by Dion Fortune
“Does that explain a good deal to you?”
“Yes, it explains everything. Excep't— Why did Trevor go out of his way to make that marriage?”
“Did you ever read a book by Henry James called, The Wings of a Dove'?”
“No, what's it about?”
“A man and a woman love each other, but they can't afford to marry. They arrange between them that the man shall marry a rich woman who's dying of consumption.”
Hugh Paston sat silent for a while. “Yes, I suppose that's it,” he said at length. “That explains a lot. I suppose I was the milch-cow that financed the liaison. God, what a world! T. J., you've performed a surgical operation on me, I'm not sure whether I'll thank you or not.”
“If I left it at that, Hugh Paston, like the Freudians do, you'd have little call to thank me. But I won't leave it at that. Having performed the analysis, we'll proceed with the synthesis.”
“You'll have to leave it alone for a bit, T. J. I feel at the moment like one feels when one's been knocked out in boxing. I think I'll got out for a walk.”
“It's raining cats and dogs.”
“Doesn't matter. I want some air.”
CHAPTER V
AT first Hugh Paston walked aimlessly about the dark streets, thankful for the cool, damp, rain-washed air after the stuffy heat of the room behind the shop. The revelation to which the old bookseller had led him had certainly been a tremendous shock. He knew that the old man had effectually lanced the abscess on his soul and it now ought to have a chance to heal. All the same, he harboured no delusion that he was out of the wood. He did not like the feel of himself. He still felt unnatural. He had heard of abscesses on the appendix bursting and causing peritonitis when they were operated on too late. He wondered whether the old bookseller had come on the scene too late to give him any real help and he was now going to have a peritonitis of the soul in addition to his original appendicitis. If he had known it, the old man whom he had left in the stuffy room behind the shop was wondering exactly the same thing, and was more than a little worried at the result of his playing with souls. It is one thing to have grasped the theory of psycho-analysis, but quite another to apply it in practice.
In a little while Hugh Paston ceased his aimless wandering and set out resolutely towards his house. It was no great distance, and his long legs carried him over the ground rapidly in the empty streets.
Arrived there, he admitted himself with his latch-key into the darkened hall. At the end of the hall was a swing-door, and passing through this, he found himself on the back-stairs. Going down a short flight, he came to a door on the half landing under which showed a line of light. He knocked, and a woman's voice with a slight Scotch accent bade him come in.
He entered a small room, much too full of knickknacks, and a short square-set woman with greying hair rose to greet him. A lady, but not the kind of lady one found on the other side of the swing-door. She offered no greeting save: ‘Good evening, Mr Paston’, but stood awaiting his pleasure.
He said, “Sit down, Mrs Macintosh”, and she did so, still silently, looking at him questioningly.
He sat down, too, not asking permission. For it was his house, and she was his housekeeper, even if she were a lady.
“Mrs Macintosh,” he said, “I am going to give up this house.”
She nodded, expressing no surprise.
(‘I'll kill the woman if she makes any comments’), he thought. But she didn't. She had seen trouble herself in her time.
“I want you to payoff the servants. Give ‘em all three months’ wages. It's no fault of theirs the place is closing down. Take everything out of my bedroom and stick it into trunks—all my personal things, I mean, I don't want any of the furniture; and take all my papers out of my desk and put them into deed-boxes, and put the lot into store. Then put the house in the hands of the agents and get them to hold an auction of everything, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“What about-Mrs Paston's things?”
Hugh Paston's face twitched.
“Sell them too.”
“But what about her papers, Mr Paston ?”
Hugh sat silent for a long time, the woman watching him with pitying eyes.
Finally he spoke. “Yes, those have got to be dealt with, but I can't do it now. Can't be done. Look here, you put them all into deed-boxes and store them along with the rest of the goods, but keep them separate from my papers, you understand?”
“Very good, Mr Paston,” said the housekeeper quietly, “you can rely on me.”
