In a haze as of a dream Darnell's thoughts seemed to move through the
opening days of the next week. Perhaps nature had not intended that he
should be practical or much given to that which is usually called 'sound
common sense,' but his training had made him desirous of good, plain
qualities of the mind, and he uneasily strove to account to himself for
his strange mood of the Sunday night, as he had often endeavoured to
interpret the fancies of his boyhood and early manhood. At first he was
annoyed by his want of success; the morning paper, which he always
secured as the 'bus delayed at Uxbridge Road Station, fell from his
hands unread, while he vainly reasoned, assuring himself that the
threatened incursion of a whimsical old woman, though tiresome enough,
was no rational excuse for those curious hours of meditation in which
his thoughts seemed to have dressed themselves in unfamiliar, fantastic
habits, and to parley with him in a strange speech, and yet a speech
that he had understood.
With such arguments he perplexed his mind on the long, accustomed ride
up the steep ascent of Holland Park, past the incongruous hustle of
Notting Hill Gate, where in one direction a road shows the way to the
snug, somewhat faded bowers and retreats of Bayswater, and in another
one sees the portal of the murky region of the slums. The customary
companions of his morning's journey were in the seats about him; he
heard the hum of their talk, as they disputed concerning politics, and
the man next to him, who came from Acton, asked him what he thought of
the Government now. There was a discussion, and a loud and excited one,
just in front, as to whether rhubarb was a fruit or vegetable, and in
his ear he heard Redman, who was a near neighbour, praising the economy
of 'the wife.'
'I don't know how she does it. Look here; what do you think we had
yesterday? Breakfast: fish-cakes, beautifully fried--rich, you know,
lots of herbs, it's a receipt of her aunt's; you should just taste 'em.
Coffee, bread, butter, marmalade, and, of course, all the usual
etceteras. Dinner: roast beef, Yorkshire, potatoes, greens, and
horse-radish sauce, plum tart, cheese. And where will you get a better
dinner than that? Well, I call it wonderful, I really do.'
But in spite of these distractions he fell into a dream as the 'bus
rolled and tossed on its way Citywards, and still he strove to solve the
enigma of his vigil of the night before, and as the shapes of trees and
green lawns and houses passed before his eyes, and as he saw the
procession moving on the pavement, and while the murmur of the streets
sounded in his ears, all was to him strange and unaccustomed, as if he
moved through the avenues of some city in a foreign land. It was,
perhaps, on these mornings, as he rode to his mechanical work, that
vague and floating fancies that must have long haunted his brain began
to shape themselves, and to put on the form of definite conclusions,
from which he could no longer escape, even if he had wished it. Darnell
had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would
therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate
speech any thought that was worth thinking; but he grew certain on these
mornings that the 'common sense' which he had always heard exalted as
man's supremest faculty was, in all probability, the smallest and
least-considered item in the equipment of an ant of average
intelligence. And with this, as an almost necessary corollary, came a
firm belief that the whole fabric of life in which he moved was sunken,
past all thinking, in the grossest absurdity; that he and all his
friends and acquaintances and fellow-workers were interested in matters
in which men were never meant to be interested, were pursuing aims which
they were never meant to pursue, were, indeed, much like fair stones of
an altar serving as a pigsty wall. Life, it seemed to him, was a great
search for--he knew not what; and in the process of the ages one by one
the true marks upon the ways had been shattered, or buried, or the
meaning of the words had been slowly forgotten; one by one the signs had
been turned awry, the true entrances had been thickly overgrown, the
very way itself had been diverted from the heights to the depths, till
at last the race of pilgrims had become hereditary stone-breakers and
ditch-scourers on a track that led to destruction--if it led anywhere at
all. Darnell's heart thrilled with a strange and trembling joy, with a
sense that was all new, when it came to his mind that this great loss
might not be a hopeless one, that perhaps the difficulties were by no
means insuperable. It might be, he considered, that the stone-breaker
had merely to throw down his hammer and set out, and the way would be
plain before him; and a single step would free the delver in rubbish
from the foul slime of the ditch.
It was, of course, with difficulty and slowly that these things became
clear to him. He was an English City clerk, 'flourishing' towards the
end of the nineteenth century, and the rubbish heap that had been
accumulating for some centuries could not be cleared away in an instant.
Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had been implanted in him as
in his fellows assured him that the true world was the visible and
tangible world, the world in which good and faithful letter-copying was
exchangeable for a certain quantum of bread, beef, and house-room, and
that the man who copied letters well, did not beat his wife, nor lose
money foolishly, was a good man, fulfilling the end for which he had
been made. But in spite of these arguments, in spite of their acceptance
by all who were about him, he had the grace to perceive the utter
falsity and absurdity of the whole position. He was fortunate in his
entire ignorance of sixpenny 'science,' but if the whole library had
been projected into his brain it would not have moved him to 'deny in
the darkness that which he had known in the light.' Darnell knew by
experience that man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions, for the
realization in his consciousness of ineffable bliss, for a great joy
that transmutes the whole world, for a joy that surpasses all joys and
overcomes all sorrows. He knew this certainly, though he knew it dimly;
and he was apart from other men, preparing himself for a great
experiment.
With such thoughts as these for his secret and concealed treasure, he
was able to bear the threatened invasion of Mrs. Nixon with something
approaching indifference. He knew, indeed, that her presence between
his wife and himself would be unwelcome to him, and he was not without
grave doubts as to the woman's sanity; but after all, what did it
matter? Besides, already a faint glimmering light had risen within him
that showed the profit of self-negation, and in this matter he had
preferred his wife's will to his own. _Et non sua poma_; to his
astonishment he found a delight in denying himself his own wish, a
process that he had always regarded as thoroughly detestable. This was a
state of things which he could not in the least understand; but, again,
though a member of a most hopeless class, living in the most hopeless
surroundings that the world has ever seen, though he knew as much of the
_askesis_ as of Chinese metaphysics; again, he had the grace not to deny
the light that had begun to glimmer in his soul.
And he found a present reward in the eyes of Mary, when she welcomed him
home after his foolish labours in the cool of the evening. They sat
together, hand in hand, under the mulberry tree, at the coming of the
dusk, and as the ugly walls about them became obscure and vanished into
the formless world of shadows, they seemed to be freed from the bondage
of Shepherd's Bush, freed to wander in that undisfigured, undefiled
world that lies beyond the walls. Of this region Mary knew little or
nothing by experience, since her relations had always been of one mind
with the modern world, which has for the true country an instinctive and
most significant horror and dread. Mr. Reynolds had also shared in
another odd superstition of these later days--that it is necessary to
leave London at least once a year; consequently Mary had some knowledge
of various seaside resorts on the south and east coasts, where
Londoners gather in hordes, turn the sands into one vast, bad
music-hall, and derive, as they say, enormous benefit from the change.
But experiences such as these give but little knowledge of the country
in its true and occult sense; and yet Mary, as she sat in the dusk
beneath the whispering tree, knew something of the secret of the wood,
of the valley shut in by high hills, where the sound of pouring water
always echoes from the clear brook. And to Darnell these were nights of
great dreams; for it was the hour of the work, the time of
transmutation, and he who could not understand the miracle, who could
scarcely believe in it, yet knew, secretly and half consciously, that
the water was being changed into the wine of a new life. This was ever
the inner music of his dreams, and to it he added on these still and
sacred nights the far-off memory of that time long ago when, a child,
before the world had overwhelmed him, he journeyed down to the old grey
house in the west, and for a whole month heard the murmur of the forest
through his bedroom window, and when the wind was hushed, the washing of
the tides about the reeds; and sometimes awaking very early he had heard
the strange cry of a bird as it rose from its nest among the reeds, and
had looked out and had seen the valley whiten to the dawn, and the
winding river whiten as it swam down to the sea. The memory of all this
had faded and become shadowy as he grew older and the chains of common
life were riveted firmly about his soul; all the atmosphere by which he
was surrounded was well-nigh fatal to such thoughts, and only now and
again in half-conscious moments or in sleep he had revisited that valley
in the far-off west, where the breath of the wind was an incantation,
and every leaf and stream and hill spoke of great and ineffable
mysteries. But now the broken vision was in great part restored to him,
and looking with love in his wife's eyes he saw the gleam of water-pools
in the still forest, saw the mists rising in the evening, and heard the
music of the winding river.
They were sitting thus together on the Friday evening of the week that
had begun with that odd and half-forgotten visit of Mrs. Nixon, when, to
Darnell's annoyance, the door-bell gave a discordant peal, and Alice
with some disturbance of manner came out and announced that a gentleman
wished to see the master. Darnell went into the drawing-room, where
Alice had lit one gas so that it flared and burnt with a rushing sound,
and in this distorting light there waited a stout, elderly gentleman,
whose countenance was altogether unknown to him. He stared blankly, and
hesitated, about to speak, but the visitor began.
'You don't know who I am, but I expect you'll know my name. It's Nixon.'
He did not wait to be interrupted. He sat down and plunged into
narrative, and after the first few words, Darnell, whose mind was not
altogether unprepared, listened without much astonishment.
