Devil's Tor (62 page)

"We are not requiring it. Mr. Saltfleet, I understand, is only carrying his scruples as far as the obtaining of your word of personal willingness; while Mr. Arsinal has none at all. Before you reiterate, let me state it in the form I wish. Do you
forbid
their appropriating this stone when they please?"

"How can I forbid it?"

"Supposing Mr. Saltfleet fetches it down to-day, there will be no charge of dishonesty brought against him?"

"I begged him to take it this morning, but he wouldn’t. I have, since, had a long talk with mother, and have promised to go to the Tor with her to-morrow. Now you are asking me to help to disappoint her. How can I do it, Peter? ... I can only say that if Mr. Saltfleet does bring it away in the meantime, I don't know whose it is, so certainly can't charge him with dishonesty."

"Of course the dishonesty wouldn't refer to the point of ownership, but to his single appropriation of a thing left jointly."

"In any case I should not accuse Mr. Saltfleet of dishonesty."

Peter turned to Saltfleet.

"Is that good enough?"

"Yes, I think so, now that Miss Fleming has been made acquainted with the intention, and is not directly forbidding it."

"Your mother has no essential stake in that meeting."

"I don't know," said Ingrid.

"None that can weigh."

Arsinal, his fingers nervously intertwined over his crossed knee, was always musing on Ingrid's face, that gradually he found impenetrable and witch-like. It was different from what he had expected, and into his trouble of understanding crept something of dread. He began to be oppressed that between her essence and his there was already no comparison; that his work hitherto had been but journeyman's work, while she, without wisdom or ambition, might yet have it in her to be the finer, sharper instrument of...
Her. …

A woman, too, by virtue of her sex, was a vessel; a vessel was for filling. A man, perhaps, could not so entirely receive the grace of heaven. … And in her long, stern-featured loveliness speaking of the snows and dark nights of another world, he believed he discerned the prepared bed of a passionateness that should far exceed his own cool flaming, which now, in consequence, all at once started to seem to himself arid, exhausted, contriving. …

Nothing of this had he expected, yet something of it all he must have brought with him to their meeting. Surely he must have been convinced, nearly from Saltfleet's opening account of her exceptionalness, that in a most particular sense she was the local heart of his quest, so curiously come to fulfilment in the downhill of his life, after his thousand diggings, gropings, defeats and half-victories in all those foreign lands, upon an obscure ancient height of his own native island, of which she should be as the warder, or votaress. … Its warder and watcher—for him?—for his coming? ...

Constantly he found himself obliged to stop his thoughts, flying off centrifugally from the case's centre of simple facts; yet was not such a tendency in itself the proof of the presence of an energy in him obedient to another mass? Arsinal was torn. He wished not to exceed his intellectual permission, but at the same time his blood was being subtly fired by this new recklessness of footholdless adventure that strove to incite him to actions in the dark. Again he wondered—now more consciously, more immediately, more
solidly,
it seemed—if his exaggerated cautiousness of moving one step and no further at a time could be consonant with that moment of translation which in the first instance, so long ago, had commanded him to these aims having no visible mark. He was not easily to forget Saltfleet's cruel likening of him to Peter in the palace of the high priest. This allowing a half-faith to rest in abeyance till some new incident should occur to reinforce it, was it then but a cowardice of his heart for the incalculable consequences of the full and final profession of allegiance to his secret ghost? Was he temperamentally incapable of moving limb against the all-compelling gravitation of human sanity, so running with his blood and grown together with his fibres that already he might no longer call himself an individual, but everlastingly must shrink from all the adverse whispers of opinion? ...

For the sane life was all around him, and so strong! And yet not for nothing could it be that this girl was daunting him, beneath her weariness that sat upon her as a thing not her own, but still was most appropriate. The silent barrier between them was not for anything he had said, since he had not spoken. He was as sure that it was by no means Saltfleet's treachery that had erected it for him; neither womanly disdain nor rancour was being displayed, but only the simple ignoring of his company. Rather was it an antagonism of strange souls... as such, it should be the sign of her authenticity.

