The peasant came home from work and said:
“Master, I thank you for the money. But we did not want it. And all I have is yours.”
But the man who had died was sad, because the peasant stood there in the little, personal body, and his eyes were cunning and sparkling with the hope of greater rewards in money later on. True, the peasant had taken him in free, and had risked getting no reward. But the hope was cunning in him. Yet even this was as men are made. So when the peasant would have helped him to rise, for night had fallen, the man who had died said:
“Don’t touch me, brother. I am not yet risen to the Father.”
The sun burned with greater splendour, and burnished the young cock brighter. But the peasant kept the string renewed, and the bird was a prisoner. Yet the flame of life burned up to a sharp point in the cock, so that it eyed askance and haughtily the man who had died. And the man smiled and held the bird dear, and he said to it:
“Surely thou art risen to the Father, among birds.” And the young cock, answering, crowed.
When at dawn on the third morning the man went to the garden, he was absorbed, thinking of the greater life of the body, beyond the little, narrow, personal life. So he came through the thick screen of laurel and myrtle bushes, near the rock, suddenly, and he saw three women near the tomb. One was Madeleine, and one was the woman who had been his mother, and the third was a woman he knew, called Joan. He looked up, and saw them all, and they saw him, and they were all afraid.
He stood arrested in the distance, knowing they were there to claim him back, bodily. But he would in no wise return to them. Pallid, in the shadow of a grey morning that was blowing to rain, he saw them, and turned away. But Madeleine hastened towards him.
“I did not bring them,” she said. “They have come of themselves. See, I have brought you money!…Will you not speak to them?”
She offered him some gold pieces, and he took them, saying:
“May I have this money? I shall need it. I cannot speak to them, for I am not yet ascended to the Father. And I must leave you now.”
“Ah! Where will you go?” she cried.
He looked at her, and saw she was clutching for the man in him who had died and was dead, the man of his youth and his mission, of his chastity and his fear, of his little life, his giving without taking.
“I must go to my Father!” he said.
“And you will leave us? There is your mother!” she cried, turning round with the old anguish, which yet was sweet to her.
“But now I must ascend to my Father,” he said, and he drew back into the bushes, and so turned quickly, and went away, saying to himself:
“Now I belong to no one and have no connection, and mission or gospel is gone from me. Lo! I cannot make even my own life, and what have I to save?…I can learn to be alone.”
So he went back to the peasants’ house, to the yard where the young cock was tied by the leg with a string. And he wanted no one, for it was best to be alone; for the presence of people made him lonely. The sun and the subtle salve of spring healed his wounds, even the gaping wound of disillusion through his bowels was closing up. And his need of men and women, his fever to have them and to be saved by them, this too was healing in him. Whatever came of touch between himself and the race of men, henceforth, should come without trespass or compulsion. For he said to himself:
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