Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  "You are not afraid to employ so extravagant a figure?"

  "No doubt I am becoming out of all proportion. … But Mr. Saltfleet's logic would be so very blind, if truly it were a product of his brain alone. …"

  "Was it less blind because instinctive?" demanded Saltfleet.

  Ingrid's eyes moved to him.

  "Already your will was weakening, and you must have been fortifying it with those arguments aloud. I felt so. Your refusal of that prophecy, on the ground of the impossibility of its coming true in the modern world... how dull and mechanical, how altogether short of what I've seen and heard of you, it sounded! All your life, I suppose, you have been pursuing life—disdaining it for its insufficiency, despising other men for so easily, like animals, taking the world of existence for granted... attacking frightful and forbidding mountains out of sheer ennui... or raiding, without two thoughts, an evil temple for the wager of a little excitement and an unprofitable short triumph, against death or disgrace... and the mightiest, noblest feat of all, on an infinitely higher plane—that you can shrug your shoulder at for impossible! This is why I know it was no more than an obstinacy of your determined will, looking for supports... intended neither for Mr. Arsinal nor for me."

  "You mean, I am at once wanting your mother's Devil's Tor meeting, and willing against it?"

  "You know that if I had expected to find either of you here this evening, I should not have come. But if the coincidence were to stand out by itself as the one accident during the last days not strange, that would be the very strangest. So perhaps the call is to make a difference. You may all three be needing the meeting; and I may be here—not to change your minds for you, certainly, but to supply a diversion. …"

  "What do you advise?" asked Saltfleet, plainly yet quietly.

  "I can't advise you—except to listen attentively to yourself... though even that may be superfluous."

  "You realise that my will can't be opposing your mother’s plan without a motive?"

  "It is to spare me."

  "Mr. Copping has already resented my solicitude."

  "Peter! ..." He turned round at the low-voiced appeal, but only to prevent what else Ingrid had been to say.

  "Do I receive a meed as well? Was my vote born of altruism, contra height? I take you to affirm that we are all in the same morass!"

  At that she rose to take his hand with her fingers, and so remain standing. "Peter, don't be angry; because these matters are too awful. … My eyes are clearer than yours here. You are needing to-morrow more than anyone."

  "Odd!"

  "I say my eyes are clearer; yet you know it too. If there is to be any sort of ordeal for me, and you care for me, my emergence from it will be the illumination you dare not miss. …"

  "You are emphatic."

  "I am unhappy."

  "Notwithstanding all which, I opine that the public debating of the case here, in this studio, is rather conspicuously undesirable."

  He disengaged himself from her touch, and, tossing his unfinished cigarette behind him through the window, began to pace the room in undisguised perturbation. She was right! It was no true ending, that could recommence; it was no solving of a problem, to leave a ragged menace of indistinct advancing abysses. … Her reference to wills versus needs was correct also. In swimming, one had to forsake the solid bottom, to surrender oneself to the sea, composed of death; and so now. The bottom, in this affair, was the will's excellent sense; but the sea was all their needs, instincts, horrors. To declare such a sea could be left unswum, ignored the fact that they were in it. …

  For Ingrid's powerlessness against this living mystical savagery clothed as enigma—an enigma sprung above ground during a few days, but whose roots went back whole years—to sit patient and motionless through the night of oppression in expectation of a delivering dawn at last, to conceive already that that night in its worst depth of storm and blackness was past, though the morn was not yet visibly appearing—such might be the mode of long optimism in the case of a beloved whose beauty of soul and body should be as her shield: practically, one knew that beyond a determined quantitative strain for each instance, cast iron snapped, trees became uprooted, men reverted, and women suddenly drooped and failed, as under a withering desert blast, to be thereafter like walking catafalques. … Unless there came at once such a quick cessation of this phenomenal tempest as would necessarily make the matters already befallen a travesty of fatality. … No! those years-long roots, this awful up-shooting stem of events risen before their very eyes, and no flower!—it was impossible. …

