Ralph was trembling as he spoke. With a hand covering his face he turned away, and we sat in silence together for a long time.
When he had recovered a little, I tried to talk to him, but he took no comfort from my efforts to understand. Exhausted and confused as I was, I had little to give.
It was after two in the morning when I got up to leave. Ralph offered to drive me to The Pightle, but he was in no state for that. In no state either – it was evident from his earnest suggestion that I sleep at the Hall – to be left alone that night. He argued that my staying overnight would make things simpler in the morning – we could learn together how Edward was, and drive in together to pick up Laura from the hospital. I dreaded returning to the emptiness of The Pightle, but it was the expression on his face that finally persuaded me to stay.
He showed me up to a room overlooking the park and the dark lake. The moon was high and clear. Calls of wildfowl echoed across the water. On the wall next to the window was a framed linen sampler, but instead of the usual biblical text or homiletic counsel for moral improvement, within its carefully hand-stitched garland of flowers were the words:
ARTIS AURI ARCANUM ET MARI ET FEMINA CONSTITIT
But if the secret of the Art of Gold consisted in the male and the female, it seemed that we had all failed to find it.
Ralph saw me pondering its rubric. “It’s very old,” he said. “The tradition is that it was stitched for Sir Humphrey by Janet Dyball in 1645, the year he attained to the Stone. Louisa had it reframed and placed here. This was her room once.”
Her father has come to her room. It is the first time he has been here almost since she was a child, and he is pale, grim-lipped. He is calamitously old, and so distraught behind the effort of composure that it seems impossible that he knows nothing of what has befallen her.
“Louisa,” he begins, “I thought it best that I visit you here because…”
But it would appear that he has forgotten his reasons, for he falters there. He can scarcely bring himself to look at her, yet what he has glimpsed from the corner of his narrowed eyes fills him with still greater trepidation. She is so pale, so utterly wan that he might believe her own spirit quite as broken now as his. Like a frail monument she stands absolutely still, and waits.
He clears his throat and says, “I wonder if I might sit down,” then crosses to a chair. “Will you too not be seated, my dear?”
She seeks to soften the distracted shaking of her head with a smile, then looks away out of the window. She had noticed what she had failed earlier to observe: that the book in his hand is a printed and bound copy of An Open Invitation to the Chymical Wedding, and she has no appetite for this unsought conversation. She has no appetite for anything.
“I have completed my reading of your book.” He too contrives a smile, and glances up at her. Her face is strangely empty; nothing for which he has prepared himself is to be found there – neither anxiety nor joyful expectation. With a deepening of the foreboding at his chest he wonders whether it is possible that she who knows so much has already seen the secret at his heart, and steels herself against it; but he shies from the thought. “My dear, you have worked so hard… And your book… It is a great marvel.” Again he looks up and sees only the palest shadow of a smile about her lips – a smile which, in one of a more worldly disposition, might seem almost sardonic and dismissive. It troubles him, for she is as little given to the sophistries of self-deprecation as she is to braggadocio and there is something wrong here. Something beyond the equivocations lodged in his own throat.
He takes his spectacle case from his pocket, and applies the lenses carefully to his face, a little fussily. He opens the book with its handsome green-and-gold binding, and presses his palm to the title page. “And the inscription…” he says, “I was most deeply touched.”
“It is your property.”
“And never has a father been given such a gift.” Her response had been less warm than he anticipated but, encouraged that she has spoken at last, he launches on an enthusiastic review of her achievement. There is much he can commend with heartfelt admiration before he brings himself to say what he must finally say, and he devotes himself with such vigour to his strategy that he remains unaware how little attention his words receive.
She is looking out of the window where the clouds are bustled by a gale across the park and the light appears to shift at every buffeting. Why, she wonders, must he talk at her so? Why can he not, as Tom Horrocks had done, simply rise from his chair and gather her silently in his arms? But then she remembers: Tom, dear Tom, had known. He had known that there were no words for such great grief. In holding her so, he had given her all that he had to give – some portion of his strength – before admitting her to Edwin’s presence. And her father knows none of this – must never know it – as he does not know that she is no longer really present in this room.
For days now she has been present nowhere. She has become strangely insubstantial, making the same limited motions day by day, coherent and outwardly unchanged, yet touching nothing and untouched. She has become mere appearance, like some ghostly revenant so harmless and regular in its manifestations that life must seem incomplete without it. Tilly has noticed, of course, and is concerned, but that there should be some link between her mistress’s distraction and the disappearance of the parson is a contingency so remote that her imagination will not stretch to it. And her father, apparently, has noticed nothing.
She is close to presence in one moment only, and that now past. Time has already been at work upon it. Each day it grows a little harder to recall what was said, and how it was said, the delicate inflections of their silences. She remembers the hangings in that upper room at Tom Horrocks’s house, and the faint smell of ether as she passed up the stair. She remembers how the room itself became an island, a world unto itself, where the air floated strangely, and the noises from the marketplace outside were so alien that they scarcely impinged at all. Yet she remembers them now – the flower-seller’s cry, the rumble of the dray, the church bell quartering the hours. Why should it be so much easier to hold these trivial things clear than to recall the words that must stand between her and emptiness for the rest of her days?
