Peter, however, made uneasy at last by the continuance of her silence, turned cautiously to view her profile—long, fair and foreign as already he was aware its illusion was, with that absence of foreground. Her features were serene like a sphinx's, her eye was veiled by its sweeping lashes, but a line of pain seemed to cross her forehead. He could not understand her. She appeared always so simple, even to weakness, yet always behind it too was her immovable strength and strangeness, as though she were less a girl than a mythological interpreting daughter of compelling fate. With a new stab he once more knew that she was not his. She was that man's, who could approach her. Her affections and softnesses were her lowlands—they were his. … He looked away from her again, biting his lip.
"Perhaps I've picked a bad time for perplexing you, though," he said aloud. "You may have some other business to worry you, and so can't give this proper concentration. I could even hazard a guess at what it is."
She moved round, surprised.
"Something certainly is occupying a good deal of my mind just now, but you can scarcely have any knowledge of it, Peter."
"Yet I fancy it concerns Devil's Tor."
She waited for him to explain this mystery of his acquaintance with a matter that none but she and Hugh had discussed. But he must have seen Hugh during the day, and fallen into talk with him—though this too would be singular.
"Am I right?"
"Yes, though I can't imagine how you have discovered it," was her quiet answer. "Have you by any chance met my cousin Hugh Drapier to-day, out of doors?"
"I believe so. You did describe him, only I couldn't have been listening very attentively. He's red-haired, lean, and tall?"
"Yes."
"I ran across such a man on Devil's Tor itself. I should explain that I went up there, on your story, to see the effect of lightning on rocks. I wasn't happy at home. However he and I had no conversation to the purpose, and my sense of your preoccupation springs from other sources."
"Tell me, Peter."
"Why, to put it shortly, the hill is bewitched, or else I am insane. I know you were up there yesterday in peculiar circumstances, I know your cousin has visited the place twice to-day; I found him in a trance; a prehistoric tomb has been opened and blocked again; and you are half in a dream all the time."
"But what do you mean by its being 'bewitched'?"
"I'll give the story another time. We have our business to settle first."
"But it is just this that is standing in the way, Peter—can't you understand that?"
"I thought so, but wanted to make sure. What do you know about the Tor that you haven't told me, Ingrid?"
"I've a thousand feelings, and hardly one clear idea. You have had the facts. There was an earthquake this morning. Uncle told us at breakfast of an extraordinary experience of his there many years ago. I long since had the intuition that there was a tomb under the leaning pile."
"I went up a little before noon. Do you believe in ghosts?"
"I must."
"Then you as well have probably seen something. But if you are still too impressed to speak of it, don't. I'll get on with my tale?"
"You are outdoing me in generosity, Peter, but I'd actually rather not say anything about my own case."
"I've never asked you for the keys of all your doors, my dear. And as to generosity, it's sometimes the height of generosity to let a poor man make a gift without return."
"You need no such counterpoise. And if ever I can tell you, I will, but till then I will tell no one else. Now what happened, Peter? Why do you talk of ghosts? How came my cousin to be in a trance? What was the order?"
"Recollect that I couldn't know him; yet I could have a shot at his identity, from the colour of his hair."
The tail of a great cloud that had hidden the sun grew attenuated and passed quite away. The quiet, quick rising to full golden sunlight, occurring at that moment of their conversation, seemed to Ingrid like a wonderful joy to come—yet Peter had said that she desired no joys. Then at once she was plunged into chill shade again by the unkind coming on of another mass of cloud, darker and greater still; and it was as if she were cruelly deprived once more of the promise of that joy, and of every joy in life. She believed this chance rising and sinking of sunshine in some strange way to present a picture of her fortunes. In less than twenty-four hours it had all become omens with her.
"He was sitting on a rock as I came up," Peter was continuing, "just inside the edge of the top of the hill, facing the site of the destruction and the direct road home.
"He sat all huddled up, with hunched shoulders and rigid, staring, sightless eyes—like the eyes of a man that has had a seizure. One hand was clenched over something on his knee. I knew at once it was some sort of a fit, and since there were none of the signs of paralysis, apoplexy or epilepsy, I concluded it to be catalepsy, a condition I know next to nothing about. It put me in a quandary. Ought I to rouse him, with the risk of giving his system a bad shock; or ought I to leave him to come round naturally, confining myself to helping him off the Tor afterwards? I decided it wasn't safe to interfere, although the situation remained distinctly unpleasant. And so I filled in the time of waiting with sauntering around, inspecting the ruin.
"The earthquake up there, which of course I hadn't heard of, has confused the whole area, so that there were fully as many puzzles for me as evidences of destructive lightning. However, I satisfied myself that there was no way down to any tomb, I saw and ruminated upon the two big blocks reposing on top, I peeped over the edge for the rest. I gazed at this and that, and kept returning to my red-haired man in a trance, who never stirred. Ten minutes or so may have passed in this mode.
