Olalla by Robert Louis Stevenson - Part 4

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
O Llallah by Robert Louis Stevenson, Part four. All day
I lay there for a long time. The cries of
that nameless female thing, as she struggled with her half
witted whelp, resounded through the house and pierced me with despairing,
sorrow and disgust. They were the death cry of my love.

(00:23):
My love was murdered, was not only dead, but an
offense to me. And yet think as I pleased, feel
as I must, it still swelled within me like a
storm of sweetness, and my heart melted at her looks
and touch this horror that had sprung out, this doubt
upon Olalla, this savage and bestial strain that ran not

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only through the whole behavior of her family, but found
a place in the very foundations and story of our love.
Though it appalled, though it shocked and sickened me, was
yet not of power to break the naught of my infatuation.
When the cries had ceased, there came a scraping at
the door, by which I knew Felipe was without, and

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Ollallah went and spoke to him. I know not what
with that exception. She stayed close beside me, now kneeling
by my bed and fervently praying, now sitting with her
eyes upon mine. So then for these six hours I
drank in her beauty and silently perused the story in
her face. I saw the golden coin hover on her breaths.

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I saw her eyes darken and brighten, and still speak
no language but that of an unfathomable kindness. I saw
the faultless face, and through the robe the lines of
the faultless body. Night came at last, and in the
growing darkness of the chamber, the sight of her slowly melted.
But even then the touch of her smooth hand lingered

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in mine and talked with me. To lie thus in
deadly weakness and drink in the traits of the beloved
is to reawake to love from whatever shock of disillusion,
I reasoned with myself, and I shut my eyes on horrors,
and again I was very bold to accept the worst.
What mattered it if that imperious sentiment survived, if her

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eyes still beckoned and attached me, If now, even as
before every fiber of my dull body yearned and turned
to her late on in the night, some strength revived
in me, and I spoke O Lallah, I said, nothing matters,
I ask nothing. I am content. I love you. She

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knelt down awhile and prayed, and I devoutly respected her devotions.
The moon had begun to shine in upon one side
of each of the three windows, and make a misty
clearness in the room by which I saw her indistinctly.
When she re arose, she made the sign of the cross.
It is for me to speak, she said, and for

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you to listen. I know you can, But guess I
prayed how I prayed for you to leave this place.
I begged it of you, and I know you would
have granted me even this, or if not, O let
me think so. I love you, I said, And yet
you have lived in the world, she said, after a pause,

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you who are a man and wise, and I am
but a child. Forgive me if I seem to teach,
who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain.
But those who learn much do but skim the face
of knowledge. They seize the laws, they conceive, the dignity
of the design, and the horror of the living fact
fades from their memory. It is we who sit at

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home with evil, who remember, I think, and are warned
and pity go rather go now and keep me in mind,
so I shall have a life in the cherished places
of your memory, a life as much my own as
that which I lead in this body. I love you,
I said once more, and reaching out my weak hand,

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took hers and carried it to my lips and kissed it.
Nor did she resist, but winced a little, and I
could see her look upon me with a frown that
was not unkindly, only sad and baffled. And then it
seemed she made a call upon her resolution, plucked my
hand towards her herself, at the same time, leaning somewhat forward,

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and laid it on the beating of her heart. There
she cried, you feel the very footfall of my life.
It only moves for you. It is yours. But is
it even mine? It is mine indeed, to offer you
as I might take the coin from my neck, as
I might break a live branch from a tree and
give it you, and yet not mine. I dwell, or

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I think I dwell, if I exist at all somewhere apart,
an impotent prisoner, and carried about and defended by a mob,
that I disown this cap soul such as throbs against
the sides of animals knows you at a touch for
its master. Ay, it loves you. But my soul does
my soul? I think not, I know, not fearing to ask.

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Yet when you spoke to me, your words were of
the soul. It is of the soul that you ask.
It is only from the soul that you would take
me o Lallah, I said. The soul and the body
are one, and mostly so in love. What the body chooses,
the soul loves where the body clings. The soul cleaves
body for body. Soul to soul. They come together at

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God's signal. And the lower part, if we can call
aught low, is only the footstool and foundation of the highest?
Have you, she said, seeing the portraits in the house
of my father's, have you looked at my mother or
at Felipe? Have your eyes never rested on that picture
that hangs by your bed. She who sat for it

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died ages ago, and she did evil in her life.
But look again, there is my hand to the least line.
There are my eyes and my hair. What is mine? Then?
And what am I if not a curve in this
poor body of mine, which you love and for the
sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me,

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not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone
of my voice, not any look from my eyes. No,
not even now when I speak to him, I love.
But has belonged to others, others, ages dead have wooed
other men with my eyes. Other men have heard the
pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.
The hands of the dead are in my bosom. They

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move me, they pluck me, they guide me. I am
a puppet at their command, and I but reinform features
and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil
in the quiet of the grave. Is it me, you love, friend,
or the race that made me? The girl who does
not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself,
Or the stream of which she is a transitory eddy,

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the tree of which she is the passing fruit. The
race exists, It is old, it is ever young. It
carries its eternal destiny in its bosom upon it, like
waves upon the sea. Individual succeeds to individual mocked with
a semblance of self control. But they are nothing. We
speak of the soul, but the soul is in the race.

