by Dion Fortune
“I don't know, Lilith, I don't know—I don't pretend to be an initiate. I simply love you and want to be happy with you, that's all.”
“I will make you happy, but you mustn't try to possess me.”
“Possession is a strong instinct with some men. It's their notion of love.”
“It's a false notion. No one can possess another without destroying them. That is why marriages are such makeshifts. The one is only partly satisfied, and the other is half destroyed. The far-voyaging soul must be free, coming and going in its own sphere. Let us learn to love as those love who are free from the Wheel of Birth and Death.”
She caught hold of him by both shoulders, her eyes shining.
“Rupert, do this with me! It is the next phase of the magical working—the next thing that is to be brought through into manifestation. Work this with me, and we need not part yet.”
He looked at her wearily. “I doubt if I've got the strength for any more, Lilith,” he said.
“You have—you have!” cried the woman, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining. “This will give you strength as the other gave you peace. Do this with me, it will be all right. Trust me, for I know!”
The man hesitated a moment. Then:
“My dear,” he said, “I'll do anything you say, you know I will,” and he put his head down on her shoulder and she held him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Malcolm went through his work at the hospital in a kind of daze. If the earth had opened under his feet he could not have been more bewildered. He had never, in his heart, believed that the woman he loved would make him that strange proposal. He ought, he supposed, to be thankful for that, and in one way he was, but in another it scared him.
Lilith Le Fay was a very beautiful, very sophisticated, very vital woman; entirely emancipated and with an experience of life concerning which he had deemed it better not to enquire. Would he, Malcolm asked himself, be able, to put it bluntly, to fill the bill, or was he in for another shattering disillusionment, from exactly the opposite cause to the original one?”
He recognised the inevitableness of an animal factor in his own nature. Once he had regarded it as a thing to be overcome; certainly as a thing that should be under the full control of the will. His failure to overcome it he regarded as being due to a divided will—it was only by a narrow majority, not by a unanimous vote, that he trod the narrow way. An ideal love, he believed, would be one that transcended the senses, and though he frankly recognised that he was incapable of attaining such heights, he nevertheless believed that in the legalised license of a marriage it was a decent man's duty to keep his animal propensities within bounds. Though he himself did not remember the days before anæsthetics, he had worked as a student under men who did, and who used to regale the students with tales of the good old days when hospital porters were picked for their strength and surgeons kept their oldest frock-coats for operating. It had seemed to him, in the light of subsequent experience, that this state of affairs was by no means extinct, and that analgesia for conception was as urgently needed as for delivery. If marriage had been a shock to his bride, it had been a disillusion to him, and he carried the scar as well as she. It was an accepted fact that the developing brain of civilised man had expanded his head till its entry into the world was a nice problem in mechanics; it seemed to him that, in a similar way, woman had risen superior to Nature, while, most regrettably, man had failed to evolve. Consequently either he had to drag her down, or she had to drag him up; and as far as he could see, the victim had to make the best of it.
He had a shrewd suspicion that Lilith Le Fay had not the slightest intention of taking him by the scruff of his unregenerate neck and raising him heavenwards; that she considered all such attempts to be misdirected energy and herself proposed to meet him on the level. This worried him greatly, for he feared she did not realise on what level she would have to meet him. He had fondly hoped that with the coming of an angel into his house the wild beasts with which he had wrestled so manfully would quit Ephesus for ever and curl up on the hearthrug; but Lilith proposed to set them free. So far from taking advantage of their new-found liberty, however, they all seemed to be lying dead from shock at the bottoms of their cages. Malcolm was sorely tempted to turn in for a drink at the first tavern he passed on his walk home from the hospital.
For once again he was walking along the Embankment in the dusk, following the path that had led him so far from the beaten track of normal life that he felt sure there could be no returning, and, he might just as well go on and see it through. This thought nerved him somewhat, and when he came to Lambeth Bridge, he crossed it.
In answer to his knock the door swung open, and framed in its arch stood Lilith Le Fay. Her hair, which she had hitherto worn wound in a coronet round her magnificently-carried head, was in a Grecian knot on the nape of her neck; nor were her robes of the rich velvets and brocades in which he was accustomed to see her, but of shimmering folds of chiffon, like clouds across the moon, and through their veiling mist he could see her underdress of silver. She was indeed a moonpriestess tonight. He felt like Actæon with the dogs waiting around him.
As he bared his head the lamplight fell on his face. Lilith looked at him with her penetrating eyes; then took him by the shoulders and made him face her.
“Well?” she said.
“I'm all right” he replied, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “I had a busy day at the hospital, you know.”
She did not answer, but let go his shoulders and turned and went ahead of him into the great hall, leaving him to follow at his leisure. The only thing that rendered the situation in any way bearable was his inner certainty that in some way Lilith Le Fay would pull him through.
