The End of the Terror
Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the real
significance of life until we began to study just those aspects of it
which we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, and
therefore, unimportant.
We were discussing a few months ago the awful shadow of the terror
which at length had passed away from the land. I had formed my opinion,
partly from observation, partly from certain facts which had been
communicated to me, and the passwords having been exchanged, I found
that Lewis had come by very different ways to the same end.
“And yet,” he said, “it is not a true end, or rather, it is like all
the ends of human inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We must
confess that what has happened might have happened at any time in the
history of the world. It did not happen till a year ago as a matter of
fact, and therefore we made up our minds that it never could happen;
or, one would better say, it was outside the range even of imagination.
But this is our way. Most people are quite sure that the Black
Death—otherwise the Plague—will never invade Europe again. They have
made up their complacent minds that it was due to dirt and bad
drainage. As a matter of fact the Plague had nothing to do with dirt or
with drains; and there is nothing to prevent its ravaging England
to-morrow. But if you tell people so, they won’t believe you. They
won’t believe in anything that isn’t there at the particular moment
when you are talking to them. As with the Plague, so with the Terror.
We could not believe that such a thing could ever happen. Remnant said,
truly enough, that whatever it was, it was outside theory, outside our
theory. Flatland cannot believe in the cube or the sphere.”
I agreed with all this. I added that sometimes the world was incapable
of seeing, much less believing, that which was before its own eyes.
“Look,” I said, “at any eighteenth century print of a Gothic cathedral.
You will find that the trained artistic eye even could not behold in
any true sense the building that was before it. I have seen an old
print of Peterborough Cathedral that looks as if the artist had drawn
it from a clumsy model, constructed of bent wire and children’s
bricks.”
“Exactly; because Gothic was outside the æsthetic theory (and therefore
vision) of the time. You can’t believe what you don’t see: rather, you
can’t see what you don’t believe. It was so during the time of the
Terror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity of
having the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Of
course, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, are
nothing and lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of facts, but we could
make nothing of them. I went home at the tail of that dreadful
procession from Treff Loyne in a state of mind very near to madness. I
heard one of the soldiers saying to the other: ‘There’s no rat that’ll
spike a man to the heart, Bill.’ I don’t know why, but I felt that if I
heard any more of such talk as that I should go crazy; it seemed to me
that the anchors of reason were parting. I left the party and took the
short cut across the fields into Porth. I looked up Davies in the High
Street and arranged with him that he should take on any cases I might
have that evening, and then I went home and gave my man his
instructions to send people on. And then I shut myself up to think it
all out—if I could.
“You must not suppose that my experiences of that afternoon had
afforded me the slightest illumination. Indeed, if it had not been that
I had seen poor old Griffith’s body lying pierced in his own farmyard,
I think I should have been inclined to accept one of Secretan’s hints,
and to believe that the whole family had fallen a victim to a
collective delusion or hallucination, and had shut themselves up and
died of thirst through sheer madness. I think there have been such
cases. It’s the insanity of inhibition, the belief that you can’t do
something which you are really perfectly capable of doing. But; I had
seen the body of the murdered man and the wound that had killed him.
“Did the manuscript left by Secretan give me no hint? Well, it seemed
to me to make confusion worse confounded. You have seen it; you know
that in certain places it is evidently mere delirium, the wanderings of
a dying mind. How was I to separate the facts from the
phantasms—lacking the key to the whole enigma. Delirium is often a sort
of cloud-castle, a sort of magnified and distorted shadow of
actualities, but it is a very difficult thing, almost an impossible
thing, to reconstruct the real house from the distortion of it, thrown
on the clouds of the patient’s brain. You see, Secretan in writing that
extraordinary document almost insisted on the fact that he was not in
his proper sense; that for days he had been part asleep, part awake,
part delirious. How was one to judge his statement, to separate
delirium from fact? In one thing he stood confirmed; you remember he
speaks of calling for help up the old chimney of Treff Loyne; that did
seem to fit in with the tales of a hollow, moaning cry that had been
heard upon the Allt: so far one could take him as a recorder of actual
experiences. And I looked in the old cellars of the farm and found a
frantic sort of rabbit-hole dug by one of the pillars; again he was
confirmed. But what was one to make of that story of the chanting
voice, and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the chapter out of
some unknown Minor Prophet? When one has the key it is easy enough to
sort out the facts, or the hints of facts from the delusions; but I
hadn’t the key on that September evening. I was forgetting the ‘tree’
with lights and fires in it; that, I think, impressed me more than
anything with the feeling that Secretan’s story was, in the main, a
true story. I had seen a like appearance down there in my own garden;
but what was it?
