“It has hurt so much!” he said. “You must forgive me if I am still held back.”
But he took off his cloak and his tunic and went naked towards the idol, his breast panting with the sudden terror of overwhelming pain, memory of overwhelming pain, and grief too bitter.
“They did me to death!” he said in excuse of himself, turning his face to her for a moment.
And she saw the ghost of the death in him as he stood there thin and stark before her, and suddenly she was terrified, and she felt robbed. She felt the shadow of the grey, grisly wing of death triumphant.
“Ah, Goddess,” he said to the idol in the vernacular. “I would be so glad to live, if you would give me my clue again.”
For her again he felt desperate, faced by the demand of life, and burdened still by his death.
“Let me anoint you!” the woman said to him softly. “Let me anoint the scars! Show me, and let me anoint them!”
He forgot his nakedness in this re-evoked old pain. He sat on the edge of the couch, and she poured a little ointment into the palm of his hand. And as she chafed his hand, it all came back, the nails, the holes, the cruelty, the unjust cruelty against him who had offered only kindness. The agony of injustice and cruelty came over him again, as in his death-hour. But she chafed the palm, murmuring: “What was torn becomes a new flesh, what was a wound is full of fresh life; this scar is the eye of the violet.”
And he could not help smiling at her, in her naïve priestess’s absorption. This was her dream, and he was only a dream-object to her. She would never know or understand what he was. Especially she would never know the death that was gone before in him. But what did it matter? She was different. She was woman: her life and her death were different from him. Only she was good to him.
When she chafed his feet with oil and tender, tender healing, he could not refrain from saying to her:
“Once a woman washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with her hair, and poured on precious ointment.”
The woman of Isis looked up at him from her earnest work, interrupted again.
“Were they hurt then?” she said. “Your feet?”
“No, no! It was while they were whole.”
“And did you love her?”
“Love had passed in her. She only warned to serve,” he replied. “She had been a prostitute.”
“And did you let her serve you?” she asked.
“Yea.”
“Did you let her serve you with the corpse of her love?”
“Ay!”
Suddenly it dawned on him: I asked them all to serve me with the corpse of their love. And in the end I offered them only the corpse of my love. This is my body–take and eat–my corpse–
A vivid shame went through him. ‘After all,’ he thought, ‘I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death. Perhaps he loved me in the flesh, and I willed that he should love me bodilessly, with the corpse of love–‘
There dawned on him the reality of the soft, warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight. “And I told them, blessed are they that mourn,” he said to himself. “Alas, if I mourned even this woman here, now I am in death, I should have to remain dead, and I want so much to live. Life has brought me to this woman with warm hands. And her touch is more to me now than all my words. For I want to live–”
“Go then to the goddess!” she said softly, gently pushing him towards Isis. And as he stood there dazed and naked as an unborn thing, he heard the woman murmuring to the goddess, murmuring, murmuring with a plaintive appeal. She was stooping now, looking at the scar in the soft flesh of the socket of his side, a scar deep and like an eye sore with endless weeping, just in the soft socket above the hip. It was here that his blood had left him, and his essential seed. The woman was trembling softly and murmuring in Greek. And he in the recurring dismay of having died, and in the anguished perplexity of having tried to force life, felt his wounds crying aloud, and the deep places of the body howling again: “I have been murdered, and I lent myself to murder. They murdered me, but I lent myself to murder–“
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