The Sending (7 page)

‘But no doubt he was getting on fine in this weather. How did he escape?'

‘I often let him loose in my boudoir,' she said, ‘but I always see that the window is shut. And it was shut and I was dreamy and opened it. So silly! I don't know what came over me.'

She explained that she had not had Leyalá very long, but often knew what he was thinking. Her dear godfather had assured her that the bird would take care of her if she would take care of him. Leyalá was just like a grandchild. At that point Sir Victor, embarrassed by the way his Concha was making a gushing fool of herself, got up to go. Both of them warmly invited me to come and see whenever I liked.

Everyone has heard such sentimental silliness from any Lady Pirrone drooling over her Pekinese, her cat or her budgerigar. But I am obsessed by the parallel of the witch trials. She is given a familiar by her Robin, told to take care of it and it will take care of her, and she claims to know what it is thinking. How well it fits! But I am sure that neither of them is a member of a coven, if covens still exist. Sir Victor is a hard-headed businessman believing in nothing much but his own ability and technical progress, and she, I think, would be less gushing about her relationship with Leyalá or more mysterious.

However, she is really in close communion with her pet. She is unaccountably dreamy and opens the window, though she is well aware that Leyalá is in the room. Order from the bird? Nothing supernatural about that if her primitive receptors were open for business. I can receive simple requests from Meg without seeing her eyes or touching her. But how was the familiar used for cursing? I am certain that Paddy never cursed anyone in all his life.

Communication from animal to man is, for me, proved. But what about man to animal? My vixen does not count, for she was partly attracted by food. Sheep dogs do not count, for they obey signals and are trained till they know the game by heart. Leyalá is dubious evidence. He may have just known that I was a friend, which certainly implies some transference of thought, though not hypnosis at a distance or any detailed command.

Tiger brother in some curious way involved an animal spirit in his healing; but so far as I know he never attempted—with one exception—to influence an individual live creature. The witches, according to their confessions, did. They claimed in court—a sane, seventeenth-century court, proceeding with legally acceptable standards of evidence—to be able to curse through the familiar without ever explaining and possibly not understanding what the familiar had to do with it. If the Fear will give me an interval when it is controllable—it was in abeyance during most of the Leyalá incident—I am going to try out my powers in the tradition of a witch.

Among the little paradises of my home is a bullock's paradise: forty acres of emerald grass starting at the wide mouth of a dry valley in the downs where the land changes from short turf only a hand's breadth deep over the chalk to meadows filled by the silt of some prehistoric flood. This rich beef ground was acquired by great-great-grandfather and sold by me to William Hutchins, who has just bought a fine bunch of Angus steers for fattening, strangers to the place and still nervous. Now let us suppose that I was an old wise woman whom Hutchins had turned out of her cottage—he's a good farmer but just the blinkered type of go-getter who wouldn't have hesitated—and suppose I had a bitter grudge against him, then I would make one of his lovely beasts break its leg. Without going so far as that, let us see if it can be done.

June 23

It can. Around four o'clock yesterday afternoon when the sun was at its hottest, a score of beasts were grazing or gathered on the beaten earth under the shade of a big sycamore. I was some fifty yards from them downwind and completely hidden by the hedge. The thorn was thick in its third year from laying and the ditch on the far side was deep. To stop any cattle getting down in the ditch and eating hedge or trying to force a way through, Hutchins had fenced it with three strands of barbed wire to a height of some four feet.

At that distance my glasses showed the colour of the ear tags and some of the numbers. I chose a powerful little beast from the group in the shade with a proud and gentle curly forelock, Red Tag 43, and put the glasses back in their case.

Tiger brother taught me how to surrender to trance. Even in that mild form without the accompanying dance I dislike it. Very different is the holiness of self-hypnosis produced without intention and akin to the mystic vision of unity. However, I used the tiger brother technique, willing the bullock to leave the group and come towards me. Willing is the wrong word; it implies master and servant. It would be truer to say that I surrendered or tried to surrender to the oneness of me and the bullock.

