But first one, then the other, of the men came up again to Ingrid, who awaited them quietfaced and silent. And Arsinal perceived neither in her nor in Saltfleet anything of the gleaming that Peter had perceived but too well: because it was a spiritual light, not for the conceited simplicity of the eye of the brain thinking to construct everything from surfaces. Indeed, yesterday he had seen the shining in her, and otherwise understood what it should betoken: but now his impatience prevented him; an impatience in the service of a larger anxiety that was his will and life. … Saltfleet beheld Ingrid's exaltation of flesh so dimly that he fancied himself deceived. He spoke not to it, but to her human circumstances:
"Here is very much the eleventh hour, I am afraid; and yet important changes of mind have been made so late. I am not to pain you by referring to Mr. Copping. I know, and wish to know, neither the motive for his present conduct, nor your last relations. But if you as well would rather put off the trial in front of us all to another time, we shall of course readily consider your natural feelings of a woman—remembering especially that you must just have been through another unpleasantness already. Mr. Arsinal will concur that we have certainly no wish to push matters beyond common humanity."
Arsinal made no sign.
"Thank you: but I think we must do it now," replied Ingrid, in a faint, resolute voice.
"There is an alternative proposition. It shall be done now, since you so desire; but perhaps there may be no need for you to participate actively. … Just now I saw your stone in your hand. …"
"Yes, I have it—it is in my pocket."
"Please keep it there for a minute. My proposal is that Mr. Arsinal shall do the joining... while I stand by as immediate witness, and you remove yourself to a distance—staying in sight if you like, though my counsel is that you should walk right away—"
"And can you engage that the danger to me will then be averted?"
"Unfortunately I cannot—so long as you are on the hill at all. But the risk should be less."
"You know I have not come up here to avoid a risk."
"I will be plain. You are no more than a girl, and I ask you to entrust your stone to me, and return home."
"Nor have I come here only to go home again. The meeting was arranged between us for a purpose,—and—I—am—here—for—it."
They looked at each other. Saltfleet's face had no super-natural light for her, but somehow she saw it thinner, sterner, nobler. … He said:
"What was arranged was a general meeting; whereas Mr. Copping has deserted you, and your mother has not appeared at all."
"Her staying away is to deprive you of nothing."
"We do not know that. I shall still be very plain. You are a single young woman, on a hill remote from other persons, with night coming on, in the company of two men much older than yourself, nearly entire strangers. Another accident may happen within the next minutes—the hill may again become publicly notorious. Then I should not care to pronounce whose plight will be the more unenviable, yours or ours. Decent men must conform to the prejudices of society.. , . Do consider the point, for I am not distorting the probabilities in the very least."
"You are talking of the world. We have left the world behind us, down there. This place belongs to a spirit."
"You should also reflect that a girl living at home has duties towards her people. …"
"I am grateful for your reminders, but have seen too much here this evening already to have any thought of leaving before the work is finished."
"Why is this reapplication of the stones to each other necessarily to be witnessed by you?"
"Because there is no meaning else."
She turned upon Arsinal. "Cannot you satisfy Mr. Saltfleet that my undefendedness, and obligations, and social liabilities, all vanished from the moment I set a foot on the slopes of the Tor? He must know it too—but should be so used to looking from all sides. …"
"I do indeed consider, Saltfleet, that you are rendering Miss Fleming an exceedingly bad service by this belated pressure. She feels herself called, and is called. The same courage that has brought her here to meet us will enable her to go through the passage now waiting. You deliberately ignore that a high heart may more than cancel the disabilities of Nature—as also that we are assembled in the invisible presence of laws definitely more dreadful than those dictated by the mutual fears of persons forming a society. But you yourself are here frivolously. …"
"Neither have I ever failed in audacity for the furtherance of my own ends."
"I will not be drawn into anger now."
"Nor will I leave Miss Fleming here alone with... a sacrificer. You want me to follow Copping, I know."
There was a pause.
"Stay, then," said Arsinal. "But to a sacrifice go knife, rope, altar, and victim, and I have none of them. I have no power to detain Miss Fleming against her will."
"You will not go down alone," Saltfleet put to Ingrid, "but will you go down with me?"
"No, I cannot."
"My insistence distresses you."
"I am distressed already. … You know how very near to me Peter Copping was. You saw how he left me so quietly. He is out of my life. Never have I honoured him so much. He could not have acted in any other way to keep my full esteem. … Well, he did not beg me to come away from this place."
Arsinal took a short step towards her.
"He was overtaken by a state of trance, during which he should have had a vision. Did he relate it to you?"
"He did not tell it all."
"Here, in this extraordinary hour, beneath this presaging sky, insolence must be far from my mind, Miss Fleming. Your statement, however, signifies that you are now free. Then doubtless Mr. Copping was shown in his vision how marriage to you would be... a great unrighteousness. …"
Moments passed before Ingrid answered him.
"Yes. … He thought we ought not to marry."
"Therefore you are dedicate."
