Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  His own message he could not share. It belonged to his personality. But when, after a great while, his personality should have absorbed and transformed it, then a whole world might share it; according to the fashion in which the great messages of beauty were shared—by means, in the first place, of chosen representatives; at last, of hollow fame. …

  Images started to his mind. Just as the archaic atmosphere of the single happenings somehow seemed to resemble for him the deepening glow of a sky after sunset, so this incitement of his active will by the succession of happenings was, rather, reminiscent of a bursting dawn out of the entire midnight sweep of shades... that, here, were the vast shapelessness and lurking instincts of years. … West-east! And so the whole sublimity was outside the cardinal points, and something new! ... Next, his achievements and essays in art hitherto—they suddenly appeared to him hardly more than as a tuning-up of his soul that was an instrument, in readiness for the first tap of a supernatural baton. …

  His depths stirred, as a tree begins to stir after a long halcyon calm; but because between a man and his depths can come no companion, Peter's sense of utter loneliness grew apace as an icy sickness that was a note of his agitation's chord. Were he alone in the room with Ingrid, still he could not find words to tell her what was passing in his being.

  In this future she could have no part. … So that when really they should be alone together in a few minutes more, she would understand from his confused explanation only that he considered his pleasure; that his grudging solicitude for her welfare throughout had been but egoism, in that he had always intended to follow up these matters for his own curiosity and intellectual increase, could he, with it, find a way of denying her... his motive, not care for her weakness, but jealousy—jealousy of her lead and greater employment; finer sensibility. …

  How was it possible for him to impart the indescribable new faint trembling of the waters of his inspirational well, which was as if a creature were at length emerging that all his life had lain covert? It was impossible, because his loneliness was an inherent character of everything he was feeling.

  The tea-time conversation at Whitestone two days ago had foreshadowed it. His own talk of symbolism in art, and symbols; followed by old Colborne's recommendation of the Madonna as the eternal and inexhaustible symbol. Here now looked to be such a symbol—such a living personification of the All, brought to his very doorstep! For that dead one of the Tor, of whom Ingrid and Arsinal had spoken—whose phantom bier he himself had seen—who doubtless, in some unheard-of way, was working through the entirety of these miracles: she, surely, might be the old man’s Madonna; his sought symbol of the universal frame. But then, with his own eyes, he must behold her. …

  It was his ascended sense that, knowing her with his eyes, he would thereafter be transfigured as to all his higher faculties. Truly, his existence on earth might be scorched and blessed by her spectacle as by the point of a sword out of heaven: his art, that was his existence, might unfold, to men's amazement, in sign upon sign! ...

  The machinery to the end was dictated, or found itself, so easy it was. On Devil's Tor had been that ghost's conjuration, with Drapier's flint must she have been conjured; but were the belonging stones to kiss there, she might well be brought back nearly to body. … Terrible promised to be such a moment. Saltfleet, with his mind's eye, saw it clearly; and had taken measures in time to prevent Ingrid's foolhardiness, whether of apathy, obedience, or superstition: but seemed to fear nothing for himself; and as soon as this queer meeting of starts and silences was over, he should be on his road to the experiment with Arsinal. For it was highly improbable that, the power being in their hand, they could resist the temptation. Then he could accompany them. …

  And therefore he, Peter, while all these others had been surfeiting with marvels, had till now held back in coldness, being instinctively aware that the meaning for him was different and his hour not yet come. Curiosity, expectation, ecstasy, the dark fascination of the magic—the compound of all or some of those for them: but, for him, his due. Was there no distinction? ...

