Devil's Tor (43 page)

"Let the first nation beyond the racial boundary receive the light, the separating out of the faith's elements begins. Let the next nations receive it, there ensues the same perpetual modifying and rejecting, until the creed shall have become interwoven with the imperishable racial traits of the peoples receiving. … Regard the destiny of Christianity, Saltfleet. Recall the innumerable types that at one time or another have presented Christianity; the simple fishermen of Galilee, the early anchorites of the deserts, the Crusading holy knights, the fanatical inquisitors of Charles the Fifth and his monstrous son, the grim Calvinists of persecuted Scotland, the old-time English hunting parsons of the shires, the modern Laodiceans of our national hierarchy, watching in despair the approaching end of all faith—what, of the Christian elements, have had those types in common? One has insisted upon the torments of hell, another on celestial love, a third on a mystical Saviour, scarcely to be understood, a fourth on the metaphysics of original evil, a fifth on right living. … A branch that is little in one land and century may become everything in another; and in yet another may wither to nothingness...

"Proceed to the matter, Arsinal. We know that the New Testament creed is a compound, and that a heterogeneous mass is unstable."

"I am merely emphasising that the root of a faith is necessarily to be sought in its land of origin. Every divine entity harboured by the human mind has needed a special environment in order to take shape at all. The Prophet's Allah demanded the glaring deserts and nightly canopy of glittering stars of Arabia; Aphrodite demanded the violet seas and perfumed air of the Grecian Archipelago; Thor, the mighty storms, salt sea spray and sunless skies of the iron coasts of the north. In like manner, I tell you, Saltfleet, the Mother could only have created herself in the human intelligence in some physical region of gloom, silence, and impenetrable forest. …

"The Minoan clay tablet has informed us—though not in quite so many words—that our monastery stone came from the west. This may indicate the western Baltic lands, Norway, Britain, Gaul, the old Hercynian Forest of Germany; but I cannot think, Spain or Southern France. In all those northern districts the archaic yield is rich. Thus they were populated very far back. The blood-descendants of that northern stock not only built all the noblest religious edifices of Greece and Gothic Europe, but created the dream-like Hellenic mythology, its naiver Norse compeer, and the clouds, ghosts, fairies, and legendary heroes of the lochs and isles.

"The savage ancestors of such creators obviously had it in their breed to see past practical existence. I don't mean, in the Semitic sense of an ingrained realisation of their creaturely impotence, inducing a relation to the invisible as of duty to a master; nor in the Hindu sense of a bodily and mental weariness of the grind of life, logically conducting in due course to Nirvana; but in the Cimmerian sense of a profound mystical recognition of the actuality of another world of phantoms and spirits interrupting and permeating their own... which long afterwards, Saltfleet, has become metaphysics and music. Even the grander monuments of Egypt seem difficult to account for, considered as the handiwork of a sun-baked race. The dusk and quietude of supernatural northern forests, one could almost aver, are reproduced by those fearful columns of Karnak, those sepulchral recesses of the Pyramids. …

"Yet mere climate and land will avail nothing unless the inhabiting race be appropriate, and a man be born to it, and that man be confronted, blinded, staggered, by his Highest possible. For the first condition, I would like seriously to put it to you: whence came those blue-eyed, deep-thoughted, metaphysical giants into the world? The native stocks of Asia, Africa, America, the South Seas, the Mediterranean, have no more than animals that pigmentation or that curiosity concerning the unseen workings of the world. … Nowadays, indeed, all colours and all characters seem so blended in our populations, that a man may inherit from many sources, and be inscrutable to himself and others. …"

"And render the whole modern theory unworkable!" completed Saltfleet. "For instance, pure blonds are still frequent enough; whereas my experience is that they are usually of the sportsman type, and spiritually rather peculiarly phlegmatic."