“Now, I was saying that, paradoxically, it is only by the inexplicable
things that life can be explained. We are apt to say, you know, ‘a very
odd coincidence’ and pass the matter by, as if there were no more to be
said, or as if that were the end of it. Well, I believe that the only
real path lies through the blind alleys.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, this is an instance of what I mean. I told you about Merritt, my
brother-in-law, and the capsizing of that boat, the _Mary Ann_. He had
seen, he said, signal lights flashing from one of the farms on the
coast, and he was quite certain that the two things were intimately
connected as cause and effect. I thought it all nonsense, and I was
wondering how I was going to shut him up when a big moth flew into the
room through that window, fluttered about, and succeeded in burning
itself alive in the lamp. That gave me my cue; I asked Merritt if he
knew why moths made for lamps or something of the kind; I thought it
would be a hint to him that I was sick of his flashlights and his
half-baked theories. So it was—he looked sulky and held his tongue.
“But a few minutes later I was called out by a man who had found his
little boy dead in a field near his cottage about an hour before. The
child was so still, they said, that a great moth had settled on his
forehead and only fluttered away when they lifted up the body. It was
absolutely illogical; but it was this odd ‘coincidence’ of the moth in
my lamp and the moth on the dead boy’s forehead that first set me on
the track. I can’t say that it guided me in any real sense; it was more
like a great flare of red paint on a wall; it rang up my attention, if
I may say so; it was a sort of shock like a bang on the big drum. No
doubt Merritt was talking great nonsense that evening so far as his
particular instance went; the flashes of light from the farm had
nothing to do with the wreck of the boat. But his general principle was
sound; when you hear a gun go off and see a man fall it is idle to talk
of ‘a mere coincidence.’ I think a very interesting book might be
written on this question: I would call it ‘A Grammar of Coincidence.’
“But as you will remember, from having read my notes on the matter, I
was called in about ten days later to see a man named Cradock, who had
been found in a field near his farm quite dead. This also was at night.
His wife found him, and there were some very queer things in her story.
She said that the hedge of the field looked as if it were changed; she
began to be afraid that she had lost her way and got into the wrong
field. Then she said the hedge was lighted up as if there were a lot of
glow-worms in it, and when she peered over the stile there seemed to be
some kind of glimmering upon the ground, and then the glimmering melted
away, and she found her husband’s body near where this light had been.
Now this man Cradock had been suffocated just as the little boy Roberts
had been suffocated, and as that man in the Midlands who took a short
cut one night had been suffocated. Then I remembered that poor Johnnie
Roberts had called out about ‘something shiny’ over the stile just
before he played truant. Then, on my part, I had to contribute the very
remarkable sight I witnessed here, as I looked down over the garden;
the appearance as of a spreading tree where I knew there was no such
tree, and then the shining and burning of lights and moving colors.
Like the poor child and Mrs. Cradock, I had seen something shiny, just
as some man in Stratfordshire had seen a dark cloud with points of fire
in it floating over the trees. And Mrs. Cradock thought that the shape
of the trees in the hedge had changed.
