Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  Coming up they had hardly spoken. He was sullen; she, fallen into another mysterious apathy, from whose retreat her own moving, breathing body seemed to her like an independent animation. In unearthing the stone but a few monosyllables had been exchanged. Now at last he faced her, to say:

  "We had better get across. But perhaps you will explain to me first about your mother. I would like to know. At the inquest she was definitely in the same mind: then, in your hall, just before you came down dressed, she appeared quickly and quietly from nowhere and took my elbow—'I can't go with you—I am prevented. I trust you in everything'—and that was all. … I know you foretold it, but it is the queerest business to me that a mother can abandon her daughter, having every reason to imagine her in danger."

  "I have seen little of her all day."

  Ingrid had not attended the inquest, which had passed off without episode, and altogether had been dreamlike to more than one. The coroner had called no jury, the evidence was taken as in a plain, straightforward case unconcerned with neglect or the suspicion of foul play, and there were neither superfluous questions put to the witnesses nor stops for legal consultation. Nearly before persons were aware that the proceedings had actually terminated, they found themselves filing out of court again. In a curt and towards cursory voice the withered-looking coroner had pronounced his verdict of "Accidental death." Saltfleet, old Colborne, and Helga had stood in the witness-box; Peter and Arsinal had been present. Reporters carried back the story, and the dead man might now be buried. … Once or twice in coming out Peter had wondered if Mrs. Fleming's refusal to accompany them could be due to the curb she had put upon her tongue in the court. Because she had there spared Saltfleet, so might she all the more desire to avoid even the shadow of a new friendliness towards him.

  He pursued, to Ingrid:

  "You may have seen enough, though, to be able to satisfy me. Is it that she doesn't care to meet Saltfleet?"

  "No; if it were the fear of him, she must have come."

  "Have you no conception?"

  "I think she has been praying."

  Peter uttered a short laugh. "Praying! To Whom?"

  "Isn't it a case for prayer? Or does the mode matter? Our words may well be misdirected, but a launched misery should steer itself. …"

  "So this staying away is the answer?"

  "Yesterday a marvellous plan came to her through her wretchedness on my account... and if it was wrong in a single particular, that only goes to prove that it presented itself suddenly and uninvited—she hadn't thought it out. Now, if she has been praying, the error has been corrected for her."

  "It is possible. But has she been praying?"

  "Don't you know what I mean? You may pray in words, or thoughts, or tears, or terrors. You may pray without the attitude of prayer—without being aware that you are praying."

  "Then what is prayer? I may some time want to know."

  "I think it is when all other help has gone, and the mind works no more."

  So they debated and surmised. But it was no more than a few hours since that foreign reiterated utterance had kept sounding within Helga's head, that Ingrid was wiser, Ingrid was wiser—wiser and older—wiser because older, than she... old as the beginning of sex, when sex as yet was not, but women still were. For it was mystical, and not what the biologists taught—truly taught. On the famous biological ladder sex was long before humans. That was for earth. There was another instinct in women: men knew it not. So Ingrid, in the fierce immaculateness of her very ancient instinct, was protected against evil adventures of the heart, and had no need of kith or kin. …

  And a little after had been her violent impulse (equally strange with that obeisance to her own child) of clinging to their low-set house when immediately to be required to quit it to attend a rendezvous of her personal suggesting. It was more than the deep dread of an unknown trial: it was a sort of prescient knowledge that she could never return to the house to find it the same. … Perhaps if over it she stood guard, the angel of death and change might glide ghostly back disconcerted, and take another time. …

  Yesterday she had been possessed to put forth this proposal that in her—in her, unpossessed—had been mad. Already gleamed like an emerging signal her unworthiness to bear her part in it. She grew old in the way of women, understanding no new thoughts, reclining among friends, loving softness and fair words and respect... but on that lonely hill her daughter had faced a spirit, and Hugh had died. No less spectral, deathly, could be its other awaitings: while she—she had no resources, she could not so much as answer for her rigour of courage. She was surely to bring shame upon them all. …

