For there Arsinal was right. Every important passion or feeling of the world should be a derivative of a higher thing of the same kind in the supermundane whole. Love, pity, sacrifice, etc., were such derivatives; but whereas in a male saviour, a Christ, the fiercer temper must be put under before the milder could rule, a supernal female essence must be conceived to include within the confines of her nature wrath, cruelty, passion, love, sacrifice, at once. There was no right inconsistency in it. What necessarily became a vice when incorporated in the self of an individual woman, could well remain an energy and sublime scourge in that terrific Unself, the great chastening Mother of spirits, men, and all Nature. In this sense, the savageness of such an Entity was love.
If man were no more than mite, crawling on the surface of an astronomical ball, then the answer to fear should be prayer; to corruption, regeneration by the grace of heaven, by means of the symbols, types, and agents of heaven; to the passions, a spiritual emasculation, instructed by the example of the long, line of Christian eunuchs. Should he recognise himself, however, for an original soul, doomed for a few fleeting years in all time—what time stood for—to suffer the million degradations of the corporal condition: then those answers to baseness were another baseness; he was on the wrong road. For the salvation of a personality was the accepting of that personality as a thing undisputed. Ten thousand mystics, sages, metaphysicians, might so have accepted it, and still personality was not the soul, but merely a bundle of earth-characters, stamped with the stamp of alien possession.
The soul was the highest; nothing was higher; therefore, to whom should it pray? Being elemental and above corruption, how could it be regenerated? Being compound of sublime passion, how could a factitious peace of heart assist or represent it? ...
Accordingly, he must first of all break from his ignorant preconceptions of the world: the Christian myth that, in the divine, love and mildness were synonyms; and the universal superstition that the soul's function was to serve, fear, and imitate the divine, its source and spring. Here, in this big confusion and wonder advancing on him, and not him alone, with giant strides, a passion should be to be faced by passion; an attempted coercing of his equal soul by a miraculous manifestation, apparently of the divine, was to be stripped of its rapture and amazement, and examined, so stripped, for its accredited passionate message of eternity, that alone his own inmost spirit could receive as an authentic sign between peers. …
Nevertheless, how to account for that spectral shape of a woman, who had descended from the heavens, lived, died, and been buried; and now, after whole ages, could show herself abroad again? Either her sex was illusion, or she was but a secondary agent. For creation truly held many a token of female origin, yet the male marks were on it too: grandeur, force, vigour, boldness, lordship. Thus already Arsinal was imperfectly informed. But if, in fact, this tomb spirit could somehow be presentative of the All before sex, what meant her constant sex for every witness? ...
A dark wave of exploit suddenly crossed him as he apprehended what now he must do in order to reach the apparition's penetralia, to uncover its mystic heart and errand. He stood stopped before the outer gate. Some miserable flaw of his psychophysical manhood was knowing the phenomenal contact under that female form; beyond must be surprises. By beyond he meant, along a certain road: that of the bringing together of the two flints, in the fittest place. Thus it was essential that Arsinal should conduct his trial, on Devil's Tor; in his company. The adventure might be accomplished within the hour. This, indeed, since Copping's proposal to them, both must have intended; but only now the wonder of the experiment was opened out. …
For, till it was achieved, he no doubt might procure new hauntings by the medium of either stone alone, but these could only continue the simple spectacle—deceitful, idle. Among the torn and thunderous titan-heights of Asia no man knew better than himself, never had he worshipped undangerously with his eyes but he had felt the ardour to follow audaciously with his body that might be destroyed or broken—perhaps deserved no greater dignity. The yearning was sublimity, but on the upper snows and crests themselves the sublimity had always vanished, to be replaced by freedom. So sublimity should not represent a natural state of the soul, but be, as it were, its homesickness. This he applied: and fancied that the reuniting of the stones might—but how, he knew not—be fated to bring him the same emancipation. …
Mentally he set the impress of his fingers upon it for a decision—well he could recognise his own irrevocable decisions, from their attendant dark glow of triumph, with the rapid clearance of his brain from its preliminary vexations, thought-litter, and suspense. When, however, his constant awareness of this one removed woman in the room amongst men caused him again to remember her case, unsettlement once more began. The plan, indeed, was to avoid her risk, and she might doubt its adequacy and fear its refusal of fate, yet was not to forbid it; but a disquietude of his conscience predicted that the weird drama was not to swerve so abruptly from her upon the word of human command.
For she chiefly should be involved in everything, while this was to dispossess her of her rank, for her safety or their haste of greed. But if their paths were thus made to diverge, who could say whether she or they would come earliest to the catastrophe! Who was equipped: he, that perhaps merely looked to the sensation; or she, that was oppressed by these accidents and presentiments as by a horror of real life? His eternal nonchalance was rebuked by the contrast.
