Lilith: A Romance

by George MacDonald

  CHAPTER III. THE RAVEN

  I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as whenone cannot distinguish between fog and field, between cloud andmountain-side. One fact only was plain--that I saw nothing I knew.Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that touch wouldcorrect sight, I stretched my arms and felt about me, walking in thisdirection and that, if haply, where I could see nothing, I might yetcome in contact with something; but my search was vain. Instinctivelythen, as to the only living thing near me, I turned to the raven,which stood a little way off, regarding me with an expression at oncerespectful and quizzical. Then the absurdity of seeking counsel fromsuch a one struck me, and I turned again, overwhelmed with bewilderment,not unmingled with fear. Had I wandered into a region where both thematerial and psychical relations of our world had ceased to hold? Mighta man at any moment step beyond the realm of order, and become the sportof the lawless? Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, andheard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me!

  "How DID I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question wasimmediately answered.

  "You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice.

  I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape. The terrorthat madness might be at hand laid hold upon me: must I henceforth placeno confidence either in my senses or my consciousness? The same instantI knew it was the raven that had spoken, for he stood looking up at mewith an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed tocast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself.

  I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour to make myselfintelligible--if here understanding be indeed possible between us. I wasin a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of conditions, anidea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and modes ofthis world--which we are apt to think the only world, that the bestchoice I can make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of whatI would convey. I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken animpossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speechat my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set downstatements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truerutterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, Ifind myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like onein process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiargradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until itsvery nature is no longer recognisable.

  I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have theright of a man to a civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a greaterclaim.

  A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but hisvoice was not disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying littleenlightenment, did not sound rude.

  "I did not come through any door," I rejoined.

  "I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!" assertedthe raven, positively but not disrespectfully.

  "I never saw any door!" I persisted.

  "Of course not!" he returned; "all the doors you had yet seen--and youhaven't seen many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out! Thestrange thing to you," he went on thoughtfully, "will be, that the moredoors you go out of, the farther you get in!"

  "Oblige me by telling me where I am."

  "That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way tocome to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."

  "How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?"

  "By doing something."

  "What?"

  "Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are athome, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get in."

  "I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I shallnot try again!"

  "You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether youhave got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen."

  "Do you never go out, sir?"

  "When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is sucha half-baked sort of place, it is at once so childish and soself-satisfied--in fact, it is not sufficiently developed for an oldraven--at your service!"

  "Am I wrong, then, in presuming that a man is superior to a bird?"

  "That is as it may be. We do not waste our intellects in generalising,but take man or bird as we find him.--I think it is now my turn to askyou a question!"

  "You have the best of rights," I replied, "in the fact that you CAN doso!"

  "Well answered!" he rejoined. "Tell me, then, who you are--if you happento know."

  "How should I help knowing? I am myself, and must know!"

  "If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else;but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your ownfather?--or, excuse me, your own fool?--Who are you, pray?"

  I became at once aware that I could give him no notion of who I was.Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who! Then Iunderstood that I did not know myself, did not know what I was, had nogrounds on which to determine that I was one and not another. As for thename I went by in my own world, I had forgotten it, and did not care torecall it, for it meant nothing, and what it might be was plainly ofno consequence here. I had indeed almost forgotten that there it was acustom for everybody to have a name! So I held my peace, and it was mywisdom; for what should I say to a creature such as this raven, who sawthrough accident into entity?

  "Look at me," he said, "and tell me who I am."

  As he spoke, he turned his back, and instantly I knew him. He was nolonger a raven, but a man above the middle height with a stoop, verythin, and wearing a long black tail-coat. Again he turned, and I saw hima raven.

  "I have seen you before, sir," I said, feeling foolish rather thansurprised.

  "How can you say so from seeing me behind?" he rejoined. "Did you eversee yourself behind? You have never seen yourself at all!--Tell me now,then, who I am."

  "I humbly beg your pardon," I answered: "I believe you were once thelibrarian of our house, but more WHO I do not know."

  "Why do you beg my pardon?"

  "Because I took you for a raven," I said--seeing him before me asplainly a raven as bird or man could look.

