Devil's Tor (65 page)

It seemed to him of extreme urgency to know what other claim than her serious interest in it this girl was making—not to the conduct of the business, for its conduct she was declining—but to its peculiar bearing upon her personal case... yet that, too, he had no recollection of her having ever declared in so many words... perhaps, therefore, a claim by her existed nowhere except in his own expectation. It was equal. Her seriousness of answer to these strangenesses amounted not to a claim; and she was willing, for instance, to surrender to Arsinal his second prize—willing now to stand altogether aside. Yet all of them with her in this room knew,
knew,
that whatever was happening to-day, yesterday, before that in the week, or, in connection, in the diffused past, was proving to point, and always must have pointed, to
her
—to Ingrid Fleming—as surely as the wavering needle of a compass pointed throughout its violent oscillations to a fixed midway mark that could only be north. Thus Drapier's tragic end might be a north-east pointing, Arsinal's triumph might be a north-west, but to her magnetic north the next incidents were always returning, from this side and from that.

How came he by the certainty? For with its origin clear he could better understand the rest—what type of fatal sequence this was that, in stark fact, could choose for victimisation an unassuming girl wishing only to lead her quiet life with a man of her own station eminently equipped to give her quietness; while he (Saltfleet), and others rather too eager to snatch whatever glory or thrill might be in the lively assault on the earthliness of them all, were contemptuously being thrust back into second rank—yes! even Drapier—Drapier, as personally insignificant to the business in death as in the last days of his lifetime. … So whence sprang his certainty?

Was it the answer, that it was not her trifling degree of pain, her mere confusion, to the present, that could have brought the insight—not that, but another feeling within him, of the class of a foreboding, that such pain and bewilderment presented merely the penumbra of a darker shadowing on the way? ... that she stood here on this floor an
inevitable
—a wretch of Design—insulated already from her fellows by her prime-marking at the hands of the unseen? Could
this
be his assurance of her spiritual predominance in the advancing glare from another world? ... It was so!—it was so! And how hideously mean and small appeared all at once his scheme to prevent her dignity under fate, by that appropriation of the final experiment with Arsinal alone!... Never in all his life had he experienced anything like the groundless conviction of this appalling feeling towards one who, after all, was known to him only by her beauty and distinction of mind, and passing distress. …

Continuing very erect, he clasped his forehead with a tightened hand, and turned from the others. And as he did so, occurred to him what a marvellous store of cryptic truth should lie in the beginning chapters of Genesis. The forbidden trees of Eden: wanting them, it must have been a mere pleasure-park; having them, it became the picture and symbol of the ghostly universe. Eve, not eating of the fruit, must have remained the simple insipid female of her species; but the serpent, who surely was God disguised, persuaded her to her fiercer, higher heart, when instantly her immortal soul could know both itself and the horror of her unreal body. … Nor was the recorded following action of herself and Adam in contradiction.

Whosoever, therefore, should invite—nay, tempt—a woman not less than Eve to taste of a fruit of equal significance with that of the tree of good and evil knowledge—that one should be the instrument of a very fated, very inherent work... inherent within the prime ancient foundations of the world; the fate merely being its apparently casual startling and insulting of sanity in due season.

Nearly an axiom it was, that the veto of human sanity in great supernatural concerns
should
be insulted. Looking past health and wholesomeness, which were but negatives, one had to suppose that the illusory bodily life offered not a single positive value that was worth the coveting, as against the dimmest hints and reminders of the spiritual. Earth's castles and palaces were too truly of thin air; a paltry hundred years at most would blow them all away for a man; and it were well rather to crack one’s brains in refusing the magic sham in its hour of greatest cloud-strength, than preserve those brains entire by keeping within the sham's internal laws, that were as the intellectual frame and principle.

