Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  "You hear that?"

  "Yes."

  "Go round yourself to Dunn, at the 'Bell', after breakfast, and get him to telegraph Harkaway, of Chagford—at my expense, if he likes. I fancy it is still Harkaway who owns Devil's Tor; but Dunn will know. To the effect that the leaning pile on top was overthrown by lightning yesterday, and that some of the stones composing it are dangerously lodged on the hill slope, demanding a notice board. You said 'dangerously'?" he added to Drapier.

  "I said 'insecurely'."

  "I cannot see a distinction."

  "Any mountaineer would understand the distinction, sir. A danger is said to exist where there is a very grave risk to life. With common precautions, there is no such risk here. It is the foolhardy folk who are not in the habit of using their eyes, that perhaps ought to be protected."

  "You are charitable."

  "I think a board should go up, if merely for the sake of conscience."

  The old man scowled.

  "I fear my conscience does not embrace fools. … Do nothing," he concluded to Helga.

  An awkward silence descended upon the party, in the midst of which the master of the house abruptly pushed back his chair without excuse; and rose to leave the room.

  Afterwards Ingrid and Hugh talked in the drawing-room. It was the stateliest apartment of the house. Its walls were hung with valuable paintings by Flemish masters, that a hundred years ago had come over from Haarlem as a part of the dowry of the Dutch bride of that Colborne who had bent the horseshoes. Their rich time-darkened beauty, their remains of a quiet reality more life-like than life itself, seemed to render these interiors and portraits very appropriate to the still intenseness of the conversation. Ingrid had shut the door, and they stood in the middle of the room, facing each other.

  He knew why she had brought him there, but still would be unable to profane his vision of the tomb, by speaking of it. He was curious to hear what she, with her remarkable intuitional gift, would have to say about that other far-back vision on the Tor—old Colborne's. If all these occurrences were linked and fated, it surely pointed towards a climax of more importance than his own miserable death—yet how could she assist him, when he was to tell her nothing? She was not to know about the vision, nor the flint, nor the flint's history, nor his attraction here from India, nor his premonition of death. Then he expected her unprovided intuitions to explain everything—not to her own understanding indeed, but to his. Truly he was clutching at straws in thus gravely facing this young modern girl as though she were a sibyl of the antique world! No, he would simply answer her questions, and be off again.

  While Ingrid, on her side, was already seeing that she could not in justice interrogate Hugh more intimately about his adventure—supposing he should not speak spontaneously—when she herself was prohibited by that secret silent command of her heart from relating her dreadful-lovely vision of last evening on the Tor. She remarked how his brooding taciturnity persisted, she was sure that he had concealed some very important feature of his penetration of the tomb, and yet her tongue was tied.

  Had he encountered down there her spirit? Was whatever he had seen or heard of urgency enough to explain the tomb's phenomenal opening?—of weight enough to allow immediately afterwards its quick closing again forever? His manner permitted it. Yet if he was not to speak—if this secret, weird or immense, was to remain everlastingly locked up in his single human consciousness—then it must concern him alone. And certainly it was queer that he had arrived back from India just in time. But still her participation, and her sensations on the Tor for such a long time past, and her sense of something to happen to her... and, infinitely above all, that spirit-woman! ... More things yet must be to take place. A great working was going on, independently of them all, so that it seemed to matter little what one said of it, or did. It was leisurely as well as swift. Uncle Magnus's experience had been before she was born.

  She said queerly to Hugh, after a quite long silence:

  "Of course you know that we are to talk about Devil's Tor. Events are moving rather fast. Since our getting back last night, there have been your earthquake, and Uncle Magnus's story, and anything you may be keeping back about your investigation of the burial chamber—three things. Only, I won't urge you about the last. You may have your reason for reticence."

  "I was sufficiently pestered at the table just now. I can't add to the account I gave."

  "Very well, Hugh—but you are willing to discuss the matter otherwise?"

  "If it is perturbing you."

