THE ROSE OF FIRE
It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
June the first Saturday in June, as I believe--that Llantrisant and all
the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.
This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
is open to systematic investigation.
But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."
This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
existence, this much is certain--it is not in the least like our
conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.
Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
a.m. And the story?
A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
of the world had come," one of the sailors said.
And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
rocks.
And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
glory of the fiery rose had been about them.
For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
coast last June.
And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.
They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.
And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
and fire hot.
"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."
I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
bell, by the sharp closing of a book.
But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
drank water and stared as if they had been _fins gourmets_ tasting an
amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.
And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
fools they had been.
"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
you fight for fivepence?"
* * * * *
The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."
This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediæval
freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.
The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.
The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
the town and district.
On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."
And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.
Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
anything at all.
"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
glass left in the eastern lancets.
But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
speaking beyond the veil.