Lastly—a minute later at table—Helga had proposed to him her daughter's company and guidance for the walk. Ingrid had expressed her willingness; whereupon he, though still stunned by this new prank of recollection, had returned his civil thanks and acceptance of the offer. But nearly simultaneously had he been struck by that final shock, which was like a reinforcing wave to the not yet subsided last. Ingrid's society as well had been provided for in that previous design of his! ... So other persons too were to confirm and fall in with his forgotten plannings! Yet that would surely make it occult.
This, then, was the third and most recent of his strains. By now he seemed to guess that it was not insanity. With the dawn, its linking to the other two appeared a theory impossible to discard; nor could there be much doubt that it was his last night's talk with Helga that had wrought the development. He had told her so much that he had not meant to, and still he was feeling that he had told her nothing. What had he kept back of such supreme importance that it could be thought to constitute the whole difference between a confession and a non-confession? He had said nothing about this unconscious gradual drawing of the Tor. It was not that omission. It was the larger linking of all three of his prepossessions that had not been discussed with her, as he himself was unaware of it last night. Just because he knew this morning that there was something big that had not come up between them, his mind was sniffing this new scent of a connection. The notion itself had appeared in advance of any experimenting with it.
He was to die in these next few coming days, on Devil's Tor.
He stopped short where he was, on the moor. It had not been a voice in his ears, it was still but a silent thought, yet just as unmistakably was it an announcement. Before, it had been a mere idea, a question, a playing with possibility, but now it was a declaration from somewhere outside himself. He was to die on this height he was making for; though not necessarily as yet. And this should be his triple link that he was seeking.
He walked on again.
He had known that he was to die. He had begun to know that Devil's Tor had brought him step by step from India. Now quietly he was inspired that it was his possession of Arsinal's sacred stone that was at the root of all. If so, it should not be this morning, for he had left the stone at the house. But Ingrid's part?—for she too had been included in that magnetic pull; it had been in his unearthly consciousness that she was to accompany him.
But for her, he would have turned back home on account of the weather last evening. He could not say what difference that might have made.
Perhaps Devil's Tor long ages ago had been the original sanctuary of the stone. He who bore it, should be borne with it towards and to the Tor, by the latter's irresistible attraction. Perhaps it was to be redeposited in the dark recesses of that ancient tomb. Then he who served such a purpose might be to lose his life down there, that there might be no living witness of the transaction. …
He recalled those three flashes of ghastly lightning that had glittered round them on the Tor's slope yesterday. What if they had symbolised these three linkings of his strains a few hours later? Indeed, his soul was being lit by the awful violet glare of this sudden threefold enlightenment.
Chapter VII
IN THE TOMB
Without troubling himself to look for Ingrid's path of last evening, Drapier had struck off at an instinctive tangent up the long heave, confident in his sense of general direction. His shoes were already soaked by the wet of the moor. The dawn had nearly changed to day. There was no sun, but the eastern sky at his back was all pearl, rose and silver.
If that fragment of a stone was truly responsible for his gathered night of soul, which needed for its penetration these lightning-blazes of inspiration, surely there presented itself one very easy way of refinding his old happier state. He had but to make a parcel of the little talisman, and post it to his agent in Bombay for delivery to Arsinal, wheresoever he was to be found. Thus its sinister spell would cease for him; Devil's Tor would no longer pull, death would no longer come grinning at him.
But he could not do it. The business had not clutched him for nothing; it was no accident that this magnetic death-hill lay within an hour's walk of a house to which he had the entrée. He was the wanted person for a commission, which therefore also included his individual case.
And supposing he elected to try to ignore the commission, still he knew that it was too late in the day to escape the stone's magic—its wonder, beauty, and message. It was impossible now for his imagination to shake itself free before the right nature of that enigmatic hieroglyphic sky should be better understood; its particular meaning read. On such a shifting tablet might be set down the symbolic representation of his own required work and fate. If it were meant that he should decipher the cryptogram, he must still live till then.
He wished he had it with him, to refresh his mind, staggering under these new insights and superstitions; scarce able to distinguish the one from the other. Of what use indeed to pay this second visit to the Tor without it? If it phenomenally needed to be lodged there by him, then he must still come up the third time, with it. Perhaps he was to prospect the tomb, in order not to have to waste time over preliminaries on that next occasion. He was ignorant of everything; could determine nothing. The flint assuredly had fetched him here from India, to die here; nearly all the rest was pure guesswork.
His mood had become peculiarly heightened, like that of a man going into action. He was glad that his worldly affairs were in good order and all behind him. The landscape was surprising him by its changedness; while his body seemed to him light and foreign, as though it were all at once no more than a mooring for his consciousness. So many endless wearisome years had he cleansed, adorned, fed and flattered it, as his supreme raison d'être, only to realise at last that it was spectral, doomed to vanish into thin air at this cock-crow of eternal life about to sound. Strictly true it was, and no fiction of the poets and mystics. And analogously, these grey slopes and rolling silver skies before him, they existed certainly, since they formed a direct material continuation of his own person, nor was their beauty to be denied; nevertheless in the twinkling of an eye they would pass into everlasting nothingness, so how should they not be a deceit of his senses?
