Devil's Tor (64 page)

"I do understand you."

"These are modern notions, you may object; they cannot have been in the past. At least, they can have been latent in the past. The noblest of those worshippers have not been concerned solely with propitiatory sacrifices. The history of the creed's fortunes shows no such chronicle as the Christian crusading wars, wars of conversion, sect wars, political wars, inquisitions, burnings, torturings, excommunications, confiscations, and the like... no such constant and inevitable process as the Christian public professions of faith, differences in faith, then argument, insistence, anger, blood, destruction... but the religion of the Mother has evidently gone for other tokens of reverence. She has not been tribal, but universal; so could not need the testimony of numbers. In purity—that purity reaching even to the stars—was no personal merit, equipping one to act as persecutor, warrior, and judge; but a state of soul—a state introductory of heaven, not with impunity to be exchanged. …''

"If Christ has been unable to purify human nature," said Peter, "I fail to see how a woman-god should do it."

Arsinal paused "Christ!—always Christ! ... And therefore, being so perpetually invoked, should He be more ancient and rooted than the tale goes. In fact, so many faiths, schools, traditions, predictions, philosophies, and risen floods of thought and feeling, have gone towards His making, that ever is He likely to remain the world's grand anomaly; unless a finer enlightenment shall hereafter come to prevail. …

"But His best was already in the Mother—that we may say at once. … And a proof of the assertion will appeal to you, Mr. Copping, an artist: His face has never been portrayed, because it could not be. The attempted paintings of the adult Christ—they have not contented anyone: lachrymose, cadaverous,
undivine,
they have been on a parity with His whole impossibility. For two genders have had to be reconciled within His person; and each has had to be absolute: the man and male god, the law-dispenser, stern, rigid, awful; but also the womanly spring of that love, compassion and purity, that only in the female nature seem to be original; in males, derived—an act of will, an effort. … This we feel. And so I say that that special spirituality of Christ, deemed new, was not rightfully His—whosoever He may have been, whencesoever come ... but was first of all, in far greater strength and brightness, in Her whom we call the ancient Mother. …"

While Peter stood looking at him in unpleasant pondering, an invisible flurry, not of the air but somehow in or through it, seemed to cross the studio, causing all the four there involuntarily to stir, and shift their eyes; but nothing was moving, or different, Peter's surprised first conception was that it had been a bird outside flying across the window. Arsinal glanced to the door. Saltfleet fingered his chin, and was silent... they were all silent, however. Was it that the impression for everyone was so insignificant, so transient and unconnected, that it was not found of sufficient moment to mention?—or was no one, perhaps, caring to start this new superfluous wonder? ... Ingrid appeared to shrink within herself, not looking towards the others; seemingly, not choosing to be informed if that sense-deceit had been hers alone or general. She closed her eyes once, while a vertical cleft of pain divided her brows. …

The silence became accepted. Its excuse was the natural conclusion of Arsinal's topic, the interval for the subsidence of his interrupting idea, before they might return to a clearing discussion of what was to be done. But each was knowing the others' quietness for a respite. That agitating trifle, nearly too shadowy to be presented in words—its truer strangeness for all was only dawning with its recession in time. It did not stand alone, to be called a fanciful nothing, but surely had its congeners among their few or many other phantoms and fearful messages. … That some of those had broken through to full consciousness, while this had no more than been the waving of a veil, took not from its awe—an awe built up, besides, of all the rest; but enhanced by this. The right awe (all received it, for it was instinctive) consisted not in the focused spectacle, but in what lay behind and was acting. Very enormous to their imaginations began to appear the night-world's force, thus able to bend and sway the solid crust of the empire of day, as it were unreal smoke or fog! ...

Quickly Saltfleet's mind had reverted to his last night's visitant at the inn. This perhaps should be a repetition—failed, because of more unfavourable conditions for the appearance. There were conflicting wills in the room, a confusion of persons; and it was daylight still, instead of that deep suggestive dusk; and no one was handling the stone, but it was in Arsinal's pocket. …

Above the Tor's stream that short time since, again, the wraith had been most perfect, because at home. The three cases (if this were one) were as if representing its merging into pure meaning at one end of the scale, its merging into nonentity at the other end, and the spectral middle. The same operative will was trying to get through. Here, in this place, there should be a thicker crust to be pierced.

