"O dust, have faith according to the term
Of this life's lease! Ere the corrupting worm
Have power to destroy the dust thou art!
                         Ere the dark rust
Of death can clog the engine of thy heart!
Great is thine honour, though thou walk in night;
For fringes of thy darkness feel the Light
          Which was ordained to be
                         When God, the Just,
          From shadow shaping thee,
                         Put trust
                         In dust."
                                   Laurence Houseman.

This is the story of a being—a thing—a spirit, if you will—who loved nothing, and therefore was free. [page 2] It wished to serve neither its own interests nor those of the Supernal Light; and had no aim, only an aching inquisitiveness. Now the itch to know, coupled with the inability to care, produces there, as here, that restless and unsociable disposition which we classify as the result of an imperfect and egotistical education. There, as here, it of course frustrates itself; since those who do not love can never understand. Hence this thing, which was free, was also ignorant and very wretched. The essence of its wretchedness was, that because it, its ignorance and curiosity, had never been born, they could never die. They existed in the unchanging Idea, without hope of release. Fortunately, it did not know this; for spirit is as unable to conceive ending as man to conceive endlessness.

This something, then, was alive and utterly alone, with a loneliness that is only possible to the disinterested and discarnate. There was nothing for it to do, since it could neither create, combine, nor destroy. It could think, but possessed no medium of self-expression, no apparatus by which it could be linked up with other lives; for it did not love, and being immaterial, lacked the senses—those oblique and clumsy substitutes for love by which men reach out towards each other's souls.

It came storming through eternity; through the crystalline spaces of that which is spaceless, and down the immeasurable periods of that which transcends time. It was isolated, energetic, and desirous of adventure; hungry, restless, and alert; a very vagrant of the invisible. Avid of all knowledge, it perceived with a certain enjoyment the general movement and [page 3] direction of things: the mighty figures of that dance of angels at which philosophy has tried to peep. But in the midst of the great pageant which the Uncreated has dreamed for His own delight, it suffered a crescent and incessant irritation because of its own lack of understanding. The figures of the dance might be comprehensible, but the steps defied analysis. This uninstructed, and therefore sceptical, observer was angrily aware of certain complicated knots, turbulent manifestations of being, which rudely disturbed the symmetry of the whole. These he could not explain to himself; for they were ugly, disorderly, irrelevant. Because they were inexplicable, because he held them to be infringements of the Plan, they attracted whilst they disgusted him. He wondered and watched: forgot himself in his occupation—a dangerous business for egotists of every grade.

Hence there was born a moment in which he saw the many worlds and planes of being, which, from the standpoint of eternity, are perceived under an aspect of great and serene simplicity, interpenetrating one another; and the world of matter, turbulent and many-tinted, crossing them all. Deep in this world of matter he identified that lawless and inconsistent element which had disturbed his first placid classification of things. It was the faint, distressful cry of life, which came in a wailing cadence from that writhing, tossing corner of the Dream, and broke the profound silence of reality.

Within this disagreeable and meaningless maze of noise, chaos, corruption, he presently perceived the earth, as a peculiarly hideous and unresting [page 4] tangle; an irreducible blot upon that perfect process of evolving Will whose shadow is the Universe. He saw it teeming with horrible little organisms, which devoured one another in their ceaseless effort to preserve a visible and independent life; but, in spite of all their care and cruelty, broke down after a few moments of meaningless activity, and were dissolved into the dust from which they came. The sight was at once fascinating and revolting. He wondered incessantly and with a growing irritation why Being should manifest itself like that. Hence the image of the earth expanded, until it filled his horizon in a fashion that he knew to be absurd. His consciousness was concentrated upon it; and the great and free vision slipped away from him, as happens to us when we turn from the largeness of landscape to contemplate the inexplicable civilization of the hive.

Thus this stupendous victim of petty curiosity—growthless, sexless, eternal—brooded over that absurd paradox of creation, a temporal world founded upon the considerations, supported by the illusions, of matter, growth, and sex. He heard the thud and surge of life which echoed through it, and gazing into its heart, saw the countless souls that clustered upon its surface, each locked inexorably within the transparent walls of the flesh. These he could understand, for they, too, were spirits; sexless and solitary things. Being as yet impervious to the false suggestions of appearance, he was peculiarly susceptible to the currents which swayed them, circulating in and about the visible world: the subtle movements of expansion and contraction, [page 5] the loves and hates of the entangled souls. He felt the curious withdrawal, like the ebbing of a strong tide, with which many drew back from life, refused it, as if dreading the impact of their waves of being against its shattering cliffs. He felt the deadening stagnation of those others, unconscious of life, who drifted through it inert. Here and there he felt the pull of a vortex of power amongst these negative forces; the eager vitality of those true lovers of life who accepted it, rejoiced in it, making a whirlpool in the spiritual sea.

Crossing all these there was still another influence, by which he was bewildered and abashed. Out of the turmoil, dragged or distilled from it as it seemed by the very conflict of the Idea with the horrible enigma of material things, there was poured forth a strange ecstasy, a vivid and penetrating love, which pierced its way to the very heart of that Divine reality whose calm as he had ignorantly thought, was disturbed by the fretfulness of the worlds which lay upon Its breast. This love passed easily by the status of those spiritual orders to which he belonged, and merged itself in that End of Being for which all creation hungers eternally. That such splendour and such fragrance should come from this loathsome and complicated dance of beauty and ugliness, growth and decay, was an exasperating paradox, an indication of essential lawlessness, which he watched with disapproval, yet with a growing fascination. He could not understand it, could not leave it alone. It excited him, as life excites the virgin who watches it with amazement and distrust.

But presently the Nemesis of the specialist overtook [page 6] him; the transparent cell-walls thickened beneath his curious gaze, and hid the dwellers within. The illusion of solidity surged mist-like across the landscape, dimming his sight: he had drawn too near, and could no longer see the life in its depths. That life was surely there, and the adorable Idea behind it; but, looking sedulously at the disconcerting appearance, its ineptitude, its cruelty, its unrest, he lost that consciousness of the Idea which is the prerogative of the spiritual life. He was caught in the chains of his own inquisitiveness; and, weighted by those chains, sank from plane to plane of perception, ever narrowing the field of vision as he fell.

The desire to know, that mortal enemy of the power to be, had forced him to accept the illusions that he despised. He was slowly and inevitably pressed into their deeps; concentrated, in spite of himself, on one point in the turmoil, where, as it seemed, a tiny and individual fight was going on. There was a little furry thing that lived, and an agonized spirit which looked out at him through two green windows; solitary in the midst of all the other life, and greatly frightened. Something in the furry bag which held the spirit hurt dreadfully. He wondered what it could be, and why the prisoner within should mind so much. Whilst he was still absorbed in his own curiosity and the strangeness of this experience, there was a struggle and a tremor that passed over the bag of fur, and then a faint cry. The light left the green windows: a small matter in itself, but bringing to this immortal watcher the appalling knowledge of things that could come to an end.

"What a loathsome dream I am looking at!" he [page 7] said; and, very naturally, he determined forthwith to cease this foolish looking at a nasty and unprofitable world.

He turned towards the great spaces, the empty and majestic Real. But the Real had withdrawn beyond his range. Then horror fell on him, and with it an utter helplessness; for he perceived that he could not leave off looking at the dream because he was no longer looking, he was there. A cry came from him—a very bitter cry of wrath and fear.

"Ah, what has happened? I am caught! I cannot get away!"

He had seen death; and suddenly felt on him the weight of the strange and dreadful fetters of mortality.


CHAPTER II: HOW SOMETHING CAME FROM SOMEWHERE


"Une pratique, même superstitieuse, même insensée, est efficace, parce que c'est un réalisation de la volonté."
Éliphas Lévi: Rituel de la Haute Magie.

WITHIN the bookshop a dusty darkness was made noticeable by the existence of one low-lying patch of light. At 10 p.m. business hours were long over, and the place revenged itself upon intrusion by the uncanny air of peopled solitude, the suggestion that all trespassers will be prosecuted with circumstances of occult terror, which lurks in empty houses, deep forests, and solitary shrines. Commerce was cast out, and seven other devils took her place.