“Thanks, yes, I know I can,” he said, and rising abruptly to his feet, he wrung her hand and was out of the front door before she had finished rubbing her tingling fingers.
He heaved a sigh of relief and cast no backward glance over his shoulder. He hoped never to look on that house again; or on that district either, for the matter of that. All he prayed was that he might meet no one he knew before he could find a taxi. But taxis are as common in Mayfair as they are rare in Marylebone, and his prayer was granted.
Although it was after dosing-time when he got back to Billings Street, he found the shop lit up, and the halfglass door yielded to his pressure. At the first ting of the bell the old bookseller was through the serge curtain, for the more he thought about the way his guest had taken things, the more anxious he had become.
Hugh Paston followed him into the room behind the shop, flung his hat on the table, and dropped into his old seat on the sofa. His action reassured the old man, for he could see he felt at home.
“Well,” he said, “I've done the deed.”
“What deed?” cried Jelkes aghast, wondering if it were a murder.
“Given orders for the servants to be paid off and the house sold up. Got rid of everything except my duds. Oh yes, and my wife's papers. Those have got to be tackled sometime, but not now. No, not even to please you, T. Jelkes, however good you may think that abreactions are for me.”
The old man heaved a sigh of relief.
“Well,” he said, “I guessed you've earned your supper.”
“Yes,” said Hugh Paston, “I guess I have.”
The frying-pan and tea-pot came into action, and the amicable, silent meal was partaken of and cleared away. But although relieved concerning his immediate anxiety, for his guest had neither blown his own nor anyone else's brains out, the old bookseller did not like the look of him at all. The hopelessness and apathy had given place to a kind of repressed excitement that struck the old man as being far from wholesome, and as likely to lead to rash acts, the consequences of which might have to be paid for heavily.
He cast about in his mind for something that should not merely distract his guest's attention, but hold it. He had got over the immediate shock of the tragedy and disillusionment, so Jelkes judged, but all that had seethed within him so long was rising like a tide. What to do with this tide was the problem; it had to go somewhere, and if no rational channel could be opened to it, irrational ones would be found.
It was not easy for Jelkes to understand the viewpoint of this man sitting silently smoking on his broken-down sofa. He was of a different class and traditions; of a different generation, and a totally different temperament. Jelkes cast his mind back to the time when he was this man's age, and tried to remember how he had felt.
But here he got no guidance. The first fires of his youth had gone up in a tremendous mystical fervour that had burnt with a smokeless flame.
His mother had been left a widow in reduced circumstances, and though not a Catholic, had solved the problem of his education by sending him to the cheap but excellent school in the neighbourhood run by some Jesuit fathers. She was assured that no attempt would be made to convert the boy, and was satisfied with the assurance. No attempt had been made, but among the teachers was, as always, a man of marked charm of character, and to him the lad became deeply attached. No attempt needed to be made to convert that boy, he came knocking at the door of the fold of his own accord. And not only did he enter the
fold, he aspired to the priesthood. He felt he had a vocation; and the very experienced men who judge of such things also thought he had a vocation. But he had been caught too late. A robust and rugged character had begun to be formed before he reached the seminary. The sports field of his preparatory school had done its work. He could not fit in with the whispering and influencing and routine humiliations. He bowed his neck to the yoke in the first flush of his faith; but presently he began to ask himself whether he, when he was admitted, would be prepared to hand on this same treatment to others? And something in the lad that had been formed on the football field rose up and said that nothing would induce him to do so. He asked to be released. His friend came and pleaded with him. And not only pleaded with him, but wept over him, wringing his hands in despair; it was nothing more or less than a spiritual jilting. The whole experience made a terrible and searing impression on the adolescent lad. He had not taken the actual vows, being still in his novitiate, but the strongest admonitions of chastity had been impressed upon him, and these, together with his friend's heartbroken revelations offeeling, had prevented him from ever looking upon a woman to love her. A priest at heart, he had passed through life in complete spiritual isolation; a mystic by temperament, he was denied all spiritual consolation by his critical brain.