“You must try to forget all this now,” Tom had said afterwards. “Your secret is safe with me and we must bury it together. The Bishop assures me that a place will be found for Edwin… but it must not be here, not in this county even. You must understand and accept that. And time will pass. You must engage your mind with other things, for nothing – absolutely nothing – can repair what has been done, and you will only make your heart sore by a prolongation of useless grief. You will forget, Louisa, and you must forget.”
“I will forget nothing,” she had answered.
Never was declaration more passionately felt; yet already her mind has begun to blur. It is a faithless friend. Only the feelings remain unadulterate: they can be summoned instantly, as now when she feels her heart sway again, a cloud in wind, a reflection in the lake, whatever insubstantial thing it is that can seem to hold everything and be entirely empty.
Her father is speaking still, but clumsily. He is absent from his words as she is absent from their hearing. He is trying to say something that he finds very difficult to say, as though there is either too little or too much energy of truth behind it. “My dear, my dear” – she hears the dolorous appeal in his voice – “surely you must have seen it for yourself?”
What should she have seen? These eyes have seen too much. But they must try to see him now, to return themselves to this moment which appears to have, for him, great import. The colour has risen among the shattered blood vessels at his cheeks. He has removed his spectacles and his eyes are restless. Something has greatly agitated his mind, and she must try to listen.
Eventually it becomes clear: he is telling her that she has written so lucidly of the inmost secrets of the Art that her book – which has, he swears, the radiant beauty of a sacrament – must pose
a danger to the very life it celebrates. She has done the work too well. She has been too generous in her appraisal of human nature. If all were of the same purity of heart as she then they would find only a mirror of their own potential in these pages, but sadly such was not the case. He is trying to suggest that though her understanding of the mystery is complete, she has little understanding of the world. It will corrupt and defile what she has offered it. It will seek to use the power invested in her work for its own cruel ends, for she has dared too much. He is saying that he greatly fears the world must never have it…
What does she care about the world? What does she care now whether it defile itself or no. She knows only that in the moment when her own life truly began, it was already over. As to the book itself – she has forgotten it. It is the excrescence of her mind, no more than that. Why then should he trouble over it? Better that the paper had stayed rags for some poor wretch to warm himself against the wind.
Her father is looking hopelessly up at her. He expects her to weep. She can see that, and he cannot know that all her tears are shed. She is dry and brittle as a stick. And he is suddenly transparent to her. Every weakness sapping at his life is evident. She sees now what he is doing; she knows why he is doing it; she can rifle his mind like an unlocked casket, for it is as open to her; and nothing she finds there really matters. It might leave her quite untouched were it not that she loves this sad old man who sits before her, waiting for her word, and dreading it.
“I feared that must be so,” she lies.
Relief, visible relief, enlarges him. “The fault is mine… You asked that I should read your work before committing it to print. I was remiss… preoccupied… selfishly preoccupied.”
Already she regrets the lie. It was no more than complicity with the death already at work inside him… with the one inside herself. Then she sees how the lie might be redeemed.
She speaks across his abject sentences. “I feared that what I sought to share was impermissible. I feared that the world must wrong it.”
He nods, caught now between relief and a suddenly more bitter knowledge of his own deceit. “I felt sure,” he tries to comfort himself uncertainly, “I felt sure from your face as I entered that you must already have seen it.”
“I sought only to be true.”
“I know, my dear, I know.”
But this is not all he knows, and her truth impugns his falsity. Only further speech might bury it more deeply. “I should have seen earlier that the duplicities of the Art are not your element, for you were never the equivocator. Truth, plain truth, has always been the very air you breathe, and to withhold it when it might be spoken… it is not of your nature.” He is speaking, and breathing, too quickly. One of his eyelids flutters like a moth.
And almost she might smile at his words, for what an innocent he is! Soon, when the first flush of his shame has passed, he will come to believe his own lies.
And yet there is a paradoxical truth in what he says. The meaning of her book was bound up with her love for Edwin: apprised of either, the world would demean and revile them both, for was that not always the way when it felt its own foundations tremble? He was speaking truer than he knew.
A great sigh shudders through his frame. “My dear… what is to be done?”
She stands in thought for a long time, for his question resounds throughout the remainder of her days. How are they to be borne? What indeed is to be done?
