Devil's Tor (63 page)

"I had already explained my attitude," Ingrid rather hurriedly said to Arsinal. "Mr. Saltfleet might have left the room for Devil's Tor without more words at all, and he knows I would not have stopped him."

"He might have done that. Nevertheless, his obstruction was for you and no one else."

"I cannot feel that it was."

"What then?"

She returned no answer. But though her lips were so strangely tranquil again after those last utterances, in her eyes lay an indescribable look of suspended communication, that Arsinal's fineness recognised. He allowed a moment to pass, then went on:

"I have indeed no right to question you about Mr. Saltfleet's motive in saying what he did, nor do I wish to discuss that prophetic record with you; but I suppose what I am really asking you is whether or not you concur in general in his view, that this whole business in all its branches, however extraordinary, however miraculous even, is still to be regarded as necessarily subject to the common known laws of the world?"

"But how can such a contradiction be?"

"So you can rise above that contention?"

"If it were not standing outside the laws we know, we should not be seeing it as a business; it would appear to us a mere fantasia of coincident arrivals, accidents, destructions, unloosed ghosts. … But because we are sure in our hearts of the connection, we have begun to understand—an
activity...
an activity too speaking not to be intelligent... an advancing of some dreadful fate on our group, I am certain. That is what I mean by a contradiction. In astronomy, a total eclipse of the sun can be accurately predicted, according to laws, hundreds of years ahead; but the annihilation of our sun by a dead star, there is no known law for that, and it can't be predicted, but it is fate. It has never happened yet, and so you cannot say what new overwhelming forces will be liberated, to mock the small astronomical brains of those asserting this and that of it..."

"You are not afraid to employ so extravagant a figure?"

"No doubt I am becoming out of all proportion. … But Mr. Saltfleet's logic would be so very blind, if truly it were a product of his brain alone. …"

"Was it less blind because instinctive?" demanded Saltfleet.

Ingrid's eyes moved to him.

"Already your will was weakening, and you must have been fortifying it with those arguments aloud. I felt so. Your refusal of that prophecy, on the ground of the impossibility of its coming true in the modern world... how dull and mechanical, how altogether short of what I've seen and heard of you, it sounded! All your life, I suppose, you have been
pursuing
life—disdaining it for its insufficiency, despising other men for so easily, like animals, taking the world of existence for granted... attacking frightful and forbidding mountains out of sheer ennui... or raiding, without two thoughts, an evil temple for the wager of a little excitement and an unprofitable short triumph, against death or disgrace... and the mightiest, noblest feat of all, on an infinitely higher plane—that you can shrug your shoulder at for impossible! This is why I know it was no more than an obstinacy of your determined will, looking for supports... intended neither for Mr. Arsinal nor for me."

"You mean, I am at once wanting your mother's Devil's Tor meeting, and willing against it?"

"You know that if I had expected to find either of you here this evening, I should not have come. But if the coincidence were to stand out by itself as the one accident during the last days not strange, that would be the very strangest. So perhaps the call is to make a difference. You may all three be needing the meeting; and I may be here—not to change your minds for you, certainly, but to supply a diversion. …"

"What do you advise?" asked Saltfleet, plainly yet quietly.

"I can't advise you—except to listen attentively to yourself... though even that may be superfluous."

"You realise that my will can't be opposing your mother’s plan without a motive?"

"It is to spare me."

"Mr. Copping has already resented my solicitude."

"Peter! ..." He turned round at the low-voiced appeal, but only to prevent what else Ingrid had been to say.

"Do I receive a meed as well? Was
my
vote born of altruism,
contra
height? I take you to affirm that we are all in the same morass!"

At that she rose to take his hand with her fingers, and so remain standing. "Peter, don't be angry; because these matters are too awful. … My eyes are clearer than yours here. You are needing to-morrow more than anyone."

"Odd!"

"I say my eyes are clearer; yet you know it too. If there is to be any sort of ordeal for me, and you care for me, my emergence from it will be the illumination you dare not miss. …"

"You are emphatic."