As Peter had done, Ingrid turned to gaze over the low south country. It lay there extended, a steadily darkening dusk of insignificance and the picture of death, so shifted was all the presentness of the scene to the giant castles and cities and seas above. Those vast, torn, rounded, crowded clouds were less masses than depths: down through their chasms were other clouds, other chasms—and others again... until she wondered what that journey could be like. On fire were some of the surfaces. Surely the sky was obeying a powerful word. Its great transformations, gradual but perpetual, were no driving of a wind, but should be the slow convulsive movements of some held mythological prodigy, as broad as the heavens, towards its doom of metamorphosis. Night now approached fast. …
She replied to Arsinal:
"I am leaving it all to you: I wish only to look on. If anyone is dedicate, it will appear afterwards."
"Has no instinct spoken within you?"
"I think that what you have in mind to say will be better left unsaid."
Coming to him from the sky, she saw him as if he stood there against her a dark ghost, and his voice was correspondingly low and unreal.
"In concerns the manipulation."
"I will give you my stone, and you shall do with it what you will."
The wind stirred at last in a long sharp gust that came straight from the sea. Facing now the west, Ingrid became filled with unimaginable fancies on account of what her eyes beheld—fancies grown together in a single riddle of emotion, that was as a music to her deeper agitation. The immense cloud shapes had welled up from within, until they were filling nearly all this quarter of the heavens, only a blue abyss or so remaining to be hidden; while every sunset glory of but a few minutes ago was replaced by an inkiness as uniform and without comprehensible cause as the coming of misfortune. So low were the lowest clouds that the earth's surface appeared a mere horizontal crack for breathing. The dusk was as if all this underworld were sinking, like a stone through infinite fathoms of water, to the mystery and blackness of ultimate repose. Only in the vert
ical line of the sun's descent a lozenge of darkest, quietest crimson hung over the horizon, as it had been a goblin window. …
She said further to Arsinal:
"So it must be. But if, in spite of all, you imagine you retain any vestige of control, then I am afraid the misconception is a bad sign for you."
"Are you prophesying?"
"I do not think that pride will gain a prize. I think it may be punished."
He faced her, pale but perfectly calm.
"Have you the gift of psychic foresight?"
"I seem to have it sometimes... and before Hugh Drapier died, I thought of death for him."
"Am I to die?"
"I cannot say that."
"You may be raised to the knowledge, since no doubt we are all in states of abnormal excitation. … But so I shall have been used indeed! Painfully, through long years, to work my way to the very threshold, only there to be stopped like an alien and interloper!..."
"It is this temper in you. Surely here is no work for the impression of personalities."
"My spirit is not craven," said Arsinal, "but you, I have seen, are selfless—an aim to you could mean nothing. …"
He stayed silent for a moment, then added:
"Yet so it may be, and we are in the blackness of night. A few more minutes will decide. In case, then, I perish, while you live on... to you I bequeath my earnest and unsparing conduct of this great mystery... but to you, Saltfleet, the two records of Knossos and Aphrodisias, for what they may be worth to you."
"In life or in death you will have your way!" Saltfleet's impatience of word and movement was his anger's repression. "Nevertheless the longer we stand here in idle gossip, certainly the more it will degenerate to futility. Also it is getting rapidly darker, and, whoever is to pay a toll, the others or other must find the way home across a blind moor."
"So give me your stone, and I will join them myself," said Arsinal to Ingrid. He reached out his hand.
While her fingers were yet on her flint, however, came the amazing intervention. … Arsinal, having his left hand outstretched and his right in the act of procuring his own stone, was all at once visibly encompassed as to his whole form by a mistily-glowing blue nebula, that seemed an emanation from his body, causing him to appear as if burning with a strange astral fire. And at the same instant Ingrid was glorified by an equal radiance: but her fire, or mist, was whitest silver. Their two shapes, but a pace apart, were like those of celestials about to meet and merge. …
Swiftly Saltfleet stepped between them, to snatch from the girl's delicate fingers the thing they so lightly retained and with the force of a blow plant it inside Arsinal's free hand, that closed upon it instinctively. The twin splendours vanished. All the happening had not lasted seconds. …
Then Saltfleet drew Ingrid away.
Arsinal stumbled forward towards the tomb-entrance and the edge above the valley. He was gazing at the dim erectness and marvellous stature of Her... as yet She shone so faintly. In either hand he held a stone, knowing that they were to be joined. Undirected his fingers fitted them, for his eyes were always on this Shape before him. The junctures fell at last together, yet no immediate change had come. …
Thus She was his boyhood's vision by night—since yesterday he had been aware that such was the identity. But in that phantom torrent scene She had been so distant. … His lips and heart prayed that a larger clearness might reward him. … This loveliness and awful calm, this deepest peace, so like a will-less eternity, that She both was, and was bringing. …
For now there could be no following work for him to essay: not again would it be needful for him to attempt the recovery of this majesty for the mean sake of a scoffing world. His frail existence on earth was no more to be prolonged. Its enthusiasm was risen to its last high flaring: then it and he must equally expire. Such death was not fear—not death. …
What proceeded interiorly was like the slow and dreadful emergence from concreted earth of a rare marble statue, long buried. He was being alarmed lest it should fail to come out perfectly. … It was himself, stripped of all the foul disfigurements of experienced life. Surely Her apparition was obstetric, and She was here to ensure him easy passage, by purification at the last. … He thought She saw him. …
"Here is death, then!"—he knew not if the words had been the hollow echo in some unknown empty gallery of his being—the echo of a comprehension too remote to be directly audible... or if She had said them. … He understood, however, that no blow of suddenness was meant, no sharp dividing line: but a movement slow—slow... in two modes: the gradual slipping away downwards from the life of will, and this other endless emergence. …
His folly clung on, endeavouring to know again some of the innumerable incidents and persons of his finishing phenomenal existence. He recalled Drapier, forgetting that he was passed before him: and found it singular that he should so inexplicably be absent from all these late scenes... but the scenes themselves he could not remember. …
And during minutes longer of earth-time his two movements continued uncompleted, joined for him in the mortal likeness and high gleaming, and in that heaven coming through Her eyes, of the One before him, that already was become as the Sea of all his baring soul.
