by Dion Fortune
I could quite believe him. He was a very dynamic personality, and such are always interesting. If he chose to make himself agreeable, he would have been very much in demand socially, for he was exceedingly eminent.
He went on. There have been times, when I was a younger man, when I have felt that emptiness so acutely that I have gone and sat in teashops and such places just to be with people. Now this is the funny thing, Lilith, you might think I'd gone there to make eyes at the women, but I hadn't. I'd gone there to watch the loving couples spooning; and out of that I got a very curious kind of satisfaction, as if a bit of their emotion were left over for me. I broke myself of it in the end because I felt it to be degrading, and I think I made a mistake. It didn't hurt anybody, that I can see, and it certainly helped me. Now would you say, in your terminology, that they were giving off magnetism when they were spooning, and that I was picking it up telepathically?”
“Not telepathically. That term is kept for astral communications. You were picking up the magnetism magnetically, sending out long processes from your aura and absorbing it.”
“Then why isn't one doing that automatically, all the time, in buses and Tubes and such like?”
“Because one has to tune-in to a person's wave-length in order to do it. It isn't just automatic. Besides, there has to be a response. You get nothing from a person who is unaware and indifferent.”
“Then how could I listen in to the loving couples? They were certainly unaware and indifferent to me, being wrapped up in each other.”
“A person who is roused emotionally opens his aura and gives off emanations. I expect you, in your imagination, were identifying yourself with the girl's lover, and so, as it were, insinuating yourself into their atmosphere.”
“Yes, I expect I was. But isn't that rather a dirty trick?”
“It isn't altogether desirable. There are better ways of getting the same results.”
“Is it those better ways that you are concerned with?”
“It is.”
“Do you want me to do with you what I used to do with those loving couples? Stand in an imaginative, not a physical, relation to you?”
“That is the precise experiment I want to make with you.”
“But what is going to be the end of it all? For us, I mean, for you and me. I'm very fond of you, you know.”
“We will face that when we meet it. I have already told you that there is always a safety valve in magic.”
“I'm glad to hear it. I think we should be wanting a safety valve before very long if I began letting my imagination loose. There was a time when I was deadly scared of losing my head with you and putting my foot in it (to mix metaphors), and upsetting you so that you'd turn against me and have no more to do with me, and so I'd lose even the little I'd got. I was deadly scared of it, Lilith, and that was what made me so stand-offish and unresponsive with you. It wasn't that I did not feel like being responsive. It was that I wasn't sure that I'd know when to stop if I once started.”
“It's the pressure behind you you're afraid of, isn't it, Rupert? The drive of all Nature behind you?”
“Yes, that's it. My intentions were of the best, but I wasn't sure of being able to carry them out. Nature might have got too strong for me. I warned you once that if you gave me an inch I would take an ell.”
“If you and I got fooling about here on a sofa, yes. But in ritual it doesn't work like that. It is impersonal. It is just pure force, and it is not on the physical plane at all. The physical is simply the end result, and we never let it get there. When you and I work together in ritual, you are the archetypal man and I am the archetypal woman. Isis and Osiris, if you like. The force passes from the sun to you, and from you to me, and from me into the group soul of the race and back to the sun again. Or on the reverse flow, for it is an alternating current—from the moon to me, from me to you, and so to the group soul and back to the moon. What I do to you, I do to all men; and what you receive from me, you receive from Great Isis Herself, for I am Her priestess and you represent the people. Can you understand that?”
“Not altogether. It is a case of telepathy of some sort, I suppose.”
“Telepathy is the active factor but it is more than that. We are telepathing the group mind of our race, but we are transmitting cosmic forces. Think of it this way, Rupert. I am what I am because I am a woman; and I am a woman by virtue of the feminine principle in life which formed me and expresses itself through what it forms. But there is more of that feminine principle than serves for the upkeep of the forms that express it, and we who are priestesses of the Moon know how to bring it through in its pure form, undiluted by matter, and we call it the moon-force. This was what was practiced in the temples of the Great Goddess in ancient times. It is practiced to this day in India, and they call it Tantra. Wherever a goddess is worshiped, it is the moonforces that are worked with, and they are important. It is the lack of them that is throwing our modern civilisation so badly off its balance. The Catholics compensate in part with the adoration of the Virgin—Stella Maris, Star of the Sea—what is she but Venus Anadyomene—Venus born of the foam? And who is Regina Coeli if She is not the Moon? If you want to understand paganism, study Catholicism, its lineal descendant. “Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.” The Latin countries do not have the same sex problems that we do.”
“Well, I don't know, my dear. It seems to me that we are playing with fire.”
“Could not that be said of Watts when he stoked his steam-engine? It doesn't do to be afraid of these things.”
“Now look here, Lilith, supposing we play with fire and things get out of hand, what is this safety valve you are always talking about?”
“We should earth the force and be finished with it, but it would be an end of the magic. Magic can only be generated under pressure, like steam power. That is why the priesthood has to learn to control its power.”