“My mind almost uttered the word that was wanted; but you see the
difficulties. This set of circumstances could not, so far as I could
see, have any relation with the other circumstances of the Terror. How
could I connect all this with the bombs and machine-guns of the
Midlands, with the armed men who kept watch about the munition shops by
day and night. Then there was the long list of people here who had
fallen over the cliffs or into the quarry; there were the cases of the
men stifled in the slime of the marshes; there was the affair of the
family murdered in front of their cottage on the Highway; there was the
capsized _Mary Ann_. I could not see any thread that could bring all
these incidents together; they seemed to me to be hopelessly
disconnected. I could not make out any relation between the agency that
beat out the brains of the Williams’s and the agency that overturned
the boat. I don’t know, but I think it’s very likely if nothing more
had happened that I should have put the whole thing down as an
unaccountable series of crimes and accidents which chanced to occur in
Meirion in the summer of 1915. Well, of course, that would have been an
impossible standpoint in view of certain incidents in Merritt’s story.
Still, if one is confronted by the insoluble, one lets it go at last.
If the mystery is inexplicable, one pretends that there isn’t any
mystery. That is the justification for what is called free thinking.
“Then came that extraordinary business of Treff Loyne. I couldn’t put
that on one side. I couldn’t pretend that nothing strange or out of the
way had happened. There was no getting over it or getting round it. I
had seen with my eyes that there was a mystery, and a most horrible
mystery. I have forgotten my logic, but one might say that Treff Loyne
demonstrated the existence of a mystery in the figure of Death.
“I took it all home, as I have told you, and sat down for the evening
before it. It appalled me, not only by its horror, but here again by
the discrepancy between its terms. Old Griffith, so far as I could
judge, had been killed by the thrust of a pike or perhaps of a
sharpened stake: how could one relate this to the burning tree that had
floated over the ridge of the barn. It was as if I said to you: ‘here
is a man drowned, and here is a man burned alive: show that each death
was caused by the same agency!’ And the moment that I left this
particular case of Treff Loyne, and tried to get some light on it from
other instances of the Terror, I would think of the man in the midlands
who heard the feet of a thousand men rustling in the wood, and their
voices as if dead men sat up in their bones and talked. And then I
would say to myself, ‘and how about that boat overturned in a calm
sea?’ There seemed no end to it, no hope of any solution.
“It was, I believe, a sudden leap of the mind that liberated me from
the tangle. It was quite beyond logic. I went back to that evening when
Merritt was boring me with his flashlights, to the moth in the candle,
and to the moth on the forehead of poor Johnnie Roberts. There was no
sense in it; but I suddenly determined that the child and Joseph
Cradock the farmer, and that unnamed Stratfordshire man, all found at
night, all asphyxiated, had been choked by vast swarms of moths. I
don’t pretend even now that this is demonstrated, but I’m sure it’s
true.
“Now suppose you encounter a swarm of these creatures in the dark.
Suppose the smaller ones fly up your nostrils. You will gasp for breath
and open your mouth. Then, suppose some hundreds of them fly into your
mouth, into your gullet, into your windpipe, what will happen to you?
You will be dead in a very short time, choked, asphyxiated.”
“But the moths would be dead too. They would be found in the bodies.”
“The moths? Do you know that it is extremely difficult to kill a moth
with cyanide of potassium? Take a frog, kill it, open its stomach.
There you will find its dinner of moths and small beetles, and the
‘dinner’ will shake itself and walk off cheerily, to resume an entirely
active existence. No; that is no difficulty.
“Well, now I came to this. I was shutting out all the other cases. I
was confining myself to those that came under the one formula. I got to
the assumption or conclusion, whichever you like, that certain people
had been asphyxiated by the action of moths. I had accounted for that
extraordinary appearance of burning or colored lights that I had
witnessed myself, when I saw the growth of that strange tree in my
garden. That was clearly the cloud with points of fire in it that the
Stratfordshire man took for a new and terrible kind of poison gas, that
was the shiny something that poor little Johnnie Roberts had seen over
the stile, that was the glimmering light that had led Mrs. Cradock to
her husband’s dead body, that was the assemblage of terrible eyes that
had watched over Treff Loyne by night. Once on the right track I
understood all this, for coming into this room in the dark, I have been
amazed by the wonderful burning and the strange fiery colors of the
eyes of a single moth, as it crept up the pane of glass, outside.
