Devil's Tor (74 page)

"Has no instinct spoken within you?"

"I think that what you have in mind to say will be better left unsaid."

Coming to him from the sky, she saw him as if he stood there against her a dark ghost, and his voice was correspondingly low and unreal.

"In concerns the manipulation."

"I will give you my stone, and you shall do with it what you will."

The wind stirred at last in a long sharp gust that came straight from the sea. Facing now the west, Ingrid became filled with unimaginable fancies on account of what her eyes beheld—fancies grown together in a single riddle of emotion, that was as a music to her deeper agitation. The immense cloud shapes had welled up from within, until they were filling nearly all this quarter of the heavens, only a blue abyss or so remaining to be hidden; while every sunset glory of but a few minutes ago was replaced by an inkiness as uniform and without comprehensible cause as the coming of misfortune. So low were the lowest clouds that the earth's surface appeared a mere horizontal crack for breathing. The dusk was as if all this underworld were sinking, like a stone through infinite fathoms of water, to the mystery and blackness of ultimate repose. Only in the vertical line of the sun's descent a lozenge of darkest, quietest crimson hung over the horizon, as it had been a goblin window. …

She said further to Arsinal:

"So it must be. But if, in spite of all, you imagine you retain any vestige of control, then I am afraid the misconception is a bad sign for you."

"Are you prophesying?"

"I do not think that pride will gain a prize. I think it may be punished."

He faced her, pale but perfectly calm.

"Have you the gift of psychic foresight?"

"I seem to have it sometimes... and before Hugh Drapier died, I thought of death for him."

"Am I to die?"

"I cannot say that."

"You may be raised to the knowledge, since no doubt we are all in states of abnormal excitation. … But so I shall have been used indeed! Painfully, through long years, to work my way to the very threshold, only there to be stopped like an alien and interloper!..."

"It is this temper in you. Surely here is no work for the impression of personalities."

"My spirit is not craven," said Arsinal, "but you, I have seen, are selfless—an aim to you could mean nothing. …"

He stayed silent for a moment, then added:

"Yet so it may be, and we are in the blackness of night. A few more minutes will decide. In case, then, I perish, while you live on... to you I bequeath my earnest and unsparing conduct of this great mystery... but to you, Saltfleet, the two records of Knossos and Aphrodisias, for what they may be worth to you."

"In life or in death you will have your way!" Saltfleet's impatience of word and movement was his anger's repression. "Nevertheless the longer we stand here in idle gossip, certainly the more it will degenerate to futility. Also it is getting rapidly darker, and, whoever is to pay a toll, the others or other must find the way home across a blind moor."

"So give me your stone, and I will join them myself," said Arsinal to Ingrid. He reached out his hand.

While her fingers were yet on her flint, however, came the amazing intervention. … Arsinal, having his left hand outstretched and his right in the act of procuring his own stone, was all at once visibly encompassed as to his whole form by a mistily-glowing blue nebula, that seemed an emanation from his body, causing him to appear as if burning with a strange astral fire. And at the same instant Ingrid was glorified by an equal radiance: but her fire, or mist, was whitest silver. Their two shapes, but a pace apart, were like those of celestials about to meet and merge. …

Swiftly Saltfleet stepped between them, to snatch from the girl's delicate fingers the thing they so lightly retained and with the force of a blow plant it inside Arsinal's free hand, that closed upon it instinctively. The twin splendours vanished. All the happening had not lasted seconds. …

Then Saltfleet drew Ingrid away.