  "It is all happening at a time when I especially want to be at peace. I've the strong feeling that I am personally concerned. In part you know what I mean, but there's something else as well that I haven't told you, and can't ever. Would you care to hear how the Tor is appearing to me? It is just like a volcano, suddenly active again after a very long period of supposed death. It might be a haunted hill merely—I mean, Uncle has had an experience there, and I—have always had my peculiar sensations and instincts, and you constitute a third, I am sure. But no simple haunting would bring down lightning to it, or raise an earthquake. It goes beyond. How far are you now sympathetic to such a feeling?"

  "I have an open mind."

  "Please understand I'm not trying to enter by a back door, but—assuming anything did happen to you this morning, it was after your accident with the torch?"

  "I can only repeat that the accident was uncaused by any sudden start."

  "So, if my feeling about you is right, you stumbled and broke the torch first. And in that case, surely it was meant you should be left in the dark. And it would go with the rest. … Now I want to ask you, Hugh. Between the opening and the destruction of the stairway, would be—how long? Less than a dozen hours. So during ten, twenty or fifty thousand years, the tomb has been available for exploration for just under twelve hours in all; with a miracle at either end. And you, out of the whole of the human race during all those thousands of years, have been down to it. Then what I have to ask you is, can you truthfully declare that your experience inside this tomb has been significant enough to justify the election and the supernatural machinery used towards it? Do you understand me?"

  "I understand you perfectly. The answer is in the negative. I will tell you at once that I have come out of that place a changed man—nevertheless I can honestly see no good reason why mountains should move in order to transform my insignificant personality."

  "So that more yet is to come of it?"

  "It seems out of the question, now that the place is apparently ruined beyond restoring; and still I won't dogmatise, and it may be possible."

  "You made use of a strange word with Uncle. Angelic. Was it careless or deliberate?"

  "It expressed my thought."

  "Then how do you regard his story?

  "That radiance of his must have been as the radiance of the angels, but its seat and centre must have been below ground, in the tomb itself."

  "And it too was for a purpose?" Ingrid asked.

  "Yes, we may think that it was for the purpose of retaining him in the district. … You see that you have brought me so far without confession of mine. In fact, Devil's Tor surely is alive and working to an end, or such coincidences are clustered round it as never were in the history of the world. I said my mind was open. I suppose I am as convinced as you are, Ingrid, that we are here suddenly in the presence of a great wonder. I know things that you don't, but there is small sense in talking about it all. Your mother told me only last night how your own birth was superhumanly brought about and defended by your father's dreamings of a woman of extraordinary height, who showed him his direction. I am not sure that this doesn't belong to the same category as Uncle Magnus's vision. If so, he was kept here because you were to live here, and know Devil's Tor."

  "Thank you for telling me, Hugh. … You really brought nothing back with you to-day?"

  "No, nothing." For since his return to the house he had been certain that the stone he had picked up in the
darkness of the cavern was genuinely his own. The empty box said so. And he thought it unprofitable to acquaint her with that story, that actually was so unassociated. It could only end in his repeating to her the whole of his last night's confession to her mother; but words were difficult to him this morning, nor was it necessary for her to know.

  The girl's perplexed silence, however, as she continued to face him, raised in his mind something like an uneasy conscience. He sought for some other fact or circumstance that she might carry away with her, to turn her ideas to the future.

  "It's on the cards," he said, twisting his moustache, "that a man may be coming down here to see me, who could perhaps throw new light on all this business. It would be a very indirect light, if any at all; but it might be completed by your intuitions. You could speak to him, at least, if he comes. He is studying the ancient cult of the 'Great Mother'. His name is Arsinal."

  "When do you expect him, Hugh?"

  "He may be here any day."

  "Will you promise to make us known?" She refrained from pressing him for more information regarding this individual so unexpectedly appearing on the scene, for a curious reason of her own. It was that the conviction was already growing within her, that it was not to be by any act of willing or seeking that she was to find her solution of these bewilderments and awfulnesses. Supposing that she had truly been chosen for a part, it was her passive nature that had gained it for her. And therefore she would ask few questions of anybody, but for the future wait—and wait. …

  "If I am here to do it, and circumstances allow, I will willingly introduce you," replied Hugh gravely.