Nothing in the world, he had thought, was serious enough for seriousness, were not laughter worse; but her seriousness could belong to the spheres. His chastisement at the hands of the offended Demiurge was that he might barely appreciate from her present instance how, in that unphilosophic grim heaviness of opinion called seriousness in general, which was humanity's response to its living forest of illusions, the function itself could be quite apart and separate from its misuse; how, if the latter were nearly the most pitiable of the reactions of the original universal spirit shattered into individuals, the former, the function apart from its objects, could be the whole grand weight, density, mass, of the same spirit considered in its originality. For all the past gleams of greatness in the world had been born, not of a light scorn and mocking, but of brooding—of a sort of sick despair at what a man had seen, and his will to change it, or rise above it.
So this girl in the room should be despairing, though her misery were personal. No orthodox feminine end was in sight for her from these crowding distresses, nor had she a man's compensating temper of adventure, or cold blood to turn a resolute back upon it all, or affinity of pre-existent occupation to draw a profit from it; but she must marshal her resources to dare the whole psychic onset in pain and stupefaction, being unconscious of any folly in her own conduct to explain so otherwise unprovoked a benighting of her wits—of her tranquil common mental processes of a woman... she, scarcely more than child, tortured and blessed by a special sensitiveness that surely ought to be reserved for the discovering of new chambers in the great house of mysterious spiritual beauty; and now, instead, was sustaining the hammer-like shocks of an affair of the open supernatural, that should be well-fitted to strike down the human equivalent of oxen. … Therefore she had the right to seriousness. Therefore he, who probably had none, was subaltern in the case; yet was impudently proposing to order it! ...
No seriousness? None?—no kind? That was to traduce himself, however. Of the right seriousness he had enough. For there was exactly one seriousness, one grimness of response to reality, for an earthbound man; namely, that of the chains of the body. Very clearly it showed itself in the circumstance that all other matters in the world gave place to birth and death. In the appearing and vanishing of the spark of life lay the contrast with eternity for even the dullest eyes. And this deep cognition of his false mortal state and its transience, he was never, or rarely, without. His lightness was his scorn of the affairs of such a shadow-penitentiary. …
It seemed to him of extreme urgency to know what oth
er claim than her serious interest in it this girl was making—not to the conduct of the business, for its conduct she was declining—but to its peculiar bearing upon her personal case... yet that, too, he had no recollection of her having ever declared in so many words... perhaps, therefore, a claim by her existed nowhere except in his own expectation. It was equal. Her seriousness of answer to these strangenesses amounted not to a claim; and she was willing, for instance, to surrender to Arsinal his second prize—willing now to stand altogether aside. Yet all of them with her in this room knew, knew, that whatever was happening to-day, yesterday, before that in the week, or, in connection, in the diffused past, was proving to point, and always must have pointed, to her—to Ingrid Fleming—as surely as the wavering needle of a compass pointed throughout its violent oscillations to a fixed midway mark that could only be north. Thus Drapier's tragic end might be a north-east pointing, Arsinal's triumph might be a north-west, but to her magnetic north the next incidents were always returning, from this side and from that.
How came he by the certainty? For with its origin clear he could better understand the rest—what type of fatal sequence this was that, in stark fact, could choose for victimisation an unassuming girl wishing only to lead her quiet life with a man of her own station eminently equipped to give her quietness; while he (Saltfleet), and others rather too eager to snatch whatever glory or thrill might be in the lively assault on the earthliness of them all, were contemptuously being thrust back into second rank—yes! even Drapier—Drapier, as personally insignificant to the business in death as in the last days of his lifetime. … So whence sprang his certainty?
Was it the answer, that it was not her trifling degree of pain, her mere confusion, to the present, that could have brought the insight—not that, but another feeling within him, of the class of a foreboding, that such pain and bewilderment presented merely the penumbra of a darker shadowing on the way? ... that she stood here on this floor an inevitable—a wretch of Design—insulated already from her fellows by her prime-marking at the hands of the unseen? Could this be his assurance of her spiritual predominance in the advancing glare from another world? ... It was so!—it was so! And how hideously mean and small appeared all at once his scheme to prevent her dignity under fate, by that appropriation of the final experiment with Arsinal alone!... Never in all his life had he experienced anything like the groundless conviction of this appalling feeling towards one who, after all, was known to him only by her beauty and distinction of mind, and passing distress. …
Continuing very erect, he clasped his forehead with a tightened hand, and turned from the others. And as he did so, occurred to him what a marvellous store of cryptic truth should lie in the beginning chapters of Genesis. The forbidden trees of Eden: wanting them, it must have been a mere pleasure-park; having them, it became the picture and symbol of the ghostly universe. Eve, not eating of the fruit, must have remained the simple insipid female of her species; but the serpent, who surely was God disguised, persuaded her to her fiercer, higher heart, when instantly her immortal soul could know both itself and the horror of her unreal body. … Nor was the recorded following action of herself and Adam in contradiction.
Whosoever, therefore, should invite—nay, tempt—a woman not less than Eve to taste of a fruit of equal significance with that of the tree of good and evil knowledge—that one should be the instrument of a very fated, very inherent work... inherent within the prime ancient foundations of the world; the fate merely being its apparently casual startling and insulting of sanity in due season.