The laws were many, and so cunningly devised that only the wisest could know them for what they were, appearing as they did more like the necessary conditions of possibility than fantastic rules sprung, God knew where from! for man's obeying. They pronounced such things as, that all reality for the mind was ultimately derived from the sense of touch; that nothing could enter into experience save what was related to past experience, though but distantly; that the infinity of gaping little "I’s" must show as masses and flat surfaces, and that the monstrous imaginary life of these variegated collections must govern the world; and a hundred other
non sequiturs
as instinctive.

But outside those laws for human sanity only—outside the whole witchcraft and imposition shaped by, yet hiding, them, as the flesh of a body its skeleton—should rest the true existence, evoking another correspondence that was neither sanity nor insanity, but more akin to the latter; without, however, the cracks and evils necessarily attendant on any failure, even of loyalty to a sham. A correspondence passed over by worldlings... better known to a small minority of mystics, saints, musicians, children. …

While Peter, and Arsinal too, starting from premises approximately identical, were arriving by quite other roads within sight of the same conclusion.

An instinct of alikeness had drawn Peter's mind back to those sense-enchantments of his first day down: the shadowy funeral train coming across the face of the height over against Devil's Tor, that had for its focus of unreality that covered bier of a length to confound his imagination; a few hours later, the second peeping of his perceptions through a gap of madness, there by the garden gate at Whitestone, confirmed by Ingrid's parallel seizure, her nearly-finished queer fish of a cousin being again present, as he had been the first time; so that the material object in his hand
both
times was of necessity the deceit's immediate cause.

This that had just happened, then—though what had happened? Nothing had happened. … But it could be a shaft from the same quiver—its failure to intensify to a living phantasm was explicable. Some discord of persons was neutralising the influence, or (guessing the stone to be probably in Arsinal's pocket) Drapier had been the better medium, or the direct contact of the hand was an essential factor. He also remembered how last evening at the inn the self-same stone had passed from Saltfleet to Ingrid without other queerness than the clairaudient shock for her alone. … So there was no doubt a law, but he was unacquainted with it. These confederates, too, had talked of having seen something on Devil's Tor since lunch; by the same stone's agency of course. Saltfleet and Ingrid had shared an earlier psychic incident up there in the morning. Indubitably it was the flint. Accordingly, it had just been trying to act on its own account, through cloth; through a man who was a bad conductor. …

But the proof that this last flickering for his eyes had not been fancy was that the others too had turned to it, and now were standing, as he conceived, subdued and privately puzzled. A repugnance stopped him from asking her, but Ingrid should have seen more than he. It could not affect the case's fearfulness, if his interpretation were true. That lay, not in any ghostly picture, but in the conception of the breaking-through of his sensuous defences; even though the swaying wall between two worlds had not this time passed silently over him like a wave, abandoning him amazed in another magic place. …

He was impressed by the very insubstantiality of his momentary displacement of vision. So might a permanent new life be imagined to begin: not by spectacles. He thought that if he should retain his senses in the hour of death, his physical environment must come to daze him in just such a manner. The supernaturally wise eyes of so many of the dying should be due, not, as popularly supposed, to the anticipatory sight of heaven, but to a subsidence of that confusion to acceptance at last. He seemed to be aware of something of the same wisdom—of the same acceptance—in his own present eyes. …

When, however, the character of this inexpressible glimpse of nothing was become a certainty to his understanding, he discovered that he was already upon a new grandeur, to concern his art. More than that of the inspiration he would not acknowledge, until it should have passed through the cooling chamber of his spirit.

Should it be an authentic lighting of his landscape, pride and loneliness, as ever, were in readiness to spring up: the inevitable escorts of his spiritual audacities. Ingrid herself would then not be suffered to intrude her paralysing gladness within a case which barely
he,
in all the immaculateness of solitude could apprehend. …

For these befallen wonders were as curiously uplifting him through their quietness of mode, unquietness of significance, as if they had been monuments carved with unknown characters of a people vanished; monuments sullen and alien in the modern day after a sepulchre of a hundred centuries. Even this last failed flitting was like such a monument: as calm, archæan, and exalting. But an especial flavour distinguished
it.
It should have been an antique appearance, yet actually had been void; accordingly its ancientness, empty of shaped phantoms, could swell his imaginative soul as a real thing, not false.