His countless small cares, too—the anxieties, absorptions, willings, mean delights and meaner fears, of daily life, that so nearly exclusively employed a man during his mortal passage—somehow they had dropped from him like a foul skin, leaving him clean and innocent of mind, as though he had been a young child again, only now with no beginnings of the guilt of the world. As a child had not yet come to it, so he had done with it, that long middle hell of vanities, dreads and passions—that nightmare of the spirit's perpetual trembling on account of the false prizes and terrors of a very few years of existence inside an illusory body.
He understood. It was the high lesson of death, vouchsafed him by special favour while still undying. The lesson was that life was neither opportunity, nor education, nor growth, as the various orders of the foolish would have it, but a heady fever, the occasional grandeur flashing through the rare lucid intervals of which represented the soul's true condition.
Finding himself so near to the mood of death, he considered his courage; how he might expect to behave at the real last moment. Thereupon he seemed to understand that nothing earthly in the shape of attitudes was to serve his passage out; not courage, nor pride, nor apathy, nor theatricality, nor cynicism, nor superstitious asseveration, nor the hugging of a conscience; but that simplicity and humility must at the very end be exacted of him. He could not conceive what might come after. The world being all so false, he thought that there must be a true.
The scene around him grew ever smaller and more domestic. The cold, sweet, wet purity of the morning air, the living mists perpetually clothing and stripping again the streaming moorland, the sharp scents, identifiable or baffling, from the scrub, heath and tangle of his moving circle, the quitted road on his left winding its a
scending way lower down along the side of the great shoulder he climbed diagonally, the soft and lovely cloud-ceiling shutting him in, the homeliness of all this solitude, in character so remote from comparison, from contrast even, with the bare, silent, awful solitude of death—the whole resembled to him in his present mood a toy world, charming but childish and unmeaning; exactly suited on that account to the requirements of his phantom bodily part, that also had no meaning. He couldn't with any magnanimity regret leaving it. As a biological product indeed he must do so, but as an immortal soul such a lingering back-gazing would be as mean as blind in him. For that real being was immediately to go on, first to the white, huge, mournful entrance-hall of another life incalculably vaster, since all the dead, of all time, had quitted the planet by its single door; and thence to that unthinkable archetypal universe which threw solidity and colours into the material world like its shadows, and instincts and passions like its faint distant voices. How could dwarfish man not be simple and humble when brought to the very threshold of such a heaven?
Drawing out his watch, Drapier learnt that it was still not six. Perhaps the day was quite come, but the low dark suspended clouds prolonged the illusion of dusk, while the sky held no tints except behind him, where he never saw them. A wet pellet or two stung his cheek, a sudden flurry of wind tried to whirl his cap off, and even as he rammed it more tightly on his head, the dark mass of Devil's Tor again stood up before him, nearly from the identical spot where last evening he and Ingrid had halted to behold it illustrated by that fearful blazing fork, that had been like the sword of an archangel. But when they had looked back to it from the same vantage on the homeward journey, the emasculated crest had been blotted out by the weather; and so it still was, for the jealousy of vapour wrapping the hill's top seemed not to have shifted throughout the night.
His mind moved over familiar ground, till it came to a new thought. He recalled Thor, and Ingrid's alarm at the idea of a descent. He continued to believe that he was perhaps wanted to return that occult stone to its former resting-place in the tomb he made for; though it could not be this time. His death might be at once to follow, nevertheless he knew no postponing desire. Then came his new thought. The stone being returned to the tomb, and he dead, what need was there for him to have troubled about that interview with Helga? For now she would only be perplexed in searching everywhere and never finding his treasure; and Arsinal in any case was not to get it back. Should this business so fall out! And so all last night's talk might well stand for nothing; in which event only another problem had started up—how was he to relieve Helga of the commission without either lies or a fresh confession? What to do about it, he could not determine; but this mental interruption had the instant effect of fetching back his entire spirit to the painful practical world, with which he had hoped to have done.
He pushed on in disquiet. This doubtless was the penalty for taking an active hand; for trying to steer destiny according to his contemptible human insights based on the codes and petty laws of society. He was to remain a thief even after his death, and nothing else had ever been intended. The penalty provided that his risen comprehension of death should be arrested and put back by this new invasion of the trivial. The lesson to learn therefrom was that as often as his will should become quick and inventive, so often must he begin again at the beginning of his peace.
Unconsciously despising the steepness of the hill at his feet, as well as to save a minute or two, he dropped straight down to the valley separating the two heights, then sprang across the stream, swollen after the rains, and started directly up the Tor's face. The way brought him through the main wreckage of the overthrown pile. Some of the great blocks surely were unsafe, so again he impressed it on his memory to get that public warning posted. He did not know if the Tor were at all frequented.