'And the long and the short of it is,' Mr. Nixon said at last, 'she's
gone stark, staring mad, and we had to put her away to-day--poor thing.'
His voice broke a little, and he wiped his eyes hastily, for though
stout and successful he was not unfeeling, and he was fond of his wife.
He had spoken quickly, and had gone lightly over many details which
might have interested specialists in certain kinds of mania, and
Darnell was sorry for his evident distress.
'I came here,' he went on after a brief pause, 'because I found out she
had been to see you last Sunday, and I knew the sort of story she must
have told.'
Darnell showed him the prophetic leaflet which Mrs. Nixon had dropped in
the garden. 'Did you know about this?' he said.
'Oh, _him_,' said the old man, with some approach to cheerfulness; 'oh
yes, I thrashed _him_ black and blue the day before yesterday.'
'Isn't he mad? Who is the man?'
'He's not mad, he's bad. He's a little Welsh skunk named Richards. He's
been running some sort of chapel over at New Barnet for the last few
years, and my poor wife--she never could find the parish church good
enough for her--had been going to his damned schism shop for the last
twelve-month. It was all that finished her off. Yes; I thrashed _him_
the day before yesterday, and I'm not afraid of a summons either. I know
him, and he knows I know him.'
Old Nixon whispered something in Darnell's ear, and chuckled faintly as
he repeated for the third time his formula--
'I thrashed _him_ black and blue the day before yesterday.'
Darnell could only murmur condolences and express his hope that Mrs.
Nixon might recover.
The old man shook his head.
'I'm afraid there's no hope of that,' he said. 'I've had the best
advice, but they couldn't do anything, and told me so.'
Presently he asked to see his niece, and Darnell went out and prepared
Mary as well as he could. She could scarcely take in the news that her
aunt was a hopeless maniac, for Mrs. Nixon, having been extremely stupid
all her days, had naturally succeeded in passing with her relations as
typically sensible. With the Reynolds family, as with the great majority
of us, want of imagination is always equated with sanity, and though
many of us have never heard of Lombroso we are his ready-made converts.
We have always believed that poets are mad, and if statistics
unfortunately show that few poets have really been inhabitants of
lunatic asylums, it is soothing to learn that nearly all poets have had
whooping-cough, which is doubtless, like intoxication, a minor madness.
'But is it really true?' she asked at length. 'Are you certain uncle is
not deceiving you? Aunt seemed so sensible always.'
She was helped at last by recollecting that Aunt Marian used to get up
very early of mornings, and then they went into the drawing-room and
talked to the old man. His evident kindliness and honesty grew upon
Mary, in spite of a lingering belief in her aunt's fables, and when he
left, it was with a promise to come to see them again.
Mrs. Darnell said she felt tired, and went to bed; and Darnell returned
to the garden and began to pace to and fro, collecting his thoughts. His
immeasurable relief at the intelligence that, after all, Mrs. Nixon was
not coming to live with them taught him that, despite his submission,
his dread of the event had been very great. The weight was removed, and
now he was free to consider his life without reference to the grotesque
intrusion that he had feared. He sighed for joy, and as he paced to and
fro he savoured the scent of the night, which, though it came faintly
to him in that brick-bound suburb, summoned to his mind across many
years the odour of the world at night as he had known it in that short
sojourn of his boyhood; the odour that rose from the earth when the
flame of the sun had gone down beyond the mountain, and the afterglow
had paled in the sky and on the fields. And as he recovered as best he
could these lost dreams of an enchanted land, there came to him other
images of his childhood, forgotten and yet not forgotten, dwelling
unheeded in dark places of the memory, but ready to be summoned forth.
He remembered one fantasy that had long haunted him. As he lay half
asleep in the forest on one hot afternoon of that memorable visit to the
country, he had 'made believe' that a little companion had come to him
out of the blue mists and the green light beneath the leaves--a white
girl with long black hair, who had played with him and whispered her
secrets in his ear, as his father lay sleeping under a tree; and from
that summer afternoon, day by day, she had been beside him; she had
visited him in the wilderness of London, and even in recent years there
had come to him now and again the sense of her presence, in the midst of
the heat and turmoil of the City. The last visit he remembered well; it
was a few weeks before he married, and from the depths of some futile
task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air
suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and
the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that
sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality
possessed him utterly. He knew then how the dull flesh of man can be
like fire; and now, looking back from a new standpoint on this and
other experiences, he realized how all that was real in his life had
been unwelcomed, uncherished by him, had come to him, perhaps, in virtue
of merely negative qualities on his part. And yet, as he reflected, he
saw that there had been a chain of witnesses all through his life: again
and again voices had whispered in his ear words in a strange language
that he now recognized as his native tongue; the common street had not
been lacking in visions of the true land of his birth; and in all the
passing and repassing of the world he saw that there had been emissaries
ready to guide his feet on the way of the great journey.