The single wonders were uplifting him, while all of them together, associated—that sequence was as though
speaking to
him; inciting his will; the half of his existence which was yet to be. The emotion and the passion were apart. For his will, it was no affair of reiterated dim shinings and interferences across time, initiated by some force strange to humanity conveniently to be called psychic; but the signals were like a message being spelt out letter by letter; all the letters different; for four, five, and six persons... perhaps a different message for each recipient.

His own message he could not share. It belonged to his personality. But when, after a great while, his personality should have absorbed and transformed it,
then
a whole world might share it; according to the fashion in which the great messages of beauty were shared—by means, in the first place, of chosen representatives; at last, of hollow fame. …

Images started to his mind. Just as the archaic atmosphere of the single happenings somehow seemed to resemble for him the deepening glow of a sky after sunset, so this incitement of his active will by the succession of happenings was, rather, reminiscent of a bursting dawn out of the entire midnight sweep of shades... that, here, were the vast shapelessness and lurking instincts of years. … West-east! And so the whole sublimity was outside the cardinal points, and something new! ... Next, his achievements and essays in art hitherto—they suddenly appeared to him hardly more than as a tuning-up of his soul that was an instrument, in readiness for the first tap of a supernatural baton. …

His depths stirred, as a tree begins to stir after a long halcyon calm; but because between a man and his depths can come no companion, Peter's sense of utter loneliness grew apace as an icy sickness that was a note of his agitation's chord. Were he alone in the room with Ingrid, still he could not find words to tell her what was passing in his being.

In this future she could have no part. … So that when really they should be alone together in a few minutes more, she would understand from his confused explanation only that he considered his pleasure; that his grudging solicitude for her welfare throughout had been but egoism, in that he had always intended to follow up these matters for his own curiosity and intellectual increase, could he, with it, find a way of denying her... his motive, not care for her weakness, but jealousy—jealousy of her lead and greater employment; finer sensibility. …

How was it possible for him to impart the indescribable new faint trembling of the waters of his inspirational well, which was as if a creature were at length emerging that all his life had lain covert? It was impossible, because his loneliness was an inherent character of everything he was feeling.

The tea-time conversation at Whitestone two days ago had foreshadowed it. His own talk of symbolism in art, and symbols; followed by old Colborne's recommendation of the Madonna as the eternal and inexhaustible symbol. Here now looked to be such a symbol—such a living personification of the All, brought to his very doorstep! For that dead one of the Tor, of whom Ingrid and Arsinal had spoken—whose phantom bier he himself had seen—who doubtless, in some unheard-of way, was working through the entirety of these miracles:
she,
surely, might be the old man’s Madonna;
his
sought symbol of the universal frame. But then, with his own eyes, he must behold her. …

It was his ascended sense that, knowing her with his eyes, he would thereafter be transfigured as to all his higher faculties. Truly, his existence on earth might be scorched and blessed by her spectacle as by the point of a sword out of heaven: his art, that was his existence, might unfold, to men's amazement, in sign upon sign! ...

The machinery to the end was dictated, or found itself, so easy it was. On Devil's Tor had been that ghost's conjuration, with Drapier's flint must she have been conjured; but were the belonging stones to kiss there, she might well be brought back nearly to body. … Terrible promised to be such a moment. Saltfleet, with his mind's eye, saw it clearly; and had taken measures in time to prevent Ingrid's foolhardiness, whether of apathy, obedience, or superstition: but seemed to fear nothing for himself; and as soon as this queer meeting of starts and silences was over, he should be on his road to the experiment with Arsinal. For it was highly improbable that, the power being in their hand, they could resist the temptation. Then
he
could accompany them. …