A woman stood within the patch of light, and also within a small circle which she had traced with charcoal upon the imperfectly scrubbed floor. She seemed a healthy and a solid woman: body and brain well balanced, soul asleep. She was studying a stained and coarsely-printed duodecimo which lay upon the desk beside her. It was a rare old English translation of the "Grand Grimoire," which, having recently been rebacked with new brown morocco by strenuous and unsympathetic hands, was now kept [page 9] open with difficulty by a heavy stamp-moistener and two bulldog letter-clips.

The light was produced by two candles of that brownish-yellow wax which Catholics always burn about the biers of their dead. Since the agents of death and birth are always one, it is hardly strange that these should be the lights assigned by antique tradition to help the incoming of another life. The candles stood upon the floor; with the spot on which the woman was, they marked the points of a triangle which had been carefully drawn within the charcoal ring. Hence they at once proclaimed themselves as instruments of ceremony, not of illumination; belonging rather to the saucerful of incense, the little pan of charcoal that stood on the gas-stove, than to the daily apparatus of ledger, order-book, and publishers' catalogues which crowded the neighbouring desk.

A small mirror hung high up between the book-shelves. It was tilted forward, giving an excellent view of the floor. The flames of the candles were reflected in it: two shining points, exhibiting with a horrible thoroughness the vast and lonely dusk in which they shone. Thus seen, winking and glittering out of the greyness, they seemed intimately, unpleasantly alive; and Constance Tyrrel, in spite of a sound classical education, and much inherited and carefully fostered common sense, felt them to be watchful personalities, companions full of eerie suggestion, poisoning her essential solitude by their hint of terrible companionship.

She began, instinctively, to calculate the shortest possible time in which her present business could be [page 10] done; then, detecting in this operation the first symptom of oncoming panic, she deliberately looked away from the mirror, and again forced her attention to the Grimoire and to the grotesque and varied objects which were ranged upon her desk ready for use.

There was a piece of cardboard, on which the Pentagram, the Tetragrammaton, and the Caduceus had been traced in coloured inks according to the recipe of Éliphas Lévi. Symbols in outline are seldom impressive, and I am afraid that this talisman had failed to affect her imagination as it should. She hung it upon her breast with a piece of string; and, noting the effect, wondered whether this were or were not the ancestor of the scapular. There was also a forked hazel twig, its tips covered with little thimbles of steel: the magician's wand. She took it in her hand; and, staying always within the circle, reached out for the pan of charcoal and placed it on the ground before her. The childishness of these proceedings would have amused her had it not been for the intense silence, the loneliness of the book-shop, its dim uncertain corners, and the horrible impression of looking out into infinite and cruel darkness—only possible to those who stand in a restricted patch of light—which she received when she raised her eyes from the ground. This darkness was made the more hateful by its very incompleteness; by the radiant mirror which swam out of it, reflecting the two candle flames, like the glowing eyes of some vigilant animal eternally imprisoned in its depths. Now and then she heard footsteps in the street; the rattle and hoot of a motor, the [page 11] barking of dogs. These noises reminded her that she was shut in with another world, another century, where she could claim no aid but that afforded by her own curiosity and courage.

She took a little incense from her saucer, and threw it on the charcoal. The perfumed smoke ascended in a thick white cloud, veiling the disconcerting mirror and the surrounding bookshelves, inappropriately filled with county histories, educational works, and cheap reprints. It placed itself between Constance and the objects of her daily toil; shut her more closely with her undertaking.

She was in the midst of it now: this visible sign of transcendental ambitions assured her of that. Its scent in her nostrils assured her, too, of the solemnities of the undertaking. It lapped her in the atmosphere of ceremony, opened vistas of dream. She turned with a new confidence to the Grimoire, and began to read aloud the Ritual of Conjuration. It was her first attempt to force the lock of that Door which has no key.

" 'Ego Constantia conjuro te per Deum vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum et regnantem.' "

She said it bravely: yet in the very act of reading her judgment sat aloof. It refused to capitulate before the fragrance, the darkness, the amazing phrases. It reminded her that the thing was silly, whilst her imagination murmured that the words were at any rate stupendous. She read them—the long elaborate spell—in the high-pitched, shaky, and shame-stricken voice of one who rehearses some pretentious piece of rhetoric alone, and dreads the mortification of being [page 12] overheard. Also, to speak clearly seemed almost an acknowledgment that there was, after all, something present to which she could speak: it was an act which peopled the dusky corners of the shop with terrible presences. She shivered a little, and forgot to attribute her discomfort to self-suggestion or over-stimulated nerves. She kept her eyes fixed upon the Grimoire, lest they should meet in the mirror the reflection of some life other than their own. With each fresh phase of the strange chant, the majestic appeal to invisible peoples, intangible powers, the suspicion that this life awaited the opening of her eyes increased.

" 'Te exorciso ut nunc et sine mora appareas mihi juxta circulum pulchrâ et honestâ, animæ et corporis forma.' "

She paused. She wondered whether she really desired this terrific result: conceived its possibility. The smoke had cleared a little, and she could detect the opposite side of the shop and the glint of some unpleasant scarlet bindings; standard English novelists in half-roan with deckled edge. Everything was very quiet. Her nervousness had passed away. Nothing happened.

Constance discovered herself to be disappointed. She believed nothing, and was therefore the more ready to believe anything; having all the transcendental curiosity of the true materialist. Her present undertaking was either perilous or absurd. She was not disposed to take either of these risks for nothing. Her fighting instincts were aroused. If success were possible, she would not forego it. Hence the last clauses of the incantation came from her lips with an [page 13] imperious ring which was appropriate enough to that superb procession of Divine names by which the student of magic really compels himself to exaltation, whilst he purports to be compelling the spirits of the air.

"'Per nomina maxima Dei deorum Dominus dominatium, Adonay Tetragrammaton Jehovah!
                    O Theos Athanatos!
Ischyros Hagios, Pentagrammaton Shadday
                    O Theos Athanatos!
Tetragrammaton Adonay, Ischyros Athanatos, Shadday!
Cados,' Eloy, Hagios!
                    O Theos A thanatos!
Adonay! Adonay! Adonay!'"

The final phrases echoed through the empty shop in a wild, an appealing cry which she hardly recognized as her own. Thus recited, fresh from the book, by one who knew nothing of its cipher, the necessity of discovering the truly secret words beneath their concealing signs, it would have sounded absurd enough in the ears of a professional occultist; but on this woman's lips it was at once a prayer and a command. She perceived for the first time why it was that these eccentric substantives were known as Words of Power. Their curious rhythms rose, as it were, to waves—inexorable waves of sound—which battered the cliff of uncreated things. As she ceased, she realized that she was intensely fatigued: the over-powering fatigue of a person who has worked beyond her strength, and feels every limb to be invaded by the languors of her brain. It seemed to her, too, that the shop had become very cold. Evidently a gusty [page 14] wind had arisen outside, and found its way under the ill-fitting door; for the two candle flames flickered suddenly, as if blown sharply towards her, then righted themselves and burned steadily again. Nothing happened.

At the ending of the evocation, said the Grimoire, if the spirit which is conjured by the Magus still fails to appear, the operator will place the steel tips of his wand upon the burning brazier, and make the last and most violent assault upon the unseen world; the mighty and primitive spell called the Clavicle of Solomon. "And be ye not afraid," adds the rubric, "though ye shall hear the loud cries and groans of the spirits who are now being forced to appear within the circle of earth."

Constance had read these directions and this warning with some amusement during her furtive studies of the occult. Upon a sunny afternoon in early spring, in the interval of serving a lady addicted to the literature of the Higher Health and a curate who wished to read Pierre Louys for reasons unconnected with French prose, she had found its careful encouragements quaint and delightful. Now, oddly enough, she turned at once, though with a certain tremulousness, to look for the page upon which the strange syllables of the Clavicle were drawn within their encompassing sign. She did it naturally and inevitably; as if it were now impossible to abandon this adventure whilst any path remained untried.

But as she searched by the feeble light of her candles, the tightly-bound leaves of the little book escaped from fingers which were no longer very steady in their grasp. It shut itself with a snap, [page 15] and she caught sight between two fly-leaves of a tiny slip of paper, so thin that a breath was needed to disengage it from the page on which it lay. There were on it a few lines of faded writing and many curious signs.

