Devil's Tor (71 page)

The male with the axe danced by himself towards the monument, throwing up his arms as though beseeching it: or perhaps he banned the hateful, the invaders of its sacredness. He should be declaiming or chanting, but the roar of the waters carried off his voice. Then, not pausing, he vanished into the dusk, round the pile and past it.

They waited; while time seemed to have no meaning. When he reappeared, it was in another quarter and his axe was gone. He was unbloody—Ingrid knew not what had happened. The old chief went forward to encounter him. They conferred apart.

Once more the chief stood alone, while the beings with seashells sounded a mad chord. He, as the other had done, lifted high both arms to the memorial; then, higher yet, to the overhead sky. … He thrust the broad spade-like point of his spear deep into a cranny of soft soil: instantly following the action in shocking surprise by casting himself headlong on the ground, face-downwards. His frame seemed to heave with terrible sobs. His daughter stood near, looking away, not weeping.

He rose awkwardly. The daughter and he of the mace approached at his beckoning. The chief gave her the thing he had held in his constantly-closed left hand. Her eyes shut as in pain while she received it. Afterwards Ingrid was to know what it had been, but now she saw it not.

A miracle came without warning. For gradually the female's bare skin, wherever it showed, became suffused with a silvery brightness, that was like the light of a lamp, or moon, triumphing through the torchlight: and at the same time her countenance grew spiritually transfigured to a beauty of angelhood: yet the beauty was always moving, either in increasing or, immediately afterwards, fading. … Ingrid could not gain the full impression for her thoughts gathered round it. She was trying—dimly, unsuccessfully, not with her whole mind—to recall under what circumstances she had sometimes seen such a brightness and transcendence before. … But while she still conjured the past of another order of reality, the phantom filling her eyes shed that impossible glory, becoming, how swiftly! her earthy self again. …

The old chief gripped the wrist, the free wrist, of him with the mace, forcing down his hand to clasp his daughter's fore-arm. She seemed to shiver, yet offered no resistance. The old one, however, should be made aware of an aversion in her, for, heavily bending his great brows, he well-nigh set a pointing finger on a region of her body. Then Ingrid knew two things at once—that this young phantasm was to be a mother, and that her right protector was departed from her. …

Meanwhile the chief, scowling, had jerked the upright spear out of the ground. Obediently to his sign a male creature advanced, and their two mouths worked alternately in inaudibility. The superior seemed to command something that the other endeavoured to evade. Suddenly and abominably—yet as so unreal it swept past Ingrid's consciousness—the elder brought up his weapon with a curiously swift twist, ran hard and fast at that brute-man, and fairly broke through his chest with its frightful death-point, instantaneously loosing a fountain of dark blood. The victim gazed at him steadily, until abruptly he sank, to continue lying crumpled on the earth. …

The killer crooked his finger to another, who so reluctantly approached that the whole of a minute seemed to pass before they stood opposed. Then again the old one's mouth went uncouthly through the visible motions of speech: but the second stayed cowed and dumb. The chief glared at him, turned away, and swung back, to proffer his blood-wet spear by its shaft, which the inferior at last took. The cantor who had borne the axe joined them, seeming to make sounds of exhortation or ceremonial instruction. Thereupon the tribal creature stuffed the spear tightly under his armpit; then waited.

The old chief clasped his daughter. … And Ingrid had the surety that here was an eternal farewell—since better they could not dream of... yet where
now
were these two, who upon a time had so wept upon each other? ... All the scene was true and false—half was it like life, half like the fearfullest of spectral plays. … The sea-shells blew again.

The commanded one gripped his spear in such a manner that the ugly, darkened breadth of its stone death lay right before him on the level of his breast, his hands being wide apart upon its shaft. With a wild, monstrous cry, that Ingrid heard, he announced his readiness, or valediction, or protesting grief and horror. The old chief, his head bent, strode from him towards the monument, between those ranks of unmoving shades that watched him. There, a dozen long paces from the other, he stopped and turned again to face him. So he stood stock-still awhile; but he with the spear now eyed him with a gloomy fixity. …

She saw a heavy body hurtle across the intervening space it... towards that senseless waiting spear—... oh, right upon it!...