"The sun was just breaking through for the second half of the day, and there was a fresh wind. As a matter of fact, I felt rather more alive and present in my senses than usual, when abruptly, without notice, the transition occurred. My eyes darkened, my limbs were all at once like lead, and I barely had time to avoid a fall by finding and sinking down on to another knob of rock close by the other man's—so that most of my back was to him, and my view was more directly over the valley one crosses coming up.
"It wasn't the same—that view. It had slipped into a different. And what for an instant I had thought to be a darkening of my eyesight, now by quick degrees established itself as a true darkening of the day—to, say, somewhat more than the brightness of full moonlight at its strongest. But the scene so lit was harder to realise. The familiar general features were retained, but the heights, proportions and aspects were all hopelessly wrong. For instance, the moor on the right had become an elevated plateau, while the shoulder over the valley towered above the Tor and me. Its face was no longer a grassy steep, but cliff. The foot-track you know, that brings one to the Tor, was scarcely represented by a tricky-looking precipice ledge, with a sheer drop. I got the impression that the valley was very much deeper, but its bottom was out of sight."
"And the Devil's head, Peter?"
"Was absent. It would have intercepted my view, which remained uninterrupted. … But I must explain about the quality of the light. Though so dark, it was definitely daylight, not moonlight. At the same time, it wasn't my eyes; they were catching all the light there was—and yet the day should be brighter than I saw it. I was seeing the ghost of a scene, in ghostly light. Can you understand, Ingrid?"
"I am trying to."
"Then, on the right-hand moor I spoke of, was a herd of monstrous brutes, that might have been elephants. …"
"But, Peter, did all this strike you as unreal—did you fancy yourself dreaming—or was it actual to you?"
"Both, in combination. It had everything of the consistency, detail and cold logic of a real experience—nothing of the fantastic foolishness and impossibility of a dream; and yet my memory was contradicting it for me. It was not the world I had lived in all my life. In that sense, it was dream-like. It was in the nature of a prodigy, without known parents, dropped from another planet on to this. But l
et me come to the extraordinary part of the story. … I saw coming round the bend of that ledge half-way down the face of the cliff across the valley, the head of a long funeral procession.
"It was in half-profile, as soon as the angle was turned. The distance away would be about the same as now—some hundreds of yards—far enough to make the persons of the procession, in that light, appear like goblins. …"
"As now! So you instinctively realised that that different landscape was the phantom of an earlier stage of the present one?"
"Yes—I knew I was seeing a phantom of the past, and why not? For if haunted houses can be, why not haunted landscapes as well? And if you object that the landscape was not only haunted, but metamorphosed, which doesn't happen to a haunted house, I reply that, given the necessary vividness of manifestation, it might happen to a haunted house too, and the rooms and furniture might be changed. In effect, my sensations, that endured as long as the phenomenon went forward, certified the supernatural character. A slight horror and quaking went on continuously in me to the end; meaning, first that my blood scented the presence of an alien world (dogs have the same instinct very powerfully developed, as in bristling and howling on account of the unseen)... and secondly, that my logical brain was raising no protest of the non-existence and impossibility of what I saw, as presumably it must have done had the thing been simple passing hallucination. It would have sought to rectify the illusion at once; and would have succeeded; but this vision and quaking went on."
"But would there be no term to such a haunting of a landscape, Peter?"
"At least, before we can assign a term, we must know what is to wear out in the haunting. … Here there were elephants in England—or shall I say at once, mammoths? I have no science, but imagine that should give us very much more than ten thousand years, for example. So this particular haunting, if true, is proved to be practically unwearoutable. Shall I now resume?
"The funeral train—the persons composing it were half-bare savages, clad in a single animal skin apiece, with flowing manes over their shoulders; brandishing primitive weapons. Caesar's Britons must have scorned them for aborigines; and indeed, they were little more than apes. Their squat trunks, brief legs, gorilla-like arms, crouching balance, and tangle of unclipped hair, were absolutely in the character of apes. And they came along that cliff face in file, an endless string of them, all stamping and dancing outrageously, in true savage style. Only the covered death-hurdle—that made it a funeral for me—required a pair of supporters at either end, and they, in reason, could not dance. The outer two looked to me to be very precariously balanced over the edge of the ledge.
"All were just grey shapes. The colouring and sex were indistinguishable; except that they appeared as little like women as could be. Yet, dim as they were—perhaps additionally because of that dimness—their advance was singularly awful to my imagination. What must have been in my mind was that the path they were dancing along was the equivalent of the path we know, leading to the Tor. So they were making for Devil's Tor, and I was on it."
Ingrid touched his sleeve.
"Peter, were they going to bury their dead on Devil's Tor?"
"It was my instinct that they were."
"The monument of course would not be up till the grave was filled. So did you see a grave?"
"No, I neither saw nor looked for one."
"I would have looked for it—still, the entrance may have been temporarily covered. What have you to say about that dead one, Peter?"
"The bier was hidden by a hanging skin or cloth. Its length was unusual—abnormal, even—but whether the corpse was of a length corresponding, was not disclosed. I thought it might be. In fact, that prodigious drawn-out extension of the bier was the most dream-like feature of the whole business. The rest was spectral, but possible; this a fantasy—"
"It necessarily was a bier?"