But
who
the wraith was, the other Tor visions showed: his own of the morning, and what he was able to understand of Arsinal's and Copping's. She was from the sky. Her phenomenal earth-existence had been thousands upon thousands of years back, when men were beast-fighting savages. Strange if she had not been as a goddess! In truth, she could never have been anything half so elementary; but was always the terminal shape of a supernatural stream issuing from another sort of reality. …

So this stream was now again striving to enter what he viewed as the room; perhaps mainly prohibited by Copping's antagonism. … Particularly he was bewildered—with the bewilderment of a resolute man unused to the state, and impatient of it—by that swift, savage, fancied turning of the phantom's eyes and face, at the extreme last of his afternoon overtaking
yonder
; even while she had been in the silent act of emptying the landscape of her significance; so quite incongruous it had seemed with all that had gone before. Savage, yet not hostile; but more in the nature of the fierce incitement of an essence grand and disdainful enough to include fierceness as well.

For there Arsinal was right. Every important passion or feeling of the world should be a derivative of a higher thing of the same kind in the supermundane whole. Love, pity, sacrifice, etc., were such derivatives; but whereas in a male saviour, a Christ, the fiercer temper must be put under before the milder could rule, a supernal female essence must be conceived to include within the confines of her nature wrath, cruelty, passion, love, sacrifice, at once. There was no right inconsistency in it. What necessarily became a vice when incorporated in the self of an individual woman, could well remain an energy and sublime scourge in that terrific Unself, the great chastening Mother of spirits, men, and all Nature. In this sense, the savageness of such an Entity
was
love.

If man were no more than mite, crawling on the surface of an astronomical ball, then the answer to fear should be prayer; to corruption, regeneration by the grace of heaven, by means of the symbols, types, and agents of heaven; to the passions, a spiritual emasculation, instructed by the example of the long, line of Christian eunuchs. Should he recognise himself, however, for an original soul, doomed for a few fleeting years in all time—what time stood for—to suffer the million degradations of the corporal condition: then those answers to baseness were another baseness; he was on the wrong road. For the salvation of a personality was the accepting of that personality as a thing undisputed. Ten thousand mystics, sages, metaphysicians, might so have accepted it, and still personality was not the soul, but merely a bundle of earth-characters, stamped with the stamp of alien possession.

The soul was the highest; nothing was higher; therefore, to whom should it pray? Being elemental and above corruption, how could it be regenerated? Being compound of sublime passion, how could a factitious peace of heart assist or represent it? ...

Accordingly, he must first of all break from his ignorant preconceptions of the world: the Christian myth that, in the divine, love and mildness were synonyms; and the universal superstition that the soul's function was to serve, fear, and imitate the divine, its source and spring. Here, in this big confusion and wonder advancing on him, and not him alone, with giant strides, a
passion
should be to be faced by passion; an attempted coercing of his equal soul by a miraculous manifestation, apparently of the divine, was to be stripped of its rapture and amazement, and examined, so stripped, for its accredited passionate message of eternity, that alone his own inmost spirit could receive as an authentic sign between peers. …

Nevertheless, how to account for that spectral shape of a woman, who had descended from the heavens, lived, died, and been buried; and now, after whole ages, could show herself abroad again? Either her sex was illusion, or she was but a secondary agent. For creation truly held many a token of female origin, yet the male marks were on it too: grandeur, force, vigour, boldness, lordship. Thus already Arsinal was imperfectly informed. But if, in fact, this tomb spirit could somehow be presentative of the All before sex, what meant her constant sex for every witness? ...