  Yet, as he stole another look at Ingrid, his thoughts still proceeded upwards, as in a rising spiral; and now he remembered how, if there should be a different meaning for each partaker in these wonders, a different message for each recipient, his own meaning and message could not be all-important, but only momentous to himself. Thus everything became enlarged. Not his single personal stimulus, but a practical constraining of all their real lives, was this mystic succession involving so many; each in another way. Perhaps, like his own art, Arsinal's learning was to be brought to significance; and Saltfleet's idle grimnesses... and Ingrid's unknown and unformed cloud-swaddled primaeval second heart! So he always confronted his intuition again, that refused to be forgotten. …

  The Tor assembly scheme was wiser than any knew—for Ingrid's wisdom regarding it should be unconscious; largely so. The reason she assigned for his needing the meeting perplexed him. It was necessary that her soul should be illustrated by an ordeal; but now he seemed to be wishing the ordeal for her sake. Appalling to him must be such an apparition on Devil's Tor as could present the universal symbol for his art; yet since it was required to fulfil his profoundest spiritual movings of a lifetime, it must needs also possess a virtue far outranking the appallingness. Should Ingrid be there too, as awful probably must be her adventure: then was she to miss the reward? ...

  He could go with these others without her; and obtain what He wanted—or fail to. She could be denied the trial still: the future happiness of both of them would approve. Neither, in the end, was it demanded of him to expose a dreadfulness in her nature that, this spell of chaos being past, might well remain as secret and harmless as the far more furious beast in nearly every man. But if it was to deprive her of an unguessed height of fortune! ...

  Rapidly now it grew upon him that the lightning perhaps about to descend through their four existences in the room could not be for them, but for itself. According to their shapes would it be shaped, and that was all: they were but roads. One of such roads—delicate, destructible, of greatest purpose to him—he had thought to stop. He had overlooked that, together with the peril and horror for her, he might thereby be preventing some extraordinary filling of her soul: some inflowing completion as electric in beauty as his intuited symbol that should stand both for the creative and the created Whole. …

  Arsinal, at the outset, had glanced towards the door.

  The mistake was intellectually corrected at once, for no one else was looking that way, and really he had seen nothing. But his mind, that was accustomed to examine the smallest oddnesses for their hint, went on automatically groping about that fancied striking of his eyes. It could have no bearing on things, yet the colourless subconscious teasing persisted; and so he stood there, silent and musing.

  An idea broke suddenly from his pensiveness. Drapier's flint in his pocket must somehow have been responsible for... this rather more than imagined jolting of his sight, if it were so. …

  The idea had come of itself. The flint had not in any way made itself remembered; it was passing no sensible weird current through him. … And the very spontaneity of the inspiration seemed to give it more weight. For had it been suggested by a sensation, he could have called the shadowy episode preternatural; but having been physically and mentally unsuggested, it should be, if anything, supernatural. The distinction was clear in his intelligence. The preternatural could be the name for any strong strange quality of the world; whereas the supernatural was essentially extramundane, extramural—something acting from outside the walls of humanity and humanity's molecular, atomic and ethereal jinn of ring or lamp.

  Thus here could be one more psychic case.

  His heart became uneasy, while he recalled his confounding at the foot of the Tor... and next, the overcomings of these other three in the room with him. Doubtless, either of the flints had always played its part.

  Then they—the flints—besides bein
g constantly joined to the appearance, must also represent its possibility. They were the cause of the appearance: though not the cause of what lay behind the appearance—the noumenon: the thing itself.

  He must give his reasoning a sharper edge. These appearances, they were occult: for if they were not that, then they were of the class of hypnotic dreams; but a criterion in him pronounced them occult. And these mineral fragments, once a whole—they, it was certain, were from astronomical space. Internally, too, they spoke of a plane different. But the word occult, as he used it, signified the acting directly upon the spirit of an unknown force; the straight impinging on the spirit without the intermediary of materiality; and materiality, of necessity, included every physical activity the most refined, the most impalpable, even as far as telepathy, the dream life, and all the processes of the invisible excitants and incitants, bringing mood, state, emotive disposition—the whole tree of daily existence. The occult was everything beyond that; everything not that. A power, sign, or sense, communicated directly to the spirit; passed then by the spirit to the eyes or ears or touch; and by those senses back again to the lower understanding brain. …