  "You did me no wrong," he returned. "Calling me a raven, or thinking meone, you allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one candemand of his fellow-beings. Therefore, in return, I will give you alesson:--No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he IS,and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself isnobody. There is more in it than you can see now, but not more than youneed to see. You have, I fear, got into this region too soon, but nonethe less you must get to be at home in it; for home, as you may ormay not know, is the only place where you can go out and in. There areplaces you can go into, and places you can go out of; but the one place,if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home."

  He turned to walk away, and again I saw the librarian. He did not appearto have changed, only to have taken up his shadow. I know this seemsnonsense, but I cannot help it.

  I gazed after him until I saw him no more; but whether distance hid him,or he disappeared among the heather, I cannot tell.

  Could it be that I was dead, I thought, and did not know it? Was I inwhat we used to call the world beyond the grave? and must I wander aboutseeking my place in it? How was I to find myself at home? The ravensaid I must do something: what could I do here?--And would that make mesomebody? for now, alas, I was nobody!

  I took the way Mr. Raven had gone, and went slowly after him. PresentlyI saw a wood of tall slender pine-trees, and turned toward it. The odourof it met me on my way, and I made haste to bury myself in it.

  Plunged at length in its twilight glooms, I spied before me somethingwith a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour,but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in aradiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smittenchords
of a musical instrument. What it was grew no plainer as I wentnearer, and when I came close up, I ceased to see it, only the formand colour of the trees beyond seemed strangely uncertain. I would havepassed between the stems, but received a slight shock, stumbled,and fell. When I rose, I saw before me the wooden wall of the garretchamber. I turned, and there was the mirror, on whose top the blackeagle seemed but that moment to have perched.

  Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garretspaces had an UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting forsomething; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder wentthrough me on the winding stair: the house had grown strange to me!something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted down thespiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On the nextfloor I lost my way, and had gone through several passages a second timeere I found the head of the stair. At the top of the great stair I hadcome to myself a little, and in a few moments I sat recovering my breathin the library.

  Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair!The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it,threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building,it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might anymoment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere safe! I wouldlet, I would sell the dreadful place, in which an aerial portal stoodever open to creatures whose life was other than human! I would purchasea crag in Switzerland, and thereon build a wooden nest of one story withnever a garret above it, guarded by some grand old peak that would senddown nothing worse than a few tons of whelming rock!

  I knew all the time that my thinking was foolish, and was even aware ofa certain undertone of contemptuous humour in it; but suddenly it waschecked, and I seemed again to hear the croak of the raven.

  "If I know nothing of my own garret," I thought, "what is thereto secure me against my own brain? Can I tell what it is even nowgenerating?--what thought it may present me the next moment, the nextmonth, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What is behindmy THINK? Am I there at all?--Who, what am I?"

  I could no more answer the question now than when the raven put it tome in--at--"Where in?--where at?" I said, and gave myself up as knowinganything of myself or the universe.

  I started to my feet, hurried across the room to the masked door, wherethe mutilated volume, sticking out from the flat of soulless, bodiless,non-existent books, appeared to beckon me, went down on my knees, andopened it as far as its position would permit, but could see nothing. Igot up again, lighted a taper, and peeping as into a pair of reluctantjaws, perceived that the manuscript was verse. Further I could not carrydiscovery. Beginnings of lines were visible on the left-hand page,and ends of lines on the other; but I could not, of course, get at thebeginning and end of a single line, and was unable, in what I couldread, to make any guess at the sense. The mere words, however, woke inme feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible.Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wakefeelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form--spiritualsensations, as it were, hitherto unproved: here, some of the phrases,some of the senseless half-lines, some even of the individual wordsaffected me in similar fashion--as with the aroma of an idea, rousingin me a great longing to know what the poem or poems might, even yet intheir mutilation, hold or suggest.

  I copied out a few of the larger shreds attainable, and tried hard tocomplete some of the lines, but without the least success. The onlything I gained in the effort was so much weariness that, when I went tobed, I fell asleep at once and slept soundly.

  In the morning all that horror of the empty garret spaces had left me.