Penniless, without any qualifications, he by great good fortune got a job as assistant to a second-hand bookseller, found the trade congenial, and developed an aptitude for. it, for he was a lad of well above the average capacity, as his teachers at the seminary had seen. Spending nothing on girl friends, or making himself attractive to the feminine eye, he saved steadily, and by the time he was forty, had launched out into a shop of his own; he soon prospered sufficiently to satisfy his simple needs, and these being satisfied, declined to exert himself any further, but enjoyed life after his own fashion, which consisted in a pot of tea on the hob, his toes on the fender, a book in his hand, and the collecting of the queer literature that interested him.
Although he had had no share in the kind of experience that had taken his new friend to Paris, he was well acquainted with the geography of the land where a man wanders after a severe emotional shock. His own trouble had taken the form of an acute crisis; Hugh Paston's, he judged, had been of a chronic nature; its cumulative effects gradually destroying his poise. ]elkes knew the thing that had saved him in his own time of trial had been the sudden opening-up of a new channel of interest. Made free of the shelves of his employer's second-hand bookshop, he had come across a translation of Iamblichos' curious work on the Egyptian Mysteries; this, coming on top of what he already knew of the Method of St. Ignatius, gave him a revelation that was little less than a second conversion, for he saw here in a sudden flash that he had glimpsed the key to the technique of the higher consciousness. This served to start him off again on the ancient Quest—the quest of the light that never shone on land or sea. He had suddenly won to the knowledge that there was another kind of mysticism in the world beside the Christian mysticism, at which his manhood had rebelled; his soul picked up its stride once more, and the man was saved. Ever since then he had pursued strange byways of thought, following up every bold speculation in science, every new viewpoint in philosophy.
His trade enabled him, though a poor man, to gather together a very remarkable collection of odd literature. Not very bulky, for there is not a great deal worth having in that line. Much that came into his hands after patient search passed out of them again to the first customer, having been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He gradually learnt that he had to look for a viewpoint rather than a doctrine, and that it was in the obiter dicta and not the reasoned judgment that he would find what was of most use to him.
Novalis, Hegel, Hinton, he returned to most often among the philosophers; Herbert Spencer he dismissed with a furious snort. Why should a thing be non-existent because it is inconceivable? Non est demonstrandum. Is the average, the very average, human mind to set the standard? To hell with you, Herbert! and he pitched him into the fire, where he smelt so horribly that he had to be rescued, which is the end of many noble acts of vengeance.
The old bookseller had learnt at the seminary that when it comes to conceiving transcendent things, minds vary enormously in their capacity, and the trained mind is a very different matter to the untrained; and the mind that is conditioned by music and incense and dim lights has very different capacities to the mind that goes at the job in cold blood. Herbert Spencer saw no further than his own pink-tipped, liverish nose.
The Search for the Absolute took hold of the untidy scholar among his dusty books, and kept him serene and happy as the years slipped by and brought him neither fame nor fortune but only the merest pittance, for he did not choose to exert himself.
He had had a good grounding in scholarship among the Jesuits and was familiar with the classical languages and had a working knowledge of Hebrew. Consequently he was able to go to the fountain-head of most things except Sanskrit. Though intensely irritated by her, he found Mme Blavatsky a useful pointer. She told one where to look, and pointed out the significance in a good many odd things. Maeterlinck compared her books to a builder's yard, and Jelkes reckoned he was about right, and wondered why it is that a mystic seldom has a tidy mind. It never occurred to him that his own establishment looked to most people as if it had been bombed.
