THE GREAT RETURN
By
ARTHUR MACHEN
AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH
PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM
STREET, STRAND, W.C.
1915
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE BOWMEN
THE HILL OF DREAMS
THE HOUSE OF SOULS
[including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]
HIEROGLYPHICS
THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
DR. STIGGINS
To
D.P.M.
CONTENTS
I. THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
II. ODOURS OF PARADISE
III. A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
IV. THE RINGING OF THE BELL
V. THE ROSE OF FIRE
VI. OLWEN'S DREAM
VII. THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
GREAT RETURN
CHAPTER I
THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.
The circumstances necessary--not to the understanding of this paragraph,
for that is out of the question--but, we will say, to the understanding
of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
thus the morning paper.
His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
transfigured.--Reuter.
That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
explanation or comment on this amazing statement.
* * * * *
There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
the matter; and so this strange event--if there were any such event--was
exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
spectacles.
This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
_poltergeists_. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
instant. Then--for an instant--we see; but the personages whom Mr.
Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the _poltergeist_ are
evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
on--to poetry or to statistics.
* * * * *
Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
Reuter, was not transfigured, and the _poltergeist_, in spite of the
late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
stand alone, for even if the _poltergeist_ be a real _poltergeist_, it
merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
Arfonshire.
Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
it--reads as follows:--
LLANTRISANT.--The season promises very favourably: temperature of
the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest."
The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
that the figure called, I think, _tmesis_, or cutting, had been
generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?
That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
lately.
I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
newspaper paragraph.
After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.
* * * * *
But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.
But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
corroborates, explains each separate piece.
So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
who was taking an early holiday in those regions.
"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
positively reeking with incense."
I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
occurrence at Llantrisant.