  That altitude of her interview with Ingrid was departed. The flight was over, and, stupefied, crushed, bleeding, her soul lay prone on its iron ground of reality, remembering but the fact of the exaltation. Her psychic passion had been true, Ingrid's transfiguration before her eyes had been true: her present fumes and confounding were not to take from the actuality of those prodigies, only she could not recover them. Therefore, although it was yet by no means too late to annul the meeting, substituting another arrangement, it was impossible, impossible, for it had been a doom. …

  But out of a new prolonged chaos of distaste, aversion and terror—terror for her daughter, terror for all that sane settlement of which she herself was a living part—these things striving against another terror of the unseen if defied, striving also against the simple deadweight of a decision made and expected by other persons to be acted upon... out of that hour-long chaos, endured crouched or pacing in her room, or restlessly seeking indiscoverable relief throughout the house, Helga, by slow victories of perception, had at last been brought to see that the meeting could stand unvaried, yet she not go to it. … Ingrid, Peter, should go: the one because—she must; it was the meaning of all; but Peter, to shield her from—unworthinesses; and because it yet remained his duty. …

  Then the front door had closed behind them: hearing which, Helga in her chamber went upon her knees. But in praying to a formless God she had somehow lost her thoughts; she had found herself instead beseeching her own mother in heaven. For a mystic minute a forgetfulness of her distress had overtaken her that was just the same as sweetness; yet whether it were a happiness come or an anguish gone, she hardly asked; but seemed, rather, to be recollecting a sensation of her child-hood, as it were a curious unnamed perfume. And though soon this faded again from the stale, hard inscription-walls of her worn brain, its bare recalling afterwards was sometimes to be to her in hours of darkness an enchanted key where otherwise no door was. …

  And now, as the ancient saga-men would say, Helga Fleming goes out of the story.

  Peter and Ingrid returned very slowly to the great stones at the east side of the hill-top, which indeed had never been out of sight. She could walk again nearly without hindrance. They were in time to view the others just appearing by quick degrees over the height across the valley. Arsinal was in front. Saltfleet, curiously unlike his wont, seemed to lag.

  So, while waiting, Ingrid sat down on her old seat by the hill's south edge; but feared to face the stairway ruin. Having it behind her, she gazed nervously across the low-lying country... yet too soon she discovered that neither would that succeed: the intrepidity failed her to continue sitting there in ignorance of what could be passing at her back. She rose impulsively, to move to a second weathered rock much farther off, from which she might hold the tomb-entrance with her eyes and still be secure from its immediate awfulness. Peter, who had not sat, now did so near-by, looking the same way.

  They talked no more. The distance between them was unsuitable: neither could they have talked. The past was meaningless, the future unthinkable, the present unreal like a dream. Peter's heart ached, and he strove for stoicism. Within the hour—within the half-hour, Ingrid's lips murmured, everything must be resolved, whether for better or worse. She understood that one of three things was certain: the new life or the old life, or death. …

  Aut
omatically her fingers felt for the flint in the pocket of her coat. … How dark the evening had grown!—how was she noticing it? Where was she? What was happening? ... There Peter was sitting, but why was he so statue-like? ... All the people! ... And the Devil's monument, it was up again—but perpendicular now—and how extraordinarily clear were its outlines!...

  Then she accepted her vision, as three men before her had accepted theirs.

  All was grey and shadowy as in early dawn before the first colours of the day; or as in late evening dusk, after the last. Unless indeed this preternatural twilight resembled rather the hushed darkness of an eclipse of the sun. … Everything in it and of it was somehow primitive and gigantic—and miles upon miles away, surely she was beholding the flamy vapour-cap of a dim conical volcano! ... This very Tor where she sat had, changed character: it was ruggeder than moorland, it was mountain. Another massive mountain, overtopping her, rose across the emptiness that was in the place of the familiar valley. She could not determine where to keep her eyes. …

  The low thunderous roar of a torrent below deafened her to any other sounds in its constant alternation between the full fury of its energies and their re-gathering. The noise, though it seized her whole frame, stunning her delicacy while exciting her blood to fever, nevertheless seemed to pass comparatively so unnoticed, she could not remember when it had not been. … Faint stars sprinkled the sky.

