The Shepherdess of the Stars

There is in this piece more romanticism than it should have had to carry — I confess it before it is held against me. One thing intercedes for me: it is a relic of the age of youth — the age in which love is everything, in which the stars, like bodies, are its arena, in which imagination is twin to reality, and legend loftier than the society page of the newspapers.

And were it not for my certainty that my dear reader knows love, and that it appears to her (or one day appeared to her) in the robe I have dressed it in, and that she understands that romanticism is not in truth so repellent as they now claim — I should not have published this piece today, nor kept it where it has lain all this long while.

T. S.

Tending the stars was her pastime. As though she were a priest of the Chaldeans, communing with the stars by night in worship, or an elder of the desert Arabs who holds the watching of them a science and an art — not a girl living in the middle of a century that disbelieves in the stars, and still young enough to have tended hearts instead.

What — did she see in the stars what we do not see? Was she bound to them by some kinship? Did she find in certain of them her own self? Questions that ran through my mind whenever I watched her in those stellar trances of hers, like the raptures of Rabi'a, or heard of her evenings outside her tent at Dhour el-Choueir, or on the seashore in Beirut, or upon her solitary bed on the roof of her house, which (it too) misses her.

There she would lose herself. Survey the universe and all that is in it. Dream. Search for solutions to problems it was an injustice should ever cross the sea of her life. In her imagination murmurings danced which, had she set them down on blue paper, poetry would have known its mistress. And she would tend the stars.

The world of the stars was virgin ground to me, and she went on revealing its unknown regions to me until I stood upon the secrets of her worship. That was in the last days before the parting — and behold, I was coming to know her anew: to know her for the first time.

And behold, I understood her saying: "And if one day we part, the stars will bring us together."

*

How it astonished me in J. — and everything about her was strange — a moment that recurred every evening. She would be talking, or listening, or talking as she listened, and you would see her fall silent without warning, and stare upward, and stare. Then she would cry out, her whole body crying with her mouth:

— Vega!

Did I not say the world of the stars was virgin ground to me? When I first heard her cry I did not grasp what she meant. I fancied she was speaking the Italian she was so fond of, or that Archimedes was shouting: Eureka!

She turned to me smiling, and I set about asking what she meant — asking those two springs clear down to the last pebble, asking her two eyes which I loved, marveling how, for the first time, I loved two at once!

And she gave me to understand, mistress of her subject, that Vega is one of the stars, that it is that resplendent star there — and she pointed upward as though she aspired to touch it with her forefinger. And she added, wondering:

— But do you not see the Lyre? Look there, those three stars above the parallelogram; that is the Lyre, and the first of the shining three is Vega.

— So there is no Vega without the Lyre, and no Lyre without Vega?

— Just so, my friend. Do you not see how that one enfolds this, and this one crowns that? Do you not see the two of them, two in one?

*

One evening J. told me the story of Vega, and there was in her a strained air I had not noticed in her before. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and drew her head near to mine. And a few moments later I was listening.

"Long ago there dwelt in the sky Shih Nu (that is her name in China; in Japan it is Tanabata), daughter of the god of the sun, and goddess of weaving. She would pass the whole of her day over the spindle, weaving from it radiance for the stars, light and shadow for the sun, and for the dawn its pale colors. The gods would see what she wove and stand amazed; but if they turned toward her, the weaver made them forget the beauty of the weave.

"It happened one day that some passing clouds troubled the clearness of the sky, and Shih Nu hastened to her spindle, carrying it down beneath the clouds to grant the earth a flood of clarity. And perhaps she came nearer the earth than she supposed (in a manuscript of one of Confucius's disciples I read that the chief of the gods contrived to make her come near, and see) — and she saw him.

"On the crowded earth she saw him alone. Alone, but for a lyre upon his arm, which he clasped to himself as though it were a beloved to be wedded to him on the morrow. His head was bowed, and he was lost in thought.

"Time after time Shih Nu would leave her eternal dwellings and draw near the earth to see him. She understood what regrets gnawed at him, and what dreams turned to burdens weighed upon the young man's back. She knew that with her was the cure — that in her was the cure.

"In the sky Shih Nu wove herself a new gown; she spun its threads from drops of dew and figured it with the reflection of starlight in still waters. When she put it on, the moon turned away its darkened face, and upon the cheeks of the stars was traced a pallor that comes over them still.

"And she let down her red hair over her shoulders and her breast, so that nothing showed but one sly beauty-spot that knew where to alight!

"And they met. She knew him for a poet who had passed his days wrestling with love: one day love felled him, and one day he felled love, and on both days he uttered his verses as though he were breathing his last, and the lyre stirred as though fingers were moving its strings.

"She knew him, and he knew her not. Was he taken up with himself? Or did he suppose her and all else to be two moldings — and the clay one? He gazed into her eyes, and rested. Rested — but did not come back.

"He knew her not, and she knew him. Is not Mephistopheles accursed? But why then does he look on from above, watching the players and not playing? Or no? His little red beard tells her he is a frolicsome satyr — but why then is he alone and weary? Or is he a god, of a family other than hers, a god who 'knows, together with immortality, the depth of annihilation'?

"And she called him: she called Mephisto to play, not to look on; to sport, not to make pilgrimage. She called the satyr to leap over the mountains, to frolic in the thickets, to burst open the springs, to glide with the great river down to the living sea. She called the god to fulfill himself. And she began to reveal herself to him, letting fall from herself curtain after curtain, rending veil after veil. And with every mask that dropped, the watching pines listened to tremblings of the lyre — tremblings they had never known in it before.

