drowsy brain had not been quick enough to interpret the cipher message of the eye.

Now it was gone.

But something had been there.

He had seen it.

Was it the lifting of a strand of hair, the wave of a white hand, the flutter of a garment's edge?

He could not tell, but it did not belong to any of those sights which he had seen so often in that place.

It was neither the glancing of a moth's wing, the nodding of a wind-touched blossom, nor the noiseless flitting of a bat.

It was a gleam merely, faint, elusive, impossible of definition, an intangible agitation, in the vast, dim blur of the darkness.

And that was all.

Until now no single real thing had occurred, nothing that Vanamee could reduce to terms of actuality, nothing he could put into words.

The manifestation, when not recognisable to that strange sixth sense of his, appealed only to the most refined, the most delicate perception of eye and ear.

It was all ephemeral, filmy, dreamy, the mystic forming of the Vision--the invisible developing a concrete nucleus, the starlight coagulating, the radiance of the flowers thickening to something actual; perfume, the most delicious fragrance, becoming a tangible presence.

But into that garden the serpent intruded.

Though cradled in the slow rhythm of the dream, lulled by this beauty of a summer's night, heavy with the scent of flowers, the silence broken only by a rippling fountain, the darkness illuminated by a world of radiant blossoms, Vanamee could not forget the tragedy of the Other; that terror of many years ago,--that prowler of the night, that strange, fearful figure with the unseen face, swooping in there from out the darkness, gone in an instant, yet leaving behind the trail and trace of death and of pollution.

Never had Vanamee seen this more clearly than when leaving Presley on the stock range of Los Muertos, he had come across to the Mission garden by way of the Quien Sabe ranch.

It was the same night in which Annixter out-watched the stars, coming, at last, to himself.

As the hours passed, the two men, far apart, ignoring each other, waited for the Manifestation,--Annixter on the ranch, Vanamee in the garden.

Prone upon his face, under the pear trees, his forehead buried in the hollow of his arm, Vanamee lay motionless.

For the last time, raising his head, he sent his voiceless cry out into the night across the multi-coloured levels of the little valley, calling upon the miracle, summoning the darkness to give Angele back to him, resigning himself to the hallucination.

He bowed his head upon his arm again and waited.

The minutes passed.

The fountain dripped steadily.

Over the hills a haze of saffron light foretold the rising of the full moon.

Nothing stirred.

The silence was profound.

Then, abruptly, Vanamee's right hand shut tight upon his wrist.

There--there it was.

It began again, his invocation was answered.

Far off there, the ripple formed again upon the still, black pool of the night.

No sound, no sight; vibration merely, appreciable by some sublimated faculty of the mind as yet unnamed.

Rigid, his nerves taut, motionless, prone on the ground, he waited.

It advanced with infinite slowness.

Now it passed through the beds of violets, now through the mignonette.

A moment later, and he knew it stood among the white iris.

Then it left those behind.

It was in the splendour of the red roses and carnations.

It passed like a moving star into the superb abundance, the imperial opulence of the royal lilies.

It was advancing slowly, but there was no pause.

He held his breath, not daring to raise his head.

It passed beyond the limits of the Seed ranch, and entered the shade at the foot of the hill below him.

Would it come farther than this?

Here it had always stopped hitherto, stopped for a moment, and then, in spite of his efforts, had slipped from his grasp and faded back into the night.

But now he wondered if he had been willing to put forth his utmost strength, after all.

Had there not always been an element of dread in the thought of beholding the mystery face to face?

Had he not even allowed the Vision to dissolve, the Answer to recede into the obscurity whence it came?

But never a night had been so beautiful as this.

It was the full period of the spring.

The air was a veritable caress.

The infinite repose of the little garden, sleeping under the night, was delicious beyond expression.

It was a tiny corner of the world, shut off, discreet, distilling romance, a garden of dreams, of enchantments.

Below, in the little valley, the resplendent colourations of the million flowers, roses, lilies, hyacinths, carnations, violets, glowed like incandescence in the golden light of the rising moon.

The air was thick with the perfume, heavy with it, clogged with it.

The sweetness filled the very mouth.

The throat choked with it.

Overhead wheeled the illimitable procession of the constellations.

Underfoot, the earth was asleep.

The very flowers were dreaming.

A cathedral hush overlay all the land, and a sense of benediction brooded low,--a divine kindliness manifesting itself in beauty, in peace, in absolute repose.

It was a time for visions.

It was the hour when dreams come true, and lying deep in the grasses beneath the pear trees, Vanamee, dizzied with mysticism, reaching up and out toward the supernatural, felt, as it were, his mind begin to rise upward from out his body.

He passed into a state of being the like of which he had not known before.

He felt that his imagination was reshaping itself, preparing to receive an impression never experienced until now.

His body felt light to him, then it dwindled, vanished.

He saw with new eyes, heard with new ears, felt with a new heart.

“Come to me,” he murmured.

Then slowly he felt the advance of the Vision.

It was approaching.

Every instant it drew gradually nearer.

