The Burning Spear

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Burning Spear


"This momentary ejaculation seemed to escape him in spite of all his
iron control; and the smell of burning flesh brought home to me as
nothing else, perhaps, could have done the tortures he must have been
suffering.

"'I feel,' he went on very gravely, 'that extravagance of word and
conduct is fatal to my country, and having so profoundly experienced
its effects upon myself, I am now endeavouring by a shining example
to supply a remedy for a disease which is corroding the vitals and
impairing the sanity of my countrymen and making them a race of
second-hand spiritual drunkards. Ouch!'

"I confess that at this moment the tears started to my eyes, for a more
sublime show than the spectacle of this devoted man slowly roasting
himself to death before my eyes for the good of his country I had seldom
seen. It had a strange, an appalling interest, and for nothing on earth
could I have torn my gaze away. I now realized to the full for the first
time the will-power and heroism of the human species, and I rejoiced
with a glorious new feeling that I was of the same breed as this man,
made of such stern stuff that not even a tear rolled down his cheeks to
quench the flames that leaped around him ever higher and higher. And
the dawn came up in the eastern sky; and I knew that a great day was
preparing for mankind; and with my eyes fixed upon him as he turned
blacker and blacker I let my heart loose in a great thanksgiving that
I had lived to see this moment. It was then that he cried out in a loud
voice:

"'I call Aurora to witness that I have died without a falter, grasping a
burning spear, to tilt at the malpractice which has sent me mad!' And
I saw that he held in his fast-consuming hand a long roll of journals
sharpened to a point of burning flame.

"'Aurora!' he cried again, and with that enigmatic word on his lips was
incinerated in the vast and towering belch of the devouring element.

"It was among the most inspiring sights I have ever witnessed."

When Mr. Lavender had completed that record, whose actuality and wealth
of moving detail had greatly affected him, and marked it "For the
Press-Immediate," he felt very cold. It was, in fact, that hour of
dawn when a shiver goes through the world; and, almost with pleasurable
anticipation he took up his lighted candle and stole shivering out to
his pile, rising ghostly to the height of some five feet in the middle
of the dim lawn whereon a faint green tinge was coming with the return
of daylight. Having reached it, he walked round it twice, and readjusted
four volumes of the history of the war as stepping-stones to the top;
then lowering the candle, whose flame burned steadily in the stillness,
he knelt down in the grey dew and set fire to an article in a Sunday
paper. Then, sighing deeply, he returned to his little ladder and, with
some difficulty preserving his balance, mounted to the top, and sat
down with his legs towards the house and his eyes fixed on Aurora's
bedroom-window. He had been there perhaps ten minutes before he
realized that nothing was happening below him, and, climbing down again,
proceeded to the aperture where he had inserted the burning print.
There, by the now considerable daylight, he saw that the flame had gone
out at the words "The Stage is now set for the last act of this colossal
world drama." And convinced that Providence had intended that heartening
sentence to revive his somewhat drooping courage, he thought, "I, too,
shall be making history this morning," and relighting the journal, went
on his hands and knees and began manfully to blow the flames....

Now the young lady in the adjoining castle, who had got out of bed,
happened, as she sometimes did, to go to the window for a look at the
sun rising over Parliament Hill. Attracted by the smell of burning paper
she saw Mr. Lavender in this act of blowing up the flames.

"What on earth is the poor dear doing now?" she thought. "This is really
the limit!" And slipping on her slippers and blue dressing-gown she
ensconced herself behind the curtain to await developments.

Mr. Lavender had now backed away from the flames at which he had been
blowing, and remained on his hands and knees, apparently assuring
himself that they had really obtained hold. He then rose, and to her
intense surprise began climbing up on to the pile. She watched him at
first with an amused astonishment, so ludicrous was his light little
figure, crowned by stivered-up white hair, and the expression of eager
melancholy on his thin, high-cheekboned face upturned towards her
window. Then, to her dismay, she saw that the flame had really caught,
and, suddenly persuaded that he had some crazy intention of injuring
himself with the view, perhaps, of attracting her attention, she ran out
of her room and down the stairs, and emerging from the back door just
as she was, circled her garden, so that she might enter Mr. Lavender's
garden from behind him, ready for any eventuality. She arrived within
arm's reach of him without his having heard her, for Blink, whose
anxious face as she watched her master wasting, could be discerned at
the bedroom-window, was whining, and Mr. Lavender himself had now broken
into a strange and lamentable chantey, which, in combination with the
creeping flutter of the flames in the weekly journals encircling the
base of the funeral pyre, well-nigh made her blood curdle.

"Aurora," sang Mr. Lavender, in that most dolorous voice,

"Aurora, my heart I bring,
For I know well it will not burn,
Oh! when the leaves puff out in Spring
And when the leaves in Autumn turn
Think, think of me!
Aurora, I pass away!
Upon my horse of air I ride;
Here let my grizzled ashes stay,
But take, ah! take my heart inside!
Aurora! Aurora!"

At this moment, just as a fit of the most uncontrollable laughter was
about to seize her, she saw a flame which had just consumed the word
Horatio reach Mr. Lavender's right calf.

"Oh!" he cried out in desperate tones, stretching up his arms to the
sky. "Now is my hour come! Sweet-sky, open and let me see her face!
Behold! behold her with the eyes of faith. It is enough. Courage,
brother; let me now consume in silence!" So saying, he folded his arm
tightly across his breast and closed his lips. The flame rising to the
bottom of the weekly which had indeed been upside down, here nipped him
vigorously, so that with a wholly unconscious movement he threw up his
little legs, and, losing his balance, fell backwards into the arms of
Aurora, watchfully outstretched to receive him. Uplifted there, close to
that soft blue bosom away from the reek of the flame, he conceived that
he was consumed and had passed already from his night of ghosts and
shadows into the arms of the morning, and through his swooning lips came
forth the words:

"I am in Paradise."