A week or two after the visit of Mr. Nixon, Darnell took his annual
holiday.
There was no question of Walton-on-the-Naze, or of anything of the kind,
as he quite agreed with his wife's longing for some substantial sum put
by against the evil day. But the weather was still fine, and he lounged
away the time in his garden beneath the tree, or he sauntered out on
long aimless walks in the western purlieus of London, not unvisited by
that old sense of some great ineffable beauty, concealed by the dim and
dingy veils of grey interminable streets. Once, on a day of heavy rain
he went to the 'box-room,' and began to turn over the papers in the old
hair trunk--scraps and odds and ends of family history, some of them in
his father's handwriting, others in faded ink, and there were a few
ancient pocket-books, filled with manuscript of a still earlier time,
and in these the ink was glossier and blacker than any writing fluids
supplied by stationers of later days. Darnell had hung up the portrait
of the ancestor in this room, and had bought a solid kitchen table and
a chair; so that Mrs. Darnell, seeing him looking over his old
documents, half thought of naming the room 'Mr. Darnell's study.' He had
not glanced at these relics of his family for many years, but from the
hour when the rainy morning sent him to them, he remained constant to
research till the end of the holidays. It was a new interest, and he
began to fashion in his mind a faint picture of his forefathers, and of
their life in that grey old house in the river valley, in the western
land of wells and streams and dark and ancient woods. And there were
stranger things than mere notes on family history amongst that odd
litter of old disregarded papers, and when he went back to his work in
the City some of the men fancied that he was in some vague manner
changed in appearance; but he only laughed when they asked him where he
had been and what he had been doing with himself. But Mary noticed that
every evening he spent at least an hour in the box-room; she was rather
sorry at the waste of time involved in reading old papers about dead
people. And one afternoon, as they were out together on a somewhat
dreary walk towards Acton, Darnell stopped at a hopeless second-hand
bookshop, and after scanning the rows of shabby books in the window,
went in and purchased two volumes. They proved to be a Latin dictionary
and grammar, and she was surprised to hear her husband declare his
intention of acquiring the Latin language.
But, indeed, all his conduct impressed her as indefinably altered; and
she began to be a little alarmed, though she could scarcely have formed
her fears in words. But she knew that in some way that was all
indefined and beyond the grasp of her thought their lives had altered
since the summer, and no single thing wore quite the same aspect as
before. If she looked out into the dull street with its rare loiterers,
it was the same and yet it had altered, and if she opened the window in
the early morning the wind that entered came with a changed breath that
spoke some message that she could not understand. And day by day passed
by in the old course, and not even the four walls were altogether
familiar, and the voices of men and women sounded with strange notes,
with the echo, rather, of a music that came over unknown hills. And day
by day as she went about her household work, passing from shop to shop
in those dull streets that were a network, a fatal labyrinth of grey
desolation on every side, there came to her sense half-seen images of
some other world, as if she walked in a dream, and every moment must
bring her to light and to awakening, when the grey should fade, and
regions long desired should appear in glory. Again and again it seemed
as if that which was hidden would be shown even to the sluggish
testimony of sense; and as she went to and fro from street to street of
that dim and weary suburb, and looked on those grey material walls, they
seemed as if a light glowed behind them, and again and again the mystic
fragrance of incense was blown to her nostrils from across the verge of
that world which is not so much impenetrable as ineffable, and to her
ears came the dream of a chant that spoke of hidden choirs about all her
ways. She struggled against these impressions, refusing her assent to
the testimony of them, since all the pressure of credited opinion for
three hundred years has been directed towards stamping out real
knowledge, and so effectually has this been accomplished that we can
only recover the truth through much anguish. And so Mary passed the days
in a strange perturbation, clinging to common things and common
thoughts, as if she feared that one morning she would wake up in an
unknown world to a changed life. And Edward Darnell went day by day to
his labour and returned in the evening, always with that shining of
light within his eyes and upon his face, with the gaze of wonder that
was greater day by day, as if for him the veil grew thin and soon would
disappear.
