Devil's Tor (69 page)

Appearing startled to rigidness, Ingrid stared across the studio, while moments passed and Peter would not relieve the starkness of his statement. But when her eyes seemed about to seek him again, her pale lips staying closed, he asked:

"Or truly were you unaware of it?"

"I could not know that," she said, after a pause. … "It is awful. …"

"How otherwise you were altered, I can't describe. … And before—at the
beginning
of the silence—the same silence—a thing moved in the room that my eyes were too slow or too blind to catch. Is it any wonder that determinations have gone by the board?"

She turned, and began to drag her feet slowly from him, as though seeking escape in a dream.

"For who am I, to refuse out of the fullness of my vanity that others can have seen these portents with me? ..." But when Peter glanced aside at that familiar shapely back, his thoughts flowed on in twin streams, one alone of which became speech. Inly he assured himself how the insensate womanish frame was now nearly everything his affections still retained of her territory. Her dim incomprehensible mythical features, her eyes like the quietude before an organ-noted storm of terror, when she should move round again
—
they
were not of the past; not his. That other supernatural brightness had been but as a wave of the incoming tide higher than the rest: already she, as to the more spiritual of her parts and instruments, was marked with the mark of separation; only her body was a vestige. …

"Saltfleet found you formidable, at least. He said so—he who can't tell a lie, and probably finds few
that.
Arsinal thought we had been visited. We have been visited."

Ingrid looked at him from where she stood.

"Therefore the meeting is meant."

"Yes, but it is also meant that you especially are claimed, and not for me any more."

"No one can say how it is to end."

"That woman of the Tor, whose funeral I witnessed and whose spirit appeared to you, I think this morning—she has been in the room."

"You can believe so on the ground of a strange change of colour in me?"

"Ingrid, I repeat—it was a pale brightness not of your skin but through your flesh—wholly outside nature; yet not illusion. Something was shining from behind your mind, to make you look like that. Whether it was a sign to us, watching you, or whether it was the inevitable effect of an alien divinity occupying your soul..

"Her divinity is unproved... for you, at least."

"I won't snatch at the implication. The divinity is sufficiently probable even for me. I will not name her Ourania, daughter of Ouranos, or any other name; but it is the multifariousness of these cases that lifts them out of the common psychic order, to an upper one of heaven—or nearly heaven. Heaven should indifferently, and more or less simultaneously, make use of all phenomenal forms—sensible, emotional, volitional, and fatal. A tomb was hurled open by lightning and closed by earthquake; Drapier was killed by a rock; necessary persons have been assembled in the same half-week from over the world; ancient scenes come back in shadow-play; a spirit of the dead appears; the flesh of your face burns like a moon in this very ordinary room; supernatural hints and suggestions are everywhere; arrangements are made only to be unmade, and wills are as fluid as water; the loveliest engagements break easily across the middle. … Here, I say, are the marks of heaven. …"

"What do you want, Peter?"

He recollected himself.

"But because we are animals ourselves, it is the similitude of the human animal person that must most impress our imagination and convince our reason: and so I would—if it were still possible—see the ultimate visual phenomenon with my own eyes, daring the result. … and
this
I want."

"To-morrow."

"If planetary art has ever stood for anything in the sight of our symbol for the highest, the grace should be conceded."

"I am not her priestess, Peter: nor if I were could I entreat her appearance, even in the name of the loneliest art. All such matters seem a universe removed from me."

"Yet, standing here not long ago, I thought this—that as many of us as are to find our account to-morrow on the Tor may know apotheosis in different modes, according to our characters and uses. …"

"Then it may be a presentiment. Indeed, if death has served Hugh Drapier, why might not illumination serve you? That his death has served him I know now: I begin to feel a great peace when I think of him. Perhaps I should feel an equal peace for your death in the eyes of the world. … Already I am much quieter about mother. She may not be required to go up at all. … No, she hasn't reconsidered," she answered Peter's raised brows, "but it is a last intuition of mine. What could she have to do at an unearthly tryst? How can she not conclude living out her simple straightforward life, either in monotony or sorrow? ... However, this talk is nothing, Peter. Let me go home. …"

He stood uncertainly, glancing away from, then at her.