Halting on the hearthrug, he gazed dumbly at her as she turned to look at him.
She laid a hand on his shoulder again. “What is it, Rupert?” she asked.
He smiled wryly.
“I suppose I'm a fool,” he said.
“I suppose you are,” said she, and laughed softly. She shook him gently by the shoulder she held. “Sit down,” she said, “and I'll make you some tea.”
He dropped into a chair, almost disappearing among the cushions in its roomy depths; then out came the inevitable packet of Players, and she left him quietly smoking as she went to make the tea.
There was an amused smile on her lips as she manipulated the kettle. Rupert really was the most amazing person. She had seen Hamlet in Modern Dress, with no one looking the part, and Rupert Malcolm, whether as great scientist or great lover, was invariably equally incongruous. Wherever he was, whatever he did, he was always utterly himself, for it never occurred to him to be anything else, and he considered himself a very ordinary man, save when in a rage, and then he suddenly turned into a crusading baresarker.
Watching him as he drank his tea in what might have passed for a badtempered silence, but which she knew was worried brooding, she realised once again how completely he acquiesced in the code that held him bound; and more clearly than ever she saw how mankind makes its own cages out of an inner bondage. Malcolm was legally free, and could hardly feel any moral obligation to a woman who had malingered for twenty years at his expense, yet here he was, the conventional widower, mourning the dear departed, who had not been in the least dear to him and for all practical purposes had departed twenty years ago. Lilith Le Fay gazed at the man and marvelled.
As if reading her thoughts, he said “Do you realise it's less than a week since my wife died?”
“Yes,” said Lilith. She did not add any comment, for she did not choose to show her hand. She had a feeling that Malcolm was using the recently dead woman as a kind of chaperone.
Lilith sat, chin in hand, staring into the fire while Malcolm slowly sipped his third cup of tea. She was divided between the desire to give him a good shaking and the knowledge that not yet was her work finished with him; not yet could she lay down her weapons and enter the sabbath peace. If she abandoned Malcolm to his own devi
ces now, he would slip back into the old, miserable, treadmill existence, and it hurt her to think of him doing that.
Never, it seemed to Lilith, had they been so far apart since he had stood glaring angrily at her from behind his desk in Wimpole Street and she had used her knowledge to dominate him—for his own sake and for the sake of Great Isis, who needed him. He had been used, and now he must be paid. In spite of himself she had made him serve; in spite of himself she must bring him into harbour.
She gazed at the rugged head seen in profile. Malcolm looked more than forbidding, he looked morose. She asked herself what purpose it could serve to adventure with him again? Yet somehow she could not leave the thing unfinished. Ends had to be tucked in, or they would give trouble.
Then, a sudden resolution taken, she said: “Come, let us go to the worship.”
Malcolm looked up sharply, coming back from a long way off like a diver coming to the surface, the bad-tempered look vanishing as animation returned to his face, he merely looked worried and unsure of himself now.
“What do you want to do?” he said.“I thought all that was over.”
He looked suspicious and a little scared.
She did not choose to explain, but rose, and he had no choice but to follow her. With a gesture she directed him to the bathroom, where he should robe.
Reluctantly, sullenly, like a boy going to have a beating, he took off his clothes and threw them on to a chair, shivered, and put on the robes. Without glancing at himself in the mirror he pulled the silver head-dress down over his brow and climbed stolidly up the long stairs, looking neither to the right nor the left.
There was no Lilith Le Fay to lift the curtain for him this time when he came to the entrance to the temple; he had to push aside its folds for himself. He entered, and saw her lying motionless on the altar of sacrifice, thus forcing him to take up his position in the place of the priest.
He stood looking at her, sullen and lowering; she gazed back at him impassive as a sphinx.
He saw that she was not looking at him, but over his shoulder into the mirror that was behind him. He saw by her eyes that she was seeing something therein that was not of this world, and that she was watching its actions, for it was moving. Secure from her observation, he watched her face.
For a moment he hated her. The magnolia skin, the beauty of the dark eyes and hair, tantalised him. He longed for them, but felt they would crumble at a touch. He was, in fact, as deeply divided in his selfimposed asceticism as he had been in his lusts. But the woman was not watching him; she was watching something else with which she was communing mentally.
Gradually it became borne in upon the man, standing thus tormented and frustrated, that he had simply to keep quiet and let things happen. It was not in his power to do anything; he was as frustrated by his own inhibitions as he had been by his circumstances, and with a sudden flash of realisation he saw the truth of Lilith's words: “It would make no difference even if you were free.”
This had been abominably true, and bitterly he knew it. His release had not altered her attitude towards him; she could have done just as she was doing now whether he were free to offer her marriage or not. He felt resentful. His wife's death ought to have altered everything; whereas it had altered nothing. He set his jaw and stared sullenly at Lilith Le Fay.