It blew through its nostrils, but that was all. I then took Meg from my pocket, and she at once climbed to the top of my head to see what I was stalking with such intentness. I raised both hands so that my finger tips were in her fur and again transmitted to the bullock. It left the group, slowly and doubtfully walking towards me. Then it began to trot with head lowered, charged the wire, broke it and subsided into the ditch. The rest of the herd straggled after it as if I were the stockman bringing hay, but with a difference in bearing. Their heads were lowered and they appeared more ready to repel than to receive. The unknown beyond the hedge was a danger, not a friend.

I was appalled at what I had done, for the bullock was rushing up and down the ditch unable to find the gap in the wire that it had made and might well break a leg in good earnest. I could not force a way through the hedge so I showed myself and followed it, quietly talking. That calmed it down. It did not connect me at all with the summons which its receptors had answered; I had become a well-meaning, everyday human being. With the aid of a long stick and an occasional poke through the hedge I guided it back and out through the gap in the wire.

I can draw some tentative conclusions from the experiment. As an analogy it may be helpful to think of the familiar as a transformer station, one of the little red brick huts one sees outside villages to reduce the voltage, though it is not voltage which needs transforming. The bullock can hardly receive me on the human wavelength, but can receive when it is modified by Meg.

A second conclusion is most curious and unexpected. It was Red Tag 39, not the intended 43, which came to me. This indicates that even at close range the target cannot be identified with certainty when it is nameless or not conscious of any name. The simplest form of witch's curse may therefore be in the nature of a broadcast.

The aggression of the beast I can only explain by the assumption that it felt the signal received was ‘evil', which I may perhaps define as deliberate abuse of love. There is a faint parallel with my own bouts of terror, but I cannot believe that I, like the bullock, am being ‘cursed'.

June 24

This evening Gargary dropped in on a casual visit to see how I was. He told me that he had been refreshing his memory of Jung but could not really understand him and was left wondering if such a thing as perfect mental health existed. If it did, he thought, it would exclude so much on the borderline that little individuality would remain; so nobody—meaning me—should be worried at divergence from the norm. Should accept it with pride, I suppose! Very questionable advice for the insane. But sane I am, though a haunted, hunted beast.

I guessed that he had not just called to comfort me with Jung and wondered who had been talking to him about me. It turned out to be Sir Victor who had treated him to the macaw story while Gargary was attending to a small boil which spoilt the beauty of his undeniably noble Italian forehead.

‘How did you do it?' he asked.

‘A silent call,' I replied, ‘like the dog whistle that human ears cannot hear.'

He reminded me of myself questioning tiger brother. If I pressed him too hard he became incoherent and frantic, having no words to explain what intuitively he knew. But an amateur such as I am knows so little; he can only accept. It may be that the ancestral Robins also found difficulty in defining and, like the court, fell back on Satan for explanations.

‘But not carried by sound waves?'

‘No.'

‘And conscious?'

‘If you mean: do I have a repeatable technique, again no.'

‘I thought not. But surely the collective unconscious doesn't include animals?'

‘What else are we? Didn't you do a course of biology?'

‘You make no allowance for the human brain, Alf.'

‘I certainly do. It has to be switched off.'

‘Not concentrated and directed as in hypnosis?'

I avoided the question and asked him what doctors thought about hypnosis.

‘A fact and a useful aid,' he answered, ‘but medical science cannot come near describing the mechanism. It's obviously connected with telepathy, yet it's the fashion to deny there is such a thing though any general practitioner can give a dozen instances of it.'

He asked me if my anxiety neurosis was wearing off. I told him that there seemed to be more lucid intervals but that when I was haunted it was worse than ever.

‘You are sure that it can have nothing to do with Paddy's Meg?'

‘You asked me that before. Nothing. Meg gives me joy when I'm capable of having any. And it's her close companionship which helps in—well, whatever I did to the macaw.'