But while the suicide, all bloody and still, lay unattended yet upon the ground, he who had been joined to the female tried suddenly to snatch from her closed hand the thing she had been given. And at the first her eyes flamed and it seemed she would have resisted; but whether she feared him, or realised that he was the stronger and must have his way, or thought the use to her of the object not worth the struggle for it, almost at once she allowed her fingers to be opened, and what was under them to be removed. Then Ingrid beheld a small, black stone, like the broken half of a rounded pebble. The appropriator, the excitement of quick victory on his face, was holding it up to a torch for examination. …

An appalling sound, as from the destruction of all Nature, out-thundered the roaring of the torrent. Ingrid shot a terrified eye across the emptiness that was the valley, in time to witness vast masses of precipice descending in smoke. The mountains were cracking... and simultaneously the dusk began to change to day. For this very cataclysm it had been waiting ominously. … The entire top of the height she was on swayed, as though it were a tidal stage. …

She,
that spirit,
came, standing as a moon among all those savage shapes of darkness, who seemed unaware of such a presence. Now was She remembered by Ingrid. She stood, a pillar, beside the female, facing, with indistinguishable eyes and low crossed arms, the despoiler of her father's gift. Nearly at once the creature moving with the mountain, staggered, regained his poise violently, again staggered, this time irrecoverably, and fell, crashing his skull against a ground protuberance of rock. He never rose.

The female, disregarding and disregarded by all those rushing, screaming shades, went to bend over him. Quickly she abandoned him, next to search, crouching, the ground around his lying form: and presently she appeared to find the stone. … The daylight strengthened until the torches had become pale and useless. Phantoms threw them down. A ghostly shower of rain descended, that could not wet Ingrid. The dust from the land destruction mingled with the heavy raindrops to create an atmosphere of grease and grime and smoke; while she alone, unsullied, need know no panic, as that mighty mountain opposite continued to lose its cliffs and prominences. …

The spirit was gone. … The face of the chiefs daughter was ashen and drawn. She pressed her hand hard upon herself below the bosom, then slowly steered a way towards the hill's margin, remotest from that falling world. None stayed to notice her, nor did she seem to desire company for her journey, which perhaps was to be as long as the endurance of her hatred of these scenes. …

She was the last of Ingrid's vision. The grey daylight returned, as by the slow waving of a wand, to the weird clouds and colours of this hideous postponed evening of fate. … Dazed, shocked to her roots, she sat on within the two existences. She could not think. She understood that there would be no time for thinking. … Her heavy eyes, seeking an escape, fell startled on Saltfleet's erect form standing a little from her, while he no doubt awaited her emergence from her ended state.

The phantom woman had come to Peter Copping at once. Hardly had Ingrid taken the flint into her hand when the moonlike shape stood between himself and the torn bed of the ancient stack, in the full awfulness of her height and beauty, facing him, but a dozen yards away. He had not seen her before. …

Not till moments had passed did his heart stop. Even then was his horror of the flesh rather than the imagination. He was able to reason against unreason, assuring himself that such an illusion must have an adequate explanation in optical laws, or else be pure hallucination, in which case it
was not.
His flesh, of older wisdom, continued to know that this unnatural adversary was not of life, therefore must be of death: threatening the kingdom of death. … And no frowning, skilled contemplation of that shining could resolve for him whence it came, unless from a source of light unknown to painters. The sky colours were nearly obliterated by it—at least he saw them not, but only
her.

That spectral funeral had been of another order: to it he could equalise himself. But this bright, still ghost was like the end of a beam from heaven... translated by his paucity of images into the presentment of a woman, because he was acquainted with nothing lovelier.