  These marvels could still not be outside Nature. The fiends pre-eminent in cruelty of the incomprehensible Omnipotent, expressly loosed on earth to torture those humans set apart for surpassing nightmare punishment, they requisitely were of their employment most skilled in the craft of screw and rack, sensing diabolically the nerves of highest personal anguish in each victim. Thus a third time Ingrid was right! It was no cataclysmal accident of occult chemistry he had to fear for her, since any other would have served for that brief fate; but all her marks were for a tragic life. … Not the ordeal, but her emergence from it. The slow skin-casting agonies of a spiritual metamorphosis. … It was shown. Defensive plans were contrivable, but the day was not yet out; to-morrow was yet to come. Twenty-four hours further down in time—forever Saltfleet—the flints, the Tor—the joining, at every angle of the day, of another evil occult tributary to the already brimming waters! Such factors meant a long, not a short, fate. …

  Drowning, and at last (her terror past) laughing, she would then be to carry with her for the rest of the mortal course—as it were some gallery, horrible to her own imagination, of all she had been and was no more—her memories sporadic and memories associated, her habits, tastes, distates, limitations, and fixed person. For none of those could again be hers. The "I" they built up would be dead with her lost life; her new "I" would use them and hate them like the clothes of a stranger. …

  He stopped again before her.

  "I know very little of needing a meeting. Because my reasons for disliking the idea are only the best of an imperfect brain, must they therefore be unsound? Then where are the perfect brains, that we should carry on with reason in the world at all? A pure flame, you know, may come from dirty straw. … The need is problematic, but I assert the dislike is instinctive, natural, and valid. This even on your own argument. No matter whether what I apprehend from such a meeting be here or there, isn't the natural response to any fear—escape? ...

  "You yourself are assuming a beautiful impersonality," he added. "I can't remember, though, hearing anything from you of a surrender of preferences. It may simply be that you have the gambler's pride, refusing to act, demanding to be acted for. Forgive me if the reading is wrong, and the word over-hard! Anyway, you seem unconsciously to have loaded the dice against us for your mother. I count on you still, gentlemen. Before you came, Ingrid, we had decided against tomorrow, and since your entering the room the spirit of unsettlement is abroad once more. You will stand aside, but nevertheless wish things in a certain way. … So I think I have the right to ask you this. As all the rest of us are to find our true account on Devil's Tor to-morrow evening—I because I need the occasion, and Mr. Saltfleet because it is a fitting feat for him, and Mr. Arsinal because it will be a pity if he fails to lick the pot clean—and because, besides, some other spirit of night inside us all is putting forth a stretching arm towards the Tor, to bring us to it... in view of such considerations, are you, Ingrid, to find your account in and at the same rendezvous? Are you—"

  "I don't wish to go," she interrupted him.

  "You are frightened, or merely disinclined?"

  "I am unwilling."

  "But then, why have you been talking all the other way? We fixed a thing, and it is as if you have been trying to unfix it. How is it to stand at last?"

  "I can’t help you, Peter. … I've always regarded it as my personal hill, so many quiet hours, private moods, sensati
ons I couldn't communicate, I've had there. Any business on it—even this—would seem like a defilement... the troop of twentieth-century persons over that grave! ... Then nothing, perhaps, could reconsecrate it for me, unless another tragedy. … I have promised mother that if she goes, I will; it is in your power to anticipate her—that is your affair, and I can't decide it for you. It may not matter. … That great rock leaping down the hillside, it never stopped till it had caught Hugh. What is to stop this fate but—someone else of us? You are trying to escape it: do you know its path?"

  Peter was silenced. After an instant Ingrid turned to Arsinal, who, while she addressed him, rose in courtesy. Then Saltfleet, the last to remain sitting, also got to his feet.