"The whole winter long she called him and he did not wake. And the whole spring long she passed in unveiling, so that it was as if he were finding her, and finding himself, and his lyre, for the first time. And in summer, at midsummer, as the muezzin lifted his cry, the dread breathed its last, and the seventh and final curtain drew aside — and he awoke, and answered, and was."

★

And she was silent a long while, and I was silent. I gazed intently at Vega, but I glimpsed my companion's eyes straying: from Vega to the Lyre, and from the Lyre to Vega.

I do not remember how much time passed before J. returned to her tale. Had I not been certain it was she who was speaking to me, I should have thought from the voice that it was someone else.

★

"And then?

"They basked in bliss, as though they truly lived in a legend. But how am I to describe that bliss to you? Have you not noticed that Dante himself said this and said that of the Inferno, and of Purgatory, but when in his wandering he reached Paradise he fell short, and knew not what to say?

"He had feared, should she come to know him, that the enchantment would vanish — and behold, the enchantment only worked after the veils were drawn away; or that they would lose their bliss — and behold, only now were the two of them entering its palace, having stood till then on the threshold of its courtyard.

"Bliss, did I say? Fate itself hates bliss; nay, the gods do not grant bliss, when they grant it, except by portion. Why then should these two enjoy it alone?

"And besides, the sun was resentful, the stars reproachful, and the dawn downcast: who now would weave for that one her light and shadow, for those their radiance, and for this its pale colors?

"....Tell me, did I relate to you that near their hut there was a wild fox, come from beyond the twilight (in the manuscript of Confucius's disciple it says the sky sent it of set purpose)? It passed before the hut continually, looking on with cunning; but the bliss they dwelt in left them no room to think of that spoiler of the vineyards.

"Why should I draw it out for you: on a blazing evening the fox bit her a savage bite. Had she been a mortal she would have perished; but she was a daughter of the sky, and the sky snatched her up to its heights.

"That night he missed her and did not find her. And with her he missed a string of his lyre that used to dye its melodies with rapture and gladness — he understood that she had taken it with her: a keepsake, and a bond.

"Now he knew loneliness; now he knew the wandering that leads nowhere. Loneliness and wandering, which once had been a pleasure and an interval between two seasons, became a life (a life?) and a whole drama. And the merry nymphs wound themselves about him: they flitted before him and he did not see; they toyed with his beard and he was like a boulder; they stirred the lyre, and the songful string to whose tune they used to dance complained, as he did, of the emptiness.

"And he played on. The poplars listened; but soon their ears were scraped by listless notes such as they fancied they had once heard the crow warble the like of, and their leaves dropped from them and they stood bare. And the nymphs pitied him in the morning, and at dusk they scattered from him.

"But when evening came, his state would change, and he felt within himself a disquiet that turned to ease when he raised his eyes to the heavens and stared — and behold, his glance came to rest upon a star he had never glimpsed in the vault before, and he saw it (what — had fancy seized him?) smile at him. And he stares again and stares, and a far-off call comes down to him, and he feels a bond drawing him toward the heights, and lifts his hands to lay hold of it, and marvels at his lyre rising with him — had it perhaps caught sight of the lost string?

"It shone forever. Even the somber clouds could not hide it.

"And he sickened: he was not of the Banu 'Udhra. He flung himself down in the wilds; emaciation refused to leave him; and movement died in him, save in two eyes that opened at evening, and marveled as they watched, for the light of the luminous star had grown dim.

"And the stars groped about and did not come upon the radiance; and the dawn lost its pale colors; and a chill came over the sun.

"One alone saw, and understood, what was coming to pass. In the manuscript in my keeping, the disciple of Confucius records that the lord of the sky — he who had appointed Shih Nu to her task, who had sent the fox from beyond the twilight, and who had raised his ward up to himself as the most radiant of his stars — it was he who grasped the secret; and the love and the devotion in a goddess and a satyr awed him, and he resolved to join them — and it was so.

"....And one day, when a season had passed in which the nymphs had not seen the lyre's owner, nor heard from it so much as a quiver, they searched for him and for it and came upon no trace of either; and in vain they tried to believe the tale of a grave old man, who related — himself scarcely believing it — that he had seen the glittering star dance, and the lyre rise toward the sky little by little, drawn aloft by a joyous string; and that he had stretched out his aged hand to it and found it heavy, and had been startled, when he brought his gaze close, to see hanging from one of its openings a red beard.

"...A strange happening in the sky long occupied the astrologers: a lyre of stars, its most prominent string ending in a great star to whose light their books knew no equal."

And she ended; and J.'s eyes were leveled at me, and she winked her left eye — a gentle wink:

"And by day, when the stars hide behind the sun, and astrologers and onlookers alike turn their gazes from the vault, Shih Nu would issue forth from Vega, and a satyr would slip out of the Lyre; and when the muezzin's cry reached the heights, the stars would miss her, and take no comfort until evening fell."

On the eve of the parting J. whispered in my ear in a faint voice:

— My message to you...

I said, breaking in: — I know: "And if one day we part, the stars will bring us together."

She said — and the sorrow in her smile was not hidden from me:

— And a second like it: "Though the moon has escaped us, the stars are ours."

***