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You fret against the common law, I said, you rebel
against the voice of God, which he has made so
winning to convince, so imperious to command hear it, And
how it speaks between us. Your hand clings to mine,
your heart leaps at my touch. The unknown elements of
which we are compounded awake and run together. At a look,

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the clay of the earth remembers its independent life and
yearns to join us. We are drawn together as the
stars are turned about in space, or as the tides
ebb and flow by things older and greater than we ourselves.
Alas she said, what can I say to you? My fathers,
eight hundred years ago ruled all this province. They were wise, great, cunning,

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and cruel. They were a picked race of the Spanish.
Their flags led in war. The king called them his
cousin the people. When the rope was slung for them,
or when they returned and found their hovels smoking blasphemed
their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen. If
he has sprung from the brutes, he can descend again

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to the same level. The breath of weariness blew on
their humanity, and the chords relaxed. They began to go down.
Their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts,
heady and senseless, like the wind in the gutters of
the mountains. Beauty was still handed down, but no longer
the guiding wit nor the human heart. The seed passed on.

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It was wrapt in flesh. The flesh covered the bones.
But they were the bones and the flesh of brutes.
And their mind was as the mind of flies. I
speak to you as I dare, but you have seen
for yourself how the wheel has gone backward with my
doomed race. I stand, as it were, upon a little
rising ground in this desperate descent, and see both before

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and behind, both what we have lost and to what
we are condemned to go farther downward. And shall I
I that dwell apart in the house of the dead,
my body loathing its ways? Shall I repeat the spell?
Shall I bind another spirit, reluctant as my own, into
this bewitched and tempest broken tenement that I now suffer in.

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Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of humanity, charge
it with fresh life, as with fresh poison, and dash
it like a fire in the faces of posterity. But
my vow has been given the race shall cease from
off the earth. At this hour, my brother is making ready.
His foot will soon be on the stair, and you
will go with him and pass out of my sight forever.

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Think of me sometimes as one to whom the lesson
of life was very harshly told, but who heard it
with courage, As one who loved you, indeed, but who
hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her.
As one who sent you away, and yet would have
longed to keep you forever, who had no dearer hope
than to forget you, and no greater fear than to

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be forgotten. She had drawn towards the door as she spoke,
her rich voice sounding softer and farther away, And with
the last word she was gone. And I lay alone
in the moonlit chamber. What I might have done, had
I not lain bound by my extreme weakness, I know not,
But as it was, there fell upon me a great

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and blank despair. It was not long before there shone
at the door the ruddy glimmer of a lantern, and
Felipe coming charged me without a word upon his should,
and carried me down to the great gate, where the
cart was waiting in the moonlight, the hills stood out
sharply as if they were of cardboard on the glimmering
surface of the plateau, and from among the low trees,

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which swung together and sparkled in the wind, the great
black cube of the residencia stood out bulkily, its mass
only broken by three dimly lighted windows in the northern front,
above the gate. They were Olalo's windows, And as the
cart jolted onwards, I kept my eyes fixed upon them,
till where the road dipped into a valley, they were

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lost to my view forever. Philippe walked in silence beside
the shafts, but from time to time he would check
the mule and seemed to look back upon me, and
at length drew quite near and laid his hand upon
my head. There was such kindness in the touch, and
such a simplicity as of the brutes, that tears broke

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from me like the bursting of an artery. I said,
take me where they will ask no questions. He never
said a word, but he turned his mule about, and
for end retraced some part of the way we had gone, and,
striking into another path, led me to the mountain village,
which was, as we say in Scotland, the kirktain of

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that thinly peopled district. Some broken memories dwell in my mind,
of the day breaking over the plain, of the cart,
stopping of arms that helped me down, of a bare
room into which I was carried, and of a swoon
that fell upon me like sleep the next day. In
the days following, the old priest was often at my
side with his snuff box and prayer book, And after

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a while, when I began to pick up strength, he
told me that I was now on a fair way
to recovery, and must, as soon as possible hurry my departure. Whereupon,
without naming any reason, he took snuff and looked at
me sideways. I did not affect ignorance. I knew he
must have seen Olala, said, I you know that I

