The child was certainly not more than five years old, and his conversation was absolutely incredible. The feeling grew that we had somehow strayed into an enchanted country. At the same time the country was enchanting.
Dionysus was all on fire to get us up to the Abbey, and tugged at our arms.
“Now, Di,” said Hermes, “you know it’s wrong to pull at people like that. It’s one of the rules,” he explained to Lou, “not to interfere with people. The Big Lion says that every one would get on all right if only he were left alone.”
He seemed to think the statement required explanation.
“Cypris is reading Gibbon to us this week; and she shows us how all the trouble came from people meddling with other people’s business.”
I shouted with laughter. “Gibbon?” I cried,
“What next, I wonder?”
“Well, one must know Roman history,” explained Hermes, in the tone of a headmaster addressing an educational conference.
“And what did you read last week?” said Lou, though she was rocking with laughter as much as I was.
“Shelley was being read to us,” he corrected. “We don’t read ourselves.”
“The Tenth don’t dance,” I quoted.
“Don’t be an ass, Cockie,” said Lou.
“Well, Hermes, but why don’t you read?”
“The Big Lion doesn’t want us to learn,” he said.
“We have to learn to use our eyes, and reading spoils them.”
“But why?” asked Lou, in surprise. “I don’t understand. I thought reading was the best way to get knowledge.”
Dionysus put his foot down.
“Enough of Betause, be he damned for a dod.”
It wasn’t physical fatigue this time. These amazing children had made us forget all physical sensation. But when one is walking uphill it is impossible to laugh as we wanted to laugh. We sat down on a patch of grass ablaze with flowers and rolled over and over, tearing up tufts of grass and biting them to overcome our emotions.
Dionysus evidently thought it was a game and began to romp; but Hermes, though evidently eager to join in the fun, was held back by his sense of responsibility.
“Where on earth did you learn such extraordinary language?” cried Lou at last, the tears running down her cheeks.
Hermes became more serious than ever.
“It’s from the Book of the Law. Change not so much as the style of a letter,” he said.
We began quite seriously to wonder whether we had not got into one of those fantastic waking dreams with which heroin had made us familiar. But this was a dream of a totally different quality. It had a strain of wholesomeness and actuality running through its incredible tissue of marvels.
At last we sat up and drew a long breath. Hermes hastened to assist Lou to her feet, and the action, natural as it was, coming from such an extraordinary quarter, set us off laughing again.
Dionysus was regarding us with big serious eyes.
“You’ll do,” he suddenly decided; and began to execute a little step-dance of his own.
But we could see that Hermes, with all his unwillingness to interfere with other people, was impatient; and we scrambled to our feet. This time, Lou took his hand, and left me to bring up the rear with Dionysus, who poured forth an unending stream of prattle. I could not even hear it; the whole thing was too much for me.
We came out on to the terrace of the villa; King Lamus was standing in the open doorway. He had changed his travelling clothes for a silken robe of the brightest blue, with scarlet linings to the hood and sleeves like that of the boys. But on the breast in golden embroidery was an Egyptian eye within an equilateral triangle which was surrounded by a sun-blaze of rays.
Behind him stood two women in robes similar to those of the boys. One was about twenty-five years old, and the other nearer forty. Both had bobbed hair; the younger woman’s of flaming chestnut, the elder’s a rich silvery grey.
“That’s the Bid Lion,” said Dionysus, “with Athena and Cypris.”
Hermes drew back and told us confidentially: “Now you be the first to say ‘Do what thou wilt’ to show you’re more awake than they are.”
We nodded encouragingly, and carried out the programme with success.
“Love is the law, love under will,” answered the three people in the doorway. “Welcome to the Abbey of Thelema!”
In a moment, as by the breaking of a spell, the seriousness broke up. We were introduced warmly to the women, and began jabbering as if we had known each other all our lives. Basil had taken the two gods on his knees, and was listening happily to Hermes’ story of how he had acquitted himself of his responsibility.
A table had been brought out on to the terrace, and we sat down to a meal. Athena put us in our places, and then explained “that it was the custom at the Abbey to eat in silence as soon,” she said, “as we have said Will.”
“What did she mean by saying Will?” We had heard of saying grace before meat, but it was a long while since either of us had said it. However, the little mystery was soon explained.
She knocked on the table with the handle of a Tunisian dagger, its steel blade inlaid with silver. She knocked three times, then five, then three times more. Some significance was apparently attached to this peculiar method. She then said “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Dionysus showed signs of strong agitation. It was his turn to answer, and he was terribly afraid of forgetting his words in the presence of strangers. He looked up to Cypris pleadingly, and she whispered into his ear.
“What is thy will?” with a sudden burst of confidence and pride.
“It is my will to eat and drink,” replied Athena gravely.
“To what end?” inquired Dionysus doubtfully.
“That my body may be fortified thereby.”
The brat looked about him uneasily, as if the answer had taken the wind out of his sails. Cypris pressed his hand, and he brightened up again.