"Yes, all the signs were of a funeral."
"So there was nothing to show if it were a woman or a man?"
"The question to ask is, what would a dead person, taller than our tallest men, be doing amongst those thick-set gnomes? By the honours being paid, he should be some prisoner of war, treated during his lifetime like a god. A woman, on all those accounts, would be less likely."
Ingrid already knew his error, but was silent; and he proceeded:
"The six leading creatures were blowing into conches, that sounded across the valley like far-off French horns—most thin and weird; above a perpetual thunder of invisible waters. A long way down the grotesque snake-line of mourners came the quiet burden, out of it all—and it suggested to me, my dear, what I have just said: a captive of high race, civilisation and rank, fallen into the hands of those simians, and worshipped by them, but never let go during the term of his natural life."
"And then, Peter ...?"
"That was the whole. The present landscape began to reappear through the ancient, the stronger light melted it away to nothingness, and the sun came out. Very shaken and moved, I found myself still sitting on my stump of rock; with your cousin, just as helpless, behind me.
"In a minute or two I got up and went to him. Before long he came round, and when his first desperate daze was past, we exchanged a few words, but we neither of us told our experience. It was somehow not the thing. I had the feeling that we had seen different visions. … He informed me of the earthquake, said that there actually had been a tomb, and that he had been down to it earlier to-day; but gave me no details; and refused my company off the hill. So I left first."
His recital being ended, he put a cigarette between his lips and lit it, but Ingrid, sitting on, with hands clasped above her lap, incorporated in silence the story with her other bewilderments. She wondered how Peter could have beheld such a marvel but an hour or so ago, and come straight from it, to talk to her of marriage. He must be trying to hide his own shock, in his English way. Some men, the more deeply they were moved by a solemnity, the more taciturn were about it. Others might be responsive at the time to a supernatural happening, yet the impression might quickly wear off with them, their own affairs being always too insistent. Thus Uncle Magnus had never cared to visit Devil's Tor a second time. … Or, having fixed the appointment with her for this afternoon, Peter had felt morally bound to go through with it, though disinclined. She asked herself what Hugh could have seen simultaneously. His trance had begun sooner, finished later, and must have been heavier. But she knew he wouldn't speak about it. In Peter's words, "it was not the thing."
So Hugh had cared to visit the hill again. Twice to-day he had been up, and perhaps was there now for a third time—she had seen him disappear with his hat on directly after lunch. He was certainly psychic, as Peter couldn't be. Possibly art was a channel that drew off all one's sense of reality into representation, so that even a quite fearful ghostly experience might become for the artist softened and unreal. But this couldn't be their incompatibility that Peter had referred to.
She must go up again. To-day it was not possible; but perhaps to-morrow. She must doctor and rest her ankle in readiness. What was Peter now expecting her to say? ... But he was resuming, turning to her through a wreath of smoke.
"Well, what do you make of it? Of course you accept the bona fides of the adventure? I did see these shapes and hear these sounds, exactly as I've reported; and I wasn't asleep and dreaming—you accept that?"
"I accept it all, just as you have told it to me."
"Nor have I distorted. Drapier has said nothing, though? Have you seen him since?"
"Yes, he was back to lunch, but said nothing; and ate nothing."
"I'm not surprised. I only sat down to mine because it was got ready. What did he find in the tomb?"
"Two stone tables, and nothing else."
"Enough to work him up, at the least, since we meet him on the hill a second time."
"Yes, I think he regards it seriously."
"A pity! These mediumistic trances, if they continue and he is going to keep on with them, look
like leading him straight into nervous lunacy. His face was ghastly. Let those follow up the topsy-turvy affair whose professional work it is. … Anyway, I'm very glad your hurt prevents you."
"You aren't to follow it up then, Peter?"
He slowly expelled a cloud from his mouth before making reply.
"No, I'm not going to. I considered the point on my way back, and found there was nothing to gain by my going further into it.
"What has happened, I take it, is this. After a number of years a stack of rocks on one of the minor heights of Dartmoor has been blown down, and an ancient grave uncovered. A resulting strong physical effluence from that opening is being able to affect the physical brains of those standing near by in such a way as to reproduce, photographically and phonographically, former happenings on the spot. It is very curious, very interesting, and essentially a case for science. But it is not a case for art. At first I was tempted to believe it might be—that optically and philosophically I could get something from it. I still might, but the charge is too high. For just as I would not swallow cocaine or opium for the sake of enriching my general imagery, so, my dear girl, I will not play Tom-Tiddler's-ground with the world of spooks for the same purpose. Ghosts have never done the human race one atom of good. I should be excited, brought to a fever, poisoned for the milder stimulations—and left. … Accordingly, your cousin must do what he likes about it—though, if you're a helpful young woman, you'll pass him on my warning—I, for my part, propose to walk out after this first act. The play threatens to be too realistic and exacting. I hope on due reflection you'll do the same."
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