The other day, as I lay with my face in the grass, I heard a gentle
rustle, and raised my head to find a hedge-snake watching me
fearless, unwinking. I stretched out my hand, picked it up
unresisting, and put it in my coat like the husbandman of old. Was
he so ill-rewarded, I wonder, with the kiss that reveals secrets?
My snake slept in peace while I hammered away with an odd
quickening of heart as I thought how to me, as to Melampus, had
come the messenger--had come, but to ears deafened by centuries of
misrule, blindness, and oppression; so that, with all my longing, I
am shut out of the wondrous world where walked Melampus and the
Saint. To me there is no suggestion of evil in the little silent
creatures, harmless, or deadly only with the Death which is Life.
The beasts who turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear
unreflectingly; with the snake there is the swift, silent strike,
the tiny, tiny wound, then sleep and a forgetting.
My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the
grass at sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my task
done, went home across the fields to the solitary cottage where I
lodge. It is old and decrepit--two rooms, with a quasi-attic over
them reached by a ladder from the kitchen and reached only by me.
It is furnished with the luxuries of life, a truckle bed, table,
chair, and huge earthenware pan which I fill from the ice-cold well
at the back of the cottage. Morning and night I serve with the
Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when
their hearts were purged by service.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25