A dark wave of exploit suddenly crossed him as he apprehended what now he must do in order to reach the apparition's
penetralia,
to uncover its mystic heart and errand. He stood stopped before the outer gate. Some miserable flaw of his psychophysical manhood was knowing the phenomenal contact under that female form; beyond must be surprises. By
beyond
he meant, along a certain road: that of the bringing together of the two flints, in the fittest place. Thus it was essential that Arsinal should conduct his trial, on Devil's Tor; in
his
company. The adventure might be accomplished within the hour. This, indeed, since Copping's proposal to them, both must have intended; but only now the wonder of the experiment was opened out. …

For, till it was achieved, he no doubt might procure new hauntings by the medium of either stone alone, but these could only continue the simple spectacle—deceitful, idle. Among the torn and thunderous titan-heights of Asia no man knew better than himself, never had he worshipped undangerously with his eyes but he had felt the ardour to follow audaciously with his body that might be destroyed or broken—perhaps deserved no greater dignity. The yearning was sublimity, but on the upper snows and crests themselves the sublimity had always vanished, to be replaced by freedom. So sublimity should not represent a natural state of the soul, but be, as it were, its homesickness. This he applied: and fancied that the reuniting of the stones might—but how, he knew not—be fated to bring him the same emancipation. …

Mentally he set the impress of his fingers upon it for a decision—well he could recognise his own irrevocable decisions, from their attendant dark glow of triumph, with the rapid clearance of his brain from its preliminary vexations, thought-litter, and suspense. When, however, his constant awareness of this one removed woman in the room amongst men caused him again to remember her case, unsettlement once more began. The plan, indeed, was to avoid her risk, and she might doubt its adequacy and fear its refusal of fate, yet was not to forbid it; but a disquietude of his conscience predicted that the weird drama was not to swerve so abruptly from her upon the word of human command.

For she chiefly should be involved in everything, while this was to dispossess her of her rank, for her safety or their haste of greed. But if their paths were thus made to diverge, who could say whether she or they would come earliest to the catastrophe! Who was equipped: he, that perhaps merely looked to the sensation; or she, that was oppressed by these accidents and presentiments as by a horror of real life? His eternal nonchalance was rebuked by the contrast.

Nothing in the world, he had thought, was serious enough for seriousness, were not laughter worse; but
her
seriousness could belong to the spheres. His chastisement at the hands of the offended Demiurge was that he might barely appreciate from her present instance how, in that unphilosophic grim heaviness of opinion called seriousness in general, which was humanity's response to its living forest of illusions, the function itself could be quite apart and separate from its misuse; how, if the latter were nearly the most pitiable of the reactions of the original universal spirit shattered into individuals, the former, the function apart from its objects, could be the whole grand weight, density, mass, of the same spirit considered in its originality. For all the past gleams of greatness in the world had been born, not of a light scorn and mocking, but of brooding—of a sort of sick despair at what a man had seen, and his will to change it, or rise above it.

So this girl in the room should be despairing, though her misery were personal. No orthodox feminine end was in sight for her from these crowding distresses, nor had she a man's compensating temper of adventure, or cold blood to turn a resolute back upon it all, or affinity of pre-existent occupation to draw a profit from it; but she must marshal her resources to dare the whole psychic onset in pain and stupefaction, being unconscious of any folly in her own conduct to explain so otherwise unprovoked a benighting of her wits—of her tranquil common mental processes of a woman... she, scarcely more than child, tortured and blessed by a special sensitiveness that surely ought to be reserved for the discovering of new chambers in the great house of mysterious spiritual beauty; and now, instead, was sustaining the hammer-like shocks of an affair of the open supernatural, that should be well-fitted to strike down the human equivalent of oxen. … Therefore she had the right to seriousness. Therefore he, who probably had none, was subaltern in the case; yet was impudently proposing to order it! ...

No seriousness? None?—no kind? That was to traduce himself, however. Of the right seriousness he had enough. For there was exactly one seriousness, one grimness of response to reality, for an earthbound man; namely, that of the chains of the body. Very clearly it showed itself in the circumstance that all other matters in the world gave place to birth and death. In the appearing and vanishing of the spark of life lay the contrast with eternity for even the dullest eyes. And this deep cognition of his false mortal state and its transience, he was never, or rarely, without. His lightness was his scorn of the affairs of such a shadow-penitentiary. …