Devil's Tor (46 page)

The rising moor that was the way to Devil's Tor, as Saltfleet traversed it at a long stride, was clothed in a fine, white, quiet mist, from which furze bushes no more than a hundred feet distant would loom slowly and mysteriously, without details or other colour than that of darkness. There was no drift, and all nature's essence seemed to be in the mounting damp ground exhalations. Before dropping to the valley at the foot of the Tor, he paused to light another cigar.

He had not deliberately planned this walk, but he had entered upon it as if naturally, without pleasure, purpose, or thought of consequence. Arsinal he had easily prevailed on to stay in; the expected message from Whitestone might come at any time.

Then Saltfleet found himself continuing to stand arrested where he had lit the cigar, smoking quietly, his eyes glancing down and away at the grassy steep before him, as far as it remained unswallowed by the mist. The Tor was quite invisible.

What really could have happened to put him so suddenly out of sympathy with a man he had liked from the first, whose interests he had made his own for months past? In a way, the answer should be simple; yet its very simplicity was dark. Till yesterday Arsinal's annexation of the affair had gone unchallenged. Now the business had spread, the girl Ingrid Fleming was interested, he himself was not without a stake. He meant his ghostly adventure at the inn last night. The woman's attire had been primitive, her size preternatural. Drapier's flint had been in his hand. What part of that experience had been Arsinal's?

His Athens overtaking, again. And the image in the stone itself; and the girl's shock of rushing waters. … The extraordinary coincidence of his finding in Drapier's dead fist the counterpart of Arsinal's stone. And Drapier's repeated escapes from death on Devil's Tor; his destruction at last. … Why must he suppress reason, and be loyal to a crazed man? These phenomena, accidents and adventures had no necessary connection with Arsinal's case. A long business needed a succession of instruments, and the earliest in might be the first to go. …

A long mystery in time, and an extended one in space, for its springs had reached to Athens, Crete, Tibet; not to mention Arsinal's early home, wherever that had been. In its minor way, it was even like the slow, fateful unfolding of a world event—such as the battle of Hastings. A number of ordained acts, crises, encounters, clashes, deaths, and chance happenings, over half a dozen lands, in five, ten or twenty years, had to interrupt the lives of a multitude of persons, many of them unassociated, before the single final impetus, to hurl England to its destruction, could be consciously launched by the hand of Norman William. … But in this smaller, domestic, supernatural piling of apparently unassociated accidents and incidents, the nature of the crash to come was still not indicated; and it could scarcely be the death of a nation.

Doubtless the ancients had enjoyed a much clearer vision of the reality and inexorability of fate. They did not, like the moderns, confound fate with their deities, but it was above them as another, more primal, universe. Thus one could not become familiar with fate—importune it with prayers—give it an image. Saltfleet presumed that men had come down to an almighty God because they were no longer big enough to confront a Fate—without pity, mercy, or hope. The ancients had done that; and, for their courage, had received the gift of soberness and balance. Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, buddhists, were all dreamers. Only; to gain this cold, clear sense of proportion, the concept of Fate must be stripped; it must not be regarded as for the use of man. … The latest developed reaction to fate resembled nothing more than the chaos of the intellect. Coincidence, luck, miracle, fortune, protection, message—those were some of the names attached at random to such fragments of manifestation as occasionally smote a man in the face as he went about his work. Sophocles and Æschylus were the voices of a wiser, maturer race. …

He stared across to where the Tor should stand, and knew that some change altogether had come to him since the same time yesterday. He contrasted his present frame of mind with that on the identical spot when he had been on his way to seek Drapier. What were the positive differences of circumstance? Then he had believed Drapier alive, while now he lay grey and stiff in a dark room. Arsinal was unexpectedly down. The other half of his flint, the search for which would have been well-nigh desperate, had marvellously turned up of itself. He himself had become acquainted with a most unusual girl. Last night he had seen an authentic spirit. One or two other new nonentities were irritating him. The invisible height before him had grown definitely consecrated for his imagination by the solitary dying sighs of a victim. Arsinal had disclosed himself a little more...