Small doubt there was that, in their manhood and womanhood, they were as opposite poles of the higher humanity: he intellectual and volitional, she, it was clear, subconscious, nervous and instinctive. Should, therefore, this first unplanned encounter be repeated and improved, not any pleasure of either in the other's type, not any harmony of spirit, not any automatism towards completion, would have effected it; but the pure fate of these concerns alone. And so the enticements of sex were being unrequired; for they were but a single substitutable tool of the celestial scheming, a scheming older than the most ancient tools to shape the world; and because the common passion was here to be set aside and scorned, therefore should the larger grandeur be presently made manifest. …

His face grew set in care while he considered hers. But she had never turned to him again after that opening look. She seemed quite unconscious of his unceasing quiet regard. …

"Then I shall go for it now," said Saltfleet. Noticeably, however, his voice was more reluctant and questioning, less decisive, than its wont. … "Yet whether it is to end the business, the providence of it knows, not I."

Ingrid asked him:

"Have you been up again?"

"Yes; this afternoon, with Mr. Arsinal. Do you see the signs?"

"It was your doubting of an end so easy. You should be finding it hard to think that any of us can keep off the Tor till a real end comes... not this forced end."

His eyes rested on her. "Mr. Copping, however, for example, keeps off."

"Yes, he does," agreed Ingrid, after a queer silence.

"I very well know how you would both explain such an exception."

"There is no mystery about it," said Peter. "I've work to do in the world; and it lies off the Tor. I hope I possess so much strength of mind as to set my solid goods before my excitements." But Ingrid knew that he spoke to her.

Saltfleet answered him:

"The best of
my
work is mostly behind me, I fear. It's inevitably so, from the nature of my profession—which some would think none at all. Anyway, I've all the more time for the attempted unravelling of this weird affair, that must be needing assistant souls."

"You have the freedom and the strength," returned the girl. "You may go up there again, again, and again; and still defy the bad enclosing the good."

"Who can say! Your unfortunate cousin was just as fit and free."

"He had a presentiment of death."

"You are to leave after the inquest," Peter reminded Saltfleet sharply. "Therefore all this talk of unlimited investigation, and the personal assets necessary to it, is a sheer impertinence, if you will pardon me."

"Very true. If we secure the stone to-day, we are to be off to-morrow."

"Then what your other remark means, I do not know."

Giving a light shrug of helplessness, the other attempted no explanation. Ingrid hesitated, while she turned nervous eyes toward Arsinal.

"Mr. Arsinal. … I wish to ask you. … We are speaking of Devil's Tor. A woman of singular height was anciently buried on top, whose spirit still has power to become visible in the vicinity of her tomb. I have seen her. Who was she?"

An instant look of reticence had come into his face, and his answer was delayed.

"It was to inquire this that you wanted to meet me?"

"I don't know."

Only after another pause Arsinal replied to her question:

"She was not born—not born on earth... but descended from space."

"Was she in the body, or always a phantom?"

"What is body? Who of us can assert that he or she is in the body? ... But also there may be degrees of corporality. According to the degree of one's grossness, one has or has not a body. Neither, because a seeming body is buried in a tomb, is it necessarily there. The New Testament declares no otherwise."

"How are you sure of what you say?"

"I witnessed her first coming this afternoon, from below the hill."

"In what shape was she?"

"In the beginning, as a pillar of light."

Ingrid closed her eyes as if to think—to shut out the company. A quite long silence followed. Peter, smoking still, wandered to the nearer of the two open windows, and gazed abroad. Then Ingrid looked again at Arsinal, and asked him further:

"The Great Mother—I am told you have pursued her myth for many years... also that she is somehow associated with these stones, which is your interest in them. Had she never a personal name or history? Was so little known of her?"

