Devil's Tor (42 page)

"So our meeting in Tibet was from fate; and I have never yet told you in what manner it came about. Until now, its fateful character being unguessed by me, I have scarcely dwelt upon the extraordinariness of the intervention, even in my moments of idle dreaming. But just as you and I, Saltfleet, were thrown together by a psychic phenomenon, so Drapier and I were. … For, originally, it was my quite unwonted apathy and listlessness at Darjiling that arrested my penetration of Tibet by way of Nepal; and much later, after we were actually across the Ladak frontier and a considerable number of marches towards Alung, you remember, don't you? how in camp at Nyak-tso one evening we debated between two routes for the next day—the one easier, the other shorter—and at last agreed upon the longer and less difficult. But in the morning again, you will further recall, I insisted very emphatically on reversing the decision thus come to—to your expressed astonishment and not a little disgust, I fear. And had the original plan held, you know we must have missed Drapier, who proved to be within a couple of marches of us, approaching by the shorter route; whereas we were quite unaware of his presence in that part of the world at all, and indeed of his existence.

"Well, Saltfleet, would you care to hear what impelled me thus to change roads overnight? In a soul-startling dream, that was a vision, in the small hours, I saw a tall, shadowy, shrouded female form, standing somewhat removed outside our tent, having her back turned to me, and an arm outstretched before her, the hand's forefinger pointing away into the distance. The phantom was past human stature, but, apart from this, my trembling of horror certified to me that she was not of the world. And she pointed towards the spur crossed by the road we had agreed to reject.

"Hitherto I have not dared to entertain the theory that this apparition could be identical with the divine one of my boyhood. It was possible, yet there was no necessary association. I did not see her very distinctly—her back was turned, and she was also in shade. And still, you will consider that it is always
a female—twice
with me, and once with yourself ... This, Saltfleet, might nearly be my supernatural claim with Miss Fleming, should you find the story sufficiently credible. You could support its enclosing outline."

"Am I to say what I think, Arsinal?"

"Surely."

"Then the story is believable enough, and she may be perfectly prepared to concede your sincerity throughout, and all the same, the fete in it may not necessarily be appropriable by
you.
"

Arsinal viewed his associate, with a slight wrinkling of his brow. Some indefinable new note of independence and challenge in Saltfleet's objection struck upon his ear like a very feint discord.

And so finely organised was his sensitive system that its small disturbance immediately became a thought; and the thought was this Miss Fleming must already and so soon be obtruding an alien influence upon a man he had always deemed quite insusceptible. … It was absurd, however; and Saltfleet could be no more than stating a positive standpoint rather roughly.

"If not by me, by whom?" he asked.

"You had better confess to her your practical aim in this life-long pursuit of yours. You have never told me. A sequence of visions occurring to a person merely for his own purposes, she might not consider an outside title."

Arsinal flushed.

"You have for some time wished to have this out with me, I fancy. … And I appreciate your tact, Saltfleet, in leaving the question unasked for as long as it was essential for us to remain on terms together. Another man might perpetually have crucified me by attacks that I must have found impertinent; but I could not have invited your co-operation had I not felt you to be a gentleman. We should now be soon to part, and so you find that you may allow yourself at last. I still don't know if I can satisfy you."

"I have made no such request. We are discussing Miss Fleming's attitude."

"Then I apologise. … Nevertheless, she may not put it in just that form."

"I think she will. It is her whole case. She herself can find an interesting and instructive use for the stone in dispute. Are your aims more special?"

"It is hardly so vulgarly practical."

Arsinal began to pace the room in perturbed thought, his hands clasped behind his back. Then he came to a stand again before his friend.

"You are waiting, are you not? for an answer to your note sent round. When do you imagine this meeting will be?"

"Perhaps this morning, perhaps this afternoon."