At last, he was to see.

It had left the shadow at the base of the hill; it was on the hill itself.

Slowly, steadily, it ascended the slope; just below him there, he heard a faint stirring.

The grasses rustled under the touch of a foot.

The leaves of the bushes murmured, as a hand brushed against them; a slender twig creaked.

The sounds of approach were more distinct.

They came nearer.

They reached the top of the hill.

They were within whispering distance.

Vanamee, trembling, kept his head buried in his arm.

The sounds, at length, paused definitely.

The Vision could come no nearer.

He raised his head and looked.

The moon had risen.

Its great shield of gold stood over the eastern horizon.

Within six feet of Vanamee, clear and distinct, against the disk of the moon, stood the figure of a young girl.

She was dressed in a gown of scarlet silk, with flowing sleeves, such as Japanese wear, embroidered with flowers and figures of birds worked in gold threads.

On either side of her face, making three-cornered her round, white forehead, hung the soft masses of her hair of gold.

Her hands hung limply at her sides.

But from between her parted lips--lips of almost an Egyptian fulness--her breath came slow and regular, and her eyes, heavy lidded, slanting upwards toward the temples, perplexing, oriental, were closed.

She was asleep.

From out this life of flowers, this world of colour, this atmosphere oppressive with perfume, this darkness clogged and cloyed, and thickened with sweet odours, she came to him.

She came to him from out of the flowers, the smell of the roses in her hair of gold, the aroma and the imperial red of the carnations in her lips, the whiteness of the lilies, the perfume of the lilies, and the lilies' slender, balancing grace in her neck.

Her hands disengaged the scent of the heliotrope.

The folds of her scarlet gown gave off the enervating smell of poppies.

Her feet were redolent of hyacinth.

She stood before him, a Vision realised--a dream come true.

She emerged from out the invisible.

He beheld her, a figure of gold and pale vermilion, redolent of perfume, poised motionless in the faint saffron sheen of the new-risen moon.

She, a creation of sleep, was herself asleep.

She, a dream, was herself dreaming.

Called forth from out the darkness, from the grip of the earth, the embrace of the grave, from out the memory of corruption, she rose into light and life, divinely pure.

Across that white forehead was no smudge, no trace of an earthly pollution--no mark of a terrestrial dishonour.

He saw in her the same beauty of untainted innocence he had known in his youth.

Years had made no difference with her.

She was still young.

It was the old purity that returned, the deathless beauty, the ever-renascent life, the eternal consecrated and immortal youth.

For a few seconds, she stood there before him, and he, upon the ground at her feet, looked up at her, spellbound.

Then, slowly she withdrew.

Still asleep, her eyelids closed, she turned from him, descending the slope.

She was gone.

Vanamee started up, coming, as it were, to himself, looking wildly about him.

Sarria was there.

“I saw her,” said the priest.

“It was Angele, the little girl, your Angele's daughter.

She is like her mother.

” But Vanamee scarcely heard.

He walked as if in a trance, pushing by Sarria, going forth from the garden.

Angele or Angele's daughter, it was all one with him.

It was She.

Death was overcome.

The grave vanquished.

Life, ever-renewed, alone existed.

Time was naught; change was naught;

all things were immortal but evil; all things eternal but grief.

Suddenly, the dawn came; the east burned roseate toward the zenith.

Vanamee walked on, he knew not where.

The dawn grew brighter.

At length, he paused upon the crest of a hill overlooking the ranchos, and cast his eye below him to the southward.

Then, suddenly flinging up his arms, he uttered a great cry.

There it was.

The Wheat!

The Wheat!

In the night it had come up.

It was there, everywhere, from margin to margin of the horizon.

The earth, long empty, teemed with green life.

Once more the pendulum of the seasons swung in its mighty arc, from death back to life.

Life out of death, eternity rising from out dissolution.

There was the lesson.

Angele was not the symbol, but the PROOF of immortality.

The seed dying, rotting and corrupting in the earth; rising again in life unconquerable, and in immaculate purity,--Angele dying as she gave birth to her little daughter, life springing from her death,--the pure, unconquerable, coming forth from the defiled.

Why had he not had the knowledge of God?

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.

So the seed had died.

So died Angele.

And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain.

It may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.

The wheat called forth from out the darkness, from out the grip of the earth, of the grave, from out corruption, rose triumphant into light and life.

So Angele, so life, so also the resurrection of the dead.

It is sown in corruption.

It is raised in incorruption.

It is sown in dishonour.

It is raised in glory.

It is sown in weakness.

It is raised in power.

Death was swallowed up in Victory.

The sun rose.

The night was over.

The glory of the terrestrial was one, and the glory of the celestial was another.

Then, as the glory of sun banished the lesser glory of moon and stars, Vanamee, from his mountain top, beholding the eternal green life of the growing Wheat, bursting its bonds, and in his heart exulting in his triumph over the grave, flung out his arms with a mighty shout: “Oh, Death, where is thy sting?

Oh, Grave, where is thy victory?

”