Nobody was aloft now at least, when he reached the top. All view off the hill was prevented by the mists. There was no excuse for delay in proceeding with his task, nor did he wish to delay it. Those ancient stairs still showed greyly from the mysterious depths of their enclosing oblong hole. It was out of the question for others to have been up here before him so early in the morning, while last evening the night had been closing in on their departure, with the storm not yet quite ceased. So the adventure remained his, come what might of it.
Accordingly, bringing out and testing his torch, then refolding the loose mackintosh over his arm, he went on without more pause to lower himself to the first stair down of that queer nightmare passage, by the clumsy manœuvre of squatting on the surface ledge and dropping his feet until they touched. When they were square on the rock, he switched on his light.
So this stairway was no illusion; and still he could continue dropping his legs to the second, and third, and fourth granite treads. At the fourth, however, a rocky roof was already above his head. After that, he counted all the steps.
Yet was he aware of no great interest in the descent; certainly of no excitement. He was in this place so quietly, so almost suddenly, that it was all being more like a dream to him; he was here because one minute always followed another, and a man's movements must be continuous. The introduction to the adventure had ended at last, so the adventure itself was commencing. He supposed that he was merely being absorbed into a hole by some fate that willed it. A mighty marvel even might be awaiting him, and yet there was this absence of curiosity from his soul. His death would be so infinitely mightier than all other possible marvels.
The walls became a rude spiral. They were of rough natural rock, chipped away in places to allow a wider passage. Of what substance could have been the tools of those ancient workmen, so to subdue hard granite? He thought of the Pyramids, the building of which also had been a miracle.
And while he continued without pause first to sit on his muscular haunches, then to dangle his feet to their next support, the light of his torch at each moment showed brighter, indicating thereby that the darkness was increasing. But the air never grew worse than cold, damp and earthy.
At the fifteenth drop he touched bottom. At that forty feet and more below ground he was shown the way now going forward without further perpendicular drop, though still falling sharply. What was before him, in effect, was a descending tunnel, the continuation of the curve of the staircase, so that his flash revealed only those few paces ahead. Already the circle might be complete and he be right underneath the upper hole again by which he had come down, as high as a house above him, as far off as another world.
Then, erecting himself for the last time to proceed onwards between these enclosing walls, that grew increasingly unreal, he found that his senses had begun to watch for the dangers that his mind despised, and that a supernatural awe was creeping over his temper which he had fancied to be steeled by that assurance of death. He supposed that the confinement of the place was recalling to him the forgotten fears of infancy; a psychologist doubtless could have explained it all. The walls sometimes were wide enough apart to have allowed room for two persons going abreast, and then they would come together again quite in the manner of an evil dream, putting him in the irrational apprehension that should the squeeze get much tighter he might become totally and inextricably jammed; and this indeed might be his doom. But ample air space was above his head.
And then again, after a hundred feet or so of this widening and reclosing in of the walls, upon turning a final acute bend of this dipping darkness he discovered himself beneath the effect of a natural archway, that imaginably might once have held a great door of wood; though the panels of such must needs have been fetched down separately from above; and had quite vanished. The arch, however, was only the emergence of the tunnel into a vast bell-shaped cavern, that was somehow strangely like a natural bubble in the solid granite of the hill.
He paused in the doorway, directing his flashlight over the walls and vault of the place, that were of craggy grey rock. The floor too, though it had come to a level at last, was all hollows and roughnesses. There could be but l
ittle human art in any of this.
The cavern was bare. If particular purpose it had ever served, it must have stood for anteroom to yonder seemingly more important interior recess that was scarcely distinguishable through an opposite archway. The line of these two doorways continued that of the last of the tunnel behind him, and ran across the greatest length of this outer cave. Moving on again, he was more than ever convinced that the entirety of the underground formation around him, with the tremendous crack of the stairway from the upper air, must have been wrought, before men were at all, by earth-shock.
But in the second archway he stopped again, gazing sternly forward, while playing his light over the dimensions, character and contents of this extreme vacuum of the hill, that should be the sepulchre itself. For with it the possibility of his further progress ceased; no sequel through another gap was revealed. And there, besides, should stand the granite corpse-table.
He would not enter yet. This buried crypt was holy with antiquity and mystery and night, so that to take one undedicated step into it would be like profanation. The hard white modern glare from his torch was already a profanation, but look he must.
It was a hive-shaped cavern, smaller than the outer; all of the same grey bossy rock, that displayed no discernible trace of working. And still it was not positively small, for half a hundred men perhaps might have stood conveniently within its round. The great table which saved its emptiness could itself have carried a dead giant.
The immense single granite slab of the table was raised a yard up from the floor on six block-legs. The slab and the legs must have been hewn down here; they could never have been got through that passage. The table's length was sideways to him where he stood. It had the appearance of a kind of shelf running along the far grey wall of the cavern. There was nothing on it—neither bones, nor ornaments.
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