I did not mention the bullock or my ancestry or witch trials. He was honestly trying to feel his way without any medical signposts, and I did not want to provoke a reaction of disbelief which would interrupt his line of thought.

‘Don't take this seriously,' he said, ‘but it occurs to me that if you can send a signal by your dog whistle which isn't, you should also be able to receive.'

‘I can from Meg and possibly I could from any other intimate pet, but not otherwise.'

‘When you came to me in such distress, you had a theory that your fear had something in common with the sixth sense of an animal—or man if it comes to that—which warns that deadly danger is very close. I suggest that you are receiving more than you are aware of. And the sixth sense warning is exactly and literally what you are receiving.'

‘But that implies a sender.'

So simple a statement, yet it brought the cloud into the room and I leaped from my chair upsetting our drinks. I could almost hear Him or It crying: ‘Ha! ha! So now you know!' It was the absurdity of that, the over-dramatisation of a nothing, which made me sit down again, trembling but managing to control the incontinence of bladder and mind.

Gargary was splendid.

‘Well done! You're as sane as I am, Alf, and the hell of a lot braver. Yes, it does imply a sender. Let's accept that, but what about it? It's not a bogeyman out of a nightmare. It's a temporary illness. And, you being you, you might have caught it off the collective fear of a rabbit warren. One or more of the community must always be in danger.'

Ingenious and perhaps just possible. Ever since his remark I have been searching past and present life for the transmitter, but have not hit on anything. Distance rules out the Birhors, and in any case no signal from my brother could ever produce terror.

Gargary shifted his ground to the effects of sexual deprivation, reminding me that chastity in religious fanatics traditionally led to hallucinations. Did I wish to discuss the matter? I did not. That's my own business. I am not chaste from choice.

I wish I were a Robin of old days and Rita the maid of my coven. The meetings seem to have been so simple and merry. In some secure and utterly deserted site—harder to find today—a feast of meat and drink was provided by the Robin and laid out on a white cloth. After a prayer to some manifestation of the Purpose, he comforted and helped any in trouble. Orgies? Somewhat exaggerated, I suspect, by envious villagers, but it is likely that there was mating in the summer dusk. I can imagine my studious Rita galloping on her broomstick like a child, pretending she flew and perhaps believing it under the influence of my elixir of aconite and belladonna. But if on the holiest days I put on my hide and horns and tail I should be disqualified. I could not present the wreathed and formidable instrument of fertility.

Deservedly incapable! When I married my girl of liquid topaz, my nymph of the Godivari twining herself about me as if I, poor, passionate, human wretch, were Krishna and she the milkmaid Radha, I should have remembered day and night that she was little more than a child and weak from old fever. I did not remember till that dawn, two weeks after our marriage, when I woke to find her dead.

Among the Birhors my medical adviser—long before he admitted me to brotherhood—was both puzzled by my impotence and compassionate. Neither his drugs nor his incantations had any effect. Also I could not and would not dance myself to exhaustion—one of the few remaining inhibitions of my urban self—and allow him to exorcise the larval spirit which, he assured me, had taken up residence in my body. He was right. I was indeed possessed, first by uncontrollable sorrow mixed with guilt, then by my determination to lose myself in the far origins of all religion and to symbolise them in art.

Tiger brother dismissed as unintelligible my more formal landscapes with the same scorn that an art critic would dismiss the picture postcard; but when I had been inspired to shadow obscurely the true spirit of the mountain jungle and the holiness of life in plant and animal, he would see at once what I was after and exclaim that it was the truth. So he came to respect my larval inhabitant, saying that I must be patient until its metamorphosis, when I would be possessed by the splendour of the butterfly. In fact he was aware as any monk of the spiritual force of chastity. Damn Gargary and his hallucinations! Would he call the mystic vision hallucination? My brother did not. He perceived that there was power in reserve.

Power in reserve! Yes, in a past self perhaps, but not this present. I have nothing in reserve.