  "Mr. Arsinal... that interred one of the Tor—she was buried, so must have seemed to live, perhaps many years... but these apparitions are only for a minute or so. …"

  "I know. Yet the inconsistency could so obviously be accounted for. Not to speak of what might still happen, at least it could not yet have happened in our time. These phantoms could in no case be more than prelude. The stones remain apart. …"

  He continued: "It may indeed be that the fitting them together would—will—effect nothing new; that the first state is irrecoverably lost. That we cannot tell; but there is this too. Even were the inconsistency one of equal conditions, it need still show no inferiority of psychic faculty in us; but the reverse. For the life, or seeming life, of that ghost on earth should have been in the nature of a visitation to thick skulls and animal blood, demanding the persistent presence, whereas we must be supposed to be towards the spiritual. For us, it may be, the endurance in our midst of such an entity would be disruptive of our but comparatively recently erected earthly reason, forcing our instinct towards the light into new channels no longer reason, therefore unfitted to our earthly case. Thus the minute or so should provide us with all we need and can. The brutish lives of those others were to be more heavily moulded."

  Ingrid's eyes looked away out of her sheet-white face, wondering. After a pause, she asked:

  "The worship of the Mother, has it been good?"

  "That we may not doubt." His voice grew quieter still. "For how could it be other than good? The marvellous liberating joy of purity—bodily, mental, and of the soul—it must present an incentive to right living and the restraint of evil passions, not less effective than the fears of humanity under the conception of a rigorous eternal justice. Pride, hypocrisy, pharisaism, intolerance—even hatred and cruelty—may and do nest under the harder, harsher creed. Blood enough, at least, has flowed. Purity, however, is a tender growth; it cannot subsist amongst the luxuriant, vicious weeds of the soul, but the ground must be cleared for it. I think it cannot be squared with any vices. Then was it ever practised? I have no doubt that innumerable populations of men, women, children, have in their day bent the knee before the Mother, discovering in Her the source of their best. She was easy to be thought real. She is in all Nature."

  "Nature, below its tenderness, is terrible."

  "Accordingly, the Mother also has been conceived as terrible. And still, the wild, hunting life of the woods, the devastating storm, the eldritch, mocking mountain voices, they have not contradicted purity. That has been reserved for the works of man; but the chief of his works is arbitrary law; and the chief of his laws is that which claims jurisdiction beyond the tomb. There can be no law beyond the tomb; there can only be reunion. Purity meanwhile, however, is a partial reunion. … Understand me, when I talk of purity. I don't mean a little matter, but my purity—the purity I have in mind—is distinguished and aloof... metaphysical, of the stars... of the big spaces. …"

  "I do understand you."

  "These are modern notions, you may object; they cannot have been in the past. At least, they can have been latent in the past. The noblest of those worshippers have not been concerned solely with propitiatory sacrifices. The history of the creed's fortunes shows no such chronicle as the Christian crusading wars, wars of conversion, sect wars, political wars, inquisitions, burnings, torturings, excommunications, confiscations, and the like... no such constant and inevitable process as the Christian public professions of faith, differences in faith, then argument, insistence, anger, blood, destruction... but the religion of the Mother has evidently gone for other tokens of reverence. She has not been tribal, but universal; so could not need the testimony of numbers. In purity—that purity reaching even to the stars—was no personal merit, equipping one to act as persecutor, warrior, and judge; but a state of soul—a state introductory of heaven, not with impunity to be exchanged. …''

  "If Christ has been unable to purify human nature," said Peter, "I fail to see how a woman-god should do it."

