Devil's Tor (11 page)

So his account to Helga of his reason for early walking had not been strictly accurate, though it did in fact represent a supporting motive. He got up because he couldn't sleep; and he couldn't sleep because of his sensations of impending death. There was no element of fear in it. He knew how to lie on the broad of his back in bed, and stare death calmly in the face with open eyes, wondering queerly how that last moment would taste, seeking vainly to analyse his unanalysable feelings; never once yielding to any swift panic desire to be assured of long life. By day he attempted no remedy of forgetfulness in the social excitements. His instinct never informed him when the event might be anticipated.

A torch was in his pocket. He should easily be back for breakfast, and it was an unutterable relief to be abroad again. The tingling morning air cooled his cheeks and toned his lungs, oxygenating him to a new carelessness of acceptance of his rearing night. Being a doom, by no contrivance of his to be avoided, he found its advancing increase immaterial and empty of menace. He might even be fated
not
to return to breakfast, and still it should not particularly matter. This underground stairway to be explored might do his business, but Helga had been spoken to, those people were to get back their own, his last scrap of earthly anxiety was removed, and to-day was as good for the purpose of his death as to-morrow or next week. It should be near.

The steady night downpour had reduced the temperature by twenty degrees, recharged the atmosphere with its highest carrying capacity of ozone, and set it briskly moving; the breeze blew straight off the moors, sharp, wrapping, flogging, wonderfully fresh and sweet. The sun was not yet up; and would not show when it should be, perhaps in not many minutes now. It would come up behind that long low band of cloud across the east. And he was glad that his humour was to escape a gaudy spectacle. The stern, clear-cut purity of this half-stormy silver dawn was worth many coloured sunrises. All was black and white. The soaking rains had brought out a hundred soft pungent odours of the soil, of the trees and bushes. In the second half of the morning the depression might finally spin off and the sky clear, but till then occasional showers still threatened; which was why a mackintosh was across his arm. The suit he had worn to the Tor last evening was wet yet, so he wished to keep this he had on dry.

Poetic by blood, and made additionally susceptible by that long series of broken nights, he fell quickly into the lonely mood of wild musical melancholy bequeathed him by his ancestors of the red-deer hills and rushing torrents and phantom mists. It was a formless melancholy, delicately ennobling the preoccupations of his brain, rather than presenting anything of its own. At the most, he knew it, without also knowing what it desired; he could express to himself no particular of the vague yearning that was like a drawing of all his fibres towards this natural world around him, as the moisture of the soil is invisibly drawn to the skies.

The mood was familiar, and since he could not understand it, he had long ago invented a formula for it. The mysterious hour and dusk, the aloneness of his being, the dark friendly trees, the intimate wind, and breaking sky—it, as its equivalent of sombre enchantment experienced elsewhere on earth, he recognised to be the right element of his eternal part. Yet it was all no more than
hint.
It stood for nothing of itself, but was the faint imperfect copy of heaven; the proof being that, though it might call, it could not satisfy, but on the contrary produced in him such states as disturbance, sullenness, infinite longing, sadness, despair. Thus he was inevitably reminded by it of some grander world not present. His formula, therefore, was that the merely beautiful might suffice a soul, but that the sublime (which was the shadow of the beauty of another world) could never suffice, since with it came gropings that must amount to pain. …

He crossed the deserted tarred main road, and at once plunged downwards between the high banks of the lane's opposite continuation. It was the way he had come with Ingrid yesterday.

The misty trees overhead dripped regularly their surplus of saturation on to the skin of his face or neck, while under foot the liquid umber mud triumphed from ditch to ditch. After a last steepening and bending of the hill to the right, however, appeared the old long straight bottom stretch that introduced the open road across the moor. Here the walking proved drier, and yet there were still the high banks, and trees above them.