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do not ask in wantonness. What of that family? He
said they were very unfortunate, that it seemed a declining race,
and that they were very poor and had been much neglected.
But she has not, I said, thanks doubtless to yourself.
She is instructed and wise beyond the use of women. Yes,

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he said, the Senorita is well informed. But the family
has been neglected the mother, I queried, Yes, the mother too,
said the padre, taking snuff. But Felipe is a well
intentioned lad. The mother is odd, I asked, very odd,
replied the priest. I think, sir, we beat about the bush,

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said I. You must know more of my affairs than
you allow. You must know my curiosity to be justified
on many grounds. Will you not be frank with me,
my son, said the old gentleman. I will be very
frank with you on matters within my competence, on those
of which I know nothing. It does not require much
discretion to be silent. I will not fence with you.

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I take your meaning perfectly. And what can I say
but that we are all in God's hands, and that
His ways are not as our ways. I have even
advised with my superiors in the church, but they too
were dumb. It is a great mystery. Is she mad?
I asked? I will answer you according to my belief.

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She is not returned the padre, or she was not
when she was young. God help me, I fear I
neglected that wild lamb. She was surely sane, and yet
although it did not run to such heights, the same
strain was already notable. It had been so before her
and her father I and before him, and this inclined

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me perhaps to think too lightly of it. But these
things go on growing, not only in the individual, but
in the race. When she was young, I began, and
my voice failed me for a moment, and it was
only with a great effort that I was able to add.
Was she like Olalla? Now? God forbid, exclaimed the padre.

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God forbid that any man should think so slightingly of
my favorite penitent. No, no, the Senorita. But for her beauty,
which I wished most honestly, she had less of, has
not a hare's resemblance to what her mother was at
that same age. I could not bear it to have
you think so, though Heaven knows it were perhaps better
that you should. At this, I raised myself in bed

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and opened my heart to the old man, telling him
of our love and of her decision, owning to my
own horrors, my own passing fancies, but telling him that
these were at an end, and with something more than
a purely formal submission, appealing to his judgment. He heard
me very patiently and without surprise, and when I had done,
he sat for some time silent. Then he began the church,

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and instantly broke off again to apologize. I had forgotten
my child that you were not a Christian, said he.
And indeed, upon a point so highly unusual, even the
church can scarce be said to have decided. But would
you have my opinion, the Senorita is, in a matter
of this kind the best judge. I would accept her judgment.

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On the back of that, he went away. Nor was
he thenceforward so assiduous in his visits. Indeed, even when
I began to get about again, he plainly feared and
deprecated my society, not as in distaste, but much as
a man might be disposed to flee from the riddling sphinx.
The villagers too avoided me. They were unwilling to be
my guides upon the mountain. I thought they looked at

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me askance, and I made sure that the more superstitious
crossed themselves on my approach. At first I set this
down to my heretical opinions. But it began at length
to dawn upon me that if I was thus redoubted,
it was because I had stayed at the residencia. All
men despise the savage notions of such peasantry. And yet
I was conscious of a chill shadow that seemed to

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fall and dwell upon my love. It did not conquer,
but I may not deny that it restrained my Ardor
some miles westward of the village there was a gap
in the sierra from which the eye plunged direct upon
the residencia, and thither it became my daily habit to repair.
A wood crowned the summit, and just where the pathway

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issued from its fringes, it was overhung by a considerable
shelf of rock, and that, in its turn was surmounted
by a crucifix of the size of life and more
than usually painful in design. This was my perch. Thence,
day after day I looked down upon the plateau and
the great old house, and could see Felipe, no bigger

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than a fly, going to and fro about the garden.
Sometimes mists would draw across the view and be broken
up again by mountain winds. Sometimes the plain slumbered below
me in unbroken sunshine. It would sometimes be blotted out
by rain. This distant post, these interrupted sights of the
place where my life had been so strangely changed suited

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the indecision of my humor. I passed whole days there,
debating with myself the various elements of our position, now
leaning to the suggestions of love, now giving an ear
to prudence, and in the end halting irresolute between the two.
One day, as I was sitting on my rock, there
came by that way a somewhat gaunt peasant wrapped in

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a mantle. He was a stranger and plainly did not
know me, even by repute. For instead of keeping the
other side, he drew near and sat down beside me,
and we had soon fallen in talk. Among other things,
he told me he had been a mule teer, and
in former years had much frequented these mountains. Later on
he had followed the army with his mules, had realized

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a competence, and was now living retired with his family.
Do you know that house? I wired at last, pointing
to the residencia, for I readily wearied of any talk
that kept me from the thought of Olallah. He looked
at me darkly and crossed himself too well. He said,
it was there that one of my comrades sold himself
to Satan. The Virgin shield us from temptations. He has