It seems that, after all, the last of tears is not shed. These remain. She will hold them at her eyes between herself and the world which blurs around her now. She stares out of the window: its lozenged panes, the park, the wind-fretted span of the lake, the scudding clouds – all blur, as though relinquishing the vain and painful effort to sustain their form. Yearning for the unity whence they sprang, they are dissolving in it – and yet, after all the dreams, the visions and the revelations, the promises passed from flesh to flesh, what a sad unio mystica is this! All things blurring from shade to shade of grey, sadder than widows’ weeds, less palpable, and nowhere in this grey dissolving world to stand…
Faintly, as from a great distance away, her father is murmuring. “I cannot see…” he sighs, “I cannot see what is now to be done…”
She draws breath, turns her head, holding the locket at her throat, and takes in the pathos of his downcast frown. He knows himself observed, and cannot raise his eyes.
Then it comes to her. She sees how the secret which embraces the secret weds, like subtle chemistry, with her father’s secret need.
Quietly, amazed how calm her voice, she says, “This at least is not irrevocable.” She gazes on him but his eyes have closed. “You must not concern yourself unduly. I hear you and I understand.” Her voice gathers strength as a kind of certainty returns. “I understand that there are things at once so marvellous and dreadful that they must never take a fixed material form.”
She is thinking – but she does not say – that such things must remain for ever alive and for ever invisible, an inward secret between the spirit and the soul; that their otherwise destructive fire must burn quietly there like a Pentecostal flame which, in its time, might bring the precious gift of tongues.
She raises her head, and the power accruing to her now demands his closer attention. “I have erred,” she confesses. “I have greatly erred. I have wished to fix that which of its very nature must remain for ever volatile. In that I was wrong. And perhaps in only that.” She sighs then, holding his eyes as he raises them. At last she is present. “I see now what must be done.”
He looks up at her, filled with new doubt.
“We must recall the book,” she says, but even as the words are uttered, she is aware of how much of herself that book contains, and how wrong she had been to dismiss it with such frigid indifference. Like stragglers from a demoralized and scattered host, the first of her feelings begin to return, and the news they bring is pain. Even as she tries to focus on what has now become the problem of her book, she sees that to sever herself from it will be like sundering her own life.
But her life is already sundered. It was sundered in the moment when Edwin severed the threads of his flesh. It was sundered again, irreparably, with the realization that he intended to withdraw from her, never to return. All that remained from this passionate winter was her book, and now, it seemed, she was required also to let go of that.
Then, with a further access of liberating clarity, she remembers what Edwin had tried to say as they sat together in that upper room while the sounds of the world chimed around them.
“I have sought,” he had murmured quietly, “to make a sacrifice on behalf of all men. And now that the sacrifice is made, none other need make it.”
She remembers how, for an instant, her heart had raged against him then – for he was wrong, wrong to the very depths of the despair on which he had entered. In silence she had raged, but for an instant only. She had held his eyes, beheld the old, familiar diffidence there – but no despair. Not now. Already he was something other; something which to her eyes – whatever their grief, their yearning for the now eternally impossible – was utterly beautiful. There was a softness to his skin, a tenderness in that shaking hand, and in the eyes a gentleness which – whatever they had seen – saw clear. For that brief moment he might, like an emblem from an old text, have been winged and crowned, and rising as the harvest of his wound.
But there were no wings, no crown. The room, like the sounds outside, was commonplace, and he was neither priest to the God, nor priest to the Goddess either: he was simply the fallible man she loved and, in that, priest perhaps to the great sea which lies between us all.
She turns to take in her father’s troubled gaze.
“We must recall the book,” she says, “and we shall burn it.” Her voice is absolute, practical, and he is awed and shamed by this sudden enthusiasm for what had been his own intolerable desire. Shocked, he recalls how often he had sat in the library willing the whole world to flame as he h
imself was in flame. He knows the desire, and understands it. He knows it a lust for destruction, and fears to see it unfettered now in her. Was this to be the end of all his labours then – to see the star-fire at his daughter’s soul turn smoke and ash?
“No.” In a rage born of insupportable remorse the word leaps to his throat. “No, that must never be.”
She watches as his face slowly dissolves before her. He is all tears, the breath breaking from him, and with it – however incoherently, however difficult its stammering – the admission of his falsity, his bitter truth. Where she has succeeded, he is striving to say, he himself has failed… He has failed from the dismal ignobility of spirit which lacked the courage to endure. His soul was craven, his will abused. “And if,” he confesses, quaking, “I have sought to deny your work, it is because I cannot bear the light it casts upon the irredeemable failure of my own.”
She is standing beside him now. She takes the sobbing head into her embrace and presses his brow against her. “Now all that you have said today is true,” she whispers softly, “and we are free of it.” But he weeps on as though the quiet deluge of his grief might quench the fire in which she means to burn her book.
“Everything is changing now,” she says, “and I think the time has come when we must both be brave. We have failed… we have both failed, and there is nothing that can mitigate the pain of that. But we are changed by it… already we become other than we were. And if we act aright, then a new thing may arise from our failure – a spirit beyond our conception, larger than we are, less confined by the personal – one which may endure, invisibly, and prevail long after our own small, personal failures are forgot. Have we not always known that it is in the realm of the invisible where the true powers work? I think we must consign our failure to their care.”
The Chymical Wedding Page 56