Devil's Tor (34 page)

"If you will have it so, it is no business of mine," said Saltfleet.

"Still, I mustn't be uncandid, and I think I understand the sort of distinction you point at.
Their
hopes are free, mine confined; they want anything, I want something—you mean that? It is not untrue. You know, of course, what Knossos, as the Minoan capital, stands for?"

"I've no clear information."

"For the cult of the Great Mother. … The island was a principal seat of her worship. Well then, as a man whose whole responsible life has been devoted to the preparation for the study of that cult, surely it is most natural that I should occasionally have been drawn hither to learn what is going on in the way of new discoveries? Only, the structure, drains, profane pottery, and so forth, of this palace and its compeers elsewhere on the island, do not happen to be in my line; and that must have been responsible for your perplexity on seeing me frequently stand hungry and idle in the midst of a banquet."

Saltfleet bowed.

"And so the case is explained. It remains only for me to apologise for my inquisitiveness."

"I hope you will not. Indeed, I feel honoured by the notice of so distinguished a—" He hesitated for the word.

"Risker of his neck!" laughed the big man. "However, you seem to be more distinguished than I, and the pleasure and honour are mine. Will you have a cigar?"

Arsinal refused civilly, whereupon the other selected one himself from the opened case, and bit and lighted it. The aromatic smoke rose straight up in the still air. The ever-darkening evening was lovely. Stars were creeping into the sky. Neither speaker was in haste to descend from the utter peace of that eminence.

"Then what induced you to take up your particular study in the first instance, Mr. Arsinal?"

The archaeologist straightened his shoulders, and put back his head wearily. The absence of a hat discovered his partial baldness. Otherwise he was dark-haired, shaven, pale and worn-looking, and every third minute drew himself up from his accustomed stoop with that nervous action of squaring his shoulder-blades. Saltfleet gave him a seniority of a few years over himself; he should be forty or so. He was on the tall side of middle height, thin, obviously delicate, yet gave the impression of having a whole reservoir of moral stamina always at command to supply his deficiencies of physique. It suggested a powerful engine in a frail frame.

It suggested as well, to Saltfleet, a force of will derived from singleness, purity, faith, that should have more in common with the soul of the mediaeval saints and martyrs than with the meaner drive that devotes a modern scientist to his science. It was some kind of spirituality. The pained abstraction of his dark-irised, exhausted eyes seemed to proclaim him as belonging to the small eternal band of lonely thinkers, as incapable of communicating their insights before ripened by the years as of co-operating with fellow-workers in the same field, the cause being identical in both cases—the retreat of a noble sleepless spirit to the inner realities of the intellect, that no companion may enter. … Saltfleet began to be greatly attracted by him. He judged him unmarried.

Arsinal, too, became partly shaken out of his meditations, that had endured beneath the chat, to note more attentively the insistent personality of this large-framed stranger from the outer world. For Saltfleet was not an individual easy to ignore. The direct vigour of honesty at the back of the electric masterfulness and hardness of his address was very effectual in putting those he talked with on their mettle, as being challenged by a nature essentially at war with feebleness, therefore quick to detect it. Defended from any such sense of inferiority by his multitude of intellectual problems always urgent for solution, Arsinal nevertheless had to know the shock of contact like the rest, and was roused accordingly. He had heard the man's interesting exploits referred to in camp, his stature and bearing were compelling, and, if he manifestly could not pretend to even the rudiments of archaeological lore, that coming of his to the island a couple of days since was at least in the nature of a courtesy that affected them all. He could not well refuse to be a host of such a guest. Why, indeed, he should be visiting Knossos, to prowl aimlessly about a work of which he was unfitted to understand the first thing, was a puzzle in mental stimuli.