But it was not even the totality of these matters that could explain his mood. The spectacle of death was no novelty to him, the girl was not especially capturing his thoughts, his phantom was only being recalled now and again. Arsinal, actually, was fatiguing him. Tibet had faded into a rather disagreeable passage of his unwritten autobiography. There was some other cause for what he was feeling.

Purity and loneliness seemed increasingly to enwrap him while he stood here. If it was a waft from Devil's Tor, it would be strange; and still, that was the likeliest. The hill should be charmed. The powers of air and earth used it as a competing ground, fate employed its loose rocks to bowl men over, a magical stone had in and on it been found and re-found. If all the theories advanced to him were to be believed, its ruined tomb might quite easily be that of the founder of the higher human species. It might yet be haunted, and the haunter might at this moment be signalling the psychic waves that were reaching him as his purifying and quieting of temper. … But then, what would be the connection between such a haunting and the much more tremendous fate that could stretch over half the world and through a human generation, to bring so many factors to a hidden end together? ...

He squared his shoulders and yawned, wondering why he was stopping like a statue to put questions unanswerable by himself, when doubtless that girl awaited him yonder through the fog, who should be the most sensitive of any to the influences underlying the facts, whose most extravagant fancies, it appeared, were securely founded upon another sort of truth, whose home district this was, and who had never yet been unwilling to speak. But had he truly come up in the hope of meeting her? In part, yes, without a doubt. But also he had had to see Devil's Tor again; he had felt, he still felt, that it held something for him. Yesterday he had not got as far as the top, he had not seen the blocked entrance to the tomb's passage. …

He started the descent to the valley.

Arsinal kept returning to and teasing his mind. He was vexed that he could come to no finality about that man. Their friendship could not be the same again, now that his secret egoism had discovered its appetite, but he had trusted to see but little more of him, and to ignore him while out of his presence. His sudden great weariness of him should have helped to that. This weariness was probably the back-springing of the bow from their unnatural tension of intimacy of months. Yet Arsinal throughout remained just underneath, or just within, his conscious mind, like an unpleasantness... and now all at once, half-way down the hill, it occurred to him that the involuntary brooding must have been busier than his will. For, somehow, his disdain of the inn had swelled to anger and that was why he had been unable to shut out thoughts of Arsinal. But that was also why it had started with disdain. The anger was not on account of any injury done to himself, or it would have flamed up immediately; it was an impersonal moral judgment and condemnation, by the tribunal of his heart, not his understanding, and its earliest effect had been the failure of his respect for his old associate, and the strong desire to cease the acquaintance.

Thus it concerned a third person, who should be injured or threatened by Arsinal, and who, perhaps, was ignorant of the fact, and stood defenceless. Such a third person was sufficiently named! The man himself had sneered at Ingrid Fleming's "deflective influence". It was nonetheless a sneer because cunningly disguised by the aspect of gravity and reproachful sorrow; despite the self-pity, the shaft had been shot. It had been intended to hurt. And for the shape of the sneer: the "influence" related to his, Saltfleet's, plastic weakness in the modelling hands of a girl, and might pass for silly; but the "deflective" was more illuminating. It revealed that an armed camp was already in being. All outside the camp was enemy ground, and so this girl was Arsinal's rival and antagonist before she had even raised a finger to obstruct his plans. But she was unprepared without knowing more about it to sacrifice her curiosity and sense of wonder to his, and this was her offence. Everyone was to bow down before the career he had chosen for himself out of spiritual voluptuousness.