From these great matters both in herself and in her husband Mary shrank
back, afraid, perhaps, that if she began the question the answer might
be too wonderful. She rather taught herself to be troubled over little
things; she asked herself what attraction there could be in the old
records over which she supposed Edward to be poring night after night in
the cold room upstairs. She had glanced over the papers at Darnell's
invitation, and could see but little interest in them; there were one or
two sketches, roughly done in pen and ink, of the old house in the west:
it looked a shapeless and fantastic place, furnished with strange
pillars and stranger ornaments on the projecting porch; and on one side
a roof dipped down almost to the earth, and in the centre there was
something that might almost be a tower rising above the rest of the
building. Then there were documents that seemed all names and dates,
with here and there a coat of arms done in the margin, and she came upon
a string of uncouth Welsh names linked together by the word 'ap' in a
chain that looked endless. There was a paper covered with signs and
figures that meant nothing to her, and then there were the pocket-books,
full of old-fashioned writing, and much of it in Latin, as her husband
told her--it was a collection as void of significance as a treatise on
conic sections, so far as Mary was concerned. But night after night
Darnell shut himself up with the musty rolls, and more than ever when he
rejoined her he bore upon his face the blazonry of some great adventure.
And one night she asked him what interested him so much in the papers he
had shown her.
He was delighted with the question. Somehow they had not talked much
together for the last few weeks, and he began to tell her of the records
of the old race from which he came, of the old strange house of grey
stone between the forest and the river. The family went back and back,
he said, far into the dim past, beyond the Normans, beyond the Saxons,
far into the Roman days, and for many hundred years they had been petty
kings, with a strong fortress high up on the hill, in the heart of the
forest; and even now the great mounds remained, whence one could look
through the trees towards the mountain on one side and across the yellow
sea on the other. The real name of the family was not Darnell; that was
assumed by one Iolo ap Taliesin ap Iorwerth in the sixteenth
century--why, Darnell did not seem to understand. And then he told her
how the race had dwindled in prosperity, century by century, till at
last there was nothing left but the grey house and a few acres of land
bordering the river.
'And do you know, Mary,' he said, 'I suppose we shall go and live there
some day or other. My great-uncle, who has the place now, made money in
business when he was a young man, and I believe he will leave it all to
me. I know I am the only relation he has. How strange it would be. What
a change from the life here.'
'You never told me that. Don't you think your great-uncle might leave
his house and his money to somebody he knows really well? You haven't
seen him since you were a little boy, have you?'
'No; but we write once a year. And from what I have heard my father say,
I am sure the old man would never leave the house out of the family. Do
you think you would like it?'
'I don't know. Isn't it very lonely?'
'I suppose it is. I forget whether there are any other houses in sight,
but I don't think there are any at all near. But what a change! No City,
no streets, no people passing to and fro; only the sound of the wind and
the sight of the green leaves and the green hills, and the song of the
voices of the earth.'... He checked himself suddenly, as if he feared
that he was about to tell some secret that must not yet be uttered; and
indeed, as he spoke of the change from the little street in Shepherd's
Bush to that ancient house in the woods of the far west, a change seemed
already to possess himself, and his voice put on the modulation of an
antique chant. Mary looked at him steadily and touched his arm, and he
drew a long breath before he spoke again.
'It is the old blood calling to the old land,' he said. 'I was
forgetting that I am a clerk in the City.'
It was, doubtless, the old blood that had suddenly stirred in him; the
resurrection of the old spirit that for many centuries had been
faithful to secrets that are now disregarded by most of us, that now day
by day was quickened more and more in his heart, and grew so strong that
it was hard to conceal. He was indeed almost in the position of the man
in the tale, who, by a sudden electric shock, lost the vision of the
things about him in the London streets, and gazed instead upon the sea
and shore of an island in the Antipodes; for Darnell only clung with an
effort to the interests and the atmosphere which, till lately, had
seemed all the world to him; and the grey house and the wood and the
river, symbols of the other sphere, intruded as it were into the
landscape of the London suburb.
But he went on, with more restraint, telling his stories of far-off
ancestors, how one of them, the most remote of all, was called a saint,
and was supposed to possess certain mysterious secrets often alluded to
in the papers as the 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant.' And then with an
abrupt transition he recalled memories of his father and of the strange,
shiftless life in dingy lodgings in the backwaters of London, of the dim
stucco streets that were his first recollections, of forgotten squares
in North London, and of the figure of his father, a grave bearded man
who seemed always in a dream, as if he too sought for the vision of a
land beyond the strong walls, a land where there were deep orchards and
many shining hills, and fountains and water-pools gleaming under the
leaves of the wood.