For quite another reason, he was moved to accept this acquaintance not of his seeking. His programmes generally were very much ahead, and all at once it had occurred to him that, could an agreement be struck, Saltfleet might later be extremely useful to him. He must have practical knowledge of the countries north of the Himalayas, as of the special needs and difficulties of travel in them. His help might save Arsinal a load of trouble if and when his half-purposed journey to Tibet should come off. It might be twelve or eighteen months yet, or never. Other clues in the nearer East were first to be taken up, which might obviate the necessity for this hardest trip of all. And so he repressed the excluding answer almost on his tongue to Saltfleet's last question, to substitute one more amicable, if still reticent.

"The study of the ancient conception and worship of the Great Mother? The goal has been before me for very many years—since my school days, in fact."

"Surely a quaint ambition for a schoolboy!"

"Need it surprise? For if we could see into the heads of all schoolboys, we should gain many a strange sight. There and nowhere else, Mr. Saltfleet, is the grand mine of all the enthusiasms that presently are to move and transform the sluggish world. Perhaps no more than one in ten thousand may struggle through to maturity, but would not it be lamentable on that account to jeer at and discourage the whole display of fantasy? One might even assert, remembering the pressing need of high imagination in life, that its promotion should be made a principal point of education. More than a few English public schools, I fear, would require to change their methods."

"What gives a boy his twist?"

"In each of us, you know, there is a marriage of inherited characters, with resulting children, in the shape of new characters. And sometimes these new characters may swell smoothly and regularly from the germ; which is the way of genius. But at other times they may lie dormant and unsuspected for quite a number of years, until suddenly released by some fate of outside accident. And that, it has seemed to me, has always been the way of the world's outstanding saints and religious reformers. Paul was an instance."

"Which method has been yours, may I ask?

"The second. … When a lad of sixteen, I experienced a night-vision, which left an ineffaceable stamp on my mind."

"May it be communicated?"

"I have never thought that I could tell anyone."

"Then don't break your rule for me," returned Saltfleet good-naturedly. … "Though, indeed, I am no scoffer at such things. Especially it would be inconsistent in me since a little psychic adventure I had in Athens just before coming here. It fetched me here, in fact. I heard something like a voice, and saw something like a shape—so here I am, awaiting my next instructions!"

Arsinal viewed him keenly.

"Yet one would scarcely connect you with such a habit of superstition."

"Nor is it a habit. Only, the single word, CRETE, came into my head, as if a command; and was succeeded by a sort of flashing shadow in front of my eyes, that seemed as though it might be a woman's."

"A woman's?"

"Yes. Though, if you can understand the distinction, I caught nothing in the way of skirts or smooth features. It was something big, formless, swift, and yet feminine—nearer than that I can't give it. … And it has been my first case of the kind. But what becomes of our boasted sense and solidity of nature, Mr. Arsinal, when one faint wave from a phantom world can upset all the plans of an otherwise rational man, to send him on a purposeless overseas excursion of a hundred leagues!"

"Unhappily, I don't know you, to be able to judge what such an incident might stand for. Yet there is this singularity about it. For me, Crete is so linked to the ancient cult of the Goddess, that I can but regard it as extraordinary in the extreme that its name, sounding in your ears, should have been accompanied or followed by a
womanly
phantasm for your eyes. The association truly has hitherto been unknown to you?"

"In my disgraceful ignorance, till coming on this visit I have only thought of the island in connection with such scholastic wearinesses as Minos and Rhadamanthus, Dædalus and Icarus, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne. The maiden Ariadne, I will swear, is nowise responsible for the generating of my apparition."

A minute passed, while Arsinal stood uneasy and thoughtful.

"Perhaps I could now relate my own story, Mr. Saltfleet. Perhaps we really are to be acquainted. You won't let it go further, of course... The thing happened to me in the early hours of a winter morning, in bed. I woke up to behold a tall, draped figure, female and angelic, standing by the bedside, looking, not down, but across me. … That conveys nothing of my neccessary sensations. How could I describe her, indeed? She seemed not a created being, but a principle, or essence. … But when I awoke from
that
awakening—to common life again—I believed that I should know for all my lifetime what a
goddess
might appear to the sight. … I searched in every suitable book at my command for mention of the grandest female divinities of antiquity. Too quickly I found that the light Greeks were not the people. And so my work took shape."