In her rather hasty collation of the Grimoire she had not seen this paper. Now, because she was eager and somewhat disheartened by her non-success, wide-eyed towards all chances of adventure, she took it from its place, held it to the light, and deciphered with difficulty the opening words

"Lo, my beloved son and very dear disciple, I bequeath to thee this Grimoire, the companion of my labours, wherein are faithfully set forth the true Rituals of Magic, together with all things needful for the prosecution of that most divine experiment on which thou art set: to wit, the Word, the Sign, and the Way. Guard well that secret knowledge, remembering the four oaths of thy initiation: to Dare; to Will, to Learn, and to Conceal. But as to this book, have no fear lest the profane and those unlearned in Philosophie discover aught therein, since, even as the Ark within the Temple, all truth here dwells behind a veil; which veil the priests of the Hidden Wisdom alone may pass . . . ." Here followed three lines of Cabalistic figures, which Constance could not read. At the side there was a gloss in tiny writing: "Nota.—Take heed that thou dost not forget to sing rightly, and according to the manner of the adepts, these most powerful and all-holy Names of God, and the great Key of Solomon, our Master; for it is very certain that upon the due [page 16] observance of this matter the whole virtue of thy evocation doth depend."

She replaced the paper in the Grimoire, feeling herself to be little enlightened; for she had no knowledge of that right singing of the adepts which it held essential to the work. However, she turned to the Clavicle, and laid the metal tips of her wand upon the brazier carefully and efficiently, as if she were busied over some intricate operation of cookery; as accurate in her ritual actions as any priest before the altar of his God. She glanced at the mirror, and saw reflected in it her own face. The candles lit it from below, casting peculiar shadows upon the eye-sockets and chin. It seemed a stranger's face: white, peering, curious, and amazed. The contours which gave to it its workaday expression of responsibility and common sense had disappeared.

She began to read; and now, to her amazement, a third and almost horrible change came over her voice. It was no longer the shamefaced muttering thing of a person who suspects her own absurdity; had no more the sharp pitch of overstrung but undefeated nerves. Constance was now impelled to chant, in a loud tone and with a grave intense and crescent determination, the strange old Hebrew spell. The words drew from her—she knew not for what reason—a long and rhythmic cry; a wailing music, with curious ululative prolongations of the vowel sounds. It came from some obscure corner of her spirit, which thus found for the first time a language suited to its needs. She had ceased to be self-conscious, and was far away from the bookshop; her whole will pressing against the barriers of an experience [page 17] which, as she had gradually and automatically come to believe, was close to her hand. And as the walls of Jericho fell before the persistent trumpets, so under the assault of her cry this barrier seemed to tremble.

"Therefore appear, lest I continue to torment thee with the Words of Power of the great Solomon thy master."

The stream of strange and twisted syllables, the unearthly wailing song, the rhythms which made no appeal to the ear of sense, rose and lifted her with them; then gathered the whole strength of her spirit for the supreme statement of exalted and illuminated will: "Messias Soter Emanuel Sabaoth Adonay, to adorn et invoco."

Her eyes were upon the mirror as she ended; and still it reflected her own strained face, but no other. There was no hand laid on her shoulder, no veiled form.

But there was surely something in the mirror which she had not seen before. She saw a tiny disturbance on the ground, close beyond the edge of the charcoal ring; as if the draught that blew beneath the door had disturbed a little pile of dust. It rose in the air a little way, and hung there like a cloud. The thing was natural enough, for there is always plenty of dust in a bookshop. Nevertheless, the small movement in the dusk had jogged Constance's weary nerves. She watched it, fascinated, longing all the while to look away; and as she watched a fresh wave of overmastering fatigue came on her, and with it, of course, a sudden gust of fear. She knew that, in the impossible event of a spiritual [page 18] manifestation, she had but to conquer her will, to lay her hand upon the pentagram, and command the Presence to obey, not to intimidate, its conjurer; but it takes great confidence in the unseen to attribute to supernatural causes a phenomenon which may well have been produced by a draughty door. She stared, and struggled with a rising pulse and feelings of great discomfort in the throat.

Meanwhile, the little column of dust rose with a curious spiral motion, as if it were impelled from within. It hung in the air; a grey, faint, cobwebby thing. And then she heard the crying of a sad and frightened voice, which said:

"Ah, what has happened? I am caught! I cannot get away!" And again an inarticulate cry, that came in a rising cadence of anguish and dread.

She exclaimed: "My God! What is it? What have I done?"

The sound of her own voice, harsh and uncertain, convinced her that the other voice had not been heard by the outward ear.

She turned from the mirror, and looked with horror at the floor. The column of dust had disappeared. The candles burned clearly in the dusk.

Then she remembered that she was quite alone: that there was nothing more to do, nothing that she could do. It was late, and she longed to be away. She went to the back of the shop, and switched on the electric light. It seemed an almost impious proceeding after all that had passed; but the nice commonplace click and the immediate radiance comforted her. She extinguished her ceremonial candles, packed away wand, pentagram, and [page 19] incense in her little leather bag, and carefully rubbed the circle from the floor. The physical exercise restored her to a sense of her own largeness, healthiness, and solidity. She forgot the imaginary voice, and remembered the real world.

She left the bookshop, locking the door behind her. She held the keys, for Mr. Lambton was of a slothful disposition, and left his manager as many responsibilities as he could. She was glad to be out in the air again, and looked forward to a brisk walk through lighted streets. At this moment the mud and motor-omnibuses, the drizzling rain that fell, were familiar and delightful things; freckles on the beloved face of life.

There was a dead kitten in the gutter; a little bag of fur. She stepped back when she saw it, and crossed the road lower down. She was not a squeamish woman, but this was hardly the moment for dead things. It was evidently true, as Éliphas Lévi had said, and the best modern occultists agreed, that magical operations did have some curious effect upon the mind. She could not recover her normal poise; things wore an unusual air, and she was an alien amongst them. She decided that she would go to bed early; she was not in the mood for sitting alone that night.

She had yet to realize that she would never be alone any more.


CHAPTER III: FURNISHED LODGINGS

"Now I know that the walls of sense that seemed so impenetrable, that seemed to loom up above the heavens and to be founded below the depths, and to shut us in for evermore, are no such everlasting impassable barriers as we fancied, but thinnest and most airy veils that melt away before the seeker, and dissolve as the early mist of the morning about the brooks."--ARTHUR MACHEN: The House of Souls

This woman had the mania of adventure, and few opportunities of gratifying her taste. For years she had moved within the dull boundaries of a wage-earner's [page 21] existence, which she abhorred, but could not overpass. Once she had explored the deeps of life; now heights and deeps alike seemed shut from her. She longed for new landscape, experience, danger. Hence her sudden excursion into life's uncharted outskirts; those building estates which the spirit of man has not yet decided to develop.

Though she was, in her own opinion, wholly free from superstition, she had thought it possible that, by deliberate recourse to the self-hypnotizing ceremonial of the old magicians, she might at any rate peep into the strange wild district beyond the barriers of sense; for much that is obviously absurd when ascribed to the agency of unseen forces, becomes acceptable to the educated mind if interpreted in terms of psychology. Explaining the human soul with that precision which is so sadly lacking in the Pentateuch, this science had taught Constance that the release of her sublimal powers was all that was necessary if she wished to perceive the unknown but strictly natural world beyond the threshold as an interesting extension of the known. If you see in your incantation a method of shifting the field of consciousness, and call your magic wand an autoscope, these things no longer seem silly, but take their place as part of the cosmic plan. A careful study of the works of Professor James had further convinced her that some forms of credulity are still compatible with self-respect.

But the result of her temporary will to believe, and of the experiment which it had prompted, was, as she now felt, profoundly unsatisfactory. She was left in complete doubt as to whether or no the [page 22] invocation had worked; and the sceptical state, so convenient when its object is the dogma of a too strenuous religion, is very uncomfortable when applied to an individual ghost. If her conjuration had indeed released supernatural powers, if it were true that something had happened, the inner eye been opened upon a hidden plane of being, then she had seen—what? An unmeaning and horrible interference with that solid earth and those respectable laws of Nature which she preferred to take for granted: a column of dust that mounted and hung in the air, as if endowed with some incomprehensible life. The thought of it, of the intimate and unnatural thing, was more dreadful than any phantom could have been. It seemed to make all things unsafe. She decided that it could not, must not, be true.