'I believe my father earned his living,' he went on, 'such a living as
he did earn, at the Record Office and the British Museum. He used to
hunt up things for lawyers and country parsons who wanted old deeds
inspected. He never made much, and we were always moving from one
lodging to another--always to out-of-the-way places where everything
seemed to have run to seed. We never knew our neighbours--we moved too
often for that--but my father had about half a dozen friends, elderly
men like himself, who used to come to see us pretty often; and then, if
there was any money, the lodging-house servant would go out for beer,
and they would sit and smoke far into the night.
'I never knew much about these friends of his, but they all had the same
look, the look of longing for something hidden. They talked of mysteries
that I never understood, very little of their own lives, and when they
did speak of ordinary affairs one could tell that they thought such
matters as money and the want of it were unimportant trifles. When I
grew up and went into the City, and met other young fellows and heard
their way of talking, I wondered whether my father and his friends were
not a little queer in their heads; but I know better now.'
So night after night Darnell talked to his wife, seeming to wander
aimlessly from the dingy lodging-houses, where he had spent his boyhood
in the company of his father and the other seekers, to the old house
hidden in that far western valley, and the old race that had so long
looked at the setting of the sun over the mountain. But in truth there
was one end in all that he spoke, and Mary felt that beneath his words,
however indifferent they might seem, there was hidden a purpose, that
they were to embark on a great and marvellous adventure.
So day by day the world became more magical; day by day the work of
separation was being performed, the gross accidents were being refined
away. Darnell neglected no instruments that might be useful in the work;
and now he neither lounged at home on Sunday mornings, nor did he
accompany his wife to the Gothic blasphemy which pretended to be a
church. They had discovered a little church of another fashion in a back
street, and Darnell, who had found in one of the old notebooks the maxim
_Incredibilia sola Credenda_, soon perceived how high and glorious a
thing was that service at which he assisted. Our stupid ancestors taught
us that we could become wise by studying books on 'science,' by meddling
with test-tubes, geological specimens, microscopic preparations, and the
like; but they who have cast off these follies know that they must read
not 'science' books, but mass-books, and that the soul is made wise by
the contemplation of mystic ceremonies and elaborate and curious rites.
In such things Darnell found a wonderful mystery language, which spoke
at once more secretly and more directly than the formal creeds; and he
saw that, in a sense, the whole world is but a great ceremony or
sacrament, which teaches under visible forms a hidden and transcendent
doctrine. It was thus that he found in the ritual of the church a
perfect image of the world; an image purged, exalted, and illuminate, a
holy house built up of shining and translucent stones, in which the
burning torches were more significant than the wheeling stars, and the
fuming incense was a more certain token than the rising of the mist. His
soul went forth with the albed procession in its white and solemn order,
the mystic dance that signifies rapture and a joy above all joys, and
when he beheld Love slain and rise again victorious he knew that he
witnessed, in a figure, the consummation of all things, the Bridal of
all Bridals, the mystery that is beyond all mysteries, accomplished from
the foundation of the world. So day by day the house of his life became
more magical.
And at the same time he began to guess that if in the New Life there are
new and unheard-of joys, there are also new and unheard-of dangers. In
his manuscript books which professed to deliver the outer sense of those
mysterious 'Hidden Songs of Iolo Sant' there was a little chapter that
bore the heading: _Fons Sacer non in communem Vsum convertendus est_,
and by diligence, with much use of the grammar and dictionary, Darnell
was able to construe the by no means complex Latin of his ancestor. The
special book which contained the chapter in question was one of the most
singular in the collection, since it bore the title _Terra de Iolo_, and
on the surface, with an ingenious concealment of its real symbolism, it
affected to give an account of the orchards, fields, woods, roads,
tenements, and waterways in the possession of Darnell's ancestors. Here,
then, he read of the Holy Well, hidden in the Wistman's Wood--_Sylva
Sapientum_--'a fountain of abundant water, which no heats of summer can
ever dry, which no flood can ever defile, which is as a water of life,
to them that thirst for life, a stream of cleansing to them that would
be pure, and a medicine of such healing virtue that by it, through the
might of God and the intercession of His saints, the most grievous
wounds are made whole.' But the water of this well was to be kept
sacred perpetually, it was not to be used for any common purpose, nor to
satisfy any bodily thirst; but ever to be esteemed as holy, 'even as the
water which the priest hath hallowed.' And in the margin a comment in a
later hand taught Darnell something of the meaning of these
prohibitions. He was warned not to use the Well of Life as a mere luxury
of mortal life, as a new sensation, as a means of making the insipid cup
of everyday existence more palatable. 'For,' said the commentator, 'we
are not called to sit as the spectators in a theatre, there to watch the
play performed before us, but we are rather summoned to stand in the
very scene itself, and there fervently to enact our parts in a great and
wonderful mystery.'
