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 Mænads 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.’