“But supposing you hadn't been free, Lilith? I wasn't when we started this work. You couldn't count on my wife's dying.”
“I have never been one of those who reckoned a woman's virtue of more value than a man's mental balance. I should still have blown the fuse if necessary.”
He sat staring silently into the fire.
“I am sorry you told me that,” he said at last.
“Why? Do you think the less of me?”
“No, not really. Of course it outrages my conventions, but I can see it is common sense. But—it throws such a big responsibility on to me. I might have come and pleaded with you if I hadn't known that—and if I'd managed to persuade you, reckoned it was all right. But now—no, I mustn't blow that fuse, it would be a coward's act. I must just go through with it.”
“You realise that I am offering you up as a sacrifice, don't you?”
“Yes, and there's something inside me that likes it. It is bringing out the biggest thing in me; It's making me put out the whole of my strength, and I like that, Lilith.”
He stood up and stretched himself, the big biceps muscles bunching under his sleeves. Then suddenly he turned on me and said again, vehemently, “I like it, my dear, I like it! And I'm not afraid of you any longer, either. Damn the consequences, we'll take our chances of them!” I saw that his eyes were blazing.
Then he suddenly stared across the room at the big window in which the stone arches no longer showed grey against the darkness, but dark against the grey.
“Dawn!” he said. “My God, it's dawn! We've talked all night, and I feel as fresh as if I'd just wakened. Let's go out and watch the dawn on the river.”
I banked the fire against the dawn-chill that I knew we should feel on our return, wrapped my furs about me, and went out with Malcolm into the silent, grey-lit road. It was filled with river mist, but the freshness of the dawn was in it.
The sun was not yet above the horizon, but the western sky was pale. In the east a low star was still visible. We strolled slowly over the dewdrenched paving-stones till we came to the tumble-down wharf,
and stood watching the river. The tide was coming in and the water swirled in great eddies about the piers. There was a profound silence in the fogwrapped dawn—a silence unbelievable in a great city. The river alone was alive.
“Do you ever feel,” said Malcolm, putting his hand through my arm, “as if the river were a bit of elemental nature in the midst of this big city?”
“Indeed I do,” I replied, “that is why I came to live beside it. I must have nature contacts. The only times one gets them in London is when there is a great gale blowing; then they come in with the wind. Have you ever noticed,” I added, “the difference between the atmosphere of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, divided by no more than a fence? The one is closed from dusk till dawn, and the earth magnetism gets a chance to well up during the hours of darkness; but Hyde Park is kept awake with lamps and never gets a chance to recuperate. It might as well be paved with asphalt for all the magnetism there is in the ground.”
“No,” said Malcolm, “I've never noticed it. I don't notice that sort of thing, I'm afraid. I never knew it existed. But I tell you what I do notice, I notice the atmosphere in your room. My God, that's powerful! Your place is like a lighthouse, Lilith. Long before I knew of your existence I used to watch it from across the river. It drew my attention. I can't tell you why. Of course it must have been there for me to see all the years I've lived in Grosvenor Road, but I never looked at it before.”
“It will draw more than you, Rupert, as the power begins to come through.”
“Yes, I suppose it will. I'll have to be prepared to take a back seat then. I can't expect to have you all to myself indefinitely. You're not that sort. Much too conspicuous. But I'm damn well going to make the most of you while I've got you.”
He laughed and I turned and looked at him. I have never seen a human being change so completely. He was an utterly different man. His curious light eyes, that had always seemed like a snakes, had a sparkle in them. There was a healthy flush under his pallor; his red hair was ruffled. There was, in fact, something definitely Dionysian about him as he stood laughing in the growing light. Yet what had that man had except a change of attitude? Nothing from me, most definitely nothing from me.
I made him turn his back on the silver river and return with me to the house. I was cold even in my furs, and he, hatless and coatless, would soon be thoroughly chilled if left to play about as the spirit moved him, for there was no sense in him at the moment. He put his hand through my arm again, and back we went together, Malcolm in simply bursting high spirits. I thought of that glowering face I had seen between turnedup collar and turned-down hat a few hours ago at the station, and marvelled at the miracle.
The furnace was low, and there would be little heat in the radiators till Mr. Meatyard stoked up in an hour's time, so I brought the breakfast beside the hearth in the hall, and made it there. I made soda scones on a griddle on the embers, for there was a shortage of bread, and cooked bacon and eggs on an electric grill plugged into a standard lamp, and coffee in an electric percolator. Malcolm enjoyed it hugely, taking the greatest interest in the proceedings, and put his plate on his knees and tucked in like a schoolboy. The incongruity of the situation suddenly struck me and I asked him how many letters he had got after his name altogether? He said he didn't know, and demanded another egg.
Then he lay down on the sofa, and I tucked him up in a rug, and he went to sleep. I retired to my room to get some sleep too, but before I lay down on the bed I climbed up the long stairs to my temple to return thanks to Great Isis that the first phase of the experiment had passed off safely and the next stood ready prepared. I was very weary, for I had taken a big strain during the past hours, and magnetism had gone out of me and into Malcolm, but I felt that I had to make that pilgrimage.