Science came to the assistance of its child, and helped her to put a proper interpretation on an adventure which refused to square itself with any known theory of the unseen, but ranged itself easily amongst the accredited varieties of optical and auditory hallucination. To look at it in any other way would have been too horrible. To connect the strange and tormented voice—which, as she assured herself, she had not really heard—with that vision of the writhing, twisting, misty, yet living, thing which rose, one knew not how, and vanished, one knew not where: this was to knock the bottom out of all her past experience, to acquiesce in the unreality of all real things, even of life.

Constance adored life. She had clutched it and been stung by it; but, in spite of this rebuff, she remained its lover, adoring the wonders which she [page 23] never tasted, passionately credulous of charms which she was not permitted to enjoy. The world which lived unconscious of life, as children sit upon the knees of their mother and play indifferently with little toys, never pausing to look into her face; this normal, practical, earning and spending world had always seemed strange to her, its scale of values unreal and remote. She had silently refused to acknowledge that scale of values; the importance of demeanour and propriety, of buying and selling, of food, furniture, games, change of air, and of all the little sterile daily acts. Watching other women in their attitude towards life, she was reminded of persons who, suddenly confronted by a goddess, confine their attention to the fact that she twiddles her thumbs.

But in spite of brave theories, of curiosity, boredom, an eternal readiness for the adventures which so seldom came, she was invaded now by a longing for ordinary trivial, homely things. The instinctive human fear of the unseen had been awakened by the evening's performance. As she walked, she looked for a dog who might be persuaded to lick her hand. She would have liked to gossip with her landlady or struggle for bargains at a sale.

A beggar accosted her, and she, who had few pennies to spare, took out her purse. She made a remark about the weather, eagerly; thirsting for the little contact with humanity which would obliterate the memory of that other contact with something, perhaps, which was not human at all. But the beggar was taciturn. He took the money and went away. Constance's eyes followed him with regret. [page 24] The mood of adventure was over, and the reaction had come.

In the midst of her solitary and uncongenial life, which a cultivated scepticism did little to cheer, she had wished so much to open a new door, to satisfy latent but passionate curiosities, add new territory to her domain. Now that wish had departed, leaving behind it the insecure sensations of one who has peeped for a moment through a forbidden door in the ramparts, and obtained from this glimpse a permanent memory of great precipices all about her dwelling-place, of the black gulf and soundless moat below.

She dreaded the four walls of her room, shutting her in to a tête-à-tête with her own imagination. Presently she came to those four walls, by way of a grained door and three flights of linoleum-covered stairs. She fumbled for matches, and lighted her duplex lamp. It smelt as usual, in a refreshingly real way. The dingy mantel-border—maroon cloth, with a faded embroidery of old-gold chrysanthemums—further reassured her; but she avoided the mirror, and would have liked to cover it up had it not been that she was afraid of despising herself. Her own contempt was the only humiliation that she could not bear.

Vera's toys lay everywhere. Constance picked up a doll's frock, upon which the child had evidently wiped her mouth after eating bread and jam for tea. Actuality was there, ready to encourage and support its worshipper. She dropped the frock and went to the window; looking out from her empty, bright, and hideous room, which distressed her, into the dim and attractive night.

[page 25]The soft rain, which was hardly more than a determined dampness, had given a delicate sheen to the sloping roof next [sic.] her own: and she enjoyed it with that cultivated taste for appearance which is the prerogative of solitary lives. Her rooms, for cheapness' sake, were high up; and the vista was all of slates, parapets, and chimney-pots, delightfully various, full of quaint and unreasonable irregularities, with that character of ruggedness which is peculiar to the tops of things. The moist roof comforted Constance. It gave to her suddenly an image of the whole safe and mighty city enshrouded in a benevolent mist of rain; all the bright eyes of its million houses peering with the utmost assurance into the dusk, all the vivid streaks of trains and trams running in and under its roads without fear or hesitation. That solid, sharply-lit, assertive city was full of living creatures: real ones. It was so compact; so assured, so full of itself, that there could be no room for the invisible populations to creep between its close network of shops and souls.

She heard the jingle of a hansom in the street behind, the scrape and clatter of the hoofs as it drew up. The iron cried, "Real! real! real!" as it struck the ground. Constance knew the sound very well. Once night had fallen, many hansoms came to the house in the street behind. Sometimes the noise, and all that was implied by it, saddened and disgusted her. Now it echoed the beloved music of the town, and brought her an inexplicable sense of companionship and consolation; for years of intensest loneliness had taught her to extract [page 26] from human noises, human sights, something of the social warmth for which she often longed. She suddenly found that it was quite easy to turn back into the glaring and solitary room. It, too, was a part of the sheltering town—a cell, her cell, in the great hive—and therefore as friendly to her, as protective as the streets. There was nothing—nothing real—to differentiate this evening from other evenings: no reason why she should not make her cocoa as usual, read a while, and go to bed. She went to the china cupboard, and discovered with vexation that her favourite cup had been used for painting-water and left unwashed. She turned and glanced round the room, searching for further disagreeable results of Vera's activity.

Then she saw near the fireplace a little column of dust, that rose and hung in the air.

She stared at it with the dull and bewildered stare of a backward child who is given a difficult task. It was far beyond her power of assimilation; but she perceived it to be henceforward a part of her life, added to experience by her own act and desire. Her nature rose then, of its own accord, to meet it; as usually happens when the great things of life break abruptly upon the soul. She was not particularly astonished. She was hardly afraid.

She began to walk up and down the room, trying to argue with herself; recalling to her remembrance all that she had ever read upon self-suggestion and hallucination. These considerations, however, wore a hopelessly academic air, and brought no conviction with them. At intervals her mind returned with a jerk to the actualities of the moment, and she glanced [page 27] hastily and furtively at the corner of the room. Always the cloud of dust hung in the air.

She knew it in her heart to be a sign of life, of something that would communicate with her if it could. She felt it there, as lonely and as curious as herself; but she was not softened by its need. She set her whole will as a barrier against its coming: she was determined to ward off this horrible companionship, which pressed towards her with a certain wistfulness, like some desperate and desolate creature exiled in a foreign town. She felt the assault of its desire, and resisted with all her strength. The room grew cold as she stood there with clenched hands and rigid knees. This time she recognized the symptom as one that was proper to her state.

Then the little grey thing wavered and leaned towards her. It was like a sudden sally from an invested citadel. Constance wavered too, and knew the battle to be lost. She screamed, and was not even ashamed of herself.

There was an answering scream from the next room. Vera cried out: "Tanta, Tanta, what's the matter? I wants you! It's dark, and I'm awake."

She went to the child—herself the more terrified, the more childlike. She, too, was awake in the dark, and accepted with gratitude the comforting presence of a fellow-victim. There was a feeble gas-jet in the passage, and by its light Vera's small dark face, convulsed with fear, was discernible as a shadowy patch amongst the tossed bed-clothes.

Constance gathered the little warm body on to her lap. It shook with the terror of an animal which scents panic in its neighbourhood. She said with [page 28] unusual tenderness: "What is the matter, my little one?" for the spur of fear had touched her human instincts on the quick.

Vera cried: " Oh, I don't know; but it's dark—it's dreadful. And I heard a bogy scream in my alone."

"There are no bogies, darling. You were dreaming." As she said it she wished that it were true.

Vera curled herself tightly against the broad, firm shoulder. "You hold me tight, and then they won't come," she said.

Constance, sitting in the darkness on the uncomfortable bedroom chair, with the child's heavy body in her arms, the querulous little voice in her ears, saying: "Hold me tight! You mustn't go—you shan't!" wished that she might thus sit for ever, with the protective influence of the flesh between her and the invading foe. It was a new sensation; for Vera was not an attractive child, and her many claims upon attention had never included a sentimental appeal. She seemed to present no promise of a future womanhood; but rather, in some elusive way, a condensed history of those animal natures through which her spirit had presumably climbed on its way towards life. The squat stature, the heavy limbs, the lowering brow, the wide and formless mouth, were adapted to be the agents of instinct rather than of character; and instinct, elemental appetites and uncontrolled passions, had already sealed them.