Darnell could quite understand the temptation that was thus indicated.
Though he had gone but a little way on the path, and had barely tested
the over-runnings of that mystic well, he was already aware of the
enchantment that was transmuting all the world about him, informing his
life with a strange significance and romance. London seemed a city of
the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its
long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity
became for him an image of the endless universe. He could well imagine
how pleasant it might be to linger in such a world as this, to sit apart
and dream, beholding the strange pageant played before him; but the
Sacred Well was not for common use, it was for the cleansing of the
soul, and the healing of the grievous wounds of the spirit. There must
be yet another transformation: London had become Bagdad; it must at
last be transmuted to Syon, or in the phrase of one of his old
documents, the City of the Cup.
And there were yet darker perils which the Iolo MSS. (as his father had
named the collection) hinted at more or less obscurely. There were
suggestions of an awful region which the soul might enter, of a
transmutation that was unto death, of evocations which could summon the
utmost forces of evil from their dark places--in a word, of that sphere
which is represented to most of us under the crude and somewhat childish
symbolism of Black Magic. And here again he was not altogether without a
dim comprehension of what was meant. He found himself recalling an odd
incident that had happened long ago, which had remained all the years in
his mind unheeded, amongst the many insignificant recollections of his
childhood, and now rose before him, clear and distinct and full of
meaning. It was on that memorable visit to the old house in the west,
and the whole scene returned, with its smallest events, and the voices
seemed to sound in his ears. It was a grey, still day of heavy heat that
he remembered: he had stood on the lawn after breakfast, and wondered at
the great peace and silence of the world. Not a leaf stirred in the
trees on the lawn, not a whisper came from the myriad leaves of the
wood; the flowers gave out sweet and heavy odours as if they breathed
the dreams of the summer night; and far down the valley, the winding
river was like dim silver under that dim and silvery sky, and the far
hills and woods and fields vanished in the mist. The stillness of the
air held him as with a charm; he leant all the morning against the rails
that parted the lawn from the meadow, breathing the mystic breath of
summer, and watching the fields brighten as with a sudden blossoming of
shining flowers as the high mist grew thin for a moment before the
hidden sun. As he watched thus, a man weary with heat, with some glance
of horror in his eyes, passed him on his way to the house; but he stayed
at his post till the old bell in the turret rang, and they dined all
together, masters and servants, in the dark cool room that looked
towards the still leaves of the wood. He could see that his uncle was
upset about something, and when they had finished dinner he heard him
tell his father that there was trouble at a farm; and it was settled
that they should all drive over in the afternoon to some place with a
strange name. But when the time came Mr. Darnell was too deep in old
books and tobacco smoke to be stirred from his corner, and Edward and
his uncle went alone in the dog-cart. They drove swiftly down the narrow
lane, into the road that followed the winding river, and crossed the
bridge at Caermaen by the mouldering Roman walls, and then, skirting the
deserted, echoing village, they came out on a broad white turnpike road,
and the limestone dust followed them like a cloud. Then, suddenly, they
turned to the north by such a road as Edward had never seen before. It
was so narrow that there was barely room for the cart to pass, and the
footway was of rock, and the banks rose high above them as they slowly
climbed the long, steep way, and the untrimmed hedges on either side
shut out the light. And the ferns grew thick and green upon the banks,
and hidden wells dripped down upon them; and the old man told him how
the lane in winter was a torrent of swirling water, so that no one
could pass by it. On they went, ascending and then again descending,
always in that deep hollow under the wild woven boughs, and the boy
wondered vainly what the country was like on either side. And now the
air grew darker, and the hedge on one bank was but the verge of a dark
and rustling wood, and the grey limestone rocks had changed to dark-red
earth flecked with green patches and veins of marl, and suddenly in the
stillness from the depths of the wood a bird began to sing a melody that
charmed the heart into another world, that sang to the child's soul of
the blessed faery realm beyond the woods of the earth, where the wounds
of man are healed. And so at last, after many turnings and windings,
they came to a high bare land where the lane broadened out into a kind
of common, and along the edge of this place there were scattered three
or four old cottages, and one of them was a little tavern. Here they
stopped, and a man came out and tethered the tired horse to a post and
gave him water; and old Mr. Darnell took the child's hand and led him by
a path across the fields. The boy could see the country now, but it was
all a strange, undiscovered land; they were in the heart of a wilderness
of hills and valleys that he had never looked upon, and they were going
down a wild, steep hillside, where the narrow path wound in and out
amidst gorse and towering bracken, and the sun gleaming out for a
moment, there was a gleam of white water far below in a narrow valley,
where a little brook poured and rippled from stone to stone. They went
down the hill, and through a brake, and then, hidden in dark-green
orchards, they came upon a long, low whitewashed house, with a stone
roof strangely coloured by the growth of moss and lichens. Mr. Darnell
knocked at a heavy oaken door, and they came into a dim room where but
little light entered through the thick glass in the deep-set window.
