She went right out in her stocking feet
In the pelting pouring rain.
If any one sees my Mary,
He’ll oblige me, I declare,
If he’ll send her back in a packing case,
‘This side up, with care.’”
We were already far down the slope, striding like giants. From above came a confused chorus of shouts and laughter.
One has to be an athlete to run downhill arm in arm with Big Lion. He didn’t seem to mind the cactus, and when we came to a ditch, it had to be jumped. And when the path took a little turn uphill, he used our momentum to take us over the crest like a switch-back. It made me positively drunk. Physical alarm was combined with physical exhilaration. I was sweating like a pig; my sandals slipped on the hard dry grass; my bare legs were torn by brambles, gorse, and cactus.
I kept on slipping; but he always turned the slip into a leap. We never checked our career till we pulled up at the door of the house on the headland.
He let go of me suddenly. I flopped, and lay on my back panting for breath. He was absolutely cool; he had not turned a hair. He stood watching me while he pulled out his pipe, filled it and lit it.
“Never waste time on the way to work,” he observed, in a tone which I can only describe as pseudo-sanctimonious. “Do you find yourself sufficiently recovered,” he added in mock anxiety, “to resume the vertical position which distinguishes the human species from other mammals? I believe the observation is due to Vergil,” he continued.
There was a twinkle in his eye which warned me that he had another surprise in store for me; I had begun to realise that he took a school-boyish delight in pulling people’s legs. He seemed to enjoy leading one on, putting one in a false position, and making a mystery out of the most commonplace circumstances. It was extremely idiotic and extremely annoying; but at the same time one had to admit that the result of his method was to add a sort of spice to life.
I remembered a remark of Maisie Jacobs: “Never dull where Lamus is.”
The events had been of an ordinary and insignificant character, and yet he had given a value to each one. He made life taste like it does when one is using heroin and cocaine, yet he did it without actual extravagance. I could understand how it was that he had his unique reputation for leading a fantastic life, and yet how no one could put a finger on any particular exploit as extraordinary in itself.
I picked myself slowly together, and, after removing a few thorns from my bare legs, was sufficiently master of myself to say:
“So this is the workshop?”
“Once again, Sir Peter,” replied Lamus, “your intuition has proved itself infallible. And once again your incomparable gift of expression has couched the facts in a tersely epigrammatic form, which Julius Caesar and Martial might despair of editing.”
He opened the door of the house, repeating his old formula:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Till that moment I had found the phrase by turns ridiculous, annoying, or tedious. It had completely lost these attributes. The dry bones lived. I thrilled to the marrow as he uttered it. A soft, sweet voice, strangely familiar, answered him out of the vast, dim room. Dim, for the blinding sunlight of the open air was unable wholly to illuminate the interior to my contracted pupils.
“Love is the law, love under will.”
I thrilled again, this time with a combination of surprise and exultation which was curiously unintelligible.
Then I saw, in one corner of the room, behind the array of benches and tables crowded with neatly disposed apparatus, a glimmering form. The back was turned to us; it was on the floor busily occupied in cleaning up.
“This is Sir Peter Pendragon,” said Big Lion, “who is coming to take charge of the laboratory.”
My eyes were still unaccustomed to the gloom, but I could see the figure scramble to its feet, curtsey, and advance to me, where I stood in the shaft of sunlight that came through the half-open doorway.
It was dressed in a knickerbocker suit of black silk. It wore sandals and black stockings.
I recognised Lou.
“Big Lion said you might want to begin work this afternoon, Sir Peter,” she said with dignity, “so I have been trying to put the place in some sort of order.”
I stood absolutely aghast. It was Lou, but a Lou that I had never seen or known. I turned to King Lamus for an explanation, but he was not there.
A ripple of laughter ran over her face; the sunlight blazed in her magnetic eyes. I trembled with indescribable emotion. Here was an undecipherable puzzle. Or was it by any chance the answer to a puzzle – to all my puzzles – the puzzle of life?
I could think of nothing to say but the most lame and awkward banality.
“What are you doing here?” I inquired.
“My will, of course,” came the answer, and her eyes twinkled in the sunshine as unfathomably as the sea itself.
“Thou hast no right but to do thy will,” she quoted.
“Do that and no other shall say nay.”
“Oh, yes,” I retorted, with a trace of annoyance.
I had still a feeling of reaction against the Book of the Law. I hated to submit to a formula, however much my good sense, confirmed by my experience, urged me to surrender.
“But how did you find out what your will was?”
“How did you find out?” she flashed back.
“Why,” I stammered, “Big Lion showed me how my heredity, my natural inclination, and the solution of my crisis, all pointed to the same thing.”
“You said it,” she answered softly, and fired another quotation. “The Law is for all.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
My stupefaction and my annoyance were melting away. I began to perceive dimly that the Big Lion had worked out the whole situation in a masterly fashion. He had done with his material – us, what I was doing with my material, the laws of mechanics.