"You speak of peace, Ingrid—when some of us are to swim in black waters, and Drapier, for aught you know, may by this be tumbled into new troubles. Your peace, I fear, is like the bloom on mountains: it is due to intervening distance: you are travelling from us. So my removal may show me to you deathly, when actually the quiescence would be covering the whole war against grief, wrath and despair. With such a facility you have cast the old! ... Still, it would be unjust to revile for a prime iniquity what is merely an issue. First and foremost in your soul, I suppose, is this constant horror of an approach that already causes the secondary disasters to others to appear like Buddhist blessednesses. … And we know that a drowning person will clutch at a straw; but you are scorning to consult me in anything. I must believe it is that my instinct you could have trusted has now for three days been obscured."

"We are all in ignorance. I hoped you would spare me"

"Then go. But this is not good-bye? I shan't try to see you before to-morrow evening: when, if your mother does accompany us ..." He ceased, and she came quietly closer to him.

"Because our friendship and love have stood for wonder, though now another wonder has power to forbid, you want the memory as a perfect thing... a quietly sprung-up long association, risen sharply at the last to a height, then ending in a sudden drop, like a cliff—but not vanishing into empty air, as if it had all been Hindoo magic with the concluding confessed trick. … Only, if the new displacing wonder were a new incorporeal space, and we were both in it, not as circling globes everlastingly facing one another with the same face, but as separate essences moving different ways; yet to one ultimate purpose, in one space... should not we, in that more faith-demanding sense, Peter, be still bound together—perhaps with the larger assurance that nothing any more could tear us apart? ... Peter, it isn't heartlessness that we can endure to see each other in real being, instead of against a background of emptiness. It still may not be; but if it is—"

"I very clearly understand that in your present mood you will love no one else; and with that I must be content!..."

He went on looking at her, twitched his shoulders, and gave an unsteady bitter little smile. Ingrid said no more. After a minute Peter lit a cigarette, then moved to the door, which he threw open.

"And yet," he observed, "since the fiat has gone forth that everything in these mystic hours shall signify something else, it remains queer to my intelligence what our very brief embracing in time has stood for, and why it need have been. Certainly it cannot have been for itself. Then has it been necessary for my love to declare itself before I could find my way to the Tor with you others?"

"It may be that too." She was with him at the door. …

"I am sure that it is your support which has enabled me to face these men at all. …"

"So to-morrow, at or about eight, I shall call at the house for you and your mother, as the plan stands.
They
will meet us up there."

Ingrid returned an assenting answer. She desired him not to go with her downstairs: accordingly they parted on the room's threshold. But had she not slipped like a phantom past his irresolute hand, he still could not have dared to meet her flesh in farewell.

Moving slowly back to the nearer window overlooking the wasted garden at the rear, he stayed there for a time gazing out.

From the top of Devil's Tor the sun was not long set. The vast sky was a weirdness of strange cloud-shapes and all the colours—vivid, sombre, delicate—from burning crimson to ambiguous green, with great expanses of still bright blue vault to show the tinted battlements and monsters interrupting them more grotesque and even portentous. In four days the weather, after painfully climbing to fineness again, was become tragic towards another storm. Ingrid and Peter stood alone on the edge of the hill farthest from the ruin, pondering in silence that unnatural splendour in the west. They were early. At the house they had settled that Ingrid should recover the flint before the others' arrival: now that it lay in the pocket of her knitted coat there were still minutes to pass. Like a living thing the sky went on changing visibly before them; the dark solidity of the away-stretching moorland was a floor to it; a wind, faint and fitful, whispered to their ears of the hour to come.