He wondered how all this cultivated part of Dartmoor would have looked, say, in Tertiary times, before the advent of man on the planet; before that uglifying master-brute had put a hand to his congenial and self-honoured labour of clearing lands of their established life. Savage and lovely beyond thought, no doubt. So what had been gained by the substitution? Additional sources of food supply for man himself and some dozen kinds of degenerated animals, his servants. For this, fair trees had been uprooted, strange, beautiful beasts and snakes of the wild exterminated, exquisite birds made rare or extinct, the inhabitants of the streams slaughtered and poisoned. Verily, a ruthless campaign!

And the effective result? Why, this foul trail of earth-viscera and metamorphosis wheresoever man passed. All over England and Europe, and gradually all over the world, the houses, pavements, factories, mines, quarries, cuttings, bridges, railways, cars, engines and machinery, slag-heaps, gas-works, roads, stagnant canals, the grime of unreckonable chimneys, the grit and dust of a hell-maze of thoroughfares; and the slums, and backyards, and hidden corners of filth and shame. Or the cabbage-rows, and manure-heaps, sties, stables and pens—to demonstrate the superlative vulgarity of this scrambler for easy food, the human biped, whose stomach was paramount in the existence of a mystic universe.

It would be an excellent thing to die, and leave it
all!...
And under what law, other than
force
majeure
(to propound the question in the parliament of all the creatures of God)—under what law had the so-styled lower life been dispossessed and destroyed, to make way for a single species? The ugliness of it might pass, if a merit could be shown for the wholesale annihilation. To allow the entrance into the world of idealism and spirituality, he supposed the cant answer would be. Then all that murdered life had the right to demand, where are those things? And the man and woman of to-day gave the reply by talking only of money, luxury, sport, amusement and sex. The Aryan Brahmins, the Stoics, the Christian saints and martyrs, the Puritans, the makers of noble music, the sublime philosophers—they had been the justification for the destruction; and they were departed, and others had not stepped into their shoes. That assassination of Nature, begun in the instinct of self-preservation, continued in blindness and barbarism, never at any time in history aware of its own iniquity, but presently, during a very few centuries out of long thousands of years, offering to the Creator an equivalent compensation in the shape of the worship of His invisible height—it was now being brought rapidly to its last horrible consummation, in its destruction as well of the whole of beauty; in the insane building by that single conquering species of an iron prison wherein it should spend the rest of its span combating its own denied instincts, that must forever break out into monstrous excrescences.

A most sinister state of affairs! How had it come to pass in this world, otherwise of flame, loveliness and passion?

The ultimate answer was refused. The cause in time of the crime and blunder of course started with the possession by man of a brain; and was ending with over-population. The infinitely greater weight of the mass nowadays was an irresistible force pulling men towards each other and away from the lonely Austere and Sublime. The other name of this gravitation was democracy; so that democracy was the grand evil. No one man could fight such a pull of a whole world, however much he might know it to be suicidal and terrible. Or if he enlisted assistance, he was but inviting a second small democracy. Men united only to discuss men and the affairs of men, whether these affairs were on earth or in Paradise. It was all as hopeless as the coming on of a cancer.

Yet if it was the ordained and necessary course of a world? For just as the thoughts, circumstances and environment of a child were mysterious and rich in beauty, while for the adult were only grim duties and responsibilities of lead, so it might be with the life of the species, and of the corresponding species of every life-bearing planet. First, Nature lived with and dimly apprehended through a veil of glory; the gods and goddesses, witches, elves and fairies. Then the transition; the Almighty and His saints, speaking the language of the Cross. And lastly the fully-emancipated intellect, finding itself amazed in a fearful life without personal future, for which it had never asked.

Arsinal's 'Great Mother'—she was Nature, when men had been children. She was dead. Men themselves had killed her. Or could she conceivably rise again, in the fashion of a dead god? ...

His stepping off the open road on to the moor coincided with the bending of his thoughts to his own more insistent problems.

He had to consider what had happened to him since his talk with Helga last night. It was upon his first getting out of bed that the uneasy awareness had stirred in his brain of the very obscure and baffling existence of some link of true association between his various strains. Up to to-day he had never suspected them to be connected.

