The laird of Glenfernie lay in the flowering grass, beneath a
pine-tree, rising lonely from the Roman Campagna. The grass flowed for
miles, a multitudinous green speculating upon other colors, here and
there clearly donning a gold, an amethyst, a blue. The pine-tree
looked afar to other pine-trees. Each seemed solitary. Yet all had the
oneness of the great stage, and if it could comprehend the stage might
swim with its little solitariness into a wider uniqueness. In the
distance lay Rome. He could see St. Peter's dome. But around streamed
the ocean of grass and the ocean of air. Lifted from the one, bathed
in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome.
There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among
time-cleansed bones and vestiges. Rome and its Campagna were like
Sargasso Seas and held the hulks of what had been great galleons. The
air swam above endless grass, endless minute flowers. In long
perspective traveled the arches of an Aqueduct.
He lay in the shadow of a broken tomb. It was midspring. The bland
stillness of this world was grateful to him, after long inner storm.
He lay motionless, not far from the skirts of Contemplation.
The long line of the Aqueduct, arch after arch, succession fixed,
sequence which the gaze made unitary, toled on his thought. He was
regarding span after span of imagery held together, a very wide and
deep landscape of numerous sequences, more planes than one. He was
seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around
the organ the luminous mist of the organism. He passed calmly from one
great landscape to another.
Rome. To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow. The
"to-morrow" put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless
breathing. He saw Rome the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast
animal life of her, the vast passional, the mental clutch and
hammer-blow. The spiritual Rome? He sought it--it must be there. At
last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....
Rome.
If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and
floating. He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to. Like
and like, and synthesis of syntheses! Images, finding that of which
they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line,
their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of
riddles never meant to be answered.... He had a great fund of images,
material so full that it must begin to build higher. Building higher
meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.
He lay still among the grasses, and it was as though he lay also amid
the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living. Now
and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always
momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and
space, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them. The lightning
went--but always left something transforming. And then for three years
all gleams stopped, a leaden wall that they could not pierce rearing
itself.
Latterly they had begun to return.... The proud will might rise
against them, but they came. Then it must be so, he would have said of
another, that the will was divided. Part of it must still have kept
its seat before the door whence the lights came, stayed there with its
face in its hands, waiting its season. And a part that had said no
must be coming to say yes, going and taking its place beside the other
by the door. And together they were strong enough to bring the
gleaming back, watching the propitious moment. But still there was the
opposed will, and it was strong.... When the light came it sought out
old traces of itself, and these became revivified. Then all joined
together to make a flood against the abundant darkness. A day like
this joined itself through likeness to others on the other side of the
three years, and also to moments of the months just passed and
passing. Union was made with a sleepless night in an inn of Spain,
with the hours after his encounter with Ian in the Paris theater, with
that time he sat upon the river steps and saw that the dead were
living and the prisoners free, with the hour in the amphitheater and
after, in carnival.
He saw and heard, felt and tasted, life in greater lengths and
breadths. He comprehended more of the pattern. The tones and
semi-tones fell into the long scale. Such moments brought always
elevation, deep satisfaction.... More of the will particles traveled
from below to the center by the door.
The soul turned the mind and directed it upon Alexander Jardine's own
history. It spread like a landscape, like a continent viewed from the
air, and here it sang with attainment and here it had not attained;
and here it was light, and here there were darknesses; right-doing
here and wrong-doing there and every shade between. He saw that there
was right- and wrong-doing quite outside of conventional standards.
Where were frontiers? The edges of the continent were merely spectral.
Where did others end and he begin, or he end and others begin? He saw
that his history was very wide and very deep and very high. Through
him faintly, by nerve paths in the making, traveled the touch of
oneness.
Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and
all others.
There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light,
Buddha in light. The glorified--the unified. _Union._
Alexander Jardine--Elspeth Barrow--Ian Rullock. And all others--and
all others. _For we are members, one of another._
The feathered, flowered grass, miles of it, and the sea of air.... By
degrees the level of consciousness sank. The splendid, steadfast
moment could not be long sustained. Consciousness drew difficult
breath in the pure ether, it felt weight, it sank. Alexander moved
against the old tomb, turned, and buried his face in his arms. The
completer moment went by, here was the torn self again. But he strove
to find footing on the thickening impressions of all such moments.