Freud made him foam at the mouth at first, and he very nearly followed Herbert Spencer into the fire as a lopsided outrager of the decencies; then ]elkes' classical education came to the rescue, and he discerned in Freud the Dionysiac philosophy. Having a great respect for the Greeks, he gave Freud a grudging hearing after that, and it appeared to him that it was a great pity that the learned doctor had not also had a classical education, and learnt that Priapus and Silenus are gods, and not dirty little boys playing with filth. And learnt also that they are not the whole of Olympus, but that there are also golden Aphrodite and Apollo. He eyed the works of the great Austrian gloomily.
“These,” he said, “are not paganism, they are decomposing Christianity,” and he returned to Petronius, whom he considered wrote much better on the same subject.
But however much he might find his own satisfaction in playing chess with the Absolute, he realised it would be little use to offer this kind of bread of life to Hugh Paston in his present state; or for the matter of that, in any state. Paston was a man who had been starved of life; who had starved in the midst of plenty without realising what was the matter with him. A good old Calvinistic nurse had started him off in blinkers, and what passes for uplift at a public school had done the rest. Old Jelkes recalled Lytton Strachey's cynical comment upon the number of the great Dr Arnold's best boys who had gone off their heads.
He was relieved to find that his guest, having disposed of his more pressing affairs, seemed quite content to enjoy the homely concoctions ofthe frying-pan and amuse himself by browsing on the shelves. He watched him browse, knowing that here he would find the surest key to the man's character, and noted with interest the old armful he brought over to the sofa and settled down with. He had got the treasured Iamblichos, he noticed; and an odd volume of Mme Blavatsky; and, of all incongruities, another book of Huysmans' ‘A Rebours’. Jelkes watched him go from one to the other, and back again. ‘A Rebours’ he reckoned Paston had picked up because of his interest in Huysmans' other book, and was surprised to see him settle down to read it. Time went by; the old bookseller started a fresh brew of tea that was to form a night-cap, and put a cup by his guest's elbow unnoticed.
Hugh Paston looked up suddenly.
“I've found my Bible, Jelkes,” he said.
“Good God,” said the old bookseller, “I like your taste in Bibles!”
“It's nothing like as plain-spoken as the original.”
“Maybe not. But even as literature, I prefer the original.”
“You have it, Jelkes, you have it if you like it. This is my choice.”
“you were my son, you'd go face downwar
ds across my knee.”
“If I were your son, T. Jelkes, you would be pushing up the daisies by now, if you weren't pushing up a goodsized oak-tree. I'm no chicken,”
“Then you're old enough to have a more mature taste in literature.”
“Come, come, now, you wouldn't call ‘A Rebours’ a kids' book, would you?”
“I'd call it a pimply adolescent's book. Anybody who'd cut his wisdom-teeth ought to be sick over it.”
“Now you mention it, T. J., this copy looks as if someone had. You do keep your stock badly. But joking apart, I really have seen a glimpse of daylight in my miserable condition. Don't take me too seriously, there's a good chap, but let me ramble if I want to. It amuses me, and takes my mind off worse things. Now see here, I've gone and shoved all my earthly goods into an auction sale, and I've got to re-stock. now haven't I? I can't park myself here indefinitely, now can I ?”
“No, I'm afraid you can't. I've sat through the bath, and you've sat through the sofa; and between us we'll go through into the cellar shortly. I'd like to have you, but it wouldn't work. We've both got enough sense to see that.”
“I didn't mean that, T. J.; I love your ménage. I meant I couldn't take advantage of you indefinitely.”
“Well, be that as it may. What are you proposing to do on the strength of that damned book? I suppose you know how Des Esseintes ended up ?”
“Flat on his back and sick as a cat. Yes, I know. But then he took no exercise. Besides, he wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't aiming at anything. Now I propose to aim at something.”
“And what do you propose to aim at ?” the old bookseller's sandy eyebrows went up till they almost made junction with the frill ofgrizzled hair just above his coat-collar.
“That's not so easily put into words. I'm not sure if I quite know what it is myself. Can you imagine a mixture of ‘La-Bas’, and ‘A Rebours” with a dash of lamblichos and Ignatius?”