But at this moment Constance forgot these things. She looked at the clumsy little body with a new eagerness, a new possessive sense. She cuddled it against her bosom, concentrated on its helplessness, its happy ignorance, its warmth. By her own act, [page 29] her own arrogant curiosity, strangeness and terror had been admitted to her universe. They must not be permitted to infect this scrap of life which was in her keeping. She perceived that she must endure them alone; must never entertain company in that dreadful room of windows which looked out upon the timeless, spaceless wilds. Everything, after all, had to be attempted and endured alone, once childhood was past. The hive-like city of a myriad cells, which seemed so social and so warm, was really a city of a myriad prisons. Each inhabitant in some unendurable hour, when the view from the windows was too clear, the solitude of the four walls too keen, would fling himself, as she had done, upon the door: to find that an inexorable hand had turned the key.

But in some of the cells two were shut together; and they protected one another from the impact of solitude and fear, so that the prison straightway became a home. There was no one who would do this for her; no one in all the world to whom she could tell her adventure, to whom she could appeal for the sheltering love, the dear human presence, the foolish comforting platitudes of common sense.

She had got to see it out; and when she had seen it out, no one would know, no one would blame her curiosity, admire her courage. This fact added to the old monotonous loneliness in which she had lived so long a new and bitter sense of isolation.

Vera was quickly comforted. Soon she fell asleep. Constance put her into bed very gently, left a lighted candle and a chocolate cream by her side, and returned to the sitting-room. As she entered, she glanced quickly towards the corner; but the [page 30] column of dust was not there. She was reassured, and shut the door softly.

Then she perceived that there was a figure sitting by the fireplace. It was, perhaps, less a figure than a form: an impressionist sketch of humanity, without detail and without sex. That unnerved her, and she shrank with beating heart against the closed door, hid her face with her hands, and stayed in that comforting and self-imposed darkness for a period which seemed to have no relation to ordinary intervals of time.

At last she heard within her mind the sad and wailing voice which had first attacked her in the bookshop; but it had lost its original accent of fear and grief. It said: "If they are all cowards, what am I to do? And how shall I ever understand?"

Because she could not endure the taunt of cowardice, even from a voice which she suspected was her own, she raised her head and looked again. Then she saw two brilliant, wild, and hungry eyes, which gazed into hers from the recesses of some alien life that had caught them in its folds.

She said: "Ah, what are you? What have I done?" And again the silent voice replied: "You know."

She exclaimed: "No! I do not understand."

It seemed to her that it was a sad and lost thing which answered her with difficulty, and picking its way, as it were, amongst the strange periods of a foreign tongue.

It said: "Nor do I; but I think that you have got to see me as a shape, as something which has a limiting edge, because otherwise you will not let me [page 31] enter your experience. You are dreaming so deeply that you cannot recognize spirit unless it enters into the unreasonable illusions of your dream. So I must attack your consciousness on its ordinary earthly plane; because I will get in, I will know, I have got to understand."

She cried out suddenly: "Oh, it isn't real! It can't be real!"

The voice said: "No. A picture built of your dream-stuff, that is all. But do not be deceived; all pictures represent realities. I am here, within the appearance, as you are there within your clothes. What does the shape matter? It is only a little dust."

But there was no one sitting by the fire.

She exclaimed in her astonishment: "I thought I saw!"

And there was again a voice that replied: "And you think you know, and you think you feel. What strange and meaningless dreams!"

Then the last scrap of courage deserted her, and she seized the lamp and fled ingloriously from the room. But she turned at the door, and looked swiftly and furtively at the corner by the fireplace, from which she fled. It was a coward's glance, and met a coward's retribution. There was a little eddy of dust that rose from the floor and hung suspended in the air.

Constance undressed hastily, and lay wakeful, with Vera held tightly in her arms.


CHAPTER IV: THE DAY'S WORK

"Petit à petit, il a pénétré un plus grand nombre d'éléments psychiques, les teignant pour ainsi dire de sa propre couleur; et voici que votre point de vue sur l'ensemble des choses vous parâit maintenant avoir changé." —BERGSON: Les Données Immédiates de la Conscience.

She had seen, abruptly, the insecurity of those defences which protect our illusions and ward off the horrors of truth. She had found a little hole in the wall of appearance; and, peeping through, had caught a glimpse of that seething pot of spiritual forces whence, now and then, a bubble rises to the surface of things. There were beings there—living, and full of horror because devoid of shape. She had opened a door for them, and now they could press in on her; and she, loathing their companionship, could not resist. All her robust and eager enjoyment of life [page 33] fled from her. It was not real any more. Only that invisible and intangible eternity behind the shadow-show was real; that, and its detestable inhabitants.

She had one consolation. She felt herself to be unique in so perceiving the true proportion of things. Many teachers, she knew, had referred to it; but she shared the conviction of all other tasters of supreme experience that no one had seen reality face to face before. It made this poor visible life seem futile, its discipline absurd; yet she was immersed in that life, and it pressed in on her, forcing itself on her attention in a peculiarly exasperating way. There were mysteries all about her, strange companions, a knowledge of some actual and densely-populated world here, at hand, penetrating her own body perhaps, as well as all objects of her thought. Yet Vera's bath must be faced every morning, and the shop, that little universe, where souls and bodies were but the material for a profitable distribution of the real things—cloth, leather, paper and ink. This state of things constituted a paradox which would have been amusing had it not been personal. As she went to business in the morning, automatically dodging the motor-omnibuses, staring out of dream in amazement at the people who surged up in her path, all hurrying and all unreal, she repeated to herself continually: "I have got to go on! I have got to go on!"

She came to the bookshop at the moment in which the last of the shutters ran up with a bang, disclosing a window in which Constance was accustomed to take a certain professional pride. She gave it as she [page 34] entered the scrutinizing glance which a good house-wife bestows on the drawing-room curtains as she goes up her garden-path. The window was wide and uncrowded; the loving amplitude of a museum, not the tightly-packed practicalities of trade. It was never without its MS. of the Decretals, its Flemish herbal, open at a page at once decorative and decorous, Burton's "Arabian Nights" placed discreetly in the background, a cover in tooled Levant from the Doves Bindery, or one or two of the rarer products of the Kelmscott Press. Within, topography and scandalous chronicles jostled the ancients very comfortably upon the shelves. There were also a few high-class remainders, and several piles of cheap reprints; for Lambton's was one of the many establishments which stand, Janus-faced, between culture and commerce. One corner was devoted to current literature: reviewers' copies, often uncut and always very cheap.

Two tables stood in the wide space between the bookshelves. On one Mr. John Lambton arranged a permanent exhibition of book-lovers' trinkets: limited editions, pocket classics, neatly-boxed marvels of limp lambskin and rough calf. Thomas à Kempis in twenty different dresses—all worldly; the wisdom of the East in American spelling; or the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," clothed with a chaste absurdity in white. The other table, which was smaller, held large unreadable colour books, a few works on Italian painters, and new copies of such novels as Constance felt that cultured and bookish people ought to read.

She looked up as she entered at the tight-ribbed [page 35] rows of books on the shelves; little nests of words, bewilderingly various. They were gay in the morning light, and wide awake. She stared at them, as one stares at abnormal shapes; seeing them no longer as concrete things, but as odd agglomerations of line and surface.

Little nests of words! Ideas, those evanescent, wandering things, caught and tucked up in paper; as unruly children are tucked up in bed. To open a book, and let the soul of it gush out like perfume, invading, overwhelming the mind; this was a daily miracle, and she the purveyor of such miracles! She had never thought of it before; but at this moment the mystery of it swept her, and with it amazement that one should thus sell thoughts for money, since thoughts were real and money was not. How inconceivable an act, to communicate the dream which came from the heart of Dante in three volumes limp green leather for six shillings net! In the face of this and all other paradoxes of her concrete life, she was suddenly infected with an unworldly bewilderment. She looked out with astonished vision on an incredible earth. All things were made new; for it seemed that she had abruptly acquired the innocence of eye which we snatch so easily from our children, to give back so tardily and incompletely to our artists, poets, and saints.

