Devil's Tor (51 page)

From his chair he stretched out his hand, which Saltfleet, smiling cynically, grasped for an instant. Then Arsinal proceeded:

"Were it but to tide us over the period immediately ahead, we must keep on terms. And to what I am about to add, I want no answer, but only ask you to reflect on it when you shall have more leisure. You likened me to Peter in his most shameful moment. I hope I am like him, not in this, but altogether,
except
in this. Peter gave up all to follow Christ, and so have I given up all—for in the worldly sense, Saltfleet, I might have made very much more of my life, and perhaps might been of greater use to the public. So I too have been stunned by an illumination, and afterwards have suffered my life to be ruled by blind faith, and have renounced, surrendered and known pain and contumely, not in pursuit of personal gain.

"Peter, moreover, had his Christ in the flesh; he had but to accompany and obey. My divine one is a phantom, very hard to seek. You won't think it sacreligious if I elaborate for you the sequence of my—I don't say, faith, but will-to-faith; in the terms of the New Testament. My ineffable apparition when I was a boy, she was the Holy Ghost. Christ is not yet—first I must know Mary. You have said that I am Peter; and I am content. … It is not for me to fasten upon any earthly girl or woman for Mary, but can you not understand how, if these things are to be true, she is the doorway through which I must pass to the new life? For the rest, I cannot conceive what she should be in time and space; and now I offer to you, Saltfleet,
not
to meet this Miss Fleming, if you imagine that she is in any way to pull me down from my dreams."

"Perhaps I have wronged you," returned Saltfleet. "Your ambition is as difficult rightly to get hold of, as the virtue of your faith to determine, but you do seem more willing than I had supposed to take second rank in the business. … Best of all would be if you could make your mind up to stand back from doorways altogether."

"Then why do you wish me to meet her?"

"For her sake. The glimmer you can shed may be of the feeblest, but so far she is in total darkness. Nobody at all has helped her."

"To what?"

"To the way out of this sublime madhouse!" rejoined Saltfleet.

And while the other was still frowning on the words, he smiled over his shoulder, and left the room.

On the open moor Arsinal, after recurring long spells of moody silence, broken only occasionally by the briefest exchanges, said more quietly, more significantly, to his friend:

"I haven't yet had the connected narrative of Drapier's doings on Devil's Tor. Will you tell me what you know?"

As Saltfleet perfunctorily complied, Arsinal heard him with a close attention. He appeared absorbed for several minutes afterwards; when at last he commented:

"So, plainly, it is something other than a purposeless marching of chance, and this independently of the ghostly element. For consider, Saltfleet! There has been the man's flight from India, to reach this petty spot in England no more than a few days before the one hour in possibly six-figures of years when the pile of rocks stopping a tomb was to be thrown down like a card house; and there has been his exacter timing of the day and hour of the disaster, enabling him to be on the scene over its actual occurrence; and, lastly, there has been his not less wonderfully exact timing of the moment of the following earthquake, that was to be his limit of allowance for investigation. These three timings, of which he could have planned nothing, are to me more astounding than the natural disasters themselves. The disasters
might
be coincidence, taken alone; the timings were clearly of an unconscious clock in Drapier. The clock has not been his own, for it never was to serve him, and immediately afterwards he is destroyed. So what compelled him to these comings and goings, at the same time furnishing him with other shallower motives that he might understand, was necessarily something outside himself; for the instincts are for our use, and the intuitions are but a stranger way of seeing things, they could not predict invisible heights and, later, miracles. That something outside himself, Saltfleet, has been an
intelligence.
Its wisdom, acting through its will, has been for Drapier, as for all of us, a
fate.
"

"To that I agree."

"And this Devil's Tor, this insignificant eminence of a small moor like a thousand others, which the whole phalanx of European experts has never heard of—if it should proclaim itself in such a fashion the mystic, hoary, fateful cradle of the northern stocks, that would be the same strangeness presented on another plane.

