Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  She added, while her mother fastened her with a curious humourless little smile:

  "He was afraid—on Mr. Arsinal's account, not his own—that you might mark your displeasure for this morning's business by confiscating it... denying it to them, after all."

  "It is to wait there for—what?"

  "Until I shall have met Mr. Arsinal."

  "And meanwhile they risk nothing, for presumably they can retrieve it at any time for themselves?"

  "Since you are to let them have it without conditions, it cannot at all matter to you if they do."

  "No; but I see little highmindedness in a refusal to accept as a gift what can always be taken as a prize of fortune."

  "Because you cannot imagine his manner or the trend of our conversation, mother. I was not cheated. … Rather take another view of it. …"

  Her mother eyed her, and her smile had faded. Ingrid went on:

  "Something infallibly must come of this depositing—something. But the depositing itself has been brought about by Mr. Saltfleet’s perception of your hostility... and you are hostile because of a terrible misconception of the possibilities of his character—some grotesque horror of him in you. Then the next course of events that will follow upon the stone's depositing and recovery, will have demanded your bad fancies as a necessary link in the chain. … A link, not a first cause; for the fancies could not have come out of the air. … And so I want to urge on you that the single events of this week may very seldom be standing for themselves; their meaning has usually been in something else to take place. Perhaps I express myself obscurely, but do you understand me?"

  "Are you not inventing a psychic drama, my dear?"

  "I almost wish it were invention... and yet I don't know. …"

  "One tragedy and a number of strangenesses have happened all together, but that is very far from showing that there is a real connection."

  Helga knew, however, that a drama was in progress, and that she was playing and to play a part in it. For all her revulsions, intuitions, unnameable fears, consequent soul-searchings and activities, were that part. And if, as Ingrid declared, such motions could become intelligible only in the light of events still to come, then of what rational avail was it to fight the preternatural tide, trying frantically to ignore and restore? ...

  Just as a violin, magically animated to conscious feeling, might be nothing but jarred by the vibrations set in motion by the drawing of the bow across its strings, knowing not the least suspicion of the music for the ears of human listeners, so her consciousness was being jarred and a progressing music might be elsewhere, the jarring representing but a mechanical sub-action having no sort of spiritual relation to that beauty hidden from her. …

  So mystical it was. How could she not hope that she was being thus deceived by her plain understanding of experience, that was without the wings with which to rise to such a visionary vault? Ingrid, it might be, was upon the flight. … But the inept challenging of her conventional mind persisted, while the girl seemed less to attend to her mother's voice than to observe her eyes for these profounder dreams.

  "A drama so truly weird to impossibility, for instance, Ingrid—it could be allowed only on the condition that not one of its scenes should prove superfluous... excrescent. But here you insist that a vast deal of machinery has been used to get poor Hugh's stone secreted on the top of Devil's Tor. Well, with or without my permission, these persons will certainly remove it for themselves, and wouldn't it have been just the same if they had honestly closed with my offer this morning? Any... shrinking of mine, from the contact of one of them, will have given them another walk, no more."

  "Who can say that, mother? ... For you were right: I was distressed up there. I came straight home from the distress, and this last of it showing in me still ..." She broke off, to shrug. … "I only wish to suggest to your imagination that whoever fetches down the stone will have to go to the Tor for it."

  She could not confide her ultimate secret, yet was painfully moved to prepare her mother for the swift, sudden calamity that now she no longer doubted was to overwhelm herself at least. … She thought, besides, to go towards liberating her mother's mind from its oppressions concerning a guiltless man. For the purpose, though half-unknowingly, she had throughout been adding so many rectifying touches to his portrait. Now she would risk expostulation and ignorant alarm in relating the fact—the bare fact without defiling particulars, she could no further—of his vision, and hers. It would show him with austerer preoccupations, inconsistent with ogrish crime... and might afford her mother, too, so intense a glimpse of the Tor's power and miracle, that she would realise at last how it was the centre of everything, in this muttering and already murderous storm... whose emblem had been that other physical storm, when she and Hugh had witnessed the destruction. Its breathlessness, as from the pressure of an incubus, was even now translated to horror in her mother's heart. Thus she might be brought to see that the horror was for service; as a self-subsisting thing, false. …

  Ingrid's sunken state, manifest in the chiaroscuro of her utterances and filling her silences with inscrutability, were the latter not rather born of shapeless idea—it was only in part the healing lethargy of her emotional brain after its duel on Devil's Tor with that projected passion. In larger part it was the dimming for her of her surrounding day by the continued spectral shining of—Her, within. … Her thoughts were not delicate enough for the analysis. She was less remembering that palely-gleaming shape, shaming and dwarfing women, than being growingly agitated by its essential life, that for a moment or two had stood it as against the hill-top and the sky. … The shape had never known the world by slow degrees, it was not from parents; therefore it was somehow unreal, and, its first shock being past, could start to fade from her mind, like all visions. But that which it had meant—the words of heaven, of which that moony image had issued forth the hieroglyph—this interior awfulness was as a ferment to agitate her not less but more as the hours should one by one melt before the last emergence upon her of the grand solving. …

