Unknown (102 page)

Both iZz two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex. One is creative, the other destructive; one is good, the other evil; one loves, the other hates. But through both of them pours forth die magnetic energy that moves and disturbs the lethargy of Matter. Both of them have abysmal levels in their being that transcend all that we at present know of the duality of life and death.

There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is in determined, unaccountable, changing at every second! The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are deluded. They are in reality—although they talk of “Spirit”—under the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage of the idea of physical matter as an “ultimate.”

Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, chere is no such “ultimate” as Matter, there is no such “ultimate” as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

There are human minds—and they find it easy to hypnotise the shallowly clever—who apply to the primordial mysteries of life and sex certain erudite names, and by this naming, and by the noting of certain sequences, they think things are explained. Nothing is explained. The only causal energy in Nature is the energy of the double-natured First Cause and of the innumerable lesser personalities whose existence is revealed in the unrolling of Time. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!

Parthenogenesis, as Christian clairvoyance has long ago defined it, is a symbol of what the soul constantly achieves. So are the Dragon's Teeth sown by Cadmus; and the pebbles cast behind them by Deucalion and Pyrrha.

The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!

They intersperse their “comic” and their “tragic” in a manner quite different—so hard is it to throw off the clinging conventions of human tradition!—from the ghastly monotonies and sublime surprises that Nature delights in.

All thoughts, all conscious feelings belonging to living organisms, in a particular spot upon the earth's rondure, mount up and radiate outward from such a spot, overtaking in their ascent the sound-eidola and the sight-eidola which accompany them!

Philip was now pausing for a minute on the path that led to the little gate out of the wood. His hands were deep in his trouser pockets. He wore no hat. He carried no stick. His suit was the same suit of rough heather-coloured tweed that he had worn in the Spring at his aunt's tea-party. What he could see of the sky above the trees was cloudy. The white mist rising from the Wookey Hole river that issued from the side of the wet green precipice below him soon lost itself in that peculiar Somersetshire blueness which is neither air nor vapour, water nor cloud, but a phenomenon, an entity, unique to itself.

With this atmospheric blueness there came to his nostrils a sweet, pungent, rather morbid odour, an odour which Philip would have simply called “the smell of Autumn”; but which was really composed of the dying of many large sycamore leaves, the emanations from certain rain-sodden, yellow toadstools, the faint fragrance of bowed-down ferns, the wholesome but very musky scent of herb Robert growing amid faded, tangled masses of dog's mercury and enchanter's nightshade.

Philip stared at the ground in front of him in a species of trance. There were a few dark-green shiny leaves of heart's tongue ferns hanging over a muddy ledge just there, and near them the smooth round roots of a beech tree covered with a black, oozy moisture. Cupped within the folds of the beech roots that were nearest the trunk were infinitesimal pools of ink-black rain water, the presence of which reduced the duskiness of the vegetable ooze that trickled near-by, to an indescribable green-black. Across the roots of this tree lay several small, rotten twigs, some of which were covered with a soft, brilliantly green moss out of which protruded those minute fungoid growths which children call fairy-cups.

What Philip would have simply called a “feeling of Autumn” manifested itself also in the clamorous cawing of the rooks above the taller trees and in an obscure smell of damp leaf mould that came drifting by, like a tremulous and voluptuous breath out of the very mouth of Death itself.

When he jumped into his car to drive back to Glastonbury he found that by making this effort to explain things to Will Zoy-land, who had a mind which was about as capable of grasping such matters as Cceur de Lion's would have been, he had not only cleared up a great deal in his own head but had made several drastic decisions with regard to immediate action.

Zoyland's careless “desperateness” had not been without its effect upon him, childish though the fellow's notions of business were, and as he swept through the narrow lanes to hit the main road without the necessity of going through Wells, he kept thinking, under the damp, overclouded sky where not a star was visible, that a really important crisis had at last arrived in his carefully-laid schemes.

“I'll begin mining at once,” he thought, “and I'll fly to Taun-ton tomorrow and see those road-contractors. Better get well ahead before the frosts begin in earnest. But the weather will stay open till Christmas! It always does in these muggy regions —so different from Norfolk!”

He drove faster and faster through the damp, chilly night, and the earth-scents that rose round him from the deep ditches and the wide fields became so much nourishment to his dominant thoughts. He did not articulate his feelings abput life. He was no philosopher. But there came over him just then, like a delicious plunge into ice-cold water, a sense of his absolute loneliness in the world.

As he turned those leafy corneis and allowed the low-hanging foliage to brush against his machine, he felt an exultant pride in being thus alone and fighting for his own hand against the whole system of things! Like many another competent statesman, both before and after Signor Machiavelli, the obtuse narrowness of Philip's atheism, dogmatic with the dogmatism of instinct rather than of reason, discounted all possibility of supernatural aid in this crisis of his affairs. He did feel a certain outward-rushing urge, surging up from deep within him; but how was he—with his innate incredulity—to know that this was the umbilical nerve within him vibrati ag in response to the nerves of the Great Mother?

He did feel a faint, strange, far-off intimation of some fount of energy, kindred to his energy, outside the dense, damp, autumnal darkness that flowed around him; but how was he to know that this was the eternal movement and counter-movement, in its abysmal pools of being, of the First Cause of all life? He was not even quite oblivious of an obscure something, hostile to him, unappeasably inimical to all his schemes, struggling un-weariedly against him in the world. But how was he, with his small, narrow Bayeux Tapestry skull, to know that this something was the undying Personality of Christ?

When he reached the main road he began to drive faster still.

