Devil's Tor (72 page)

So he too came to conceive how femaleness could be before sex. Existing alone, needing no completing half, marvellously wise, solitary, ancient, awful, the
female
had in some unthinkable hour of cosmic tragedy fallen into sex, thereafter to become the slave and sport of its derivative. Thus the unnatural effeminacies of women, their animal voluptuousness and cowardly sheltering from the knocks of the world, their infantine love of dress, their intense interest in the interrelations of men and women, their passion to outvie other women in wealth, rank, influence, society, and beauty: all came from that fall to sex. But the heights of woman were original. In nobler purity she was once a whole nature. …

So many fancies now assailed him at once, that some were lost. His early portrait of Ingrid... Mary had two aspects: one as an anomaly in womankind because of her miracle; but the other as the presentation in a ruined world of that femaleness knowing not males. Well might she bear a god!... He thought of Ingrid, forgetting that she was on a hill with him. When he had so painted her, she too should have been without sex for him, a like presentation of the original of women: and indeed these years had passed during which he had not dared to propose marriage to her... but lately his intuitions must be coarsened and failing. … Yes, she too could be mother of a child having no father—so said her face and eyes, and life, and conversation, that were all of the prior nature. And this in the real world might not be: yet, in the symbolic sense, so it was. …

Then what of men?—who did exist in a place where existence was but too serious. … He also conceived that men might derive in part from that femaleness which was before the later feminine. For sure it was that mankind's spiritual advance owed itself in principal measure to the men with very much of women in them: and this through the instinct of childbearing. If women had little assisted, the failure had arisen from their natural channel for the instinct's relief: in men, however, such relief must filter slowly and laboriously through the brain; and great works, great children, ensue. But also it seemed to follow that no grandeur could be born of men save by the womanly dictations of the heart, impelling to sacrifice. …

So Peter came to know he had been blind. For the passionateness he had wished to bring to painting was but a term to express a desire for the absent. The passions were infinite according to the heart, they agreed only in a base of desire. How could desire be painted? But desire could paint, passionateness could paint. And thus it needed but that his heart should be so increased that through the obscene purgatory of the split sexes the heaven of the undivided soul should shine its images. …

But
she
throughout was standing up before him, compelling his forgetfulness of time and place and circumstance, while he remained lost in those effluxions that were her eyes, as in a slow flood of insights. He thought that he was being given these few minutes to change his whole life. …

Yet it was a point of terrestrial space, it was this hill, no other spot, she haunted. Here Ingrid too had seen her. Therefore she indeed was a ghost of the dead, she had been buried here; and once had been a living woman. Why then was he judging her his deceived perception of a shaft of splendour? Was it that that life as well had been unreal? Had she walked the earth a symbol? ...

On what account could she have done so? ... Or the softness always attacking him—a tidal softness of other life and loveliness, pouring out through her eyes as if through an emptiness had its function and purpose in the past too been to withdraw from the idle, profane world those persons preferred for its encounter?

But most fearful of all was it that this wraith could persist upon its ancient ground even after the lapse of immense ages. For it made the duration of the planet to be nothing. An invisible force was fulfilling its will regardless of the inexorable beats of the clock governing the events of men; then its acts could have no applicability to the reason of men, no meaning. … Or if it were required that the great grey gap of years should occur between the first coming and the return, just as remote was a reason. A flouting of law, an imposition of hidden law, were equal. …

Out of a previous thought stole another. A woman's sex-love was a delight and an instinct not towards that delight. The delight was a delight in the person, but the instinct was towards the future child. Both, however, because they were constituent parts of that sex-love, belonged to the effeminacy of her fallen state; neither to the original femaleness. The instinct to a child lay through a receiving: an essence must only give; its nature was sacrifice. Then Ingrid—his willingness during years to renounce his happiness for hers, it surely meant that thereby he thought to serve by no means her sex, but altogether her soul. For that mystic
other
he had feared for her should be not to procure her a child of her body, but of her soul. … And therefore, though he had been willing to it, he had feared it. Indeed, he had not feared for his own mean happiness. But the fate, though still to the best, humanly was sinister. Naked she would come to the sacrifice of her earthly purity, where other women came to it clothed in the beautiful veils of love, such as the marriage customs symbolised. …