“I discovered my will four days ago,” she said very seriously. “It was the night that you and Big Lion climbed Deep Ghyll and took so long over Professor’s Chimney, that you missed the champagne dinner.”
“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, “and what was it?”
She put her hands behind her back and bent her head. Her eyelids closed over her long slanting eyes, and her red, snaky mouth began to work tremulously.
“While you were asleep after tiffin,” she said, “Big Lion took me up to the semicircular seat on the hill above the Strangers’ House, and put me through my paces. He made me tell him all my early life and especially the part just before I met you, when I thought I loved him. And he made me see that all I had done was to try to please myself, and that I had failed. My love for him was only that of a daughter for her father. I looked to him to lead me into life, but nothing meant anything to me till the night I met you. At that moment I began to live. It was you, and not Gretel’s beastly cocaine, that filled my soul with that Litany of Fuller’s. I had chanted it often enough, but it had never touched the spot. That night I used it to get you. I had only lived that I might one day find you. And all my life curled itself, from that moment, round you. I was ready to go to hell for you. I did go to hell for you. I came out of hell for you. I stopped taking heroin only because I had to fit myself to help you to do your will. That is my will. And when we found out this morning what your will was, I came down here to get the place ready for you to do it. I’m going to keep this place in order for you and assist you as best I can in your work, just as I danced for you, and went to McCall for you, in the days when you were blind. I was blind too about your will, but I always followed my instinct to do what you needed me for, even when we were poisoned and insane.”
She spoke in low, calm tones, but she was trembling like a leaf. I didn’t know what to answer. The greatness of her attitude abashed me. I fe
lt with utmost bitterness the shame of having wronged so sublime a love, of having brought her into such infamy.
“My God!” I said at last. “What we owe to Big Lion!”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, with a strange smile, “we’ve helped him as much as he’s helped us – helped him to do his will. The secret of his power is that he doesn’t exist for himself. His force flows through him unhindered. You have not been yourself till this morning when you forgot yourself, forgot who you were, didn’t know who kissed you and brought you your breakfast.”
She looked up with a slow half-shamefaced smile into my eyes.
“And I lost you,” said I, “after tiffin, when I remembered myself and forgot my work. And all the time you were here helping me to do my work. And I didn’t understand.”
We stood awhile in silence. Both our hearts were seething with suppressed necessity to speak. It was a long, long while before I found a word; and when it came, it was intense and calm and confident.
“I love you.”
Not all the concentration given by heroin, or the exaltation of cocaine, could match that moment. The words were old; but their meaning was marvellously new. There had never been any “I” before, when I thought “I” was I, there had never been any “you” before when I thought of Lou as an independent being, and had not realised that she was the necessary complement of the human instrument which was doing “my” work. Nor had there been any love before, while love meant nothing but the manifold stupid things that people ordinarily mean by it. Love, as I meant it now, was an affirmation of the inevitable unity between the two impersonal halves of the work. It was the physical embodiment of our spiritual truth.
My wife did not answer. There was no need. Her understanding was perfect. We united with the unconscious ecstasy of nature. Articulate human language was an offence to our spiritual rapture. Our union destroyed our sense of separateness from the universe of which we were part; the sun, the sky, the sea, the earth, partook with us of that ineffable sacrament. There was no discontinuity between that first embrace of our true marriage, and the occupation of the afternoon in taking stock of the effects of the laboratory, and making notes of the things we should ask Lala to bring us from London. The sun sank behind the ridge, and far above us from the Refectory came the sonorous beat of the tom-tom which told us that the evening meal was readv. We shut up the house, and ran laughing up the slopes. They no longer tired and daunted us. Halfway to the house, we met the tiny Dionysus, full of importance. He had been deputed to remind us of dinner. Sister Athena (we laughed to think) must have realised that our honeymoon had begun; and – this time – it was no spasmodic exaltation depending on the transitory excitement of passion, or stimulants, but on the fact of our true spiritual marriage, in which we were essentially united to each other not for the sake of either, but to form one bride whose bridegroom was the Work which could never be satiated so long as we lived, and so could never lead to weariness and boredom. This honeymoon would blossom and bear fruit perennially, season by season, like the earth our mother and the sun our father themselves, an inexhaustible, frictionless enthusiasm. We were partakers of the eternal sacrament; whatever happened was equally essential to the ritual. Death itself made no difference to anything; our calm continuous candescence burst through the chains of circumstance, and left us free for ever to do our wills, which were one will, the will of Him that sent us.
The walk up to the Refectory was one long romp with Dionysus. Oh, wise dear Sister Athena! Was it by chance that you chose that sturdy sunlight imp to lead us up the hill that night? Did you suspect that our hearts would see in him a symbol of our own serene and splendid hope? We looked into each other’s eyes as we held his hands on the last steep winding path among the olives, and we did not speak. But an electric flame ran through his tiny body from one to the other, and we knew for the first time what huge happiness lay in ambush for our love.