“This Glastonbury medievalism,55 he thought, ”won't stand up long against the crowds of modern workmen I'll bring into the place. My trouble will always be the same—strikes engineered by these damned Communists."

Tilly had gone to bed when he got home and so had Emma. He had not slept in the same room with his wife for years; and things were always arranged for him so that he found whiskey and biscuits and butter and cheese left out for him on a black tray on the green tablecloth on the dining-room table; and his bed nicely turned down and a hot-water bottle, usually quite cold when he arrived, but giving a friendly look to the bed where the clothes were uplifted into a little hill near the foot.

All these small things, the particular look of that black tray against the green tablecloth, the particular appearance of the napkin that Emma always placed over the butter and cheese, the welcoming friendliness of that stone hot-water bottle—Philip was old-fashioned in certain matters—gave him a delicious sense of being humoured and considered, not only by one. but bv two competent housewives. He found tonight, so careful had Emma been to tuck his towel tightly around the metal hot-water jug in his china basin, that the water was still hot; and as he washed his hands he thought to himself:

“My life is exactly as I like it to be. This year is going to be the crisis of my life.”

No knee did Philip Crow, Esquire, of The Elms, Glastonbury, Somerset, bend to any supernatural power, as he clicked off his electric globe, climbed into bed, and stretched his feet downward, delighted to find there was still warmth in the stone bottle.

“There's an autumn feeling in the air tonight,” he thought. “It was chilly in those lanes.”

But he did a thing then which proved how excited he was after his resolute conversation wTith Zoyland. He pressed his knuckles against his closed eyeballs. When he had been quite a little boy—after his Devereux grandmother had repeated over his pillow in her stern and yet doting voice:

“Angels one and two and three guard thy counterpane for thee; While above thy sleeping head be the wings of Michael spread!”------

he had been accustomed to do this; finding that the kaleidoscope of astonishing colours which this pressure made to pass before his vision was curiously soothing to his young mind in the black darkness.

And now as he removed his knuckles he beheld the Glastonbury wThich his present plans would create. He beheld his heavy lorries tearing along a broad road from Wookey to the outskirts of Lake Village Field. He beheld his good concrete road cutting diagonally over the meadows from this point to the centre of Street. He beheld his great new bridge (making the old Pom-paries one—the Bridge Perilous of the Legends—look insignificant and negligible) by which his motor-trucks would cross the Brue. He beheld three tall new factory-chimneys rising up from his dye works in the town. He saw the rows and rows and rows of workpeople's cottages—not silly, fancy ones, but solid serviceable ones—to which labouring men from Bristol and Cardiff, and even further afield, would be attracted. He saw the sign “To Let!” set up over their precious, socialistic toy-factory, which he would not even bother to purchase from them!

“And I alone shall have done all this,” he said to himself.

One quaint and surprising peculiarity Philip had. He always slept—except in the very warmest summer nights—with his window shut. This was a peculiarity that, without his being aware of it, he shared with most of his factory-hands. But it was no doubt one of his old-fashioned early-Victorian habits. Grandmother Devereux used, for instance, always to say, “Beware, children, of the night air!” Thus, as he now turned over upon his left side to compose himself to sleep, the smell in his nostrils had very little of that autumn feeling that had made his stone bottle so welcome. It was a composite smell, a smell composed partly of his quilted eiderdown, partly of the paint of his hot-water jug, partly of his cake of recently used brown Windsor soap, and partly of a large cedar press in which Tilly and Emma kept his winter clothes.

Small physical movements, nay! the scarcely conscious physical positions of human bodies in sleep have at many great crises of history tilted ponderous scales. Had Constantine, for instance, slept on his right, in place of his left side, before his decisive battle, had Caesar slept on his right side instead of his left before they called him to the senate-house, had Boadicea slept on her back before fighting the Romans, or Cleopatra on her face before sending Antony to fight them, great issues might have fallen out in a changed manner and the upshot of vast events been different.

Philip Crow on this occasion turned over on his left side to sleep. Now when he had slept with his cousin Percy he had always had the girl on his left side and therefore it was natural enough that when the ferment of his schemes had died down and he tried to sleep, instead of sleep coming upon him, love came upon him and began to tantalise him and to torment him.

There is doubtless in certain old, indurated families a deep ineradicable strain of what might be called centripetal eroticism. A tendency to inbreeding is not always a sign of degeneracy in a race. It is often an instinct of ethos-preservation, suspicious of the menace of mixed bloods. Doubtless something of the inordinate individuality of the Crows wTas due to a constant intermarriage between cousins among them, doubling and redoubling the peculiarities of their “Gens.”

It was Persephone's long slender wraist and narrow boyish hips that tormented Philip now. He had often in his life fancied to himself that he was chaster than most men, because of the cold, critical eye with which he was able to regard women. His only passionate love-affair before he met his cousin again, after a long separation, had been with a boy at school, whose figure, girlish for that of a youth, was almost identical with Percy's.

The natural softness, sweetness, submissiveness of normal girls had always been repulsive to him. To quicken his pulse at all there had to be something wilful, evasive, difficult, withdrawm; and since all these qualities were of the very essence of his cousin's nature she had attracted him fatally, the first second she reappeared. She was still in Glastonbury. He knew that, though he had not seen her for weeks and weeks, and had not spoken to her for a couple of months. She had apparently left Dave. At any rate, he had returned to Bristol without her after the strike ended. The gossip of the town—reported to Tilly by Emma and retailed by Tilly to him over some subsequent tea-table—declared that she had become the inseparable companion of Angela Beere.