  She did not know how she could both be quieted and healed by her lethargy and still, far underneath her nervous system, be ever more violently rocked as to her unwilling soul by this invisible element of meaning and passion; she believed, nevertheless, that it was good. An evil potency would approach her through pleasure. …

  Her mother she was aware of, sitting there against her, like another phantom. But Peter was become still more shadowy. Whenever he had been named, she was recalling him, not as a living lover, with whom she probably was to pass her years, but as a sort of appendage of her old life, either vanished or indefinitely suspended—he seemed insulated from her, without reference to time, by a transparent solid wall, through which they might no more than behold each other's uneasy motions. She could feel no resentment for his obstruction of her imagined will, for the reason, that she was as unable to pity him. She was not wronging him, he was not opposing her, but a shrouded formidableness was ploughing through them both; and all their old affection and later playing with love—it was suddenly fled, like the breaking up of a children's game before danger. …

  Her mother had been viewing her face in quiet thoughtfulness. … Ingrid's distress, then, was acknowledged, and might be learnt for the asking. She feared to ask; and her composure was instead. For the hurried prevention of further confession by a diversion would be weakness, while she desired only to collect her courage by little and little for this hateful necessary interrogation. … Nevertheless, her calmness and long pausing produced, first of all, only the evasion.

  "You will tell me of your trouble this morning when you are ready. I have been rather assuming that it was singly on Mr. Saltfleet's account. … He is attracted by you, is he not?"

  Ingrid, however, returned her look with one as clear.

  "You are certainly not understanding him, mother. Nor are you understanding me."

  "Your dignity, I hope, is secure, and I am inquiring about him alo
ne. Can you say that you have failed to notice admiration in his manner?"

  "It would be as impossible as horrible."

  "Why so? ... These are hard, mature men—cunning, bold—the world would find a name for them. With all their plausibility, the outstanding fact in their known career remains that they have robbed a native temple of treasure. I am not satisfied that Mr. Saltfleet intends you any good. The other may be his fellow. Why would it be so impossible?—and why horrible? These quick admirations are in every rank of society."

  "On Devil's Tor I saw... a spirit... and he, something else."

  There was silence in the room for a short time.

  "And this was your distress?" asked Helga, as though distastefully.

  "Yes."

  "Then not he at all?"

  "He found me in it. You are not to suppose that either of us could have avoided it."

  "What did he see?"

  "A haunting of another kind."

  Helga by now was very pale, though her composure seemed but to establish itself the more. She recalled Peter's "landscape full of ghosts"; and commented:

  "This may be so, as Peter apparently has had a psychic experience on the same spot, that might be identical. … Yet it was before these prodigies that Mr. Saltfleet sought you out. His coming after you was not for them."

  "The Tor drew him, mother. He had the instinct, and accounted for it to himself by the lucky hit of his imagination, that I might have walked out there and that was what he should be after. Do you want a proof? He broke his word to you, you think. But such a man as he—so strong and unfriendly—wouldn't normally change his mind just for the softness of talking to a girl or sparing her silly pride; and therefore he was behaving eccentrically. He had to go up there—perhaps it has turned out that he had to meet me up there. But he could have had no notion of what we were to do together... so it was the Tor that attracted him."

  "What were you to do together, Ingrid?"

  "Why, I have said. The stone was to be buried, and he was to have his vision."

  "Couldn't he without you?"

  "No, it depended on Hugh's stone I was carrying."

  "No wonder if you are thinking strangely! ... But these are distinct matters. I now understand how you should have come back looking like death, yet his conduct remains ambiguous still. In this way I put it to you, Ingrid. If he is so innocent of evil intentions, then what caused my heart to shrink yesterday morning, when he and you were talking together? Peter, who is only too easy with you, and diffident of his own claims, why is he so quite wrought up by his fears of that man on your account? He could not be jealous in a day, nor I apprehensive in five minutes. … You have too little general vanity, or might have noticed something. Granted he was otherwise subjected on the Tor, that does not prove him a monk."

  "You wish, perhaps, to make me ashamed to be with him, mother? My humiliation will hardly do it. But these sensations of yours and Peter's, they are so very curious, surely they can't stand for a mere instinct of danger. It may be that you are both to forbid me his further society. Perhaps your forbidding is to be a necessary instrument to our meeting under conditions outside our contrivance—conditions themselves necessary. … Or your feelings may be for another purpose, but this as well. …"

  ''I shall not expect you to go to any clandestine meeting."

  "I am going to obey you; only, possibly, we may both be commanded."

  Helga looked down in silence, then gave her daughter a single quietly-stabbing glance, before again dropping her eyes. Her hesitation was a covered one.