Imagine the effect of myriads of such eyes, of the movement of these
lights and fires in a vast swarm of moths, each insect being in
constant motion while it kept its place in the mass: I felt that all
this was clear and certain.
“Then the next step. Of course, we know nothing really about moths;
rather, we know nothing of moth reality. For all I know there may be
hundreds of books which treat of moth and nothing but moth. But these
are scientific books, and science only deals with surfaces; it has
nothing to do with realities—it is impertinent if it attempts to do
with realities. To take a very minor matter; we don’t even know why the
moth desires the flame. But we do know what the moth does not do; it
does not gather itself into swarms with the object of destroying human
life. But here, by the hypothesis, were cases in which the moth had
done this very thing; the moth race had entered, it seemed, into a
malignant conspiracy against the human race. It was quite impossible,
no doubt—that is to say, it had never happened before—but I could see
no escape from this conclusion.
“These insects, then, were definitely hostile to man; and then I
stopped, for I could not see the next step, obvious though it seems to
me now. I believe that the soldiers’ scraps of talk on the way to Treff
Loyne and back flung the next plank over the gulf. They had spoken of
‘rat poison,’ of no rat being able to spike a man through the heart;
and then, suddenly, I saw my way clear. If the moths were infected with
hatred of men, and possessed the design and the power of combining
against him; why not suppose this hatred, this design, this power
shared by other non-human creatures.
“The secret of the Terror might be condensed into a sentence: the
animals had revolted against men.
“Now, the puzzle became easy enough; one had only to classify. Take the
cases of the people who met their deaths by falling over cliffs or over
the edge of quarries. We think of sheep as timid creatures, who always
ran away. But suppose sheep that don’t run away; and, after all, in
reason why should they run away? Quarry or no quarry, cliff or no
cliff; what would happen to you if a hundred sheep ran after you
instead of running from you? There would be no help for it; they would
have you down and beat you to death or stifle you. Then suppose man,
woman, or child near a cliff’s edge or a quarry-side, and a sudden rush
of sheep. Clearly there is no help; there is nothing for it but to go
over. There can be no doubt that that is what happened in all these
cases.
“And again; you know the country and you know how a herd of cattle will
sometimes pursue people through the fields in a solemn, stolid sort of
way. They behave as if they wanted to close in on you. Townspeople
sometimes get frightened and scream and run; you or I would take no
notice, or at the utmost, wave our sticks at the herd, which will stop
dead or lumber off. But suppose they don’t lumber off. The mildest old
cow, remember, is stronger than any man. What can one man or half a
dozen men do against half a hundred of these beasts no longer
restrained by that mysterious inhibition, which has made for ages the
strong the humble slaves of the weak? But if you are botanizing in the
marsh, like that poor fellow who was staying at Porth, and forty or
fifty young cattle gradually close round you, and refuse to move when
you shout and wave your stick, but get closer and closer instead, and
get you into the slime. Again, where is your help? If you haven’t got
an automatic pistol, you must go down and stay down, while the beasts
lie quietly on you for five minutes. It was a quicker death for poor
Griffith of Treff Loyne—one of his own beasts gored him to death with
one sharp thrust of its horn into his heart. And from that morning
those within the house were closely besieged by their own cattle and
horses and sheep; and when those unhappy people within opened a window
to call for help or to catch a few drops of rain water to relieve their
burning thirst, the cloud waited for them with its myriad eyes of fire.
Can you wonder that Secretan’s statement reads in places like mania?