"And from such a cradle the uneasy half-lith that we recovered in Tibet, whose later
pied-à-terre
for a paltry few centuries was Knossos—it started its memorable, unsung journey across two continents of all kinds of men, supernaturally drifted by that invisible current—the captive of a hundred shrines and altars, yet escaping eastwards always; until the predestined hour should arrive when two persons from the west, and a third as yet unknown to them, should assemble beyond the frontiers of civilisation, to carry it back to its interred fellow—or bride, as the prophecy has said. And upon the approach of the thing of magic, the tomb has yielded up its dead. But what could be the meaning of so seemingly unneccessary a journey to and from the east? A very big gap of time was to be filled up, Saltfleet. During a hundred thousand years perhaps, the world was to become slowly prepared for that second bursting of a mysterious potency."

"Thus you accept Miss Flemings supposition that Drapier found the stone on Devil's Tor!"

"I have tested it in my mind. Drapier could at no time before his death have had
both
flints in his possession, for curiosity, or an inward stimulus far stronger than curiosity, must then have induced him to join the two; and there would have been, to put it at the lowest, amazing results, of which we have seen nothing. So it has been during his stay in the locality that he found the second, by which time the first was already out of his hands. He seems, however, to have been drawn to this Tor again and again; little doubt, it was his descent underground that began the attraction. There he must have seen a sight not easily to be forgotten. But if, as you assert, the tomb is certainly sealed, that spectacle would not have been enough, for he is dead, and the spectacle vanished with him like a bubble; and all these voyagings of minerals and men have not been for
that.
In fact, the finding of the stone in the tomb is necessary. Without it, everything falls apart again, half the circumstances known to us remain isolated and unaccounted for."

"I think with you."

'"The overthrown stack—obviously of human construction, since it covered a grave—was it fashioned like a devil, that the hill should bear the name it does?"

"So I am told."

"Taking into account its long standing in a damp climate, could that portraiture have been intended?"

"Who knows? It is not here as in Egypt."

"But if it
were
a work of art, magic or sacred, it would nearly point towards a female interment. For the times were savage and the tribal superstitions impossibly other than crude. A dead male chief, dreaded in life for his strength and ruthlessness, would surely keep off grave-robbers by the terror of his ghost. The departed wife or paramour of such a chief must be defended in her last house. And so a malignant spirit-entity, to squat for all time upon her bones."

"Miss Fleming arrived at the identical conclusion, I have no idea by what means."

"Thus already the guess is probably right."

"Does it go further?" asked Saltfleet.

"I will say the things that I think, but I will not grasp at air."

"Then I shall put it. If gods historically have died and been buried in stone sepulchres, why not goddesses?"

Arsinal threw him a side-glance of quick anxiety.

"Why this, Saltfleet?"

"It as well serves to bring more facts into the synthesis, and give it more cement. My shade last night should have been taller than the very tall. You know whom you've been seeking."

"You are in earnest?"

"I think that if a woman has been buried yonder, she has been unlike all other women."

"Could this afternoon decide it?"

"I have a plan. May it be fruitful!"

Arsinal's face became expressionless and dark. He dropped the subject of the tomb, but, after some more steps pushed in silence, asked:

"Are there any surviving local legends or superstitions relating to this hill? For frequently such go an immense way back; their present unlikely form, as in a well-known children's game, is identifiable with a surprising original."

"I've heard of nothing," replied Saltfleet.

They reached the angle of the shoulder, and Devil's Tor came suddenly into their view, startling both men quietly, for its identity was unmistakable, yet the apparition was unexpected and neither had seen its shape before. Saltfleet dragged foot and halted, whereupon Arsinal's remaining doubt instantaneously dispersed; but it already was as if he had known the hill from some existing picture in his head—yet none had even lightly sketched it for him. He too stopped.

