Bride of the Mistletoe
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James Lane Allen >> Bride of the Mistletoe
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He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under the
candle--and went on:
"To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:
Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw
and the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age
thought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul
and the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. The
Magdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at
the foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third century
after Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christian
symbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of
Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire of
life which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross he
has ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man as
crucified as the image of humanity. And thus ages before Christ,
cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance,
among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made with
the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three they
cut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood."
He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the
tree--the dove under the cross, and went on:
"In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove
of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the
heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends,
overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white
dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of
reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to
manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine
mother of nature is often represented with this dove as having
actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here again
forest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;
for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in
the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wings
an omen."
On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of
each backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was
entwined with forest worship.
He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he
said, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of
the vine. And vine worship was forest worship. Moreover, in the same
oak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their
tinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy
beats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worship
of Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man's first
written music in forgotten China. In the first century of the
Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhist
sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship of
the sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the service
of forest faith.
He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram's
horn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used
also to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine
itself--the forest's first goblet.
He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest
of all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned
to shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at
least bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring,
the wild fruit of autumn.
He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left
uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that
he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the
most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most
clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the
progress of humanity.
He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it
like a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of
ages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest
worship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything
most precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice and
self-sacrifice. Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the
sacred tree with gold and ornaments. Herodotus relates that when
Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had
it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that when
Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung rich
spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of
decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we can
meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Now the custom
has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mock
sacrifice for the real.
He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to
have been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. In the course
of time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock
countenance replaced the real.
He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others,
its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing
children in forest worship. How common this custom was the early
literature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter
the trace of it in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by the
command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slaying
his son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been well
established. In the case of Jephthah's daughter the sacrifice was
actually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate of
Iphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world's mercy; in her
stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac's case, was
accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for
the real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the
Christmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites
only these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the
innocent.
He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and
ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest
worship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
"Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree
is all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could
not worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore
he brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts,
remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his
sacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since,
the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the
better to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to
the best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it
would still have to worship what is highest in human nature and so
worshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice
become the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offer
up what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankind
has ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its own
Calvary."
He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her
appreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and without
a word. But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as a
listener who wakens from a long revery.
"Have you finished the story for me?" she inquired.
"I have finished the story for you," he replied without betraying
disappointment at her icy reception of it.
Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
"You have not interpreted this," she said, her mind fixed on that sole
omission.
"I have not explained that," he admitted.
She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward
the manuscript on the table across the room.
"Have you explained it there?"
"I have not explained it there."
"But why?" she said with disappointment.
"I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine."
"But why, Frederick?" she inquired, startled into wonderment.
He smiled: "If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story."
"But why do you not wish to tell me the story?"
He answered with warning frankness: "If you once saw it as a picture,
the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
darkly."
She protested: "If it is dark to you, why should I not share the
darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life's shadows together?
And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us
and dark things but half as dark?"
He merely repeated his warning: "It is a story of a crueler age than
ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids."
She answered: "So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to
take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from
the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not
printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in
libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when
must I begin to dread anything in books? Or anything in life? And
since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always
looked at it with four eyes?"
"I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things
to see with two, and things to see with none."
With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
mistletoe.
"Tell me the story of this!" she pleaded as though she demanded a
right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
he now saw, would give her pain.
"Happily the story is far away from us," he said, as though he were
half inclined to grant her request.
"If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!"
He held back a long time: "You who are so safe in good, why know
evil?"
"Frederick," she cried, "I shall have to insist upon your telling me
this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
truth!"
He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
the narrative of the historian:
"Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening
by the blue AEgean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
soldiers of Caesar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
"Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Caesar who was to conquer
it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
Britain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;
in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak one
bough--the mistletoe."
He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in
the early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was
the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. In Greece it was the
tree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy
it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of
mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial
Caesars. After the Caesars had passed, it was the oak that Michael
Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--there
as always the chosen tree of human desire. In Britain it was the
sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests
performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:
never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such
ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest
worship: the New Year's day of the Druids.
A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their
way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been
found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the
excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of
reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is
spread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the Arch
Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own
eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims
annually sacrificed to the oak.
A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough,
and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden
pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is
blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each
one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of
which it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have
never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are
slaughtered in sacrifice.
Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
itself, and the New Year's ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the
oak is at an end.
Here he ended the story.
She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
bewilderment:
"But why did you call that a dark story?" she asked. "Where is the
cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will
never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year's day--the winter
woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet
beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed
priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the
mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will
be blessed in life's sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like
to paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl,
pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven's covenant with
her under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished to
withhold such a story from me?"
He smiled at her a little sadly.
"I have not yet told you all," he said, "but I have told you enough."
Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under
her breath one word escaped:
"Ah!"
It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to
her.
"I am sparing you, Josephine!"
She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the
wood in her clutch.
"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are you
sparing yourself?"
The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
picked it up.
"I am going to tell you the story," he said with a new quietness.
She was aroused by some change in him.
"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"
"You will have to listen," he said. "It is better for you to
know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
impossible for you to misjudge."
"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
do not understand you are judging yourself!"
He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial
tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on
him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its
passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned
his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor
likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood
ankle-deep in forestry.
This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of
it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old
forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest
tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the
earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she
waited.
He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the
first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
"Listen, Josephine!"
She buried her face in her hands.
"I cannot! I will not!"
"You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first
meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest
survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and
pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint
traces of what were once vital realities.
"Among these there has always been one that until recently I have
never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of
everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the
mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have
always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to
some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know."
In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the
first day of the year--the New Year's day of the Druids when they
celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of
the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is
just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the
trees. The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the
spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
singing, singing.
Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of
the woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its
youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the
all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild
violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though
reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as
its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the
colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--the
Forest Lover.
The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the
moon's rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more
passionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.
Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the
scene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs most
lightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her
skin--in her eyes love's great need and mystery. Step by step she
comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside
thing may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searching
amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet
more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman's fruitfulness which
the young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her. Finding it,
beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--the
virgin's tryst with the tree--there to be tested.
Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission to
that test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has
rejected.
Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man
enters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of the
Forest Lover--to officiate at the test.
* * * * *
He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence
of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of
ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.
_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_
feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for the
figure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of moss
and violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--the
breasts of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of the
nightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the full
surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape
the penalty of their own death.
The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his
own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The
light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--the
old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense
nostrils.
And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years
before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his
lips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the
room fell his words:
"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"
The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the
vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.
He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or
he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about
himself.
"This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine," he said quietly.
She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of the
sleeping ones, of the buried ones--the butterfly broken on the wheel
of years: lustreless and useless now in its summer.
She sat there with the whiteness of death.
V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES
The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little white
candles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in the
room concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedar
from the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of its
bitter rosary.
Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--the
debt of courtesy and gratitude.
"It is a wonderful story, Frederick," she said in a manner which
showed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not to
the end.
"As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own path
into the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing back
what no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things that
I never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate your
having done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is too
much for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter try
to understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose by
waiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish to
speak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you some
questions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to ask
you a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right."
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