It was dark and quiet and warm in the temple, and smelt of smouldering incense. It was alive with presences; one could almost see the shadowy forms with the physical eye, they were so tangible. They seemed to be going round and round in an endless procession, and as they passed the East a limb or a face or a bit of drapery would be semimaterialised. It was the dance of the Devas celebrating the dawn. Elemental power was here in full force now.
I laid my hands on the altar and thought of the horned moon, and Great Isis came to me. I felt Her presence, behind me, as always, for thus She comes to women. And I returned thanks, looking in the mirror and seeing there my own face, for I am She when I am Her priestess.
I returned thanks for the success that had so far crowned my work; I prayed for strength and insight to continue it; and I asked for a blessing on my priest. And as I thought of him as he lay sleeping in the room below with my cloak thrown over him, there came to me a wave of such intense tenderness that it alarmed me. I must not feel like this towards my priest, I thought, or I shall spoil the magic; and then it came to me that only thus could I do magic with him—the magic that was to be done through one man for all men in order to lift burdens grievous to be borne in a world that has forgotten the holiness of the Great Horned One.
PART III
THE DOOR WITHOUT A KEY
Time arose and smote thee silent at his warning,
Change and darkness fell on men who fell from thee;
Dark thou satest, veiled with light, behind the morning,
Till the soul of man should lift up eyes and see,
Till the blind mute soul get speech again and eyesight,
Man may worship not the light of life within.
—Swinburne
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There was nothing save a carelessly knotted black tie to differentiate the man who came back from a month's holiday from the man who went away, yet everybody at the hospital knew there was a difference. His face was as mask-like as ever, his speech as curt, yet his students no longer backed away from him as if from the heels of a vicious horse.
He was demonstrating a case of glove and stocking anæsthesia, showing his students how to differentiate a hysterical paralysis and insensibility from one of organic origin; showing how in the one case the insensibility to pain ended in a straight line across the limb, bearing no relationship to any anatomical structure; and in the other it followed the distribution of a particular nerve.
“What is the cause of it, sir?” demanded a junior student, not realising that the simplest question is often the most difficult to answer. Malcolm looked at him, pushing his greying red hair back from his forehead with both hands in the characteristic gesture that had so often been mimicked at students’ concerts.
“Ask them across the way,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the wing that housed the psychiatric clinic, a recent innovation with which he had a perpetual feud, and to which he was outrageously rude.
“Yes, sir, I know. But how does it work? Why doesn't she feel anything although there's no organic lesion?”
Malcolm looked at the crowding students, who hung waiting on his words. He looked back at the patient, who was watching him out of the corner of her eye with a smugly triumphant, faintly furtive air, and picking up the bandage that he had removed from her eyes, tied it round her head again as if she had been a wax dummy; then, with the mounted needle with which he had been testing the skin for insensitivity, he stabbed smartly six inches in the air from the anæsthetic hand—and was rewarded by a yell! He apologised to the indignant patient, who was now rubbing the hand that had been six inches away when the stab was given, and looked at the students, who looked back at him with their mouths open.
“Did you ever read Gurney and Podmore on “Phantasms of the Living,” sir?” came a voice from the back of the room, and Malcolm jumped as if he had been prodded by a needle himself.
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
Students and teacher looked at each other again. Malcolm looked from face to face. Most of them were gaping, but a not inconsiderable minority were alertly interested.
“Yes,” he said, slowly and thoughtfully untying the blindfold from the bit of pathological can
non-fodder beside him,
“Yes, I've read it. It's worth reading.”
“So have I,”came a voice from under the muffling folds of the bandage that he had absent-mindedly allowed to slip down over the patient's nose.
“Oh, you have, have you?” said he, whisking off the bandage and looking at her for the first time as if she were a human being.
“Yes,” said she proudly, “and I'm an example.”
The students laughed, but the teacher did not. He stood looking at the woman, pulling the bandage slowly through his hands.
“What does it feel like?” he asked.
“It feels like going down in a lift.”
The students laughed again.
Malcolm touched the paralysed arm lightly.
“I shouldn't do too much of it, if I were you,” he said.
“You think that's what done it?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” was the reply.
The students gaped.
“Thank you, doctor, I'll bear in mind what you say,” said the patient.
As the class dispersed, the student who had mentioned “Phantasms of the Living” came up to him. No student had ever done that before, and the older man felt a sudden, secret pleasure.
“Have you ever known a case of astral projection, sir?”
“Yes,” said Malcolm, “I have. Have you?”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other.
“What does it feel like?”said Malcolm.
“Just like she described.”
They turned and walked slowly towards the door together, and Malcolm did a thing he had never done before—laid his hand on the lad's shoulder.
“I started it when my mother was in her last illness. I was abroad at the time, but I saw her as plainly as I see you, and then I followed her out.”
His eyes turned to Malcolm's tie, but he did not like to ask the question.
“No, it wasn't that with me,” said Malcolm.