There were heavy beams in the ceiling, and a great fireplace sent out an
odour of burning wood that Darnell never forgot, and the room seemed to
him full of women who talked all together in frightened tones. Mr.
Darnell beckoned to a tall, grey old man, who wore corduroy
knee-breeches, and the boy, sitting on a high straight-backed chair,
could see the old man and his uncle passing to and fro across the
window-panes, as they walked together on the garden path. The women
stopped their talk for a moment, and one of them brought him a glass of
milk and an apple from some cold inner chamber; and then, suddenly, from
a room above there rang out a shrill and terrible shriek, and then, in a
young girl's voice, a more terrible song. It was not like anything the
child had ever heard, but as the man recalled it to his memory, he knew
to what song it might be compared--to a certain chant indeed that
summons the angels and archangels to assist in the great Sacrifice. But
as this song chants of the heavenly army, so did that seem to summon all
the hierarchy of evil, the hosts of Lilith and Samael; and the words
that rang out with such awful modulations--_neumata inferorum_--were in
some unknown tongue that few men have ever heard on earth.
The women glared at one another with horror in their eyes, and he saw
one or two of the oldest of them clumsily making an old sign upon their
breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered fragments of
their talk.
'She has been up there,' said one, pointing vaguely over her shoulder.
'She'd never know the way,' answered another. 'They be all gone that
went there.'
'There be nought there in these days.'
'How can you tell that, Gwenllian? 'Tis not for us to say that.'
'My great-grandmother did know some that had been there,' said a very
old woman. 'She told me how they was taken afterwards.'
And then his uncle appeared at the door, and they went their way as they
had come. Edward Darnell never heard any more of it, nor whether the
girl died or recovered from her strange attack; but the scene had
haunted his mind in boyhood, and now the recollection of it came to him
with a certain note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in
the way.
* * * * *
It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and of
Mary his wife to a greater length, since from this point their legend is
full of impossible events, and seems to put on the semblance of the
stories of the Graal. It is certain, indeed, that in this world they
changed their lives, like King Arthur, but this is a work which no
chronicler has cared to describe with any amplitude of detail. Darnell,
it is true, made a little book, partly consisting of queer verse which
might have been written by an inspired infant, and partly made up of
'notes and exclamations' in an odd dog-Latin which he had picked up
from the 'Iolo MSS.', but it is to be feared that this work, even if
published in its entirety, would cast but little light on a perplexing
story. He called this piece of literature 'In Exitu Israel,' and wrote
on the title page the motto, doubtless of his own composition, '_Nunc
certe scio quod omnia legenda; omnes historiae, omnes fabulae, omnis
Scriptura sint de ME narrata_.' It is only too evident that his Latin
was not learnt at the feet of Cicero; but in this dialect he relates the
great history of the 'New Life' as it was manifested to him. The 'poems'
are even stranger. One, headed (with an odd reminiscence of
old-fashioned books) 'Lines written on looking down from a Height in
London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the Sun' begins thus:--
One day when I was all alone
I found a wondrous little stone,
It lay forgotten on the road
Far from the ways of man's abode.
When on this stone mine eyes I cast
I saw my Treasure found at last.
I pressed it hard against my face,
I covered it with my embrace,
I hid it in a secret place.
And every day I went to see
This stone that was my ecstasy;
And worshipped it with flowers rare,
And secret words and sayings fair.
O stone, so rare and red and wise
O fragment of far Paradise,
O Star, whose light is life! O Sea,
Whose ocean is infinity!
Thou art a fire that ever burns,
And all the world to wonder turns;
And all the dust of the dull day
By thee is changed and purged away,
So that, where'er I look, I see
A world of a Great Majesty.
The sullen river rolls all gold,
The desert park's a faery wold,
When on the trees the wind is borne
I hear the sound of Arthur's horn
I see no town of grim grey ways,
But a great city all ablaze
With burning torches, to light up
The pinnacles that shrine the Cup.
Ever the magic wine is poured,
Ever the Feast shines on the board,
Ever the song is borne on high
That chants the holy Magistry--
Etc. etc. etc.
From such documents as these it is clearly impossible to gather any very
definite information. But on the last page Darnell has written--
'So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary,
useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an
ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath
a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden
places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.'