She took off her hat, assumed her blue linen overall, and sat down at her desk. The mirror was opposite to her. She raised her eyes, saw it, and at once the scene of the past night was re-created for her: the dusk and solitude, all the ceremonial absurdities, the perfumed smoke which had ascended [page 36] like a white pillar, that other pillar of grey and shivering dust which had arisen from the floor, the urgent and tormented voice that had addressed itself to no earthly ear. Fire and all the eternities evoked in a bookshop—in that prison of a myriad cells! The tangible and intangible worlds were swept up together, in one heap of confused experience, like the surging clouds in a crystal-gazer's ball. But it was the invisible side that seemed homely and possible of comprehension; the visible that was alien and remote. When she questioned herself she found nothing, save the nervous upheaval caused by her late experience, to account for this state of things. She was amazed by her own topsy-turvy condition, conscious of it, and interested in it. But she seemed to have lost the useful art of taking things for granted. She stared at the strange new world of unmeaning colour and shape, and wondered why it should exist at all.

Then Mr. John Lambton came through the glass door from his private room; and at once Constance became the normal business woman, the useful manager, the prudent and cultivated bibliophile. Mr. John held a catalogue in his hand. He was going to ask her advice; a circumstance much dreaded by Miss Tyrrel, since it often compelled her to exhibit an intellectual superiority which prudence advised her to keep for the sole use of her customers. It is one thing to bandy Horace with old gentlemen, and another to improve inadvertently upon your employer's Latin pronunciation.

Mr. Lambton had engaged Constance because an assistant who knew something about literature had [page 37] become necessary to his peace of mind. He was one of those unfortunate persons whose short sight and aquiline nose suggest a culture which their conversation cannot endorse. In such a superior class of business as that of Lambton and Sons this was particularly inconvenient; for Elzevirs in the window are held to imply erudition behind the counter. There was scarcely a day in which some customer did not embark upon a conversation which Mr. John was obliged to terminate in a sudden and sometimes tactless way. The thing came to a head on the morning upon which a disgusted liturgiologist found Dugdale's "Monasticon" and Haeckel's "Monism" side by side on the shelf labelled "R.C. Theology." Mr. John, stung by his client's contemptuous glance, alarmed by his immediate exit, felt that the services of a well-educated inferior had become no less necessary to commercial prosperity than to personal comfort and self-respect.

Miss Tyrrel, then, found herself obliged to maintain a carefully subsidiary position, whilst keeping a vigilant eye upon her employer's bibliographical aberrations. She was rather glad to find that on this morning he wished to consult her about nothing more recondite than the "Romaunt of Syr Gawayne," the large-paper edition of which had just gone into remainder. Mr. John thought that it could be sold very profitably at one-and-six, and he observed that it was a fine large book for the money, and if cased in velvet calf, with ribbon ties, would be singularly suitable for presentation.

"You had better send an order to-day," he said, "or else one of the other big houses will go and buy [page 38] the lot. When they come, get them bound up and put aside for the Christmas season. They'll fetch half a guinea then."

"But I think it's only a facsimile of the Burdett MS.," answered Constance—"not at all a book for general circulation: Middle English, very difficult to make out, and a good deal of curious matter in the notes."

Mr. John replied: "All the better. Looks cultured, medieval, and so on. People don't want to read the books they give away."

Constance wrote out the order in a spirit of disgusted obedience, and then remembered how little such things mattered to one who had attained to the superb generalizations which characterized her present view of life. This view had departed from her at Mr. John's entrance; now it began to encroach by slow steps upon her orderly and busy mind. She was enfranchised from that carefulness about many bibliographical things which usually obsessed her from nine till seven; but she had only cast off one set of chains to assume another.

It was gradually borne in on her that her senses were no longer quite her own; there was a Thing which used them, and she participated in that use, but could not control it. She leaned, as it were, over the shoulder of a new inhabitant, and peeped out of the window with him. So peeping, she recognized a fellow-victim of that impassioned curiosity, that cold lust of knowledge, which had urged her to all the adventures of her life. It seemed as though she, out of the whole phenomenal world, had attracted her antitype in the world of reality. When she turned [page 39] inwards and asked the persistent Presence, "Why are you here?" he, using perforce the language with which his hostess provided him, could only answer, "I want to know!" All through life that had been her own need. She respected it.

Presently a customer, who had been prowling happily in the recesses of the shop, approached with a copy of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques." He had unearthed it from the dark corner where those books which are catalogued "curious" were usually kept, and was turning it over with interest. Seeing a young woman behind the desk, he hesitated; but reflected that shop-girls share with nurses a certain immunity from the ordinary decencies of life, and came boldly on.

"This," he said, "seems a very quaint, uncommon sort of book—most amusing, too. But it's—well, distinctly, don't you know?" —he thought for a moment, came to the conclusion that his French was bound to be better than hers, and added firmly, "lubrique."

Constance, hardly readjusted to West London ideals, answered him calmly and vaguely:

"He writes entirely from the medieval standpoint: puts everything down, of course, just as it really happens, without leaving out the usual things. But there's nothing uncommon in it really—nothing but life. The costume is different, and the people are quite candid, that is all. Modern married life in the suburbs is just as"—she was determined to give him his word again—"just as lubrique."

The customer looked at her with surprise, and with a noticeably joyous anticipation, but her smooth black [page 40] hair and solid figure did not suggest pleasantries. She added immediately:

"That copy is twelve-and-six. It's in a very good state, and has all the Doré illustrations. I can give you another, with the margins rather cut down, for seven shillings, if you like; but it isn't such good value for the money."

The customer thanked her, and said that he would think it over. He left the book lying on the desk, and Constance carefully reinterred it in its dark corner, returned to her ledger, and glanced at the clock. It was after half-past twelve, and a quarter to one was the hour of the Mid-day Friend.

Every prosperous bookshop has its gang of prowlers, who pay their footing by a purchase once in a while, but have their real commercial value for the establishment in the fact that they stimulate the prowling instincts of other passers-by. These may be persons of a nicer conscience than your true adept of the business, and feel that each delicious loiter and surreptitious bout of reading must be paid for, if only from the penny box. The conscientious prowler, however, tends with the passing months to join the more professional and less lucrative class. It was the distinction of the Mid-day Friend that he had moved in the opposite direction.

In that slow, unnoticed way which is peculiar to great constitutional changes, his visits had ceased to be an accident and had become an institution. There had been first the involuntary glance at the wide and open entrance as he passed, and then the momentary lingering to read a title or so, and then the day on which he had entered the shop in chase [page 41] of a colour book whose vivid charms had forced it into remainder a little before the usual time. He had turned it over, looking with admiration at the blue trees and orange castles, and the purple-margined peasants silhouetted against greenish skies. Then he had put it down with a sigh.

"I'm afraid I must not take it," he said. "The truth is, my wife doesn't like these books, and it vexes her to see them lie about. You see, she has made our house very artistic—whitewash, and all that."

This statement at once aroused sentiments of interest and pity in Constance; delightful and stimulating emotions which her customers seldom provoked. She conceived of this blunt, square, bullet-headed man, wholesomely animal, poised uncomfortably upon sparse and tasteful furniture; his very weight and virility an offence, his broad-toed boots always in the way. The constant society of a wife who condemned all that one thought ingenious and beautiful seemed a more lonely business than her own solitary lodgings, where there was, at any rate, no one to set up irksome and exclusive canons of taste.

On his next visit she learned that his name was Andrew: a circumstance mentioned in connection with Scotland, the national thistle, and the animals which feed thereon. This form of humour seemed a relief to him. She divined that it was not permitted at home. She had laughed with such evident good-humour and enjoyment that he could hardly fail to index her as the sort of woman who understands and appreciates a man. He bought a book. On the next day he returned and bought another, [page 42] with a pathetic air of trying to make his visits worth her while. In a week they seemed intimate friends.

Upon this morning Constance looked forward almost hungrily to Andrew's visit. She turned towards the idea of his solid and unimaginative personality with that instinct for a counter-irritant which causes us to seek out our least appropriate acquaintances in seasons of grief. He did not want to be spiritual, he did not want to think. She saw at this moment much to commend in such a point of view. She loved her body, honoured it deliberately as the medium of all great experience. The Mid-day Friend took the body seriously; was interested in the clothes which it wore, the games that were good for it, the things that one gave it to eat. His own body was excellently groomed, warm, efficient, and compact. He would have been shocked and puzzled by the suggestion that it really had something in common with a column of dust; for outside the Pages of the Burial Service such metaphors were clearly morbid and absurd.