  Yet why now, if these appearances were occult, should they be needing the agency of material stones? For however weird and associated with weirdnesses might be the flints, they still possessed gravity, cohesion, reflected colour, and the like: basically they belonged to the material universe. … Or was such a base unreal? Were they too occult—over thousands of years? ... Or half-occult! Something was present, but not the stones. Something was lying in another spatial dimension; something with extraordinary properties of mental compulsion: but the three dimensions of earth were too rudimentary to show it as it was, and so one could see no more than the broken halves of a worn pebble, and a sort of distant magic in them; and all the time might be looking at shadows, and touching emptiness. But those shadows and that emptiness would only be words of earth. The true substantiality should be there, to disclose itself as it might, in hieroglyphic meaning; in progressive action. …

  Beneath this startling supposition, he doubted no longer if the astonishing of his sight, that had seemed to mark the beginning of their long silence, had been on account of what he had thought (and still could not but go on thinking) a thing—solid, resting lump-like in the pocket of his coat. That lump being an immaterial shadow, and that shadow being a strange force acting from another place, too surely would he be upon the very verge of the realm of all manner of subversions and phantasms. Like a great flood of... fourthness, a whole other world was being invited in this seeming room by the ghost he had ignorantly appropriated. Barely, the grossness of his body protected him. …

  He calmed himself. So now the hour had arrived when his worth should be put to proof; when his ancient election by the divine should be justified. For his labour of many men in one throughout a number of years, his refusal of women and pleasures, his loyalty to the image of that immortal visitant by night: it all mounted not an inch towards the miracle of favour; the long debt was still unpaid. Sublimity could be repaid only with sublimity. Heavenly sublimity was like a violent rent in the noisome fogs of life, affording an unforgettable narrow blinding of heaven; but man's sublimity was not apart from tragedy and agony. They could repay his debt.

  Thus quickly he was knowing what all his life he had chosen not to know; his vanity coming between. For in his born egoism, which he had allowed to grow up with him like a weed, he had never doubted but that he was fit to receive the messages and perform the will of the Unseen... he, without preparation by pain; untried; effeminate with contentment. … The Unseen!—though he had seen it. He had seen that glimpse of it that should perhaps be the least possible. Never had it been repeated. He was to be visited by the godhead: no step of excruciation towards it had he designed at any time to take.

  So small, mean and shrunken all at once he seemed to himself, that he pictured a devil, who should be purely intellectual—without vice, without cruelty, emotionless, set only and always upon his impersonal work: and if Heaven should appear to such a one, bidding him serve It, he too would obey, and doubt nothing of his qualifications! And the qualifications he would have; but they would be those of an implement; there would have been no favour, so there would be no debt. Was it really thus with himself? Then his labour was finished, since without the high wonder of it all he could not go on. …

  That seen glimpse of the Unseen that had never been repeated!—but hadn't it been repeated this very day? ... Yes; but as the echo of a sound; as the picture of a spirit. She had not come to him: he had seen Her from afar, come to others.

  Perhaps the debt was still to be paid, by one terrible moment. He must not fail in it: he thought he would not. Supposing it to be so, what should be expected of him would not be, surely, the common fortitude and courage of a simple man, but... the tortured rising of every part of his nature, to meet... even bodily dissolution. Another had died yesterday.

  For this, during so many years, he had hunted down his brace of phantom stones as though they had been solid; and one seemed to repose deceitfully in a pouch of his illusory earth-garments, the other was said to await him on an infinitesimal point of all imaginary space—out yonder on the Tor. But then phantomhood being known at last, all else was curiously changed to phantoms for him: the miraculous life had started.