"We appear to have only too much time on our hands, and I am wondering if I could attempt a sketch. If I am to open myself to this girl, Saltfleet, our long association deserves that I should first be as candid with you. Then, without a certain disloyalty, you could scarcely refuse to throw in your weight. … Yet I must add how little I ever expected that such a bribe would be necessary. I am convinced by my feelings that some change has taken place inside you since we parted at Oxford. You are perhaps becoming tired of the whole business? A new person, a new point of view, has corrected your vision of it. It no longer seems of importance... or your sympathies are rather suddenly transferred? I feel the advance of this cloud over our excellent relations hitherto. Not to suggest anything feeble or banal, is it that girl? Has she presented a view of ownership that happens to have caught your imagination? Tell me!"

"Far from getting tired of the business, it is just beginning really to interest me, Arsinal. The girl—yes! she does represent a new feature. Is there a change in me? There may be. But it would not be a transference of sympathies, but a broadening. An affair appears to be going on. Drapier was three times aimed at."

"You seem all at once, so very strangely, to be regarding my peculiar work as no longer peculiarly mine—but almost anybody’s."

"Why do you want it to be yours? I will even be rather blunt, and ask you, in what sense the
divine
—which is your incentive and your mark—in what sense it can
belong
to any man with arms and legs? Surely, it must be the possessor, not the possessed!"

Arsinal gazed at him in mournful steadiness. Afterwards, straightening his back, he sat down.

"Words, as you know, Saltfleet," he said quietly, "may have all truth, all reason, and all right, in them; and yet may be false. I must see Miss Fleming myself before I can determine the degree of her deflective influence, if any such there be..."

But while Saltfleet, taking a second chair, returned the other only a front of stone and grimness, he was already conscious in his heart that their breach was opened, and might not again be mended. For now he understood that he was
scorning
Arsinal, who of a sudden had shown himself without generosity. Because of a mystical vision in early youth, he had struggled through life under an imaginary mantle of destiny, rather too heavy for him; and yet this delusion had enabled him to do great things. But all was based on greed and egoism. Plain enough was it that the destiny, should it, against his refusal, prepare to quit him, was still to be forced to ambition. He was but a human, moved by vanity.

To the account of his secret aims, that should be at once to follow, Saltfleet prepared himself to hearken with these uneasy expectations. He knew an increasingly settled contempt for the man, on account of this revealed half-hypocrisy of his entire career. He feared, at the same time, the application to real persons and events of the prophecy of Knossos, that might well be to find utterance by an incited tongue.

Perhaps he was a little ahead of Arsinal. He felt only that he would come to it, and must be allowed to talk, and develop all the dark convolutions of his soul; but
then
must be stopped. … He had the intuition that to-day was to be no less extraordinary in his life than yesterday had been...

Arsinal sighed, was silent for another moment, then said quite suddenly:

"I gave you the Knossos record. Later I had the somewhat remarkable luck to strike a fellow to it in the vicinity of the ancient Aphrodisias, in Caria, which repeats the prophetic part of the text just differently enough to throw a new illumination. The inscription is on a small silver figurine of the mother-goddess, which I have secured. I can repeat its purport from memory. The Mother, you must know, was worshipped in Caria as well."

And he quoted:

"'To one bed shall I bring another man and another woman, of whom shall be born a greater than they, greater than all mankind, who shall put wickedness under foot, and found my people.'

"Thus, Saltfleet, this miracle of new birth, which in the one prediction was to arise directly from an action of the temple stone, in the other is to be the intelligent personal work of the goddess. It is one more piece of confirmatory evidence of the close connection between the two. The goddess either, mystically,
is
the stone; or else is to work through it.

"I surmise that the broken sections of the original whole stone are to be rejoined before the fated marriage of the man and the woman can be consummated. One knows not the beginning of the myth, and therefore one cannot pronounce upon it. Should you desire to scoff, you have every justification. Nevertheless, there are certain appearing facts in the dark emergence of faith from the mists of the planet's prime, that do seem to bear out a history of which these prophecies may be the intuitive fruit.