He came. His "Morning, Miss Tyrrel. Hope you're well. Beastly weather we're having!" at once satisfied her craving for honest ordinariness. But, to her surprise, he did not fidget in the usual way; flick the Pages of the second-hand novels, or otherwise try to find a reason for his presence. He walked without hesitation towards the bookshelves, and she found herself following him in the subdued but attentive attitude of the expert saleswoman. For once, it appeared, there was a definite object in his visit.

"It's my wife's birthday," he said. "Forgot all [page 43] about it till I'd left the house this morning. Rather awkward! I must take something home. She's a curious woman, you know—childish in a way, as many are, although clever. Doesn't like these little things passed by. Seems to me I may as well give her a book as anything else. She reads a good deal: the right sort of thing, of course. It occurred to me that you'd be able to find me something she would like. It had better be thoroughly up to date or else quite old-fashioned; anything in between is no good."

Constance successively suggested "Neolithic Pantheism"; "Southern Siberia: the Home of the Soul"; and "The Duty of Duties: Development of Self"; but he thought that she was sure to have read all those. He wandered from one table to another, picking up books with an uncertain hand. She liked the air of manly helplessness with which he confronted an intellectual choice. Clearly, it was important that he should avoid any mistake.

"Women are queer," he said. "One doesn't understand 'em. Not that one wants to, for that matter; but it's more comfortable not to do the wrong thing if one can help it."

"If they really are women—just that—you can't do the wrong thing, can you?"

"That's it!" said Andrew eagerly. "That's what one wants 'em to be, of course. But they never are nowadays—at least, not in our set. Don't seem to understand what men want. Oh, very nice to us, do their duty, and so on, of course. I'm not saying anything. But clever, and always worrying about it; as if brains in women were a sort of disease. I [page 44] beg your pardon! Beastly of me. I forgot. Really, you let me come chatting to you, and sometimes one's tongue runs on."

Constance was aware of something which picked up these utterances, looked at them curiously, and laid them by with a helpless air of non-comprehension. But she resisted its companionship, expelled it as it were from the neighbourhood of her mind, and concentrated her will upon Andrew and his interests. His robust humanity called out hers to meet it. He found her, on this morning, peculiarly sympathetic; and never suspected that her unusual proximity of spirit was due rather to the repulsive powers of another than to his own attractive force.

He was greatly pleased by an expensive copy of Browning's "Christmas Eve," printed in illegible Gothic type, with fantastic bloomers, and bound in naked millboards held together by linen braid.

"The binding," he said, "is just right for our drawing-room—so bare and simple—couldn't be better. But she wouldn't read it; and I doubt if she'd even let it lie about. You see, Browning, from what I hear, is just a bit gone by in our set; and old-fashioned books are worse to them than last year's clothes. Quaint, isn't it, the way things come and go? When we were first married, you know, she got quite depressed because I couldn't stick him; and now he goes on the top shelf, with Ruskin and George Eliot and Carlyle."

He was standing by her desk; and having laid down the blatantly austere "Christmas Eve," he picked up a shabby duodecimo and began to flick its [page 45] leaves, gently and indifferently, as he talked. It was the "Grand Grimoire."

"Now here," he said presently, "is a very rummy little thing! I wonder if that would do? I shall be late for lunch if I don't find something soon. What is it? Magic, eh? That's quite a notion. A bit out of the common, I suppose. She's not likely to have seen one before?"

"Hardly. They are getting very scarce. This is the first copy we have had for years."

He gazed vaguely at the queer woodcuts and strange garbled recipes, as precise and unemotional as a cookery-book.

"Queer notions those old chaps had! Look here: 'To evoke the spirit of an angel, the magic circle being drawn and the altar of incense prepared—!' God bless my soul—what next? First catch your angel, eh? Oh, I'll take this; it will just suit Muriel. She's keen on spooks and things, and she hates the point of view of modern science. Not much modern science here!"

Constance answered: "On the contrary, if you know how to read its formulæ, this is modern science, and the things that modern science hasn't yet got to."

"Oh, come!" said Andrew, humouring her. "Modern science, you know, is practical, experimental, constructive, and so on."

"Well, so is this. It is just a series of scientific experiments; nothing else. And they are real enough and practical enough for those who know how to perform them, goodness knows! Other people, of course, will find it about as enlightening [page 46] as a collection of chemists' prescriptions; and about as dangerous, too, if they go meddling without authority."

"Yes, but vampires and spells and salamanders, you know!" insisted Andrew. "They're all here, taking themselves quite seriously. You're not going to tell me those are scientific facts, are you? We mayn't know much, but we are jolly well sure they don't exist."

"You can't prove a negative."

"God bless my soul—what next?" said Mr. Vince for the second time. Within his own mind, he added: "She seemed such a sensible woman, too."

He felt puzzled for a moment, and slightly disheartened. It was the first time that they had disagreed. Then the word "angel" suddenly occurred to him, and suggested that the queer little book might perhaps have something to do with religion, though it seemed on the surface to have more in common with Maskelyne and Cooke. There were so many new religions now. No doubt Miss Tyrrel affected one of them—a circumstance which would explain her peculiar attitude at once. She might even be a Romanist; they believed a lot of very curious things. He became shy and careful; for it was an axiom with him that one should never disturb women's religion. They required it, poor creatures!

As for Constance, she asked herself with temper: "What on earth can have made me play the fool, and talk to him in that idiotic way? For two pins I should have told him the whole affair. Of course, he is disgusted now, and thinks I am a [page 47] superstitious rotter; and very likely that is what I am!"

Her manner became constrained and business-like, confirming his suspicion that he had somehow shocked her by mistake. He paid for the Grimoire, and retired in a mood of contrition. Constance wrapped it up in brown paper, and tied thin green string about it, with a certain relief. She still had a vague idea that in the absence of all exciting suggestions, it might be possible to banish the humiliating memory of her experiment, and of the tiresome hallucinations which it had induced.

But the protective influence of humanity seemed to have departed with her friend; and a puzzled voice, which she was learning to recognize, murmured in her ear: "It is all so very funny, but what does it mean?"

And once more she looked out on a world which had become strange to her—inconceivable, grotesque.

CHAPTER V: A DOMESTIC INTERIOR


"How much more dulcet the dulcis Amaryllidis ira, when Amaryllis knows Sophocles and Hegel by heart!" —COVENTRY PATMORE: Religio Poetæ.

ANDREW VINCE entered the drawing-room carefully. The floor was highly polished, and the one small rug, which always skated before his advancing feet, added to its deceptive qualities. There was a purple sofa near the window, a closed cupboard in one corner. Four large fat cushions were arranged upon the floor. The walls were white. There were no curtains and no pictures.

Mrs. Vince—who would have resembled a Dominican nun dressed by Liberty had it not been for the masses of healthy-looking yellow hair which she wore, with becoming austerity, in a coronal plait—sat upon one of the cushions, and spoke with her accustomed earnestness about nothing in particular. She had applied to the uses of society the journalist's trick of skimming things with an air of intensity, and many men called her a wonderful little woman. "The blue butterfly," one of them had said of her; but this unusually irreverent epigram had been [page 49] generally condemned, though constantly repeated, in her set.

A member of this set lounged before the fire and listened to her hostess's conversation. She, like Muriel, seemed at first sight too healthy to be eccentric; tall and pretty, with a mature and comfortable prettiness that suggested an easy disposition and an absence of tiresome ideals. If Muriel was the butterfly of her circle, Phœbe Foster was its bumble-bee. She was prosperous, and dressed well; believing that luxurious surroundings and an ample diet constituted as fine a discipline for the modern soul as the tedious simplicities of the cloister or its agnostic equivalent; the workman's dwelling adapted to the use of ladies living alone. "Anyone," she said, "could be spiritual with self-denial, boiled vegetables, and the 'Lives of the Saints'; but it is much more difficult to feel that you are resting on Eternity when there is a brocaded cushion in between."

She was speaking of purity as Andrew entered; and one feels it to be characteristic of her point of view that she did not think it necessary to change the conversation.

"One is obliged," she was saying, "to leave the static conception, the mere idle chastity, behind. Where, otherwise, would be Woman's value to the race? The courtesan is a heretic, the nun is an atheist. Do you remember?"