You perceive the horrible position of those people in Treff Loyne; not
only did they see death advancing on them, but advancing with
incredible steps, as if one were to die not only in nightmare but by
nightmare. But no one in his wildest, most fiery dreams had ever
imagined such a fate. I am not astonished that Secretan at one moment
suspected the evidence of his own senses, at another surmised that the
world’s end had come.”
“And how about the Williams’s who were murdered on the Highway near
here?”
“The horses were the murderers; the horses that afterwards stampeded
the camp below. By some means which is still obscure to me they lured
that family into the road and beat their brains out; their shod hoofs
were the instruments of execution. And, as for the _Mary Ann_, the boat
that was capsized, I have no doubt that it was overturned by a sudden
rush of the porpoises that were gamboling about in the water of Larnac
Bay. A porpoise is a heavy beast—half a dozen of them could easily
upset a light rowing-boat. The munition works? Their enemy was rats. I
believe that it has been calculated that in ‘greater London’ the number
of rats is about equal to the number of human beings, that is, there
are about seven millions of them. The proportion would be about the
same in all the great centers of population; and the rat, moreover, is,
on occasion, migratory in its habits. You can understand now that story
of the _Semiramis_, beating about the mouth of the Thames, and at last
cast away by Arcachon, her only crew dry heaps of bones. The rat is an
expert boarder of ships. And so one can understand the tale told by the
frightened man who took the path by the wood that led up from the new
munition works. He thought he heard a thousand men treading softly
through the wood and chattering to one another in some horrible tongue;
what he did hear was the marshaling of an army of rats—their array
before the battle.
“And conceive the terror of such an attack. Even one rat in a fury is
said to be an ugly customer to meet; conceive then, the irruption of
these terrible, swarming myriads, rushing upon the helpless,
unprepared, astonished workers in the munition shops.”
There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Lewis was entirely justified
in these extraordinary conclusions. As I say, I had arrived at pretty
much the same end, by different ways; but this rather as to the general
situation, while Lewis had made his own particular study of those
circumstances of the Terror that were within his immediate purview, as
a physician in large practice in the southern part of Meirion. Of some
of the cases which he reviewed he had, no doubt, no immediate or
first-hand knowledge; but he judged these instances by their similarity
to the facts which had come under his personal notice. He spoke of the
affairs of the quarry at Llanfihangel on the analogy of the people who
were found dead at the bottom of the cliffs near Porth, and he was no
doubt justified in doing so. He told me that, thinking the whole matter
over, he was hardly more astonished by the Terror in itself than by the
strange way in which he had arrived at his conclusions.
“You know,” he said, “those certain evidences of animal malevolence
which we knew of, the bees that stung the child to death, the trusted
sheepdog’s turning savage, and so forth. Well, I got no light whatever
from all this; it suggested nothing to me—simply because I had not got
that ‘idea’ which Coleridge rightly holds necessary in all inquiry;
facts _qua_ facts, as we said, mean nothing and come to nothing. You do
not believe, therefore you cannot see.
“And then, when the truth at last appeared it was through the whimsical
‘coincidence,’ as we call such signs, of the moth in my lamp and the
moth on the dead child’s forehead. This, I think, is very
extraordinary.”
“And there seems to have been one beast that remained faithful; the dog
at Treff Loyne. That is strange.”
“That remains a mystery.”
It would not be wise, even now, to describe too closely the terrible
scenes that were to be seen in the munition areas of the north and the
midlands during the black months of the Terror. Out of the factories
issued at black midnight the shrouded dead in their coffins, and their
very kinsfolk did not know how they had come by their deaths. All the
towns were full of houses of mourning, were full of dark and terrible
rumors; incredible, as the incredible reality. There were things done
and suffered that perhaps never will be brought to light, memories and
secret traditions of these things will be whispered in families,
delivered from father to son, growing wilder with the passage of the
years, but never growing wilder than the truth.