  Those animated shapes in skins, they were like ridiculous gnomes in their shadowy slinking about the base of the monument. But it, piercing the upper gloom, seemed a monstrous fungus. … Yes, at last she could be positive it was neither dawn nor nightfall, but an uncanny full day. Its duskiness was ominous and horrid. Some immense natural catastrophe impended. … They were brutes—but were they brutes? ...

  They were nearly brutes, at least. Their thick ungainly trunks, apish legs, and prehensile arms of quite disproportionate length, their mane-like hair, too, and the bestial crouch of their carriage, all declared that they should be sub-human. Yet, as in a nightmare, she also made out that these loathly phantom creatures were still adorned with beads, and clothed in pelts, and armed with savage weapons. …

  The hoarse blare of a lung-blown horn shocked her: then torches appeared, with more shapes. But in the new yellow-red flaring she recognised them at last for humans. They should have speech, manipulation, laughter and fancy. The sexes were too obvious. Soon her eyes had separated a young female from the rest.

  She, the single one, stood apart from the interwoven moving throng, seeming as if lost to her surroundings in melancholy musing. In her rudeness she could not pretend to beauty, and yet she might be on the path to the future beauty of women. Paler than the other females she was, more slender, more erect even, far more pensive... doubtless of a finer birth, if that discrimination was between them: having in the slightly sinister slant of her eyes a suggestion of some wild nomadic Asian origin. Not without grace she wore a bear's fur, shaped to her waist, leaving her limbs branching.

  Next, a male, older than many and seeming to possess authority, advanced within the circle of Ingrid's vision. In daylight his beardless face might be yellow: his black hair descended to the shoulders. He was the thickest and strongest she saw—aggregated and buttressed quite out of resemblance to the fair human shape. But the network of deep lines impressed by years, anxiety, possibly grief as well, everywhere crossing the superior sagacity of his physiognomy, quickly restored him to manhood, emphasising him thereafter as the most awful to watch. So his chieftaincy grew clear. For she witnessed how a space became emptied about him almost of itself, of which he was the centre, the rest viewing him in fear, while he for his part continued as if oblivious of their attendance, brooding over thoughts. He lent no eye to anyone; but, standing bowed, rested his weight heavily on a spear.

  And then, since nothing immediately was to alter in that weird picture, Ingrid let herself observe one more creature, who had posted himself midway between the chief and those expectant others: and he might be young, for his lithe restlessness. His glittering eyes were never still, as he perpetually played with a stone mace, tossing it from hand to hand, then twirling it, not once looking at it. But she was unable to understand whether his forwardness were born of impudence or privilege.

  That one who could be thought a girl—were there not the beginnings of a likeness between her and the old chief, thick and unsightly though he was? Very well she might be his daughter or granddaughter. The hint of a loftiness invisible in the other creatures showed in them both... but her eyes were stranger than his, looking out from that unfitting face. Indeed their colour was indiscernible, yet Ingrid marvelled how they were so sad and distant, full of mystery. What could she be enduring—she, with her few thoughts, her heart ignorant of complexities? Who was she? What were these? What were all doing here, congregated beneath a granite pile that sparkled in the torchlight with newness?