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paid the price. He is now burning in the reddest place,
and hell a fear came upon me. I could answer nothing,
and presently the man resumed, as if to himself. Yes,
he said, oh, yes, I know it. I have passed
its doors. There was snow upon the pass, the wind
was driving it. Sure enough, there was death that night

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upon the mountains, but there was worse beside the hearth.
I took him by the arm, Senor, and dragged him
to the gate. I conjured him by all he loved
and respected to go forth with me. I went on
my knees before him in the snow, and I could
see he was moved by my entreaty. And just then
she came out on the gallery and called him by
his name, and he turned, and there was she standing

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with a lamp in her hand, and smiling on him
to come back. I cried out aloud to God and
threw my arms about him. But he put me by
and left me alone. He had made his choice. God
help us. I would pray for him, But to what end?
There are sins that not even the pope can loose.
And your friend, I asked, what became of him, nay,

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God knows, said the muleteer. If all be true that
we hear, his end was like his sin, a thing
to raise the hair. Do you mean that he was killed?
I asked, Sure enough, he was killed, returned the man.
But how I how, but there are things that it
is sin to speak of the people of that house,

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I began, but he interrupted me with a savage outburst.
The people, he cried, what people? There are neither men
nor women in that house of Satan's. What have you
lived here so long and never heard here? He put
his mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even
the fowls of the mountain might have overheard him and
been stricken with horror. What he told me was not true,

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nor was it even original, being indeed but a new addition,
vamped up again by village ignorance and superstition of stories
nearly as ancient as the race of man. It was
rather the application that appalled me. In the old days,
he said, the church would have burned out that nest
of basilisks, But the arm of the church was now shortened.

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His friend Miguel had been unpunished by the hands of men,
and left to the more awful judgment of an offended God.
This was wrong, but it should be so no more.
The Padre was sunk in age, he was even bewitched himself.
But the eyes of his flock were now awake to
their own danger. And some day, ay, and before long,

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the smoke of that house should go up to heaven.
He left me filled with horror and fear. Which way
to turn? I knew not whether to first warn the
Padre or to carry my ill news direct to the
threatened inhabitants of the Residenzia. Fate was to decide for me.
For while I was still hesitating, I beheld the veiled
figure of a woman drawing near to me up the pathway.

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No veil could deceive my penetration. By every line and
every movement, I recognized Ollallah, and keeping hidden behind a
corner of the rock, I suffered her to gain the summit.
Then I came forward. She knew me and paused, but
did not speak. I too remained silent, and we continued
for some time to gaze upon each other with a

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passionate sadness. I thought you had gone, she said, at length,
It is all that you can do for me to go.
It is all I have ever asked of you, and
you still stay. But do you know that every day
heaps up the peril of death, not only on your head,
but on ours. A report has gone about the mountain.

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It is thought, you love me, and the people will
not suffer it. I saw she was already informed of
her danger, and I rejoiced at it. Oh Lalla, I said,
I am ready to go this day, this very hour,
but not alone. She stepped aside and knelt down before
the crucifix to pray. And I stood by and looked
now at her, and now at the object of her adoration,

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now at the living figure of the penitent, and now
at the ghastly daubed countenance, the painted wounds, and the
projected ribs of the image. The silence was only broken
by the wailing of some large birds that circled sidelong,
as if in surprise or alarm, about the summit of
the hills. Presently, Olalla rose again turned towards me, raised

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her veil, and, still leaning with one hand on the
shaft of the crucifix, looked upon me with a pale
and sorrowful countenance. I have laid my hand upon the cross.
She said, The padre says, you are no Christian, But
look up for a moment with my eyes, and behold
the face of the Man of sorrows. We are all
such as he was, the inheritors of sin. We must

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all bear and expiate a past which was not ours.
There is in all of us, ay even in me,
a sparkle of the divine. Like him. We must endure
for a little while until morning returns bringing peace. Suffer
me to pass on upon my way alone. It is
thus that I shall be least lonely, counting for my friend,

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him who is the friend of all the distressed. It
is thus that I shall be the most happy, having
taken my farewell of earthly happiness, and willingly accepted sorrow
for my portion. I looked at the face of the crucifix,
and though I was no friend to images and despised
that imitative and grimacing art, of which it was a
rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was

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carried home to my intelligence. The face looked down upon
me with a painful and deadly contraction, but the rays
of a glory encircled it and reminded me that the
sacrifice was voluntary. It stood there, crowning the rock, as
it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching
to passers by an emblem of sad and noble truths,

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that pleasure is not an end but an accident, that
pain is the choice of the magnanimous, that it is
best to suffer all things and do well. I turned
and went down the mountain in silence. And when I
looked back for the last time, before the wood closed
about my path, I saw Olalla still leaning on the crucifix.

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End of Part four. End of Ollalla