II

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered

the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants

do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.

Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,

taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to

descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the

sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was

no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were

so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as

they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and

silence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams

suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found

before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose

wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough

clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years

before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had

recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter

of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for

me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and

remembering the magnetic power he had once possessed over me, a

little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion,

as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking

and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler

days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic

movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some

unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the

light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon

the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first

beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the

door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured

flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I

could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was

about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a

little chainless bronze censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of

painted china by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique

amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its contents, I

began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my

thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me

the due of things so long connected with secret hopes and fears. 'I

see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are still fond of incense, and

I can show you an incense more precious than any you have ever seen,'

and as he spoke he took the censer out of my hand and put the amulets

in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the _alembic_. I

sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat there for

awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his hand. 'I

have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense will fill

the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we are

talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made from

flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple

petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ

in the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath,

until He cried against the cross and his destiny.' He shook some dust

into the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the

floor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that

spread out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was

like Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with

a faint sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to

ask you that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left

Paris rather than answer.'

He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the

firelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will I

become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not

consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that

I have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely

to consent?'

'You have changed greatly since then,' he answered. 'I have read your

books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand you

better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many

dreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world and

gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at

their feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering

purpose, for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and

noise of the multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical

union with the multitude who govern this world and time.' And then he

murmured something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could

not see.

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he

was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness

the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense

colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused

by memory, and by the twilight of incense, for I would not

acknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect; and I

said: 'Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form

of worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary?' He leaned

forward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and

as he spoke I had to struggle again with the shadow, as of some older

night than the night of the sun, which began to dim the light of the

candles and to blot out the little gleams upon the corner of

picture-frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the blue of the

incense to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer and

glow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had

fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him

speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with

only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in

imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he

meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of

Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of

the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing

away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the

world and could not find them; and under the power of all those

countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies

in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the

power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won

everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and

fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many

think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them

again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in

soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay

in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking

humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.'

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my

waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had

begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably

silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in

the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice

began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you

have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the

thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an

existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal

god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as

though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and

there is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell

over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might

reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is

a god; and there, O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilight

falling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are

the grey and white doves.' In the midst of my dream I saw him hold

out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked

the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to

tear me in two, and said with forced determination: 'You would sweep

me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; and yet

a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind reflect

everything with indifferent precision like a mirror.' I seemed to be

perfectly master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command

you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the

illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin

to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.' I had grown

suddenly angry, and seizing the _alembic_ from the table, was

about to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the door

behind him appeared to grow immense; and then the _alembic_ fell

from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and

bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant

voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that all life proceeds

out of corruption.' The glittering feathers had now covered me

completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years,

and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the

green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea

of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a

voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and

another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a

more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken

into numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were

reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and

half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were

forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the

tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will,

everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise

through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in

some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal

moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of

rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.

And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they

had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods,

melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed

into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness

which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had

ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and

I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen

from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and

become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a

night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant

wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the

wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself

leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw

the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner it

had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will

go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for I

have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need

answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must

come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple

between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of

men.'