I was walking along one of the Dublin quays, on the side nearest the
river, about ten years after our conversation, stopping from time
to time to turn over the books upon an old bookstall, and thinking,
curiously enough, of the terrible destiny of Michael Robartes, and his
brotherhood; when I saw a tall and bent man walking slowly along the
other side of the quay. I recognized, with a start, in a lifeless mask
with dim eyes, the once resolute and delicate face of Owen Aherne. I
crossed the quay quickly, but had not gone many yards before he turned
away, as though he had seen me, and hurried down a side street; I
followed, but only to lose him among the intricate streets on the north
side of the river. During the next few weeks I inquired of everybody
who had once known him, but he had made himself known to nobody; and I
knocked, without result, at the door of his old house; and had nearly
persuaded myself that I was mistaken, when I saw him again in a narrow
street behind the Four Courts, and followed him to the door of his
house.
I laid my hand on his arm; he turned quite without surprise; and indeed
it is possible that to him, whose inner life had soaked up the outer
life, a parting of years was a parting from forenoon to afternoon.
He stood holding the door half open, as though he would keep me from
entering; and would perhaps have parted from me without further words
had I not said: ‘Owen Aherne, you trusted me once, will you not trust
me again, and tell me what has come of the ideas we discussed in this
house ten years ago?--but perhaps you have already forgotten them.’
‘You have a right to hear,’ he said, ‘for since I have told you the
ideas, I should tell you the extreme danger they contain, or rather the
boundless wickedness they contain; but when you have heard this we must
part, and part for ever, because I am lost, and must be hidden!’
I followed him through the paved passage, and saw that its corners were
choked, and the pictures gray, with dust and cobwebs; and that the
dust and cobwebs which covered the ruby and sapphire of the saints on
the window had made it very dim. He pointed to where the ivory tablets
glimmered faintly in the dimness, and I saw that they were covered with
small writing, and went up to them and began to read the writing. It
was in Latin, and was an elaborate casuistry, illustrated with many
examples, but whether from his own life or from the lives of others
I do not know. I had read but a few sentences when I imagined that a
faint perfume had begun to fill the room, and turning round asked Owen
Aherne if he were lighting the incense.
‘No,’ he replied, and pointed where the thurible lay rusty and empty on
one of the benches; as he spoke the faint perfume seemed to vanish, and
I was persuaded I had imagined it.
‘Has the philosophy of the _Liber Inducens in Evangelium Æternum_ made
you very unhappy?’ I said.
‘At first I was full of happiness,’ he replied, ‘for I felt a divine
ecstasy, an immortal fire in every passion, in every hope, in every
desire, in every dream; and I saw, in the shadows under leaves, in the
hollow waters, in the eyes of men and women, its image, as in a mirror;
and it was as though I was about to touch the Heart of God. Then all
changed and I was full of misery, and I said to myself that I was
caught in the glittering folds of an enormous serpent, and was falling
with him through a fathomless abyss, and that henceforth the glittering
folds were my world; and in my misery it was revealed to me that man
can only come to that Heart through the sense of separation from it
which we call sin, and I understood that I could not sin, because I
had discovered the law of my being, and could only express or fail to
express my being, and I understood that God has made a simple and an
arbitrary law that we may sin and repent!’
He had sat down on one of the wooden benches and now became silent, his
bowed head and hanging arms and listless body having more of dejection
than any image I have met with in life or in any art. I went and stood
leaning against the altar, and watched him, not knowing what I should
say; and I noticed his black closely-buttoned coat, his short hair,
and shaven head, which preserved a memory of his priestly ambition,
and understood how Catholicism had seized him in the midst of the
vertigo he called philosophy; and I noticed his lightless eyes and his
earth-coloured complexion, and understood how she had failed to do more
than hold him on the margin: and I was full of an anguish of pity.
‘It may be,’ he went on, ‘that the angels whose hearts are shadows of
the Divine Heart, and whose bodies are made of the Divine Intellect,
may come to where their longing is always by a thirst for the divine
ecstasy, the immortal fire, that is in passion, in hope, in desire, in
dreams; but we whose hearts perish every moment, and whose bodies melt
away like a sigh, must bow and obey!’
I went nearer to him and said: ‘Prayer and repentance will make you
like other men.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I am not among those for whom Christ died, and this
is why I must be hidden. I have a leprosy that even eternity cannot
cure. I have seen the whole, and how can I come again to believe that a
part is the whole? I have lost my soul because I have looked out of the
eyes of the angels.’
Suddenly I saw, or imagined that I saw, the room darken, and faint
figures robed in purple, and lifting faint torches with arms that
gleamed like silver, bending, above Owen Aherne; and I saw, or
imagined that I saw, drops, as of burning gum, fall from the torches,
and a heavy purple smoke, as of incense, come pouring from the flames
and sweeping about us. Owen Aherne, more happy than I who have been
half initiated into the Order of the Alchemical Rose, and protected
perhaps by his great piety, had sunk again into dejection and
listlessness, and saw none of these things; but my knees shook under
me, for the purple-robed figures were less faint every moment, and now
I could hear the hissing of the gum in the torches. They did not appear
to see me, for their eyes were upon Owen Aherne; now and again I could
hear them sigh as though with sorrow for his sorrow, and presently I
heard words which I could not understand except that they were words of
sorrow, and sweet as though immortal was talking to immortal. Then one
of them waved her torch, and all the torches waved, and for a moment it
was as though some great bird made of flames had fluttered its plumage,
and a voice cried as from far up in the air: ‘He has charged even his
angels with folly, and they also bow and obey; but let your heart
mingle with our hearts, which are wrought of divine ecstasy, and your
body with our bodies, which are wrought of divine intellect.’ And at
that cry I understood that the Order of the Alchemical Rose was not of
this earth, and that it was still seeking over this earth for whatever
souls it could gather within its glittering net; and when all the faces
turned towards me, and I saw the mild eyes and the unshaken eyelids, I
was full of terror, and thought they were about to fling their torches
upon me, so that all I held dear, all that bound me to spiritual and
social order, would be burnt up, and my soul left naked and shivering
among the winds that blow from beyond this world and from beyond the
stars; and then a faint voice cried, ‘Why do you fly from our torches
that were made out of the trees under which Christ wept in the Garden
of Gethsemane? Why do you fly from our torches that were made out of
sweet wood, after it had perished from the world and come to us who
made it of old times with our breath?’
It was not until the door of the house had closed behind my flight, and
the noise of the street was breaking on my ears, that I came back to
myself and to a little of my courage; and I have never dared to pass
the house of Owen Aherne from that day, even though I believe him to
have been driven into some distant country by the spirits whose name is
legion, and whose throne is in the indefinite abyss, and whom he obeys
and cannot see.