Section 11

IOI
The House of Souls
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 founda- tion 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 manu- script books which professed to deliver the outer sense of those mysterious ‘Hidden Songs of [olo 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 dic- tionary, 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, ten- ements, 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 sum- mer 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.’
102
A Fragment of Life
But the water of this well was to be kept sacred per- petually, it was not to be used for any common pur- pose, 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 signifi- cance and romance. London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an en chanted 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 transforma-
103
The House of Souls
tion: 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 trans- mutation 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 rep- resented 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 re- mained 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 break- fast, 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
104
A Fragment of Life
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 105
The House of Souls
torrent of swirling water, so that no one could pass by it. On they went, ascending and then again descend- ing, 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 com- mon, and along the edge of this place there were scat- tered 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 wilder- ness of hills and valleys that he had never looked upon, and they were going down a wild, steep hill- side, 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 106
A Fragment of Life
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 fire-place sent out an odour of burning wood that Darnell never for- got, 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
107
The House of Souls
clumsily making an old sign upon their breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered frag- ments 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 recol- lection of it came to him with a certain note of warn- ing, 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. Dar- nell, it is true, made a little book, partly consisting of queer verse which might have been written by an in- spired infant, and partly made up of ‘notes and exclamations’ in an odd dog-Latin which he had picked
108 |
A Fragment of Life
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 historia, omnes fabule, 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,
109
The House of Souls
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 impos- sible 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 be- neath 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.’
IIo
The White People
he
* fe Ma phar
evs
ieee He RARE
PROLOGUE
are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.’
Cotgrave listened, interested. He had _ been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his books.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘magic is justified of her children. There are many, I think, who eat dry crusts and drink water, with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of the “‘practical” epicure.’
‘You are speaking of the saints?’
‘Yes, and of the sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.’
‘And you think the great sinner, then, will be an as- cetic, as well as the great saint ?”
‘Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect
113
G sette: and sanctity,’ said Ambrose, ‘these
The House of Souls
copies and go to the perfect originals. I have no doubt but that many of the very highest among the saints have never done a ‘‘good action’ (using the words in their ordinary sense). And, on the other hand, there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an “ill: deed.” ?
He went out of the room for a moment, and Cot- grave, in high delight, turned to his friend and thanked him for the introduction.
‘He’s grand,’ he said. ‘I never saw that kind of lunatic before.’