But presently his sullenness changed to misery, and it seemed to him as if he were holding on to her with his eyes like a drowning man clinging to a rock; and again came to him the feeling that she was communing with something, and that with this something he would be expected to cooperate. In a flash he realised that the work of the new phase had already begun, and for a second he backed away like a startled horse. Then he steadied. Let come what would come—he didn't know how the thing worked, or what was right or wrong when looked at from this point of view. Of one thing he was certain—Lilith Le Fay was not out for evil. He had seen her do things strange beyond all imagining, bold beyond all daring, but they had all worked out for good. He trusted her. She had never let him down yet, and he did not think she would now.
He could feel the beginnings of the gathering of power. The magic was starting to work. He was in the place of the priest, and whatever this unknown force might be, it meant to work through him. He steadied himself and waited. Let it work! It was the only way. He needn't do anything. It was a natural force, and it would use him, its natural channel; all he need do was to let it use him.
He concentrated on the idea of passivity, of presenting an open channel to that which would come to him from behind, and through him to her. Great Nature was drawing near; the tide was rising along the appointed channel.
Then, for the first time, he knew himself as part of Nature. Such a thing had never entered his head before, for all his study of comparative anatomy. He knew that, deep in him, was a level that had never been separated from the earth soul, just as the image of the primordial woman in the Black Temple had never been cut away from the living rock but was united to it along her back-bone, and he knew that he too, at the spinal level, belonged to Nature, and that through the channel of that hollow rod Nature would use him, and gave himself up to Her power.
Then in a flash he felt the levels coalesce; that which he had previously known as purely physical he felt to be spiritual as well. The force was rising from the spinal to the cerebral level and passing out of the province of physiology. Then he felt it lift level again, and pass out of the province of psychology into that which lies beyond. A vision of starry spheres seemed around him. The room had faded. Lilith had changed into Isis and he himself was the Nature-force rising up from primordial deeps to fertilise her! He was not a man, he was a force. He was part of the earth-life, and Nature was manifesting through him; and she, Lilith, was not a person either; she was the goal of the force—that was all. It was quite simple. The force had taken charge. There was no thought, no feeling, save the terrific pressure of force that used his organism as a channel of manifestation. The less of personality there was in this the better—let the force do its own work!
It was like being struck by lightning. The power came, and passed, and as its reverberations went rolling away into space, he saw as the clouds parted before his eyes the face of Lilith Le Fay, but made young and lovely, and he gazed at her as Adam must have gazed at the newlycreated Eve when he awoke from his deep sleep and found her beside him.
The straight run-through of power had blown clear all the obstructions and blockings and tangles in his nature just as a choked channel is cleared by a force-pump. From level to level the power had risen, and cleared the channel as it went. He was a man utterly re-made. How, and by what, he could not say. He only knew that, exhausted and at peace, he was ready to sing with the morning stars as soon as his strength came back to him, and that his mind had the crystal lucidity of sunlit space.
He stared at Lilith, and wondered what she had made of it all. He had never seen her look so lovely. The remoteness that usually veiled her had vanished, melted away, and he felt that her nature was open to him, that there was no dividing-line between them. Their souls were no longer two circles, bounded by their peripheries, but two centres of radiation whose rays met and mingled. It was the sense of the breaking down of barriers that struck him most profoundly. There was, at that moment, no line of demarcation between him and her; the straight run-through of force had swept it away. From him to her it had passed, been raised by them to human level, and so back again whence it came.
He saw how the sense of sin, for which marriage is advised as a remedy, prevented the straight run-through of power, and by confining the force to its lower levels, stopped it from ever reaching its divine aspects, but by turning it back too soon, short-circuited it so that it never passed in its fullness from the man to the woman, and there was no breaking down of barriers—”Bitterly we re-embrace—single still.”
In one flash there came knowledge. Later on, he would think it out as ideas, but now he just knew, though he had no words for what he
knew.
Lilith came and stood beside him, and took his hand and they looked in the mirror. There was nothing to be seen now in the crystalline darkness of its depths, stretching away into far space in another dimension; nevertheless it seemed to the man that they opened upon an inner world, and that again and again, by the same magic, they could be opened and re-opened. The world of dreams and the wake-world met on that threshold, and he knew now the secret of passing over.
For in the great moments of life we cross the threshold in a kind of trance that has been described by those who have known it as a lesser death—when St. Theresa swooned in the Divine Union, when Keats first looked into Chapman's Homer, when the Vikings leapt baresark into battle, they knew that lesser death and its illuminations. Whoso has never experienced this flux of the soul in some transcendent experience lacks the key to Life.