"An old-time monk would rather have fastened on one of the saints, or the blessed Virgin herself."

"But mistakenly, so clearly increate was this Being."

There was another long silence, after which Saltfleet commented:

"The pedestal was sublime, if only you have found an adequate statue to erect on it. You can hardly soberly be proposing in these sceptical days to refound a dead female worship. Jeanne d'Arc had a realm to deliver, but realms are no longer delivered so, even if England needed your patriotic services. Without desiring to play the cynic, Mr. Arsinal, I can't see that the adding of a few more tomes to the world's learned library is any such illustrious matter, to demand a special visitation by heaven itself."

"Actually you are right, and my work is a blind work. I don't know where it will lead to. Only, I have written no tomes, and am not contemplating the writing of any. … However, there is still this point. For a man who is neither prophet, nor reformer, nor deliverer, it may be a sufficiently worthy labour to rescue from the defiling dust a divine shape of antiquity, though it be not of marble or bronze. In this simple service may rest an importance that none of us alive is to comprehend."

"It may be so, and I wish you the active protection and furtherance of your Goddess in the pursuit. But after Knossos—?"

"My movements will largely depend. For the moment I am essaying what my friends here consider a hopeless task, namely, the deciphering of the Minoan clay-tablet inscriptions without the aid of a bilingual writing. I must not call them uninventive, and yet that is what it may amount to. Still, there is a sort of instinct in these things—one has it, and another has it not. I wish to fancy that I am approaching the solution. How long are you staying, Mr. Saltfleet?"

The other gave a shrug.

"I don't know."

"Unless you have engagements, I would have liked you to stop on for a couple of days longer, by which time I might have had something to report."

"I'm agreeable."

"Please say not a word to anyone about my hope of a speedy success. The world is very interested in these inscriptions, the first interpreting of them will create an enormous excitement in the right quarters, and even popularly; but I am not yet sure that I shall attach my name to that first interpreting."

"You mean, you will suppress your discovery?"

"At first I wish only to retain in my power the doing so if I please."

"Very well. You may rely on my silence."

Arsinal smiled, which queerly beautified his face.

"Your call to Crete was perhaps to me, Mr. Saltfleet. I have already the suggestion to make to you that possibly there may be a joint expedition before us, in another region of the earth altogether. This you may choose to regard as an impertinence, yet I trust you won't. I have in distant contemplation... a hunt—not of animals ... in Tibet. You know Tibet?"

"In part."

"It may not come to anything. If it did, it would not be for a year at least. So it is early days to broach the subject of expenses, for instance; but they would of course fall to me. Then you will proceed to inquire where your advantage lies in the proposition, and sincerely, I can't satisfy you. Nor may I appeal to your generosity or sporting spirit, since we are barely acquainted—"

"An archaeological hunt?" asked Saltfleet bluntly.

"Yes. … I am not requiring a decision here and now, but only a slight indication of how such a proposal would strike you when the time draws nearer. I will be quite frank. I am no very attractive companion for any man, but, on the other hand, I have few cranks and am comparatively easy to get on with. I know how to respect the moods of other people, I can hold my tongue on occasion, and my temper is fairly equable."

Saltfleet studied his cigar. "If I were free when you wanted me, I don't know that I should have any objection."

"Thank you!"

"I ask no details, though the connection between Crete and Tibet is rather obscure. Also, any part of the globe I can see at any time for myself, while the question of expenses doesn't enter into it at all. I should put up my share. So it reduces itself to the pleasure of the companionship. Without offence be it said, there are one or two things about you I rather like, Mr Arsinal. You have long aims, and a full measure of individualism, with very excellent information on a number of first class topics, I should say; and above all, the aristocratic temper, that detests publicity. I don't think I should be at all bored by a month or so of your society. Nor do I suppose that you would be bored by any society. You appear to possess the shutting-out capacity in supremeness."