  And so it was true in its entirety—his whole quest, with every circumstance, the most insignificant as the most fantastic. Meaning and reality—emblematic reality—were throughout. Those prophecies of the ancient East could not be the one thing false. …

  With a quick sigh, he looked round at Ingrid. She was not seeing him. … This deeply troubled girl!—she, too, was as if half destroyed, while her part continued as impenetrable as ever. Yet, humanly, her future was planned for her and unalterable: no place was in it for a strange man; by her existing affections she was defended against mystic capture. … He did not know that his features were rigid like a mask. …

  Then for an instant two incompatible ideas seemed to merge in a new possibility... but no!—immediately again he saw the fancy to be fallacious. Never like the famous-infamous Delphic responses to puissant and moneyed inquirers could those predictions have been ambiguously phrased of set purpose. This sacredness could not pollute itself by that half-lying. A man and a woman were to be joined: therefore, before the prodigy they must be apart—strange to each other. Only by casuistry could the fatum be made to point to persons already affianced: who had needed for that degree of joining no interposition of ghostly flints. Indeed, his travail in the world had not been for Copping's sake! ...

  Oh, why must he follow in Saltfleet's wake by returning and returning to her! The district's landmarking hill, dedicated to a fiend, where manifestly now these wraith-stones were meant to to meet after their doom of years perhaps as apparitional—it was accessible to all, and women were not rare. Neither, if she went, would it be alone—the single representative of her sex; but it would be in the company of her mother, who also was a woman.

  Truly, it was an enormous respect he was paying to this child, who, with so very few weapons, was overcoming them all! Admitted that she was young, lovely, helpless... quiet and proud... need her stunned state be other than her very natural reply to the successive strokes of a business accidentally come upon her by her relationship to Drapier, the nearness of her home to Devil's Tor? ... No, he feared her, too. And because of herself; not her fortuitous, if germane, rank in these affairs. A height in her was loftier than any height in him—so that he was shrinking from her: nearly as the unclean from the clean, or the brown-skinned from the fair. It was not her quite surpassing beauty. …

  But Saltfleet had maligned him. Always he had studiously held back from that unimaginable picture of a mystic marriage. Pride he possessed, or his career had been less lonely: he could not willingly consent to the advancement of another man over his head in a charge appropriated to him by the celestial. But he was of a piece. Pride, always a
modern virtue or vice, he had; but monstrousness, an antique character, he had not. Never had his faculty of image-forming cared to anticipate the scenic happening of so frightful, so barbaric and satyr-like a case. Doubtless his nervous modern hypersensibility was towards the feminine: distasteful he found such an insane gloating. …

  But altogether he was baffled by Saltfleet. He should be infatuated, yet apparently was not. Since her entry into the room, his manner towards this girl had retained its quiet control. His obvious honouring of her seemed less like the homage of sex than a troubled approval of some high quality in her soul. There were no lingering intent regards, no stolen glances of a kind to mean one thing only, no unnatural humilities, for the involuntary revelation of his illicit interest. … It was impossible he should be fascinated by her physique. Yet out of his course she had dragged him. Within a couple of days he had reconsidered his friendship, withdrawn his alliance; in every way was acting eccentrically. …

  Now Arsinal, with ghostliness all around him—upon the Tor, and in this room, and on his very person—dared to contemplate again that suggestion which during all their months in common never once had occurred to him; but only to-day, when, with the recollection of the dread splendour of his night, fire and pale spirit vision still confusing his eyes beside the stream, he had said to Saltfleet, yet so introspectively that he was unsure if the words had been heard to be understood, "You may be the man, after all!..." The fancy had faded since: but now it was come back with the first new psychic wonder, and he was quieted by the return as by an inward shock.

  For had there been the signs of a weak admiration between these two—Saltfleet and the girl—his mind, contemptuous of such a drifting together, so ignoble and unseasonable, could not be thus continuing to dwell upon the consequent defection as though a treachery. The absolute sin against friendship was not enormous. His colleague's mistakes and offences since arrival here were under fate, appearing indispensable at last: the result discharged his part in them. Nor had the intimacy ever risen quite to affectionateness, that his will to disservice (the disservice itself being resolved to its reverse) should wrench an emotional chord, humble a secret vanity. Nor was his decamping so late to represent an injury: there was little more to do, and that he (Arsinal) could do alone.