“To what end?” he repeated boldly.
“That I may accomplish the Great Work,” replied Athena.
Dionysus seemed to have got on to his game. He retorted without the slightest hesitation.
“Love is the law, under will.”
“Love is the law, love under will,” corrected Cypris and the baby repeated it solemnly.
“Fall to,” cried Athena cheerfully, and sat down.
Chapter V
AT TELEPYLUS
Lunch consisted of fish of a kind that we had never seen before; long, thin bodies with beaks like sword-fish. We were very hungry; but they would have tasted exquisite under any circumstances. The meal continued with cheese, honey, and medlars; and ended gloriously with real Turkish coffee; not one cup but as many as we wanted; and Benedictine.
We had drunk the rough, strong wine of the country with the meal; and to us it tasted as if it had been the best red wine ever made. It had not been submitted to any chemical process. There was a sort of vitality inherent in it. It was primitive like all the arrangements of the Abbey, but the freshness and naturalness of everything made more than amends even to our cultivated palates. We were apparently sitting down to lunch with a choice selection of Olympian Deities and the food seemed to be in keeping!
Besides that, we had no time to be critical; we were overwhelmed by the beauty of our surroundings.
Far away to the west, a line of hills ran out into the sea, the farther peaks were over fifty miles away, yet in that translucent atmosphere of spring they stood out sharply. We could even see in front of the range a small, dark line of crags which jutted out parallel with them and about ten miles nearer. Thence the coast line swept towards us in a complex curve of indescribable beauty and majesty. Telepylus being itself on a promontory, there was nothing to break the mighty stretch of sea between us and the distant rang
e with its twin cones which overhang the principal city of the country; the city from which we had started that morning.
To the left of the coast line, a range of tumbled mountains, fantastically shaped and coloured, reached thence to the very hillside on which we were sitting. In front the ocean reached to the horizon. The light played upon its waves like some mysterious melody of Debussy’s. It varied in hue from the most delicate canary yellow and glaucous green through infinite changing shades of peacockry to lilacs and deep purples. Ever-changing patches of colour wandered about the surface in kaleidoscopic fantasy.
A little to the right again, the limitless prospect of water was cut off by a precipitous cliff crowned by the ruins of a church, and up again to the right, the sheer crag reared its perpendicular terror to the skyline; a jagged line of quaintly carven pinnacle. Beyond these the slope suddenly eased off, and thence the rock took a final leap to its summit on which stood the remains of ancient Grecian temples.
With even greater suddenness the right hand precipice plunged clear into the sea. But on this side the view was closed in by groves of olive, cactus, and oak. The terrace before us was edged by a rock garden where flowered enormous geraniums, bushes of huge daisies, tall stems of purple iris, and a clump of reeds twice a man’s height that swayed like dancers to the music of the gentle breeze that streamed up from the slopes of the sea.
Below the terrace were mulberry, cherry, and apple trees in blossom, together with a number of many-coloured trees whose names I did not know.
Between the house and the hill that overhung it on the south was a grassy garden shadowed by a gigantic tree of unfamiliar leaves, and behind this stood two Persian nuts, like cyclopean telegraph poles tufted with dark green leaves which reminded one of a guardsman’s busby.
With the arrival of the coffee the rule of silence was broken. But Lamus had already left the table. Athena explained that the theory of meals in the Abbey was that they were deplorable interruptions to work, and that “Will” was said before beginning to eat in order to emphasise the fact that the only excuse for eating was that it was necessary to keep one’s body in condition to assist one in the performance of the Great Work, whatever that might be in any particular case. When any one had finished he or she got up and went away without ceremony, the interruption being over. Lamus now came out of the house in a flannel shirt and buckskin riding breeches. He sat down and began to drink his coffee and Benedictine. He was smoking a thin, black cigar, so strong that its very appearance was alarming.
“I hope you’ll excuse me this afternoon,” he said, “I have to go and inspect the other houses. This house is the antechamber, so to speak, where we receive strangers. In the other houses, various courses of training are carried on according to the Wills of their inhabitants. You will sleep here, of course, and considering the reason for which you have come – No, Dionysus, this isn’t the time to say ‘He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason’ – I will sleep down here for the present instead of in my lonely little tower, as I usually do.”
We noticed that Cypris and the boys had slipped away quietly; but Athena sat engrossed in studying us “In the absence of Lala,” he said, “Sister Athena is our chief psychologist. You will find her knowledge very useful to you and your work. I will leave her to talk things over with you for the next couple of hours. But, of course, the first thing is to get you rested from your journey.”
He got up and walked off round the corner of the house. We didn’t feel that we needed rest, we were much too interested by the atmosphere of the place. It was not merely the curious customs that stimulated our imaginations; there was an indefinable atmosphere about the place and the people which left us at a loss. The mixture of simplicity and elegance was in itself bizarre but still more so was the combination of absolute personal liberty with what was evidently in some ways a rather severe discipline. The automatic regularity with which everything was done seemed to imply an almost Prussian routine.