Nearly an axiom it was, that the veto of human sanity in great supernatural concerns should be insulted. Looking past health and wholesomeness, which were but negatives, one had to suppose that the illusory bodily life offered not a single positive value that was worth the coveting, as against the dimmest hints and reminders of the spiritual. Earth's castles and palaces were too truly of thin air; a paltry hundred years at most would blow them all away for a man; and it were well rather to crack one’s brains in refusing the magic sham in its hour of greatest cloud-strength, than preserve those brains entire by keeping within the sham's internal laws, that were as the intellectual frame and principle.
The laws were many, and so cunningly devised that only the wisest could know them for what they were, appearing as they did more like the necessary conditions of possibility than fantastic rules sprung, God knew where from! for man's obeying. They pronounced such things as, that all reality for the mind was ultimately derived from the sense of touch; that nothing could enter into experience save what was related to past experience, though but distantly; that the infinity of gaping little "I’s" must show as masses and flat surfaces, and that the monstrous imaginary life of these variegated collections must govern the world; and a hundred other non sequiturs as instinctive.
But outside those laws for human sanity only—outside the whole witchcraft and imposition shaped by, yet hiding, them, as the flesh of a body its skeleton—should rest the true existence, evoking another correspondence that was neither sanity nor insanity, but more akin to the latter; without, however, the cracks and evils necessarily attendant on any failure, even of loyalty to a sham. A correspondence passed over by worldlings... better known to a small minority of mystics, saints, musicians, children. …
While Peter, and Arsinal too, starting from premises approximately identical, were arriving by quite other roads within sight of the same conclusion.
An instinct of alikeness had drawn Peter's mind back to those sense-enchantments of his first day down: the shadowy funeral train coming across the face of the height over against Devil's Tor, that had for its focus of unreality that covered bier of a length to confound his imagination; a few hours later, the second peeping of his perceptions through a gap of madness, there by the garden gate at Whitestone, confirmed by Ingrid's parallel seizure, her nearly-finished queer fish of a cousin being again present, as he had been the first time; so that the material object in his hand both times was of necessity the deceit's immediate cause.
This that had just happened, then—though what had happened? Nothing had happened. … But it could be a shaft from the same quiver—its failure to intensify to a living phantasm was explicable. Some discord of persons was neutralising the influence, or (guessing the stone to be probably in Arsinal's pocket) Drapier had been the better medium, or the direct contact of the hand was an essential factor. He also remembered how last evening at the inn the self-same stone had passed from Saltfleet to Ingrid without other queerness than the clairaudient shock for her alone. … So there was no doubt a law, but he was unacquainted with it. These confederates, too, had talked of having seen something on Devil's Tor since lunch; by the same stone's agency of course. Saltfleet and Ingrid had shared an earlier psychic incident up there in the morning. Indubitably it was the flint. Accordingly, it had just been trying to act on its own account, through cloth; through a man who was a bad conductor. …
But the proof that this last flickering for his eyes had not been fancy was that the others too had turned to it, and now were standing, as he conceived, subdued and privately puzzled. A repugnance stopped him from asking her, but Ingrid should have seen more than he. It could not affect the case's fearfulness, if his interpretation were true. That lay, not in any ghostly picture, but in the conception of the breaking-through of his sensuous defences; even though the swaying wall between two worlds had not this time passed silently over him like a wave, abandoning him amazed in another magic place. …
He was impressed by the very insubstantiality of his momentary displacement of vision. So might a permanent new life be imagined to begin: not by spectacles. He thought that if he should retain his senses in the hour of death, his physical environment must come to daze him in just such a manner. The supernaturally wise eyes of so many of the dying should be due, not, as popularly supposed, to the anticipatory sight of heaven, but to a subsidence of that confusion to acceptance at last. He seemed to be aware of something o
f the same wisdom—of the same acceptance—in his own present eyes. …
When, however, the character of this inexpressible glimpse of nothing was become a certainty to his understanding, he discovered that he was already upon a new grandeur, to concern his art. More than that of the inspiration he would not acknowledge, until it should have passed through the cooling chamber of his spirit.
Should it be an authentic lighting of his landscape, pride and loneliness, as ever, were in readiness to spring up: the inevitable escorts of his spiritual audacities. Ingrid herself would then not be suffered to intrude her paralysing gladness within a case which barely he, in all the immaculateness of solitude could apprehend. …
For these befallen wonders were as curiously uplifting him through their quietness of mode, unquietness of significance, as if they had been monuments carved with unknown characters of a people vanished; monuments sullen and alien in the modern day after a sepulchre of a hundred centuries. Even this last failed flitting was like such a monument: as calm, archæan, and exalting. But an especial flavour distinguished it. It should have been an antique appearance, yet actually had been void; accordingly its ancientness, empty of shaped phantoms, could swell his imaginative soul as a real thing, not false.
The single wonders were uplifting him, while all of them together, associated—that sequence was as though speaking to him; inciting his will; the half of his existence which was yet to be. The emotion and the passion were apart. For his will, it was no affair of reiterated dim shinings and interferences across time, initiated by some force strange to humanity conveniently to be called psychic; but the signals were like a message being spelt out letter by letter; all the letters different; for four, five, and six persons... perhaps a different message for each recipient.
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