Balls and streaks of white mist still clung motionless to the Tor, but it was truly visible at last as far as its flat top. The air had little draught; the surrounding moors were in a gloomy haze, while the sky was dull and colourless. From a bright patch where the south-west sun should be, a fan of dark vertical and slanting shafts fell on a circumscribed area of the great falling sweep of land continuing past the distant open road down below, lifting the grey-green of the moor to a sort of pallid solar shine; but elsewhere one felt that the day had failed. Already it was between three and four o'clock.

"We may get a better view by keeping along," counselled Saltfleet. And soon, as he had supposed, they won a point from which the whole east face of the Tor, from stream bed, up through the witch-kitchen of cataclysmal ancient rocks ringing the inferior slopes, to shorn summit, was thrown up for them and defined in close detail, interrupted only by those few floating vapours.

Standing there, his arms tightly folded behind his straightened back, Arsinal inquired where Drapier had died, and then where the overthrown stack had stood. Not too quickly, Saltfleet indicated both spots in succession with a considering forefinger. Afterwards they relapsed into a silence of contemplation that prolonged itself to minutes. Twice now had the one man known unutterable experiences upon that grey enigma always newly starting up; but the other's imaginings, less personal, were on that account possibly the richer and deeper in the grandeur of a metaphysical antiquity. It was Saltfleet who first restlessly broke the spell.

"Who could have been those tomb-makers, Arsinal?"

The addressed one emerged unwillingly.

"If the half-stone were brought here from elsewhere, I cannot answer you, and an answer is unnecessary. But if this hill, as we must dare to think, has been the first seat and terrestrial home of the undivided lith, then an answer would be more possible, though difficult. It is not the technical books, however, which will teach us what we wish to know."

"I ask
you.
"

Arsinal faced his companion with an uneasy and still absent eye.

"Yet if I am to attempt any sort of reply, I must first clear the way. The palæontological library, I say, is increasingly a welter of chaos. Petrified crania and bits of crania have been measured, physical characters of human and subhuman types have been compared and contrasted, the vocabularies of the seven or eight great Aryan stocks have been exhaustively examined for common roots, to arrive at the last common habitat. Superstitions, proverbs, religions, fairy stories, have all been put under bloodless analytical survey, to discover what men could have started them, in what regions of the globe, under what circumstances. Then caves, lakes, marshes, mounds, barrows, have been dredged and ransacked, flint implements innumerable studied under optical power, all the available remains of 'mammoth' art squeezed for their last drop of meaning. The beginnings of ancient nations as recorded have been ruthlessly pulled to pieces, in order to be reconstructed
de
novo. …
And, as the broad result of all, to-day there is a wider contrariety of learned opinion than ever before, as to what manner of man or manlike ape has autochthonally occupied each land—what simian features have been contemporaneous with what degree of emergence to intellectuality. Each new fragment of yellow skull, each new far-fetched lingual derivation, but draws us further into the intricacies of the labyrinth—which in the end may well prove to have neither centre nor exit for us. …

"We are at least assured that the so-called Nordic races have been, beyond all others, warlike and freedom-loving, the primitive Romans stern, severe and disciplined, the Achaeans brilliant, rational, aesthetic, the Celts poetically restless and mystical. All these have been blue-eyed peoples. It is no conjecture, but a necessity, that these blue-eyed peoples, appearing suddenly as strangers in a world of brown humanity, should be derived from one stock. The later branchings and differences are to be otherwise explained. It is
scarcely
a conjecture that the home of that single blue-eyed stock has been north-west Europe.

"The metamorphosis took place—I have spoken of it to you before. It took place amongst a certain brown race, because of its latent possibilities of advancement. The after branchings—as of Goth, German, Roman, Celt and Greek—were a consequence of the tremendous spirituality of the new characters, overflowing into a vital flood that would not for long ages be confined to any one racial channel. But the north-west European race, who were the fathers of all, may well have been more stable. Over a stretch of a thousand or fifteen hundred miles, perhaps, and during untold ages, such a race may have moved practically not at all, in the way of social or spiritual development. It waited. It should have been in Britain; Britain was still the connected extremity of the continent of Europe. The North Sea was still a river, of which the Rhine and the Thames were unequal tributaries.