"I am unhappy."

"Notwithstanding all which, I opine that the public debating of the case here, in this studio, is rather conspicuously undesirable."

He disengaged himself from her touch, and, tossing his unfinished cigarette behind him through the window, began to pace the room in undisguised perturbation. She was right! It was no true ending, that could recommence; it was no solving of a problem, to leave a ragged menace of indistinct advancing abysses. … Her reference to wills
versus
needs was correct also. In swimming, one had to forsake the solid bottom, to surrender oneself to the sea, composed of death; and so now. The bottom, in this affair, was the will's excellent sense; but the sea was all their needs, instincts, horrors. To declare such a sea could be left unswum, ignored the fact that they were in it. …

For Ingrid's powerlessness against this living mystical savagery clothed as enigma—an enigma sprung above ground during a few days, but whose roots went back whole years—to sit patient and motionless through the night of oppression in expectation of a delivering dawn at last, to conceive already that that night in its worst depth of storm and blackness was past, though the morn was not yet visibly appearing—such might be the mode of long optimism in the case of a beloved whose beauty of soul and body should be as her shield: practically, one knew that beyond a determined quantitative strain for each instance, cast iron snapped, trees became uprooted, men reverted, and women suddenly drooped and failed, as under a withering desert blast, to be thereafter like walking catafalques. … Unless there came at once such a quick cessation of this phenomenal tempest as would necessarily make the matters already befallen a travesty of fatality. … No! those years-long roots, this awful up-shooting stem of events risen before their very eyes, and
no flower
!—it was impossible. …

These marvels could still not be outside Nature. The fiends pre-eminent in cruelty of the incomprehensible Omnipotent, expressly loosed on earth to torture those humans set apart for surpassing nightmare punishment, they requisitely were of their employment most skilled in the craft of screw and rack, sensing diabolically the nerves of highest personal anguish in each victim. Thus a third time Ingrid was right! It was no cataclysmal accident of occult chemistry he had to fear for her, since any other would have served for that brief fate; but all her marks were for a tragic life. … Not the ordeal, but her emergence from it. The slow skin-casting agonies of a spiritual metamorphosis. … It was shown. Defensive plans were contrivable, but the day was not yet out; to-morrow was yet to come. Twenty-four hours further down in time—forever Saltfleet—the flints, the Tor—the joining, at every angle of the day, of another evil occult tributary to the already brimming waters! Such factors meant a long, not a short, fate. …

Drowning, and at last (her terror past) laughing, she would then be to carry with her for the rest of the mortal course—as it were some gallery, horrible to her own imagination, of all she had been and was no more—her memories sporadic and memories associated, her habits, tastes, distates, limitations, and fixed person. For none of those could again be hers. The "I" they built up would be dead with her lost life; her new "I" would use them and hate them like the clothes of a stranger. …

He stopped again before her.

"I know very little of needing a meeting. Because my reasons for disliking the idea are only the best of an imperfect brain, must they therefore be unsound? Then where are the perfect brains, that we should carry on with reason in the world at all? A pure flame, you know, may come from dirty straw. … The need is problematic, but I assert the dislike is instinctive, natural, and valid. This even on your own argument. No matter whether what I apprehend from such a meeting be here or there, isn't the natural response to
any
fear—escape? ...

"You yourself are assuming a beautiful impersonality," he added. "I can't remember, though, hearing anything from you of a surrender of preferences. It may simply be that you have the gambler's pride, refusing to act, demanding to be acted for. Forgive me if the reading is wrong, and the word over-hard! Anyway, you seem unconsciously to have loaded the dice against us for your mother. I count on you still, gentlemen. Before you came, Ingrid, we had decided against tomorrow, and since your entering the room the spirit of unsettlement is abroad once more. You will stand aside, but nevertheless wish things in a certain way. … So I think I have the right to ask you this. As all the rest of us are to find our true account on Devil's Tor to-morrow evening—I because
I need
the occasion, and Mr. Saltfleet because it is a fitting feat for him, and Mr. Arsinal because it will be a pity if he fails to lick the pot clean—and because, besides, some other spirit of night inside us all is putting forth a stretching arm towards the Tor, to bring us to it... in view of such considerations, are you, Ingrid, to find
your
account in and at the same rendezvous? Are you—"

"I don't wish to go," she interrupted him.