Moving back to Rome, along the old way where had marched all the
legions, by the ruins, under the blue sky, he had a sense of going
with Cæsar's legions, step by step, targe by targe, and then of his
footstep halting, turning out, breaking rhythm.... From this it was
suddenly a winter night and at Glenfernie, and he sat by the fire in
his father's death-room. His father spoke to him from the bed and he
went to his side and listened to dying words, distilled from a wide
garden that had relaxed into bitterness, growths, and trails of ideal
hatred.... _What was it, setting one's foot upon an adder?... What was
the adder?_
He entered the city. His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a
recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender
of these and merchant to whom would buy. The man was artist besides,
maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought.
Glenfernie liked him--an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed,
subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage. No great custom came to the
shop in front; the owner of it might work all day in the room behind,
with only two or three peals of a small silvery summoning bell. The
lodger acquired the habit of sitting for perhaps an hour out of each
twenty-four in this workroom. He might study at the window gem or coin
and the finish of old designs, or he might lift and look at sheet
after sheet of the man's drawings, or watch him at his work, or have
with him some talk.
The drawings had a fascination for him. "What did you mean behind this
outward meaning? Now here I see this, and I see that, but here I don't
penetrate." The man laid down his mending a broken Eros and came and
stood by the table and spoke. Glenfernie listened, the wood propping
elbow, the hand propping chin, the eyes upon the drawing. Or he leaned
back in the great visitor's chair and looked instead at the draftsman.
They were strange drawings, and the draftsman's models were not
materially visible.
To-day Glenfernie came from the noise of Rome without into this room.
His host was sitting before a drawing-board. Alexander stood and
looked.
"Are you trying to bring the world of the plane up a dimension? Then
you work from an idea above the world of the solid?"
"_Si._ Up a dimension."
"What are these forms?"
"I am dreaming the new eye, the new ear, the new hand."
Glenfernie watched the moving and the resting hand. Later in the day
he returned to the room.
"It has been a fertile season," said the artist. "Look!"
At the top of a sheet of paper was written large in Latin, LOVE IS
BLIND. Beneath stood a figure filled with eyes. "It is the same
thing," said the man.
The next day, at sunset, going up to his room after restless wandering
in this city, he found there from Ian another intimation of the
latter's movements:
GLENFERNIE,--I am going northward. There will be a
month spent at monseigneur's villa upon the Lake of Como.
Then France again.--IAN RULLOCK.
Alexander laid the paper upon the table before him, and now he stared
at it, and now he gazed at space beyond, and where he gazed seemed
dark and empty. It was deep night when finally he dipped quill into
ink and wrote:
IAN RULLOCK,--Stay or go as you will! I do not
follow you now as I did before. I come to see the crudeness,
the barrenness, of that. But within--oh, are you not my
enemy still? I ask Justice that, and what can she do but
echo back my words? "Within" is a universe.--ALEXANDER
JARDINE.
Five days later he knew that Ian with the Frenchman in whose company
he was had departed Rome. On that morning he went again without the
city and lay among the grasses. But the sky to-day was closed, and all
dead Rome that had been proud or violent or a lover of self seemed to
move around him multitudinous. He fought the shapes down, but the sea
in storm then turned sluggish, dead and weary.... What was he going to
do? Scotland? Was he going back to Scotland? The glen, the moor, White
Farm and the kirk, Black Hill and his own house--all seemed cold and
without tint, gray, small, and withered, and yet oppressive. All that
would be importunate, officious. He cried out, "O my God, I want
healing!" For a long time he lay there still, then, rising, went
wandering by arches and broken columns, choked doorways, graved slabs
sunken in fairy jungles. Into his mind came a journey years before
when he had just brushed a desert. The East, the Out-of-Europe, called
to him now.