  "Won’t you stay on till he comes?"

  "It may not depend on me."

  Ingrid had a sudden feeling that he meant that he might die before his friend arrived. She looked at him anxiously, but dared not interrogate him. The same telepathic thought had been with her last night, but then she had coupled it with his intended descent to the Devil's Tor tomb; and he had survived that.

  She could not understand what any of these things meant, and without more conversation they left the room together.

  Chapter X

  HILL SHADES

  At the appointed hour that afternoon Ingrid, hatless and in a sleeveless frock of pale green, met Peter when he had just turned in at the lane gate to get to the house. He was neatly dressed in a grey town lounge suit, with a soft felt hat, as for a call of ceremony. Ingrid already knew that he would never do the socially wrong thing—that it was only intellectually that he was a scorner and independent; and still it vaguely displeased her to see him thus; she wished he could have left formality out of a meeting which surely merely concerned their two hearts. But they greeted each other in quiet friendliness, and Peter never replaced the hat he had removed, but in another moment cast it carelessly on to the porch seat as they passed by.

  The day had turned to fine. Above it was all blue sky and white clouds, the sun kept coming and going; the breeze, more caressing than keen, brought the sweetness of the moor to them. The thirsty ground had sucked in last night's rainfall, leaving the grass underfoot dry again. They made for a well-known seat half-way down the sloping lawn on the west of the house. Ingrid was limping a little yet, but needed no support. She dreaded this conversation to come.

  Nothing to the purpose, indeed, was said until they were settled down, with that lovely view before them of the narrow dipping valley at the lawn's end, and the slow ascending beyond it of the purple moor to its invisible top. Then, however, Peter lost no more time in reaching the subject that had fetched him to the house so early. For once he was not smoking.

  "I conceive that if any two persons in the world can begin the discussion of a thorny theme without preliminary embarrassments, it is you and I," he started in his cool fashion, that some called conceit, and others an absence of warmth from his nature, but which Ingrid herself knew to be pride, and nervousness, and a real distinction of his mind, all together. And he went on, with scarcely ever the flicker of a glance at her, while she too gazed straight ahead.

  "So we'll skip the prelude, and enter on the theme. It relates of course to the possibility and advisability of a marriage between us. I am very desirous of making clear to you at once that my doubts are not the usual ones of an over-modest worshipper. I do on occasion very nearly worship you, as a matter of fact, just as I am perfectly prepared to admit my general inferiority to you—but in the present instance the hesitations neither refer to my unworthiness, nor specifically to me at all, but to you. … For an offer of eternal life, I wouldn't give you an unsuccessful marriage, my dear. And the problem in my head is, have you—you yourself—any internal prompting that another type of man altogether would bring you greater blessedness? This is a question I want to put you before ever going on to inquire—the customary inquiry... Perhaps I have muddled it for you. What is in my mind is, that your nature, consciously or unconsciously, may be requiring for its fulfilment another nature, stronger, and—haughtier, and more passionate, if you like—all in the sense of the world only. I may be these things in art. I am not asking about your affection, of which I'm sure—I am asking about your natural spiritual correspondence. I have this painful instinct that our sort of love is not to be enough for you... almost that you will need to fear your husband—if fear you can."

  Ingrid had grown pale; yet without turning round she answered him calmly and immediately, if in her lowest voice.

  "You know, Peter, I have not met anyone whom I could ever regard as I regard you."

  "Thanks for that woman's reply. It remains a woman's reply, however—it confines itself to the personal fact. The question was as to your future unfolding. At present you are in a state of innocence—supreme temptation hasn't come your way."

  "You think I need a man of the world for my husband?"