"She had many names, and too full a history of ignorance and distorted tradition. An undoubted name of hers, badly come through, was Ourania... daughter of Ouranos, not Zeus; Plato's inadequate heavenly Aphrodite, distinct from the corrupt Aphrodite of fleshly love and beauty."

"She of the Tor..."

"Is still unrevealed."

"You can go away, and leave your work unfinished?" Arsinal returned no reply.

"Is yours, then, merely a student's interest?" demanded Ingrid.

"No. It began with a revelation by night; and has not grown less through all the years."

"So wouldn't you adventure your life—or anything—to know her more directly?"

"Yes—anything." The emotion in his quiet, simple response was impressive, because obviously against his will. She read in his face that with her, perhaps, he would be more expansive, less afraid of the profanation of these mysteries, but for the presence of the others—of Saltfleet, for some strange rough contempt of different strength; of Peter, for his dry self-exclusion. She did not know how to help him.

"There is a prophecy as well?"

"Of that I would not wish to speak. I have found it preserved in Crete and Asia Minor."

"Dare you have faith in it?"

"I am ignorant how much you have heard; but indeed, it would need a great surrender of the common ways of thought or a facile madness."

"You aren't mad?" None in the room found insolence or absurdity in her question. It seemed to have been introduced, and was unironically put. Arsinal appeared even to consider it before replying.

"I should not be mad. My related ideas should be sufficiently consecutive and logical; what is more to the purpose, they should be grounded. Such satisfaction as I derive from them is neither sterile nor degraded, as I must believe. These should be the assurances of a whole mind."

"So that your faith in the prophecy is such that you have at least had to... doubt yourself? The prophecy is of the transfiguring sort? ... For the single stone, before its fracture, began a new race on earth; and the equal miracle is to follow from the reuniting of the halves. … A wonderful faith, I think, is necessary!"

Arsinal was pale, but collected.

"I shan't aspire to the founding of new races, if only men may be brought back to worship."

"To that you could aspire?"

"Yes. To the living worship of the highest."

"This phantom has been womanly. No shape of sex can present the highest."

"Our eyes cannot see the highest, but only the shapes which are towards the highest. The womanly may be most conspicuously such. … Just as human lips may possess a legion of varied smiles, ranging from heaven to the pit, so the womanly form may express any of an infinitude of essences lying between the two extremes of deity and beast. You say that you have
seen
—in seeing, have you not understood this directly?"

Ingrid bowed her head, while she murmured a reply that should be assentient. Saltfleet interposed:

"Neither may I play the sceptic. You can't pick and choose out of the plain statement of events to come, however; and it is definite about the founding of a people... a race, not a sect—I go by your own reading, Arsinal. Either you must have faith in the whole prophecy, or in none of it. But the practical prodigy nowadays is so grotesquely unthinkable, that merely to examine its possibility must be nearly lunacy. Men are to be brought back to worship. The old spirits and tempers of men are shrivelled—who except the troglodytes can worship to-day?—accordingly, the new type must be created... from a single pair, miraculously informed, I say it for you. And then? The very first purest children of that new type will find themselves already surrounded by a mechanised civilisation, the advantages of which cannot be renounced, so its corruptions likewise must endure. Such a civilisation of decay will resume its old evil work with the earliest visit of the doctor, the earliest paid caresses of the hired nurse. As surely as all waters fall at last into the sea, mankind is doomed to go on descending to the universal mess of vulgarity. No miracle can come before a primary natural operation. … These are some of the facts against your restoration of the divine on earth, Arsinal."

"The refuters have always refuted with their brains," rejoined the other, "but the believers have believed with their hearts and souls; therefore, many a thing declared impossible has come to pass. … The true intention of your speech is not hidden from me, however."

"You may tell it, if you know it."

"Ostensibly addressed to me, it has so evidently been for Miss Fleming's alarming. …" He was to have said more, but thought better of it. Saltfleet's lip faintly curled.

"Persuading her to keep out of eccentric company! I could have found directer arguments. No! it was merely that I fancied the conversation to be drifting from sincerity."