  Her memory of an ancient tomb in front of her slept. As if spontaneously came to her the apprehension that someone of supreme honour in this assembled tribe of man-like beings lay interred under that queer-shaped ponderous stack... that a barbaric ceremony about to begin concerned the new erection of such an emblem of reverence. Within a stone's-cast of her might be shed the blood of human victims. … Her limbs' paralysis from the sudden imagination forced her revulsion into channels of impotent passionateness. That atrocity, then, was perpetrable in despite of her alien protesting womanhood, and she must sit on as a spectator at an arena. So from shuddering she turned to angry horror and vain furious essays to break her spell. …

  Desisting, she tried again to place herself within the case of that girl creature. Was she in sorrow for the dead? Surely she would then be moaning and rocking her frame—concealing with tight hands the sacred springs of her eyes... but she was quiet. … Nor was it her sex that caused her to stand there weaponless, for other females bore spear or spike, and life it seemed went dangerously: but it might be that, as chief's daughter, she should walk defended by every hand of her community ... and yet Ingrid rather believed that she was not caring overmuch for safety. Perhaps some new quickness of her soul tortured her, for which she was unable to discover the expression. Then all the brutalities of these brutes would be to her horrible: and still she would not know why: and might not escape by flight—for it should be an outer world of enemies and blackness. Deep pity for her stole into Ingrid's heart. …

  The monument, in light and shade, seemed farther set from the hill's edge than she could comprehend. Somehow she knew that its front was on the side away from her, overlooking the falling of the ground there; yet the old leaning head and neck of all her life till this week—the picture was not in her consciousness... and still she thought the edge should be nearer. She was incurious about the invisible face of this stalked bulbous grave-stone of more might than art. It was of savagery, but it was that appearing through the savagery which she expected. … The old chief was moving.

  She saw how his left hand was clenched over something in it. With the right he brought down the stout wooden shaft of his spear so forcibly on the rocky ground against its butt that the hollow sound separated itself from the noise of the torrent. Immediately everything changed.

  Torches flitted. Countless thick shapes passed into and out of the illumination in seeming confusion, only to resolve themselves into a dreamlike formation. Four males, having instruments of the appearance of large twisted sea-shells slung around their necks, stepped mystically forward, to blow a blast of oddness—for long years it rang sometimes at dead of night in Ingrid's ears. The audacious half-chief—if such he was—stopped sporting with his mace, though his shifty eyes still roamed. The supposed chief's daughter seemed to shrink upon herself in helplessness.

  Another male moved into prominence. He was anthropoid like the rest. His age was unguessable, but his face the grimmest there, yet without ferocity, without malice; while extraordinarily deep-sunken were his eyes. He flourished a great stone axe aloft; and those
nearest to him fell away. …

  Then Ingrid, gazing at him, was perplexed. She had somehow not conceived that all these beings could be so individual. And their unlikeness was not the unlikeness of People—for that seemed to belong to the past; as the number of human ancestors grew, so grew the differences... but these creatures, she felt more than thought, were unlike as to the future. Vigorous new natures were dawning. She understood in them a robust, straining blood, of another chemistry—not effete, orderly, obedient, cynical, like the blood of people. … Thus she might no longer condescend to these shades for their brutism and hideousness and unrisen souls: but knew herself instead venerating them on account of that mystical grandeur of very life. They advanced in wonder, the true sires of an immense rising, then ebbing, humanity, fated to flow fanwise from them through as many parted roads as here were persons. This strange quality in them she responded to as another person might respond to the invisible real movements of the universe of stars. The riddle was read by another sense in her: not fully grasped. …

  But the grim one, of no prompting that she had remarked, took in head to commence an amazing dance forward, cutting rhythm with his air-sweeping axe, with all those phantoms following. First on his heels were the musicians, stepping the four abreast; periodically raising their instruments to wind in unison singular chords that were never twice alike. She never doubted but that those chords possessed a significance. After danced the whole company, first males, then females; and in their exaggerated agility she found nothing absurd; none could be laughing in heart, therefore neither could she smile. He of the mace might leap more extravagantly than the rest—she knew that not even he could as yet be infected by the deep poison of the comic, which later was to course resistlessly through the world, and kill souls. … She witnessed how next to the last walked downcast that chief's daughter: but the absolute last was he himself who should be her father, bowed, sullen, planting his feet.