Arsinal stumbled forward towards the tomb-entrance and the edge above the valley. He was gazing at the dim erectness and marvellous stature of Her... as yet She shone so faintly. In either hand he held a stone, knowing that they were to be joined. Undirected his fingers fitted them, for his eyes were always on this Shape before him. The junctures fell at last together, yet no immediate change had come. …

Thus She was his boyhood's vision by night—since yesterday he had been aware that such was the identity. But in that phantom torrent scene She had been so distant. … His lips and heart prayed that a larger clearness might reward him. … This loveliness and awful calm, this deepest peace, so like a will-less eternity, that She both was, and was bringing. …

For now there could be no following work for him to essay: not again would it be needful for him to attempt the recovery of this majesty for the mean sake of a scoffing world. His frail existence on earth was no more to be prolonged. Its enthusiasm was risen to its last high flaring: then it and he must equally expire. Such death was not fear—not death. …

What proceeded interiorly was like the slow and dreadful emergence from concreted earth of a rare marble statue, long buried. He was being alarmed lest it should fail to come out perfectly. … It was
himself,
stripped of all the foul disfigurements of experienced life. Surely Her apparition was obstetric, and She was here to ensure him easy passage, by purification at the last. … He thought She saw him. …

"Here is death, then
!"—he knew not if the words had been the hollow echo in some unknown empty gallery of his being—the echo of a comprehension too remote to be directly audible... or if She had said them. … He understood, however, that no blow of suddenness was meant, no sharp dividing line: but a movement slow—slow... in two modes: the gradual slipping away downwards from the life of will, and this other endless emergence. …

His folly clung on, endeavouring to know again some of the innumerable incidents and persons of his finishing phenomenal existence. He recalled Drapier, forgetting that he was passed before him: and found it singular that he should so inexplicably be absent from all these late scenes... but the scenes themselves he could not remember. …

And during minutes longer of earth-time his two movements continued uncompleted, joined for him in the mortal likeness and high gleaming, and in that heaven coming through Her eyes, of the One before him, that already was become as the Sea of all his baring soul.

Soon, however, his sensations belonged no more to the world so cannot be recounted in a book of the world.

Staring bewildered after Arsinal's diminishing shape through the gloom, the others saw how his hands were together before his body, no doubt for the purpose of fitting those counterparts. Then his right hand dropped to his side, and seemed to be shut over a dazzling blue light. The blue was shining through the cracks between the fingers: less brightly, it was gleaming through the substance of the hand itself.

It changed to silver, and almost simultaneously appeared to burst within the hand, a flying hail of sparks, that were luminous white particles, escaping through the air towards all the cardinal points. They never went out, but became bigger, and, universally travelling upwards, at last were turned to fixed stars... in a sky that was pure night, and cloudless. …

Those stars grew to be magnificent gems, till the whole heaven before them was filled with great stabbing diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethysts and sapphires, that were so much larger and fiercer than the stars of the common sky that they seemed as if alive. … And next, there
were
clouds again—huge separated masses, moving monstrously in endless procession across that lower vault of vision, alternately burying and restoring each field in turn of blazing orbs. … Thus they upgazing were in another world. Arsinal had disappeared.

Long afterwards they compared these outward happenings, and learnt that they had been identical for each. During all their life together they had many such fearful talks. …

Now nothing of earth was visible except the lesser blackness of their immediate environment and the mind-supplemented perception of each other's shadowy column. So a strange comradeship, sprang up between them, though no words were to pass and neither had the thought of seeking contact. The spoken symbols of another order were inadequate for this experience, as their bodies could express nothing of their personal nearness.

Saltfleet believed that he could make out—yes!—that the air's pure silence, as of a still and frosty midnight, was being very faintly troubled by some pulsation which was not from his blood. Heavier clouds came up, to blot out all the stars, and each watcher from the other, wrapping them in a solid blindness. Then, that pulsation remaining everything of their sensuous existence (for Ingrid caught it too), it promised to become music. The music should be from the buried stars. … The mighty cloud-drift was muting it, yet it grew distincter: so either they must be drawing nearer to the stars, or the stars were themselves descending. … Soon the rhythm and whole tone of the music, the direction of its sounding, dictated to their ears, which but a minute since with the utmost straining had failed to distinguish them. The harmony advanced from the entire sky ahead. It was like the ordered emotion of a far-distant orchestra numbering, not hundreds, and not thousands, but millions, it seemed, of instruments... that played otherwise than in groups, since each instrument, with its voice of unique
timbre,
should be proclaiming its own peculiar message. Thus the overruling thought was, as an organism, alive in all its parts.