It was the more obtuse in him, since all three must have dated approximately from the same time, namely, from between Tibet and Simla, on this last trip. He could recollect the indistinct beginning of one only in Tibet; after Simla all three were in action. The Tibet strain was queer, the other two were quite unaccountable; they had sprung up in him like strange weeds in a protected flower-border.

The chief in rank was his premonition of death; but that was not the Tibet one. It was like a taste in the mouth, destroying all other tastes. Little by little it had sapped his love of life, till now he was not so sure that he would accept a longer career as a gift. It had introduced to his soul quietness, and easiness, and something of majesty; but not daunting or depression—he thought not depression. There were necessarily accompanying practical embarrassments, such as his new shunning of outside society, and his complete neglect of the future. But on the whole the taste was good. It was somehow both tranquillising and exciting. The tranquillity concerned his affairs, his worldly affairs, which by now seemed not to matter at all; but the excitement consisted in the adventure of it. It was like a preparation for a journey; anything might be going to happen to him. The principal evil of the business was that it left his present short remainder of life rather empty. He had too much time on his hands in which to hark back to the past, and repent the little use he had made of it.

For, dividing all human acts into the two classes, those having eternal meaning and those others having only temporary applicability to the things of earth, then, obviously, he had woefully squandered the best part of his days and chances. He had loved none, he had brought into the world no work of perpetual beauty, he had relieved few in distress, and that most scantily, he had done nothing for the spirits or bodies of men, for long years he had not communicated directly with heaven; but he had hugged his æsthetic misanthropy in burying himself in wild places; and would leave no monument behind him. Unless it were his gravestone, on which should be carved the words:

Whatsoever this man hath done, do thou avoid.

Indeed his death mattered the less, because his life had been so trivial. Neither had it been ennobled by high deeds or love, nor darkened by suffering. A thousand million living persons knew the deeper experience.

His sense of being slowly enveloped by death was not a bodily taste. It was not a blight, or
malaise,
gradually destroying his hold on life, and so translating itself for his consciousness. It was not a supernatural voice or message. If it could be compared at all, it was like a coming, rather than a going. Something positive was approaching, and this something was his death, and it was already dark, and void, and of a peculiar bitterishness, and altogether indescribable; but it was not being a mere cessation of his known experiences. It was bringing a new knowledge. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat with a slow, heavy exhilaration, as if it was hearing music—solemn music, that his ears could not.

The second and earliest of his strains had to do with that flint he had shown Helga. It consisted in the always-increasing subjection of his imagination to what was surely the most amazing vision of natural beauty, reduced to the dimensions of art, that could at any time possibly have existed on earth. It amazed, because it was as living as a mirror reflecting real things, and yet the real things in its case were nowhere present. Provided the experiment were conducted in shadow, that night sky was just as visible by day, or those stars were just as needle-bright and shining when the true sky was thick with a mile of cloud. This he had discovered at a very initial stage. Since then, the little marvel had been in his hand a couple of hundred times perhaps, over a period of two months, so that his eye was sharpened to a much finer adjustment to the difficult details of its weird field. Great doggedness had been called for in the beginning. Barely enough advance had been yielded to encourage him to the persistence.

Bit by bit had he been forced to discard his successive hypotheses. It was not a right mirror, because, looking upwards from it, he failed to see its images in space. But neither was the appearance a false one, due to some smokelike motion within the body of the stone. The tiny star-points sprinkling the black rifts and spaces between the white clouds, they were congregated into constellations—constellations unknown to him; and these constellations
shifted,
not quickly like the clouds, but during weeks of patient observation. The progress was from left to right. The constellations disappearing altogether off the right-hand margin of the field never came back; those appearing on the left were new. So a real sky of stars would behave; so no interior animation of the stone could. Therefore he was seeing the image of stars existing somewhere. And yet they were not real, but must be mystical, because by ordinary physical eyesight they must be indistinguishable by reason of their minuteness. There might be a hundred or more of them, scattered over a ground of a couple of inches. No human eye could separate such a packing, and make out its configurations, unless it should see
differently,
and so the phenomenon was both real and unreal in short, of a world, but not of this world.