It is enough to say that the cause of the Allies was for awhile in
deadly peril. The men at the front called in their extremity for guns
and shells. No one told them what was happening in the places where
these munitions were made.
At first the position was nothing less than desperate; men in high
places were almost ready to cry “mercy” to the enemy. But, after the
first panic, measures were taken such as those described by Merritt in
his account of the matter. The workers were armed with special weapons,
guards were mounted, machine-guns were placed in position, bombs and
liquid flame were ready against the obscene hordes of the enemy, and
the “burning clouds” found a fire fiercer than their own. Many deaths
occurred amongst the airmen; but they, too, were given special guns,
arms that scattered shot broadcast, and so drove away the dark flights
that threatened the airplanes.
And, then, in the winter of 1915-16, the Terror ended suddenly as it
had begun. Once more a sheep was a frightened beast that ran
instinctively from a little child; the cattle were again solemn, stupid
creatures, void of harm; the spirit and the convention of malignant
design passed out of the hearts of all the animals. The chains that
they had cast off for awhile were thrown again about them.
And, finally, there comes the inevitable “why?” Why did the beasts who
had been humbly and patiently subject to man, or affrighted by his
presence, suddenly know their strength and learn how to league
together, and declare bitter war against their ancient master?
It is a most difficult and obscure question. I give what explanation I
have to give with very great diffidence, and an eminent disposition to
be corrected, if a clearer light can be found.
Some friends of mine, for whose judgment I have very great respect, are
inclined to think that there was a certain contagion of hate. They hold
that the fury of the whole world at war, the great passion of death
that seems driving all humanity to destruction, infected at last these
lower creatures, and in place of their native instinct of submission,
gave them rage and wrath and ravening.
This may be the explanation. I cannot say that it is not so, because I
do not profess to understand the working of the universe. But I confess
that the theory strikes me as fanciful. There may be a contagion of
hate as there is a contagion of smallpox; I do not know, but I hardly
believe it.
In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, the source of the great
revolt of the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of
inquiry. I believe that the subjects revolted because the king
abdicated. Man has dominated the beasts throughout the ages, the
spiritual has reigned over the rational through the peculiar quality
and grace of spirituality that men possess, that makes a man to be that
which he is. And when he maintained this power and grace, I think it is
pretty clear that between him and the animals there was a certain
treaty and alliance. There was supremacy on the one hand, and
submission on the other; but at the same time there was between the two
that cordiality which exists between lords and subjects in a
well-organized state. I know a socialist who maintains that Chaucer’s
“Canterbury Tales” give a picture of true democracy. I do not know
about that, but I see that knight and miller were able to get on quite
pleasantly together, just because the knight knew that he was a knight
and the miller knew that he was a miller. If the knight had had
conscientious objections to his knightly grade, while the miller saw no
reason why he should not be a knight, I am sure that their intercourse
would have been difficult, unpleasant, and perhaps murderous.
So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A
learned man said to me a few weeks ago: “When I have to choose between
the evidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always
believe the evidence of tradition. Documents may be falsified, and
often are falsified; tradition is never falsified.” This is true; and,
therefore, I think, one may put trust in the vast body of folklore
which asserts that there was once a worthy and friendly alliance
between man and the beasts. Our popular tale of Dick Whittington and
his Cat no doubt represents the adaptation of a very ancient legend to
a comparatively modern personage, but we may go back into the ages and
find the popular tradition asserting that not only are the animals the
subjects, but also the friends of man.
All that was in virtue of that singular spiritual element in man which
the rational animals do not possess. Spiritual does not mean
respectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean “good” in
the ordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal
prerogative of man, differentiating him from the beasts.
For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has been
wiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared,
again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, the
equal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed that
he is not Orpheus but Caliban.
But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to the
spiritual quality in men—we are content to call it instinct. They
perceived that the throne was vacant—not even friendship was possible
between them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was a
sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.
Hence, I think, the Terror. They have risen once—they may rise again.
THE END