"You are frightened, or merely disinclined?"

"I am unwilling."

"But then, why have you been talking all the other way? We fixed a thing, and it is as if you have been trying to unfix it. How is it to stand at last?"

"I can’t help you, Peter. … I've always regarded it as my personal hill, so many quiet hours, private moods, sensations I couldn't communicate, I've had there. Any business on it—even this—would seem like a defilement... the troop of twentieth-century persons over that grave! ... Then nothing, perhaps, could reconsecrate it for me, unless another tragedy. … I have promised mother that if she goes, I will; it is in your power to anticipate her—that is your affair, and I can't decide it for you. It may not matter. … That great rock leaping down the hillside, it never stopped till it had caught Hugh. What is to stop this fate but—someone else of us? You are trying to escape it: do you know its path?"

Peter was silenced. After an instant Ingrid turned to Arsinal, who, while she addressed him, rose in courtesy. Then Saltfleet, the last to remain sitting, also got to his feet.

"Mr. Arsinal... that interred one of the Tor—she was buried, so must have seemed to live, perhaps many years... but these apparitions are only for a minute or so. …"

"I know. Yet the inconsistency could so obviously be accounted for. Not to speak of what might still happen, at least it could not
yet
have happened in our time. These phantoms could in no case be more than prelude. The stones remain apart. …"

He continued: "It may indeed be that the fitting them together would—will—effect nothing new; that the first state is irrecoverably lost. That we cannot tell; but there is this too. Even were the inconsistency one of equal conditions, it need still show no inferiority of psychic faculty in us; but the reverse. For the life, or seeming life, of that ghost on earth should have been in the nature of a visitation to thick skulls and animal blood, demanding the persistent presence, whereas we must be supposed to be towards the spiritual. For us, it may be, the endurance in our midst of such an entity would be disruptive of our but comparatively recently erected earthly reason, forcing our instinct towards the light into new channels no longer reason, therefore unfitted to our earthly case. Thus the minute or so should provide us with all we need and
can.
The brutish lives of those others were to be more heavily moulded."

Ingrid's eyes looked away out of her sheet-white face, wondering. After a pause, she asked:

"The worship of the Mother, has it been good?"

"That we may not doubt." His voice grew quieter still. "For how could it be other than good? The marvellous liberating joy of purity—bodily, mental, and of the soul—it must present an incentive to right living and the restraint of evil passions, not less effective than the fears of humanity under the conception of a rigorous eternal justice. Pride, hypocrisy, pharisaism, intolerance—even hatred and cruelty—may and do nest under the harder, harsher creed. Blood enough, at least, has flowed. Purity, however, is a tender growth; it cannot subsist amongst the luxuriant, vicious weeds of the soul, but the ground must be cleared for it. I think it cannot be squared with
any
vices. Then was it ever practised? I have no doubt that innumerable populations of men, women, children, have in their day bent the knee before the Mother, discovering in Her the source of their best. She was easy to be thought real. She is in all Nature."

"Nature, below its tenderness, is terrible."

"Accordingly, the Mother also has been conceived as terrible. And still, the wild, hunting life of the woods, the devastating storm, the eldritch, mocking mountain voices, they have not contradicted purity. That has been reserved for the works of man; but the chief of his works is arbitrary law; and the chief of his laws is that which claims jurisdiction beyond the tomb. There can be
no
law beyond the tomb; there can only be reunion. Purity meanwhile, however, is a partial reunion. … Understand me, when I talk of purity. I don't mean a little matter, but
my
purity—the purity I have in mind—is distinguished and aloof... metaphysical, of the stars... of the big spaces. …"