  Arsinal paused "Christ!—always Christ! ... And therefore, being so perpetually invoked, should He be more ancient and rooted than the tale goes. In fact, so many faiths, schools, traditions, predictions, philosophies, and risen floods of thought and feeling, have gone towards His making, that ever is He likely to remain the world's grand anomaly; unless a finer enlightenment shall hereafter come to prevail. …

  "But His best was already in the Mother—that we may say at once. … And a proof of the assertion will appeal to you, Mr. Copping, an artist: His face has never been portrayed, because it could not be. The attempted paintings of the adult Christ—they have not contented anyone: lachrymose, cadaverous, undivine, they have been on a parity with His whole impossibility. For two genders have had to be reconciled within His person; and each has had to be absolute: the man and male god, the law-dispenser, stern, rigid, awful; but also the womanly spring of that love, compassion and purity, that only in the female nature seem to be original; in males, derived—an act of will, an effort. … This we feel. And so I say that that special spirituality of Christ, deemed new, was not rightfully His—whosoever He may have been, whencesoever come ... but was first of all, in far greater strength and brightness, in Her whom we call the ancient Mother. …"

  While Peter stood looking at him in unpleasant pondering, an invisible flurry, not of the air but somehow in or through it, seemed to cross the studio, causing all the four there involuntarily to stir, and shift their eyes; but nothing was moving, or different, Peter's surprised first conception was that it had been a bird outside flying across the window. Arsinal glanced to the door. Saltfleet fingered his chin, and was silent... they were all silent, however. Was it that the impression for everyone was so insignificant, so transient and unconnected, that it was not found of sufficient moment to mention?—or was no one, perhaps, caring to start this new superfluous wonder? ... Ingrid appeared to shrink within herself, not looking towards the others; seemingly, not choosing to be informed if that sense-deceit had been hers alone or general. She closed her eyes once, while a vertical cleft of pain divided her brows. …

  The silence became accepted. Its excuse was the natural conclusion of Arsinal's topic, the interval for the subsidence of his interrupting idea, before they might return to a clearing discussion of what was to be done. But each was knowing the others' quietness for a respite. That agitating trifle, nearly too shadowy to be presented in words—its truer strangeness for all was only dawning with its recession in time. It did not stand alone, to be called a fanciful nothing, but surely had its congeners among their few or many other phantoms and fearful messages. … That some of those had broken through to full consciousness, while this had no more than been the waving of a veil, took not from its awe—an awe built up, besides, of all the rest; but enhanced by this. The right awe (all received it, for it was instinctive) consisted not in the focused spectacle, but in what lay behind and was acting. Very enormous to their imaginations began to appear the night-world's force, thus able to bend and sway the solid crust of the empire of day, as it were unreal smoke or fog! ...

  Chapter XXVIII

  THE DRAG-NET

  Quickly Saltfleet's mind had reverted to his last night's visitant at the inn. This perhaps should be a repetition—failed, because
of more unfavourable conditions for the appearance. There were conflicting wills in the room, a confusion of persons; and it was daylight still, instead of that deep suggestive dusk; and no one was handling the stone, but it was in Arsinal's pocket. …

  Above the Tor's stream that short time since, again, the wraith had been most perfect, because at home. The three cases (if this were one) were as if representing its merging into pure meaning at one end of the scale, its merging into nonentity at the other end, and the spectral middle. The same operative will was trying to get through. Here, in this place, there should be a thicker crust to be pierced.

  But who the wraith was, the other Tor visions showed: his own of the morning, and what he was able to understand of Arsinal's and Copping's. She was from the sky. Her phenomenal earth-existence had been thousands upon thousands of years back, when men were beast-fighting savages. Strange if she had not been as a goddess! In truth, she could never have been anything half so elementary; but was always the terminal shape of a supernatural stream issuing from another sort of reality. …

  So this stream was now again striving to enter what he viewed as the room; perhaps mainly prohibited by Copping's antagonism. … Particularly he was bewildered—with the bewilderment of a resolute man unused to the state, and impatient of it—by that swift, savage, fancied turning of the phantom's eyes and face, at the extreme last of his afternoon overtaking yonder; even while she had been in the silent act of emptying the landscape of her significance; so quite incongruous it had seemed with all that had gone before. Savage, yet not hostile; but more in the nature of the fierce incitement of an essence grand and disdainful enough to include fierceness as well.