Then also it wrote itself in his mind that this confronting phantom should be for him as an angel of the Annunciation, to declare that of a soul once more most urgent it was that a child should be born. …

Now the strangest sensation swelled through him, which never afterwards could he bring back. It came to him that the whole of contentless past time for thousands upon thousands of years—the bare passage of time unconcerned with persons, things, states or happenings—was rushing upon him in one huge unceasing wave, that always passed over his head, while he seemed to know that always also he drew nearer and nearer to where he already was. The intangible illusion dazed him as if he stood on the crust of the globe spinning free, watching sun, moon, planets, stars, slipping frightfully by. One self was here, one self approached with that dreadful smooth onrush of the past: but when they should meet and coalesce, these selves, he thought the wave must surely still run on, to leave him
dead. …

The contact arrived. Nothing had happened. The self that had come up with the past continued forward with the time-wave into the future: the other self looked after. Hardly, though, had he accustomed himself to his new security when the phenomenon abruptly and altogether ceased. He could fancy that the wave, too great for him, was gone on, discarding him stranded and senseless. …

Half-night wrapped the hill, and the spirit had departed; but exactly in her place stood a faintly shining man. Very indistinct he was... nigh as tall as
she
had been, gigantically broader and stronger. His vast chest looked an iron arc, while his uncovered arms seemed fit to drag down trees. He was dressed as if for coldness and roughness. Through the deep dusk he loomed like one of those fabulous contenders with giants, monsters, trolls, of the northern tales: only it needed that he should bear an antique weapon; but his hands were empty.

What of his features could be discerned was stamped with such a hardiness that even were he not spectral he yet could not be of the modem world. His eyes were unjoking, his jaws grim and set. It was a problem that the face should be hairless. Thus he could be standing there the reappearance of no wild man of the old. Out of the past he had not come. Rather he seemed some vast dim gleaming shape cast back from the future. …

Then Peter kept thinking that it was Saltfleet. It was the odder since there could be no distant likeness between this unreal shape of mist and might, impossibly emerged from a world perhaps yet to be, and Saltfleet's recalled smaller, meaner actuality, son of facetiousness that he was, with every living man. And still, while he frowned on at the projection with the queerest screwing of his eyes, the notion unreasonably persisted that it should be Saltfleet himself, so singularly transformed.

The deceit sank only when the eyes of the apparition began in such a way to stand out that they became a bright animate focus for all the rest of the unchanged insubstantial form. Thereupon Peter believed that he was again to know that beam: but nearly at once it went differently. For in some special manner that his unskilled brain could not receive, these male eyes were representative of this male phantasm seeing by their means, and the whole frame was the intelligence, not the eyes alone were. And the illusion was willing—exerting its will—to appear from futurity: but closest to the will were the eyes, which therefore could press forward before the rest, and not only take on the semblance of life but be it—be life itself... while the far lower degree of intelligence of the enveloping body was causing it to stop still there in half-obscurity. … But neither was it quite so. The eyes and shape assuredly belonged, yet were of different worlds. They were two messages in one... that resulting one was apart from either—a third highest message. …

Most incredibly, the deep spiritual blue of those eyes always increasing in power and lustre was implanting another meaning in the grimness of the pale phantom face, making it appear as of divinity... a terrible constant-emotional engine for the adventuring singly through the black, whistling night of the Devil... to destroy his traps baited to the taste of all, with honey, or wine, or opium, or foulness—the lusts of life, the flight before pain and death. … But in itself the soul-light of the eyes was stern and incorrupt. And, away from that rocky face and enormous form, such must have been the vision's communication: but in the iron, giant setting, the eyes held war as well. They were Ingrid's. …

Often in her unconscious glancings had he seen her eyes thus, travelling past the eyes of others seeking her sympathy, past all her surroundings, as far as to an unseen heaven; but never once in all the hundreds of his acquaintance or millions of his chance encounter had he witnessed such journeys of the spirit at all: and so these eyes were Ingrid's yet more resolute, more hateful, than hers.