The notion, as still he dared to lower his lids at her, began to exalt him. So that she need not be a woman at all! For if she were one, then her face's curves and organs, her duplicated limbs, her milk-breasts, were a legacy from the first mammals, she had been framed to bear and nourish young, and never could her beauty exceed the bounds of her skeleton within. Moreover, if ever she had truly walked the earth, she should herself once have been a helpless sucking infant, and obeyed her childish vanities and passions through life; and died—the final act sealing the imperfection of her nature. … And
thus
her dreadful gleaming beauty could stand for no Platonic ideal; but she was merely here before him, the dim record of one who had been very beautiful. The better alternative, however, was that he was not seeing truly. It was in him that this face and form were but symbolic: that his eyes were beholding something very much nearer than shaped womankind to God. …

How could her lunar luminosity be unmeaning? It was of the colour of light reflected from a distance. So might not whatever in him projected her to his eyesight be as profound in his soul as, for instance, the moon was far from the sun? But his eyesight would represent the earth. …

Accordingly, while every revolted fibre of his physical nature shrank from the contiguity, his spiritual logic went on solidifying to the conviction that she, just as she appeared, could be no more and no less than the terminus of his mortal capacity for receiving a beauty greater than any of the world; a beauty prior to the world's faded examples of beauty put to use. … Thereupon overcame him a strange calm and careless blessedness during his agreement to such a limitation of his faculties, for the inaccessibility concerned only his wretched four-limbed self, whereas now the assurance could shine to his art that the Ideal was an entity: no mere high-sounding name for the giving and enjoying of the largest æsthetic pleasure.

And while this confrontation in its supernatural intensity could not last, nor the full exploration of its meanings come till too late to him by reason of the perpetual imminence of its vanishing, already he was informed that he was to emerge a metamorphosed man for its simple experience and memory. Ever more tranquil became his face as with open, glowing eyes he forgot boldness in absorbing what of her pale radiance might yet be permitted him. She was priming him with a grandeur to suffice him all his days. Even now a great general stir and whispering of vital ideas seemed to work in him like the awakening of irresistible spring. …

She drew closer, in a gliding that was unlike any woman's tread. The silver of her flesh burned with a peculiar fire, suggesting neither heat nor flaming: suggesting only his own crass ignorance of all matters outside his little house of the world. … Then, when her advance must have ceased, she appeared much distincter and tall beyond credence... yet his eyes were no higher raised to her, so that the distance was still unreal, still mystical, as it had always been. Her arms hung straight against her sides relaxed: her draperies should be appropriate to the dead.

Her eyes would not acknowledge the intension of his, yet so mildly she looked—not at him, not from him—in an undimensional direction impossible to determine or understand—that the involuntary shuddering of his frame as well subsided at last.

The inspiration that falsely he saw her as a woman—now it led quickly to another. Not without reason could that falsification be. The womanliness of the image must have a source. Rightly it was impossible she should be a woman: yet that which so presented itself to his sight must needs be of the womanly kind.

Her eyes—for thus mysteriously his could meet them without being met—were dark, swelling seas of feelings such as he had never felt. Their sense exceeded him. Only their chaining was bringing what occasionally in his life the quietly sympathetic eyes of the best, the purest women had brought—coolness, friendliness, repose, the perfect encounter, the cessation of all willing, that was like timeless heaven itself. On such occasions, when every factitious excitement of his spirit had been laid, its native soaring could begin. But never had any man so stilled him. Therefore this ghost was of women... of
women
: not of the one woman whose shape it feigned.

And still the quality of the quieting was different. He received the analogy that the sympathetic loving looks of women resembled the isolating yellow rays of feeble candles, to light his soul into beauty against an outside world of contrasted darkness: whereas from these miraculous eyes sprang an illustration nowise less than that of a sun, to cast the world itself into a flood of beauty. … In
this
serenity his egoism, that was the eternal enemy of beauty, might not exist.

His certainty of the womanliness was underived from her mammalian form, but was coming to him through her eyes. Yet there was a distinction felt by his intuition—he tried to clothe it in a thought. The emission from these eyes was not softly regarding like a woman's: it was soft and enriching... arriving from the vast and distant—passionate without the descent to persons... the definition failed. … Her womanliness was not in lack of sex: sex was a curtailment and limitation, and degradation. The emission was something of women, not men—softness, mercy, emotion—yet the instinctive lasciviousness and allurement even of good women, though in them repressed—their absence was like a presence of original essence, mighty past bonds and boundaries.