Lou saw the point at once, and with her usual frankness asked Sister Athena outright to explain it.
“Thank you for reminding me,” said Sister Athena. “The Big Lion said you had better rest. Suppose you lie down in the studio. I know you don’t want to go to sleep, but we can talk there just as well as we can here. So you’d better make yourselves comfortable while I explain our funny little ways.”
The arrangements for repose were as primitive as everything else. The studio was furnished with narrow mattresses on steel springs on the floor. They were covered with comfortable cushions. We threw ourselves down with a certain hesitation; but immediately discovered that we were much more at home than if we had been at a higher elevation. It made the room seem larger, and the sensation of rest was more in evidence. There was a sort of finality about being so low, and it was certainly much more convenient to have our drinks and cigarettes on the floor than on a table. We found out that we had always gone about the world with a subconscious fear of knocking things over. I began to understand why a picnic on the grass gives such a sense of freedom. It was the absence of a worry which had annoyed us none the less because we had not been aware of it.
Sister Athena stretched herself out on a folding chair, also very low. It was no trouble for her to pick up her glass from the ground.
“About what you asked,” she began, “it’s perfectly true that we have vanadium steel discipline in this place; but we are made to think out everything for ourselves and the regulations don’t bother us, as soon as we see their object.”
In civilised life, so-called, at least two-thirds of every one’s time is wasted on things that don’t matter. The idea of this place is to give every one the maximum time for doing his own Will. Of course, if you come here with the fixed determination to resent everything that is different to what you are accustomed to, you can work yourself up into a constant irritation, which is all the worse because there is nothing to interfere with your indulgence. When I came here two years ago, every detail was an annoyance and an insult. But I came around gradually, through seeing that everything had been thought out. These people were enormously more efficient than I was, through economising the time and trouble which I had been accustomed to waste on trifles. I could no more fight them than Dionysus could fight Jack Dempsey. There is absolutely nothing to do here in the way of amusement except walking and climbing and reading, and playing Thelema; and, of course, bathing in the summer. The housework occupies practically no time at all because of the simplification of life. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do. The result is that with eating and everything else thrown in there is not much more than an hour of our waking time which is occupied by what one may call necessary work. Compare that with London! Mere dressing accounts for more than that. These robes are decorative enough for a royal banquet and yet they’re absolutely practical for anything but rock climbing. To dress or undress is a matter of thirty seconds. Even our climbing clothes – it’s merely a shirt and a pair of breeches, stockings and tennis shoes instead of these sandals – and off we go.”
Lou and I listened sleepily to this disquisition. We were so interested that we simply had to keep awake. We each took a big sniff of heroin for the purpose. Sister Athena jumped up from her chair.
“That reminds me,” she said, “I must get you your charts.”
She went to a cabinet and produced two forms. We languidly marked our little crosses in the proper section.
“Excuse the interruption,” she said, “but the Magical Record is always the first consideration in the Abbey.”
The heroin woke me completely.
“I see the point, I think. All your rules are intended to reduce the part of life that has to be run by rules, as much as possible.”
“That’s it,” she nodded emphatically.
“But I say,” said Lou, “it’s all very well; but I don’t know whatever I’m to do with mys
elf. The time must hang frightfully heavy on your hands.”
“God forgive you,” cried Athena. “One never has a minute one can call one’s own!”
We laughed outright.
“It’s easy to see you’re a pupil of King Lamus. You have acquired his talent for paradox in a very complete manner.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, smiling. “If you’re a lazy person, this is the worst place in the world for getting bored, and the lazier you determine to be the more bored you get. We had two people last year, absolutely hopeless rotters. They called themselves writers, and imagined they were working if they retired solemnly after breakfast and produced half a page of piffle by lunch. But they didn’t know the meaning of work; and the place nearly drove them insane. They were bored with the Abbey, and bored with each other, and were very insulted because everybody laughed at them. But they couldn’t see the way out, and wouldn’t take it when it was shown them. It made them physically ill, and they went away at last to every one’s relief to an environment where they could potter about indefinitely and pose as great geniuses. The Big Lion does more in a day than they will ever do in their lives if they live into the next century. I’m sorry, too, as sorry as sorry can be. They were delightful personally, when they weren’t pinned to a cork by their fixed ideals of what we ought to be doing. They had come one thousand miles to be trained, and then wouldn’t give us a chance to train them. But they have good brains, and the stamp of this Abbey never wears off. They’re better and wiser for their stay here, and they’ll be better and wiser still as soon as they allow themselves to admit it!”
“You don’t encourage us much,” said Lou in a really alarmed tone. “I haven’t got even the consolation of these people. I can’t fool myself that I am a Wunderkind. You probably know without my telling you that I’ve done nothing all my life but potter. And if I’ve nothing to potter about, I go off into the blackest boredom.”
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 31