Nevertheless was it strange how that unparalleled soul of the fair fragile woman he had once been near to, which he had ever set so infinitely above the coarser souls of all other women and all men, should now seem to be surpassed as to its peculiar virtues by the created nature that quested past from the ghostly orbits of a male whose time as yet was not—who was still to be born and live. … In Peter's art were the similitudes of all things. Sometimes a work would start from one inspiration, only to be arrested and changed by a second that made it as of another genius—richer, deeper, more amazing. Then would the original conception, in his later re-examination of its sketch, be rudimentary and ancient to him, bringing him pleasure by reason of its nigh incredible crudity. Not
crude
could Ingrid's soul be: but still he understood not how her eyes should be the same to him, from these. …

Thereafter again he found Saltfleet in this dusky glimmering figure. He reissued from the set of the mouth, the harsh patrician hollows of the cheeks. Now he confessed in thought what always he had seen and hated—yet loved too... that that man was a great natural lord... but how insignificant beside this mighty one! ...

Or it was derangement, this discovery of resemblances in a nameless thing. Their persons were haunting him more than he knew—agitating him even in the awful presence of the powers of night. In artists was this visualising faculty to excess. … How far indeed reached it? Two persons of appearing in one—each must change, dropping something of identity. Thus would follow the illusion of real change; an advance into the future. That could be this shade's character of futurity. … It was no reasoning in him, but the lightning skeleton of a scheme for escape. The scheme died in his invention's womb. The way was not one. Those blue phantom deeps were not from
him.
Deeper than his deepest soul, they reduced him, unstruggling, to the proportions of a dwarf. Neither was the grimness imaginable by him. Not for his lightness was it to envisage the world with that terrific energy of masculinity.

The change of two to one, he knew, was
growth.

A mystical union had brought two spirits to compactness in one frame... the elements were distinguishable, that the fact might be clear. The fact indeed was clear: but the meaning he deduced not—he
dared
not. …

Surely some monstrous malignity of world-existence was to be contemplated by these skyey eyes and encountered in death-grips by this shape of roughness. Inadequate was the thought that here miraculously stood one still unborn, whose life, when it should come, was to express no more than the mortal turmoil of his own few years. Like a father and founder of a new earth he shone forth so unequally. Pressing forward into their kingdom in infinite numbers from the inexhaustible procreative vigour of this menacer and his resembling sons, the freeborn men and women of a clean and high and holy race, it came to Peter, were in due season to bend the knee of awe before a Spirit, the beginnings of Whose right nature no smaller spirit of human creature had yet imagined. …

He recognised the coloured, broken sky—and yet the recognition must have been gradual. His vision was gone and not gone: it worked in him, and gave him no peace. But chiefly he understood that an essential thought contained in it remained to be grasped. …

In a little while he rose, to cross to Ingrid. She sat where she had done, her eyes persistently cast down on the ground, waiting for he knew not what. Those men were up. Saltfleet stood nearer than Arsinal to her, but both were watching her. He had no idea how long his trance had lasted.

Extraordinary was her skin's light. Through its bloodless pallor it was so luminous that for an instant he could fancy he was beholding a third apparition. … Yet it was the Ingrid of life. And as, avoiding Saltfleet, he came closer to her, his eyes could even detect the motion of her quiet breathing: only she did not look up to him. … But the amazing gleaming of her flesh failing to depart notwithstanding, he turned quickly to
them,
to learn how they seemed. His uneasiness leapt. Arsinal's colour was unaltered, while he stood there thoughtfully, his hands behind his back in the familiar manner: Saltfleet's visage, however, appeared illumined by the same preternatural splendour as Ingrid's. The same—though the emanation was less pure, less shining—his man's coarseness of ground intervened... or the explanation was elsewhere. …