"Rarely are we so fortunate in science as to find the truth on the surface. Here, in this circumstance of yours, Saltfleet, it may be very much as with the massive ruins still strewing the globe from the receded tides of northern conquest and sovereignty. The sublime philosophies of India represent the turned ebb of such a tide of blue-eyed warriors sweeping in from the west. The vigorous blood, used to cold temperatures, sickened and ceased under withering suns; but the philosophies remain. So with the Goths, Franks, Normans, Lombards, in southern and western Europe. While they were yet superior to their new circumstances, lofty cathedrals everywhere shot up to express a ghostly faith. But those races, too, have sunk from their first height, and sometimes the earlier brown-eyed have crept back to equality, through the greater stamina of their blood in countries physically suited, and sometimes the conquering race has flamed up within these last few hundreds of years, only immediately afterwards to die out; as in the Gothic Italy of the Renaissance, the Gothic Spain of the conquests of Granada and America. Then, as well innumerable intermarriages between the races have depressed the higher, and raised the lower.

"But the cathedrals still stand. And just such a monument in his own person is the blond of to-day. The blood of his forefathers has failed, leaving him colour, physical habit, stature, for vestiges. Why has it failed, Saltfleet? Because over too long a time it has not been renewed."

Saltfleet was silent, eyeing him sombrely, through the smoke of his cigar.

"To renew it—that northern blood—we should need to know more of its beginning," said Arsinal. "As a
lusus
naturæ,
a miracle for it may have to be presumed. Yet such a miracle as even science might allow."

"Would this be the Stone Age happening, that once you spoke to me about?"

"With that idea I have played. … Yes, many times have I played with it; but never quite seriously before to-day. Indeed, it would be very awful to contemplate, Saltfleet. For imagine! Long, long ago a meteorite, of elements unknown to earth, would have shot to ground in the west; and somehow, with that descent, originated the worship of the Mother. … And since men cannot be wise from nothing, our two predictions, of Crete and Caria, have been a history, and also with the descent of the aerolith, a people has been founded; but I have told you but just now that the earliest worshippers of the Mother may most probably have been the first ancestors of the northern stocks. …

"Chiefly I have connected these events because a racial change of supreme importance has been adumbrated. No change grander than the creation of this highest and noblest of all human peoples hitherto can be conceived. Nor can I feel that a Messiah has been indicated by the son who was to be greater than all mankind and put wickedness under foot. Neither is that need for a Messiah agreeable with the spirit of the early northern faiths, nor, historically, has such an one ever come out of the north or west. …

"I grow confused with too many associated thoughts, and can but sketch one here and there. … How could a meteorite have induced a racial change? A chemical emanation from such, terrific as that from radium, but of a far different nature, may well have had force to raise that atomic storm within the flesh of a brown-eyed pair—a savage woman and her paramour, lying together—that even the sacred citadel should become pierced through and through. … Thus a new son would indeed be born!... I could not support its probability against the meanest physiologist, but neither could the most expert deny the possibility. Hardly do we yet know all the elements of earth; and the spectroscope has given us quite unknown ones among the stars. …
"

"What
is
this phenomenon of the flint in your pocket, Arsinal? How caused?"

"I can't yet decide. … But perhaps the whole was shattered, after arrival, along the line of easiest frangibility, and the halves may be polar. This polarity may indicate a strong galvanic action for the whole. It is a thought I have had. I have no more doubt that it is meteoric. …

"Then, the peopling of half a world from a single pair, with whole tribes of individuals having revolutionary new characters... this might well come to pass, given the necessary might of the radiated particles, continuing to be inherited by common generation. It is little in history for a strong character to triumph during many hundreds of years. The world has seen the Hapsburg jaw and the Bourbon eye. So one single pair, both possessed of the new force, and completing each other, might found that dynasty of a million natural kings.

"But the 'wickedness' to be put under foot. This can but signify the subjugation of the inferior races practising barbarism and savagery. … Or should it be a longer prophecy, relating to all the world, what in effect would happen—has happened—is this. Those possessed of the new characters went on multiplying in the north until a sufficient time had elapsed to over-stock it with these yellow-haired; when the usual choice between famine and migration would present itself, and be decided in the usual way. In this manner the conquest of the rich, unwarlike 'wicked' lands would begin. …

"Strange, Saltfleet, if true, that the first man and father of such a stock should escape mention in the early chronicles! Yet is it true? Snorre Sturlason's Ynglinga Saga relates the conquest of the northern lands, including Sweden, by a chief named Odin, removing with his followers from the neighbourhood of the Black Sea. This was not long before Christ. Now such an event, with all its magical circumstances, is to-day no more credited than the founding of Rome by Romulus; and yet the invention has its value of another sort.