Coming up they had hardly spoken. He was sullen; she, fallen into another mysterious apathy, from whose retreat her own moving, breathing body seemed to her like an independent animation. In unearthing the stone but a few monosyllables had been exchanged. Now at last he faced her, to say:

"We had better get across. But perhaps you will explain to me first about your mother. I would like to know. At the inquest she was definitely in the same mind: then, in your hall, just before you came down dressed, she appeared quickly and quietly from nowhere and took my elbow—'I can't go with you—I am prevented. I trust you in everything'—and that was all. … I know you foretold it, but it is the queerest business to me that a mother can abandon her daughter, having every reason to imagine her in danger."

"I have seen little of her all day."

Ingrid had not attended the inquest, which had passed off without episode, and altogether had been dreamlike to more than one. The coroner had called no jury, the evidence was taken as in a plain, straightforward case unconcerned with neglect or the suspicion of foul play, and there were neither superfluous questions put to the witnesses nor stops for legal consultation. Nearly before persons were aware that the proceedings had actually terminated, they found themselves filing out of court again. In a curt and towards cursory voice the withered-looking coroner had pronounced his verdict of "Accidental death." Saltfleet, old Colborne, and Helga had stood in the witness-box; Peter and Arsinal had been present. Reporters carried back the story, and the dead man might now be buried. … Once or twice in coming out Peter had wondered if Mrs. Fleming's refusal to accompany them could be due to the curb she had put upon her tongue in the court. Because she had there spared Saltfleet, so might she all the more desire to avoid even the shadow of a new friendliness towards him.

He pursued, to Ingrid:

"You may have seen enough, though, to be able to satisfy me. Is it that she doesn't care to meet Saltfleet?"

"No; if it were the fear of him, she must have come."

"Have you no conception?"

"I think she has been praying."

Peter uttered a short laugh. "Praying! To Whom?"

"Isn't it a case for prayer? Or does the mode matter? Our words may well be misdirected, but a launched misery should steer itself. …"

"So this staying away is the answer?"

"Yesterday a marvellous plan came to her through her wretchedness on my account... and if it was wrong in a single particular, that only goes to prove that it presented itself suddenly and uninvited—she hadn't thought it out. Now, if she has been praying, the error has been corrected for her."

"It is possible. But has she been praying?"

"Don't you know what I mean? You may pray in words, or thoughts, or tears, or terrors. You may pray without the attitude of prayer—without being aware that you are praying."

"Then what is prayer? I may some time want to know."

"I think it is when all other help has gone, and the mind works no more."

So they debated and surmised. But it was no more than a few hours since that foreign reiterated utterance had kept sounding within Helga's head, that Ingrid was wiser, Ingrid was wiser—wiser and older—wiser because older, than she... old as the beginning of sex, when sex as yet was not, but women still were. For it was mystical, and not what the biologists taught—truly taught. On the famous biological ladder sex was long before humans. That was for earth. There was another instinct in women: men knew it not. So Ingrid, in the fierce immaculateness of her very ancient instinct, was protected against evil adventures of the heart, and had no need of kith or kin. …

And a little after had been her violent impulse (equally strange with that obeisance to her own child) of clinging to their low-set house when immediately to be required to quit it to attend a rendezvous of her personal suggesting. It was more than the deep dread of an unknown trial: it was a sort of prescient knowledge that she could never return to the house to find it the same. … Perhaps if over it she stood guard, the angel of death and change might glide ghostly back disconcerted, and take another time. …

Yesterday she had been possessed to put forth this proposal that in her—in her, unpossessed—had been mad. Already gleamed like an emerging signal her unworthiness to bear her part in it. She grew old in the way of women, understanding no new thoughts, reclining among friends, loving softness and fair words and respect... but on that lonely hill her daughter had faced a spirit, and Hugh had died. No less spectral, deathly, could be its other awaitings: while she—she had no resources, she could not so much as answer for her rigour of courage. She was surely to bring shame upon them all. …