"Both records were inscribed many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Ostensibly they have in no way influenced the Gospel story. Yet those thorough-going folk who style themselves Rationalists will inform you that the legend of a Virgin and holy Child has arisen, as if spontaneously, in many lands of both the old and the new worlds long anterior to Christian missionary activities. … They have, indeed, gone a step beyond. They have assigned a fixed astronomical date for the common original of those legends; calculated, if you please, on the rising of the sun in conjunction with the setting of the constellation Virgo, whose five principal stars are assumed to have suggested to primitive anthropomorphic imaginations the outstretching of the Virgin Mother towards her infant Sun-God!

"By such imbecilities do scientists, snatching a holiday from their science, make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of gods and men. For the individual stars, equally with the constellations, were to be given distinguishing names by the ancients, and, since they, the stars, were in themselves sublime, after whom or what should they be named but the sublime gods and archetypes? And should a poor likeness to a known shape, in these clusters of stars, suggest the appellation, would not it be adopted? But most are unhappy. To affirm that the men of old literally
saw
in the stars the god or mythical type whose name they were made to bear, this surely is the height and apex of learned childishness! ...

"The Virgin myth truly has reappeared in many surprising forms and places throughout the world, but it never originated in a constellation. Most obviously, it is a statement of the extremely antique Mother worship, distorted in this way and in that. In the Palestine version, for instance, the goddess herself is even eliminated; the human mother is half-confounded with her, half remains in her own rank and person; the father is so completely despised and ignored that he is denied the honour of begetting his own son; the son is made a god; the extramundane meteor, that is so important an element of the earlier tradition, becomes a bright announcing star. Such a crass perversion of every feature of the original might reduce even a cynic to astonishment, but that it is all very instructive. … I don't weary you, Saltfleet?"

"No. Pray go on."

"For so many kindred myths distributed over the globe indicate, of course, a common source; and this of Palestine is manifestly an orientalising—probably of a north-west European faith. Here are my supporting reasons. The social equality of a free people would fail to find its counterpart among the rigid castes of the East; accordingly, the mother of a fateful son, if of known lowly birth, must be ennobled by heaven. Being thus translated, she would come to usurp many of the functions of the goddess, and in time the memory of the independent existence of the latter would altogether disappear. The goddess was alone; therefore her successor is humanly unmated—a virgin. Her divinity, however—how could it be otherwise in the East?—is still below that of her infant, by reason of his sex.

"You will understand, Saltfleet, that I am not attempting anything so foolish as the destruction of the historical figure of Christ, with His inimitable character and teachings. Since something does not come out of nothing, such a personage, whether divine or human, has existed. I simply maintain that He has become attached to a pre-existing myth, with which He has no true connection. This myth, I say, doubtless sprang from the north-west of the world known to the ancients, so agreeable is its nature with what we are told of the peoples primitively occupying that cold and mystic region. For only among those peoples do we encounter the reverence of womankind which, despite Schopenhauer and his tribe, surely remains as the basis of the finest qualities in humanity. Nowhere else could the chaste worship of the Creatrix have originated than in the first home of those free Scandinavians whose blackest shame it was for a man to set finger in anger on a woman; or of those forest-dwelling Germans, who according to Tacitus, believed the females of their race to be divinely inspired with the spirit of prophecy—"

"Knossos came later?" asked Saltfleet.

"Necessarily, if my theory be correct. Knossos was a lingering on the road to Asia and to degeneration. Crete, of which Knossos was the then capital, furnishes perhaps our earliest exact knowledge of the cult in working. In like manner the final wanton worship of Cybele throughout Phrygia and Asia Minor generally, that was a presentment of the faith’s flaring up to death. It had passed slowly eastwards, from the deep-natured, deep-sighted men of the north, to brown-skinned priests and moralists, and so on to heavily-bejewelled, painted, perfumed women, with their appropriate male companions, dancing mad orgies. The passage east was coincident with the passage of the centuries. Were it ever needful to seek a cause for the decay and death of a creed or system, here the explanation would not be obscure. A creed removed from its land, climate, circumstances, and own people, is already becoming something else. In but few cases can the new soil be as favourable as the old for its increase to purity and splendour.