"The chief god of the north has always been Odin. Of the South-east of Europe, Zeus. These chief deities had precisely equal functions; neither was a tyrant, like the supreme gods of the Orientals, but both were the just, and on the whole benevolent, fathers and elder brothers of gods and men. The name of the mother of Odin is known, but has no connection. That of the mother of Zeus was Rhea, the Great Mother. … And so, if the human founder and hero of the northern peoples were still called Odin, the other circumstances of his recorded career being all dismissed, and his date being put back even into palaeolithic times, then one might begin to see why in the mythology of the other branch of those peoples, the Hellenic branch, his counterpart, Zeus, after his apotheosis should have been given this Mother-Goddess for maternal parent.

"For, be his name Zeus or Odin, he, no other, would be the first product of that marriage which, perhaps too imaginatively, I am wishing to associate with the fall to earth of an aerolite, that has always spoken of the Mother. Thus, figuratively at least, he would indeed be her son. … And in the higher arch of his skull would at last be space for that vision of transcendental glory, that after the lapse of generations might make of him a supernatural being, a
god. …
"

'That is for him, then!" said Saltfleet. "And for the goddess? ..."

Arsinal got to his feet irresolutely, but did not move away.

"I have no theory for her. … Yet perhaps she might be attached, mystically, to the aerolite—as
eidolon
... its spirit, or apparition. … I cannot explain. …"

The other pitched what was left of his cigar into the fire-place.

"And you are to have the hardiness, believing, or even only half-believing, these things, or some of them... to fit the halves together?"

"I could not have pursued them all my life, to draw back now."

"You have formed no notion of what is likely to happen?"

"I am not mad, Saltfleet, although you may think me so. A very ancient prediction exists. To put its wisdom to the test, now that I may, is surely not equivalent to the confession of faith!"

"It speaks of a man and a woman."

"I know that it does."

"Then are you to arrange for the presence of such a couple at your experiment?"

"Why do you ask me this?"

Arsinal had turned pale, and, understanding that he had reached the limits of his complaisance, Saltfleet urged him no more. But after a long silence, there dropped from him:

"I have seen your
eidolon,
Arsinal."

"You have not told me that."

"In this very room. Sitting here in the dark last evening, with your stone in my hand, I saw a phantom, silent and erect in
that
chair." He pointed. "It was in the shape of an extra-ordinarily tall woman; only just visible, but not to be mistaken. This is not an invention; neither could I have imagined it."

"What passed, Saltfleet?"

"Nothing. She vanished, and I went to bed."

Arsinal looked down at him heedfully, but soon turned his back, and there followed a long silence.

It was interrupted by a knocking at the door. Saltfleet opened it to the waiter.

"Mr. Copping is below, sir."

The two in the room exchanged glances, and Saltfleet said:

"Ask him to come up."

Peter entered; and again he wore his rainproof, and it was damp. In jaunty sullenness and without a smile, he took the introduction to Arsinal, returning him the stiffest of half-bows. Then he put back the cigarette to his lips.

"Please take a seat!"

"I am not staying. … I've looked in only to say that I duly received your note, and posted straight across with it after breakfast to the house; where I've spoken with Mrs. Fleming, who is Drapier's executrix. Miss Fleming was out so soon, so we couldn't get her concurrence to the arrangement. But in any case it is to stand. … That meeting at my place is off, Mr. Saltfleet. Neither of you, gentlemen, is to meet, or try to meet, Miss Fleming for the purpose of discussing
anything.
Word of honour being passed to this effect, Mrs. Fleming will let you have both the stones in question, for your own, without payment or further condition."