Soon, however, his sensations belonged no more to the world so cannot be recounted in a book of the world.
Chapter XXXIII
THE FAR GLIMPSE
Staring bewildered after Arsinal's diminishing shape through the gloom, the others saw how his hands were together before his body, no doubt for the purpose of fitting those counterparts. Then his right hand dropped to his side, and seemed to be shut over a dazzling blue light. The blue was shining through the cracks between the fingers: less brightly, it was gleaming through the substance of the hand itself.
It changed to silver, and almost simultaneously appeared to burst within the hand, a flying hail of sparks, that were luminous white particles, escaping through the air towards all the cardinal points. They never went out, but became bigger, and, universally travelling upwards, at last were turned to fixed stars... in a sky that was pure night, and cloudless. …
Those stars grew to be magnificent gems, till the whole heaven before them was filled with great stabbing diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethysts and sapphires, that were so much larger and fiercer than the stars of the common sky that they seemed as if alive. … And next, there were clouds again—huge separated masses, moving monstrously in endless procession across that lower vault of vision, alternately burying and restoring each field in turn of blazing orbs. … Thus they upgazing were in another world. Arsinal had disappeared.
Long afterwards they compared these outward happenings, and learnt that they had been identical for each. During all their life together they had many such fearful talks. …
Now nothing of earth was visible except the lesser blackness of their immediate environment and the mind-supplemented perception of each other's shadowy column. So a strange comradeship, sprang up between them, though no words were to pass and neither had the thought of seeking contact. The spoken symbols of another order were inadequate for this experience, as their bodies could express nothing of their personal nearness.
Saltfleet believed that he could make out—yes!—that the air's pure silence, as of a still and frosty midnight, was being very faintly troubled by some pulsation which was not from his blood. Heavier clouds came up, to blot out all the stars, and each watcher from the other, wrapping them in a solid blindness. Then, that pulsation remaining everything of their sensuous existence (for Ingrid caught it too), it promised to become music. The music should be from the buried stars. … The mighty cloud-drift was muting it, yet it grew distincter: so either they must be drawing nearer to the stars, or the stars were themselves descending. … Soon the rhythm and whole tone of the music, the direction of its sounding, dictated to their ears, which but a minute since with the utmost straining had failed to distinguish them. The harmony advanced from the entire sky
ahead. It was like the ordered emotion of a far-distant orchestra numbering, not hundreds, and not thousands, but millions, it seemed, of instruments... that played otherwise than in groups, since each instrument, with its voice of unique timbre, should be proclaiming its own peculiar message. Thus the overruling thought was, as an organism, alive in all its parts.
But when the sounds grew—hardly louder any more, but clearer, vivider in definition—then they also became essentially mystical, because archetypal. They presented the music of humanity, without its associated mechanical noises. The forcing of air through narrow orifices, the scraping of resonant objects one against another, the striking of stretched elastic membranes, the vibrating of metals—all such impurities were absent—their familiar musical effect that was a second nature of the ear, it too was absent—from this music: and the remaining purity was hard to know. It was what a passion of the heart might be before the sympathetic arousing of the seconding will. Not even were the great sounds of the natural world brought to mind. … To Ingrid, each separate instrumental voice suggested the dropping of a new soul into existence from an ineffable ghostly Womb. …
And the theme bearing along these tones upon its back—its progress was not in time, but in some other incomprehensible mode of change from state to state. Its line of advancing was not between a full past and an empty future, carrying them listening upon its constant front: but they were carried by it—feeling, more than listening—towards another kind of future, already full, though this music was helping to fill it. Therefore the perpetual filling should be of intensity, not substance.
These individual tones—to Ingrid, like the dropping of souls—instead of running one upon the heels of another and vanishing at the moment of their sounding, were somehow joining themselves to and increasing the next tones following... wherefrom there was no light heartless stepping from corpse to corpse of sound until the last corpse should be reached and straightway forgotten, and all should be forgotten, as in the music of the world: but always there arrived, never again to depart, this grander and grander intensity of emotion, compounded of all the past. … Indeed, too little analogy there was between the dim stupendous astral communication and that other dull and simple music of humanity. …
Devil's Tor Page 57