  "Heaven defend you from such! But a man able to daunt the world—a man able to fight and defeat the world with its own practical weapons. Someone who can set you high. For you are this queer compound of the regal and the surrendering, and over and above all, the world can hardly, in any sense whatsoever, be a real place to you. That someone must see its reality for you as well. Both qualifications go beyond me. The whole of such activity as I possess goes into my work, while life is passionately true to me only so far as beauty can make it so. These are my intuitions, expanded. You are a girl living quietly at home, and I am a dabbler in paints; but whereas I shall go on being a dabbler in paints, you should have strong wings preparing—that conceivably may bear you a very long way off from me. Has nothing ever whispered in you, Ingrid?"

  "I have never thought of a husband, apart from you, Peter."

  "My dear! ... Yet that is the very danger. If you had more of the egoism and vanity of the ordinary girl, you would by now have considered all men for their desirability or falling short. Also a woman's ignorance of the arts of attraction implies a corresponding ignorance in her of the attractive force of others. You're to go through life safeguarded only by your own height—which may suffice in the cases of all men except one, who will sweep you off your feet by reason of your long accumulation of secret repressions. I don't wish to say disheartening things. Haven't you ever suspected anything of the strain in me?"

  "I've known for a very long time past that something has been troubling you. Can it seem so real to you?"

  "As real as whatever stops one's happiness."

  "What can I say? No doubt more than a few of us have these affinities somewhere, if by luck we could meet them; but we never shall. How could it be possible in a world teeming with population and split into the tiniest circles of acquaintance? Tell me how to help you dismiss this misery, Peter."

  "You have helped to rivet it, my dear—by denying our affinity."

  "Is it essential that we should be the spiritual halves of each other? We can admire, and love, and honour one another without that, Peter—it's even a rule of life that it should be so. Life is an endless affair of makeshifts and compromises,
and our spirit has been given to us for the very purpose of ennobling such a terribly human condition. You can't be supposing that in the event of a marriage between us, I could afterwards turn to another man?"

  "Not in evil."

  "Then I am weakly to allow myself to be wretched on account of an imagined missed joy? The whole world is hardly worth so much to me."

  "Very true—you desire no joys. You are pursuing something else quite different, which presently your nature will tell you about. That is precisely my instinct."

  "But, Peter—you have forced yourself at last to make this confession—with what motive? Why have you wished to speak? If you are truly so fearful of my later on meeting someone who will be nearer than you to me in soul, how can verbal denials of mine assist?"

  "I believed that talking it out with you might be useful, my dear. I saw how my reserve ran the risk of being misunderstood; also I hoped against hope that you might show me my lunacy. But doubtless the chief reason of all for opening the subject was my appreciation of your gift and habit of deep feeling. So I want you now to consider, not your heart, but your whole being, in quietness. Inform me later—in a few days—that my apprehensions have just grounds, in so far as an essential part of you knows me not, but scorns me; and I will then go away again—in small gladness, as you may imagine, but at least on the long weary road to peace once more. So will you do this?"

  Ingrid glanced oddly at him, but it was only for a moment. She was a longer time silent. It had come suddenly to her mind how Hugh that morning had mentioned a friend who was to visit him here. The mention had been in connection with Devil's Tor, and all at once everything concerned with the Tor was become significant. It was therefore fated that she was to know and somehow get involved with this stranger; whose name, she remembered, was Arsinal. And now Peter, for the first time in all their intimacy, was insisting on his instinct of a man, other than himself, in her life. What was she to reply to him? Was Peter too an instrument? Was their quiet love, on this very threshold of its acknowledgment, to be arrested? Presumably a professor—and Peter, whom she had known all her life. … No, she was incapable of thinking any more about anything whatever. These flashes of some great storm advancing upon her were paralysing her brain, and she could but hold on to her courage, as it were with both hands. She must be passive and stoical, yet Peter's love she would never renounce. She could promise him nothing in words until she knew what was wanted of her. That spirit-woman must be an announcing phantom of happenings immediately at hand. She was and they were to be... and how dull and shadowy seemed love itself, beside such a dreadful coming on of the invisible! All the ancient life of these parts might be heavily moving again, after some long dream of death. …