But when the sounds grew—hardly louder any more, but clearer, vivider in definition—then they also became essentially mystical, because archetypal. They presented the music of humanity, without its associated mechanical noises. The forcing of air through narrow orifices, the scraping of resonant objects one against another, the striking of stretched elastic membranes, the vibrating of metals—all such impurities were absent—their familiar musical effect that was a second nature of the ear, it too was absent—from this music: and the remaining purity was hard to know. It was what a passion of the heart might be before the sympathetic arousing of the seconding will. Not even were the great sounds of the natural world brought to mind. … To Ingrid, each separate instrumental voice suggested the dropping of a new soul into existence from an ineffable ghostly Womb. …

And the theme bearing along these tones upon its back—its progress was not in
time,
but in some other incomprehensible mode of change from state to state. Its line of advancing was not between a full past and an empty future, carrying them listening upon its constant front: but they were carried by it—feeling, more than listening—towards another kind of future, already full, though this music was helping to fill it. Therefore the perpetual filling should be of intensity, not substance.

These individual tones—to Ingrid, like the dropping of souls—instead of running one upon the heels of another and vanishing at the moment of their sounding, were somehow joining themselves to and increasing the next tones following... wherefrom there was no light heartless stepping from corpse to corpse of sound until the last corpse should be reached and straightway forgotten, and all should be forgotten, as in the music of the world: but always there arrived, never again to depart, this grander and grander intensity of emotion, compounded of all the past. … Indeed, too little analogy there was between the dim stupendous astral communication and that other dull and simple music of humanity. …

But Ingrid conceived that if the tones were souls, and they were being born into life, then neither could they be so born for themselves, nor yet for the purpose of the creation of another world—another senseless work of art, expressive merely of a pre-existent reality: but perhaps they should be born for the ennoblement by sorrow of that great spectral Womb out of which, one by one, they marvellously issued. … So both end and beginning of this theme-progress must be in that Mother... for Whom, certainly, time could have no meaning. …

To Saltfleet, however, it occurred that he might be dead already. He found these experiences not to consort very well with what he had hitherto known of life. …

When, immediately, the most confounding leap of all for his senses began, and this very soul of music promised to forsake ear for eye, so destructive of the fabric of his human notions was the violence that, whether he were in death or only in its foretaste and resemblance, no longer might he suppose his state one for the exercise even of fundamental judgements. Reposings, or their quick series, were for the eye, actions were for the ear; from the gases and fluids of the atmosphere no living entity could be constructed: these things he knew, or had thought to know. But now the hereditary structure of his mind was declared by a new and last fact to be on wrong principles, and everything was to tumble about him. … For, from having beheld the translation of those bright sparks of the joined flints into stars of the sky, and then imaginably heard the same stars give forth a metaphysical music, now he was still to be marched along the road of impossibility by the return to vision... yet how different a category of vision from that elementary spectacle of stars! ...

Nevertheless because she was a woman, Ingrid was the more greatly overcome. For her mental ways remaining always womanly, she was less than Saltfleet astounded by this latest eccentricity of heavenly changing for them both, yet in her depths could be moved by the underlying spiritual significance to a degree and in a manner that he might not share. Hardly of herself, little of the world's women, was she reminded; only it was as if never before in all her days had she stood even outside the door of such a new conception of womanhood as now was distressing her spirit from that mystic ambiguity in the sky. …

All the great continent of cloud had rolled by; the stars, that should have been behind, were gone as well. The music was receding. It was withdrawing into the galactic phosphorescence occupying the heaven before them: and during the process was losing its clarity that was instead of volume. The new conformation was as much more wonderful than the dying harmonies, as they at their height had been than the blazing spheres that had given them birth. A true passage it was. While the music departed, so its diminution fed that increasing awful glow. …