  "Another thing I should make clear to you, Ingrid, for the prevention of misunderstanding. I am referring now to Hugh's case. You believe I could drop my shocking doubts if I would... no doubt, you have decided that I am enjoying some sort of—morbid delight of self-torture, or what you will. The psychologists and pathologists would give you all the necessary support for your diagnosis of such a very common deceit of nature. Otherwise neither you nor Peter could comprehend why I am electing to be so venomous against—him without proof; or you would add, probability. … Well, I will tell you, my dear, that I would sacrifice nearly all I own in the world to be allowed to put this hideousness from me. … To no one else could I confess it, but such is my opinion of the man, that if I could be clearly shown to be in the wrong about him... I think I would humbly thank heaven for the great mercy of his acquaintance, even though too late. …

  "It can't be romanticism, for that, I know, is voluntary illusion—seeing things and people as we are well aware they are not. But my imagination can add nothing to him. Nor is he stern and forcible—possibly brutal, too—for any quiet feminine friendship, which is all I have left to offer. His only association with us—our sex—would almost necessarily take the form of the mastery and enjoyment of great beauty, without any of its exasperating caprices. I could have no nonsensical hopes in connection with this man younger than myself; I have nothing of what he wants... and yet, to me, my dear, he is suddenly making other men look like nothing. That, too, is why I feel you cannot be so uninfluenced by him as you pretend. Between a true indifference and a conscious attraction, that may stop at that and not become infatuation at all, there are a thousand climbing, winding paths—all of them lovely, no doubt—all strange and unreckonable at least... on one of which you may well be at this moment. … But what was I to say? ...

  "No; my more or less defined feeling towards him since yesterday afternoon isn't that morbid bone-sweet pathological thrill, too delicious to abandon—just as the pressing of a half-exposed nerve in the gums may be. Yet I know it is just as little my honest answering to a fact. … Can I want him to be such a man? I mean, is my fullest admiration of him to depend on his inexorability—his scorn of laws, rules and consequences? So that my insistence on... an atrocity... would be a sort of loyalty to a certain image set up within me. You may say that that is the same thing in other words. … Then it still isn't this. It is a fear lit from another fear, as a house from its blazing neighbour. I know the other was before it, though dim in consciousness. It may have wanted the thoughts to be thought with at the beginning; and still have been devouring my instincts, that merely afterwards explode through thoughts. That earlier fear, my dear, lighting the other... he was an eagle swooping for prey—you; though you will deny it... and therefore wouldn't stop before any crime, however dreamlike. … He is this man, or he is nothing that my apprehension regarding you has felt him; and Peter's insight. … That is what I had to tell you, and the apology for my unreason, as you see it. …"

  "It must be so, then; and I won't attempt to persuade you any more," returned Ingrid simply. But her mother had not yet done.

  "For if it were any other man, do you suppose, Ingrid, that I should not know what to do with this vicious dilemma? While there are officials remaining in the land, I would see the sensible solution easily enough. But it is because it can't constitute an accusation in itself, but could only open the door to another of no public concern, that my hands are tied. And it isn't as if it could serve poor Hugh. I have the faith, too, that all abominations—if this should be one—must bear their own punishment. …

  "I may be mistaken, and it may be a straightforward doubt but you have not thought so—you with your theory of a mystical dictation, to an end... and that theory is uncontradicted by what I have said of the catching fire of my fears, one from another. By your assent, you have seen at once that I have only uncovered a richer mystical foundation for your mystical erection. … But then, why is the one of my excruciations intensifying, and the other not growing less, if they have already done what they were to do—lodged that stone on Devil's Tor? Or when they have achieved some other practical purpose, do you soberly believe that these miseries of suspense will droop and die in me?"

  "A river naturally flows into a sea, mother; and so I imagine your particular troubles will cease with all the rest."

  "I haven't asked you about your apparitions: do you guess why?"

  "
You dread losing me," replied the girl, "and you must be fearful of hearing how it might come about."

  "God forfend I should lose you, Ingrid! What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. Not by death. … But if the old childish life were nearly over for me. …"

  "Through him ?"

  "I don't know if through him. Who can say what else he is to do? Yesterday he seemed like a breath from the world, but since then nothing has happened without him. One can only read what is written, and guess that it may go on so."

  Withdrawing her look from her daughter's face, Helga went to the window, where she remained standing, gazing out at the garden.

  She felt a rising as of some dark solidity in her mind, like the emergence from its depths of a monstrous lacustrine messenger of woe, dividing and ousting the existing images of her lake of consciousness. She felt that the room behind her was uneasy with an odd gentle stirring, that was not of the air. Before Ingrid's coming in, there had been the same half-whispering in her ear—she knew not what it was, or what she was being hunted to; she immediately knew merely that something infinitely subtle and impalpable must for a long time past have been seeking to assail her, now in this way, now in that; now ceasing, now resuming... that its delicacy was as fine as the faintest movement to arouse the attention, but its tormenting as insistent as a continued uncertainty of any of the five senses. Yet while her heart beat heavily in a curious unspeakable anxiety, her face was finding no other expression to substitute for its calm; the eyes, enlarged in that unseeing out-of-doors contemplation, were only more troubled. … The rising—risen—thing was the answering of her many questions about Ingrid in one surpassing answer. No, it was not an answer, but a confrontation: what stood up before her was as a vast block—permanent and wicked. It had seemed dark in the emerging: and that was the night-world it sprang from. And its solidity was the impossibility of its now ever leaving her again; she could no more refuse it than—she could some ghastly blasted tree in her path, that should have separated all at once from the mist. … But this confronting truth and the room's invisible stir, they were together. And still she was ignorant what was being done to her. …