The silence of dinner shone with silken lustre. It lasted long – so long – each moment charged with litanies of love.
When coffee came, Big Lion himself broke the spell. “I am going to the tower to sleep tonight; so you will be in charge of the Strangers’ House, Sir Peter! The duties are simple; if any wanderer should ask our hospitality, it is for you to extend it on behalf of the Order.”
We knew one wanderer who would come, and we would make him welcome.
“A bright torch and a casement open at Night To let the warm Love in.”
“But before you go across, you will do well to join us, now that you have discovered your true wills, in the Vesper Ceremony of the Abbey, which we perform every night in the Temple of my tower. Let us be going!”
We followed, hand in hand, along the smooth, broad, curving path that bordered the stream, cunningly bended to run along the crest of the ridge so that its power might be used to turn various mill-wheels. The gathering shadows whispered subtle lyrics in our ears; the scents of spring conveyed superb imaginations to our senses; the sunset squandered its last scarlet on the sea, and the empurpled night began to burst into blossom of starlight. Over the hilltop before us hung the golden scimitar of the moon, and in the stillness the faint heart-beat of the sea was heard, as if the organ in some enchanted cathedral were throbbing under the fingers of Merlin, and transmuting the monotonous sadness of existence into a peaceful paean of inexpressible jubilance of triumph, the Te Deum of mankind celebrating its final victory over the heathen hordes of despair.
A turn in the path, and we came suddenly upon a cauldron-shaped depression in the hillside; at the bottom a silver streak of foam darted among huge boulders piled bombastically along the bed of the valley. Opposite, jutting from the grassy slopes, there stood three stark needles of red rock, glowing still redder with some splash of crimson stolen from the storehouse of the sunset; and above the highest of these there sprang a sudden shaft of stone against the skyline. A blind dome of marble rimmed with a balcony at the base crowned the tower, circular, with many tall windows Gothic in design, but capped with fleurs-de-lys; and this was set upon eight noble pillars joined by arches which carried out the idea of the windows on a larger scale. When we reached the tower, by a serpentine series of steps, megalithic stones laid into the mountain side, we saw that the floor of the vault was an elaborate mosaic. At the four quarters were four thrones of stone, and in the centre a hexagonal altar of marble.
Four of the principals of the Abbey were already robed for the ceremony; but they furnished themselves with four weapons – a lance, a chalice, a sword, and a disk – from a pillar which had a door and a staircase which formed the only means of access to the upper rooms.
Basil seated himself in one of the thrones, Sister Athena in another; while a very old man with a white beard, and a young woman whom we had not yet seen, took their places in the other two. Without formality of any sort beyond a series of knocks, the ceremony began. The impression was overwhelming. On the one hand, the vastness of the amphitheatre, the sublimity of the scene, and the utter naturalness of the celebrants; on the other, the amazing distinction of the prose, and the sharp clarity and inevitability of the ideas.
I can only remember one or two clauses of the Credo: they ran thus:
“And I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.”
“And I believe in the communion of Saints.”
“And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass.”
“And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom, whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation.”
“And I confess my life one, individual, and eternal, that was, and is, and is to come.”
I have always told myself that I had not a spark of religious feeling, yet Basil once told me that the text, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, ought to be tran
slated “The wonderment at the forces of nature is the beginning of wisdom.”
He claims that every one who is interested in science is necessarily religious, and that those who despise it and detest it are the real blasphemers.
But I have certainly always been put off by the idea of ceremonial or ritual of any kind. There again, Basil’s ideas are fantastically different to other people’s. He says; what about the forms and ceremonies used in an electric light plant?
I gave a little jump when he made the remark. It was so destructive of all my ideas.
“Most ritual,” he agreed, “is vain observance, but if there is such a thing as the so-called spiritual force in man, it requires to be generated, collected, controlled, and applied, by using the appropriate measures, and these form true ritual.”
And, in fact, the weird ceremony in progress in his Titan tower produced a definite effect upon me, unintelligible as it was to me for the most part, on one hand, and repellent as it was to my Protestant instincts on the other.
I could not help being struck by the first of the collects.
“Lord visible and sensible, of whom this earth is but a frozen spark turning about thee with annual and diurnal motion, source of light, source of life, source of liberty, let thy perpetual radiance hearten us to continual labour and enjoyment; so that as we are constant partakers of thy bounty we may in our particular orbit give out light and life, sustenance and joy to them that revolve about us without diminution of substance or effulgence for ever.”
The words were full of the deepest religious feeling and vibrated with a mysterious exultation, and yet the most hardened materialist could not have objected to a single idea.
Again, after an invocation of the forces of birth and reproduction, all rose to their feet and addressed Death with sublime simplicity, masking nothing, evading nothing, but facing the huge fact with serene dignity. The gesture of standing to meet Death was nobly impressive.
“Term of all that liveth, whose name is inscrutable, be favourable unto us in thine hour.”
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 35