The unfairness, the greed and colossal insensibility of it were what were angering him. … Yet this could be neither early enough, nor deep enough. For surely his new dislike of Arsinal must have begun to work before this morning.
Instinctively
he must have known what the man's attitude towards that girl was to be, and his following words and gibes had initiated nothing. So that Arsinal's malice sprang naturally out of his life-long obsession, and had always been predictable. His spirit was grasping. That it grasped not at money, power, or the common honours of men, mattered nothing: the high soul was magnanimous and renouncing. But though this should be the source and beginning of it, it was not the worst of it. That he should be so callously ready to refuse the legitimate deep concern of a girl coming to the strangeness by another road, was bad enough—if he should be waiting to insult her as well, however! ... And not insult her alone, but, it might too easily be,
harm
her! For it appeared that the joining of these two belonging stones was to be no jest, but a serious risk. Clearly were they bewitched. They showed queer skies of stars, and were accompanied by apparitions and supernatural noises, and had come from ancient places; prophecies were written around them. Their reuniting was a bold man's business. But there was no security that she, in whose possession the one of them was, would not be invited to challenge their nature and the tradition, in her own person. …

Supposing Arsinal hid beneath his mild exterior this icy heart of insanity, then Ingrid Fleming must never be in his company alone. …

He stopped again on the brink of the rain-swollen, discoloured brook, and saw it not, although he could still smoke composedly.

These painful fantasies, it was his final mental task before proceeding, were somehow to be reconciled with the fact of his new purified feelings in the unseen presence of the Tor he was immediately to attack. The only half-credited superstitious explanation of the latter, he would drop at once. In effect, his half-amused, half-reckless enthusiasm for Arsinal's chase across the globe had fallen away, that he might stand back, silent, heedful, and rather disturbed, before the spectacle of wonders greater than himself; and this was his sense of ennoblement, that now the solitude of the Devil's Tor approaches but emphasised. Such an ennoblement, unless quite transitory—which perhaps meant, if continued to be fed by fresh marvels—was like a view of a known scene from an upper stand; the details should dwindle, and a background appear and assume chief importance. Thus Arsinal, from having been the centre and whole of an affair, was now occupying his correct place as one among many. That he should still strive to be the whole was a contradiction of the new circumstances, as absurd as offensive. That he should drag others to subserve his imaginary lordship, might be of the nature of crazy Lucifer himself. Saltfleet's discontent with that proud angel had always been that his pride was vulgar and second-rate; he had not that quality of pride that could scorn his own ambitions, he was infinitely far from the scorn of self, and so, before and after his fall, remained a boy. Arsinal too, for all his sapient airs, continued a boy—but boys, Saltfleet also remembered, were hard, brutal and cruel.

He need not take emphatic action yet—nothing unpardonable had been done or said. No need to break with Arsinal until it was not any longer to be avoided; wherefrom, later, the satisfaction would be his that at no stage of the business had his feelings been out of control. But again he determined it: from now on, after this morning and while down here, he must watch Arsinal's every movement as he would watch the craft of a lunatic. …

Why then had he been at pains to reject young Copping's offer, seeing that its acceptance would have closed everything, and kept the girl at arm's-length during their one remaining day? He reconstructed his mental reactions to the proposal, and believed that he had a very little wished to chasten Arsinal by a postponement, that the honouring of his own word had had rather more to do with it, and that he had also wanted to serve Ingrid Fleming, as no one else seemed wishful to serve her, by procuring her the satisfaction of her desire to remain included in the unrolling of the great mystery behind these wonders. Yet after all these imperfect motives were allowed for, there should still be a residue.

He dimly conceived that a recognition in his head of her psychic predominance was constituting a background to everything. Matters, during all the present week, seemed to be touching
her,
not Arsinal; their best interpretation was to be looked for from her. Arsinal was being clogged by the past, but her unencumbered and delicately-sensitive perceptions were just the fitting instrument. … And the background of this background showed itself in strange gleams of insight: that, if she was to be the affair's chief interpreter, it was also because she was the
nearest
to it—because it was for her sake. … His refusal of Copping's offer had been a response necessitated. She was not to go out; therefore something, someone—he—was to keep her in. So he too was an unconscious subordinate. …

With a smile not quite cynical, but arising from the silent antithesis between his spirit of independence and his eternal self-disdaining, he jumped the stream, and at once commenced the climb beyond.