"Purity in wifehood!" answered Mrs. Vince, with the gentle didacticism appropriate to her youth: "Spiritual eugenics! That must, of course, be our ideal. To bear one or two children of beautiful [page 50] character, and shed an atmosphere of peace upon the home."

Andrew, fresh from the tossing current of the streets, the eager war with other brains which made up his daily work, felt that there was something chill and horrible in the peaceful grey light which came through the curtainless windows, the peaceful spaces of white walls and polished floor, and the arrogant prattle of these women who sat safely ensconced as in a fortress, protected from life and truth by the earnings of the men whom they despised. It threw him back upon himself, as sudden entrance. into a refrigerator forces the organism to draw heavily on its stock of latent heat. Domesticity, for him, had been drawn in outline, with a pen of exaggerated refinement. Its convention was excellent, its design was complete, but it still awaited the warm tints which should give it the semblance of life.

However, the place was his, after all. He spread his coat-tails, sat down deliberately upon the purple sofa, checked its recoil by planting his heels firmly on the floor, and said, "Where's the boy?"

The ladies looked at one another, and Muriel rang the bell twice. The child who came in response to it was fair and languid, as if the forces which brought him to birth had wearied before the end of their task. He ran to his mother, and leaned against her with a pretty gesture of abandonment. His hair was a little too long, his socks were a little too short. His smile, if a trifle superior, was seraphic. [page 51] Vince said to his son, "Well, Felix, what have you been doing to-day?"

The boy answered, "Bits of poetry and rhythmy things, of course;" and his mother put her arm about him, as if she felt competent, at any rate, to protect her child from the cruder follies of fatherhood and the degrading influences of an ordinary education. One of his hands was within hers: with the other, he began to trace the course of the black embroidery which ran over her white dress. His touch was dainty and bird-like. He and his mother appeared to be wholly content. They had forgotten Vince's presence.

Phœbe Foster said to him politely, "Felix loses none of his prettiness. He is quite a little angel still."

She spoke in a discreet and social murmur, and neither the child nor his mother caught the words.

Andrew replied, "Perhaps; but he's getting rather beyond the angelic stage now. He's got to be a boy before long, drat him! That means coming to terms with Old Nick as well as with Gabriel, you know." His intonation was quite clear, and his intention no less so when he added, "He will be ready for the preparatory school in another year or two, and then it's good-bye to poetry and long hair. Takes a man to make a man. I sometimes think you ladies don't quite know what a male thing means."

"We know—some of us—what it ought to become," said Phoebe gently.

It was noticeable that whilst Andrew's entrance had only introduced constraint, that of Felix had [page 52] brought with it a sense of active hostility. Already camps were formed. The glove had been thrown down, and a little encouragement would set the combatants to work. Miss Foster rose and said goodbye. She loved tranquillity, and believed that she had a right to it.

Andrew was now left with a forced option. He could either change the conversation or continue it. Silence was impossible, for he did not live in his wife's universe. He therefore took the "Grand Grimoire" from his pocket, and wished her, rather tardily, many happy returns of the departing day.

Muriel accepted the little old book very graciously. She had a keen sense of duty: and except in moments of intellectual collision, always treated her husband with kindness. Also, in spite of herself, she was pleased and excited by the unusual nature of his gift.

"This is quite interesting!" she said. "Only the other day someone was speaking to me about auto-suggestion and will-power, and the place which they occupied in medieval magic. It is going to be an important subject, from the point of view of historical psychology: which is most interesting, of course. But I am rather surprised that you—"

Felix, still leaning against her knee, anticipated her, exclaiming, "Fancy Father finding such a queer little thing as that!" He would have pulled it away, but his mother kept it within her own hands, holding it open firmly and cruelly: the gesture of a person who feels that her act of reading is far more important than any domestic sanctities which may happen to pertain to the thing read. [page 53] She pressed back the covers until the new morocco hinges gave the despairing squeak of a stout lady compelled to unsuitable athletics; and said— "Look, Felix! This will interest you. That's called a colophon, and those are woodcuts. Are they not rough and funny? That's the way that people first began to make the pictures for their books."

Peace might have reigned in the room, for Muriel was always amiable when she was imparting information; but Felix, watching the turning of the small torn brownish pages, suddenly arrested the process, and broke the spell by planting a beautifully clean little finger on the middle of a leaf.

"What's that?" he said.

Muriel's serenity departed. Felix had asked a question which she could not answer; an objectionable and unheard-of situation, for which Andrew and his extraordinary present must certainly be blamed. She was silent.

Vince said cheerfully, "What have you got hold of, old boy?"

Felix began to read aloud, carefully, syllable by syllable, "'Vaychen stimulamaton y ezpares Tetragrammaton oryoram irion esytion existion eryoma!'"

"It is a spell, darling," said his mother.

"Sounds like one of my rhythmy things," answered Felix: and Andrew laughed in a hearty and irritating way.

"Modern education," he said, "does not seem to be so very modern, after all! I was told to-day that this thing was full of modern science and the [page 54] things that science has not got to yet; and it really begins to look rather like it."

"Who told you that?"

"The woman from whom I bought it."

"But what does it mean?" said Felix anxiously.

Andrew replied, "If you want to know what it means, I fancy that you will have to ask Mummie to take you to see the lady who sold me this book. She knows all about everything."

"So does Mummie," answered Felix. "And I don't like ladies; they talk so. Oh, Mummie, what does it mean?"

Muriel left the question on one side, and spoke directly to her husband: "Where did you pick it up?" she said.

"Oh, at a second-hand bookshop that I pass on my way to the office."

"What made you get it? Was it in the window?"

"No. I look in now and then," said Andrew grudgingly. He began to feel that he might as well have given her the Shorter Catechism at once.

Muriel became almost interested. "You look in?" she exclaimed. "At a bookshop? What an extraordinary idea!"

"I like a novel to read with my lunch sometimes," explained Vince.

Muriel replied indifferently, "Oh, I see; I thought as they had things like this, it must be a good bookshop."

"All sorts," said Andrew, "doggy books, travels, Kipling, Corelli, and so on: and rows of these old brown things at the back, all looking as if they'd been dug out of a mousy cupboard."

[page 55]

"And this woman? She sounds rather interesting. Does she keep it?"

"No. She's the manager. Curious thing: she's quite a lady—educated, nice manners. I suppose the poor creature was left badly off and didn't find a husband. Bad luck! Must be over thirty now, but she is a fine woman still. We've got quite chummy one way and another. It makes a bit of a change for her, I dare say, to have a little chat now and then."

Muriel sprang from the middle classes, and had the eye for minute social detail and all that is implied by it which is peculiar to this caste. She thought quickly and automatically, "If this girl really finds it interesting to chat with a man like Andrew, she cannot be quite a lady."

Felix had been amusing himself with the Grimoire, and now offered another passage for interpretation.

"What is an Undine?" said he.

Muriel answered, "It is a very beautiful story which you shall read when you have grown a bigger boy."

"No, it's not a story; it's a thing, and you say prayers to it," replied Felix. "There's one in here. How funny! Raymond Percy says prayers too; but I don't think they are about Undines. Shall I say prayers when I'm a bigger boy?"

"No, dear; it will not be necessary," said his mother. "Your little soul has been nurtured from birth. It will, I hope, expand like a flower by its own innocent strength."

Felix recognized the language and remembered his supper; a slice of bread and butter with brown [page 56] sugar on it, which an old-fashioned and affectionate nurse administered at half-past six o'clock.

"Please, may I go back to the nursery?" he said. "Good-night, Father. Do you know, Mummie, Raymond has got a lovely rocking-horse now, and a little runny train, as well as prayers?"

"Why on earth don't you let the child have some toys?" said Andrew when his son had gone away. There was almost a growl in his voice.

Muriel answered him gravely and patiently. "I have told you, Andrew," she said, "that the child's training must be left wholly in my hands if I am to undertake it at all. At this point, a divided influence would be fatal. He has his poetry-books and dancing and his singing-games; the newest authorities are agreed that those are the proper agents for the development of the subconscious mind. They awake the sense of joy, which has no rational relation to tin soldiers and mechanical ships. Such toys only enchain the imagination, and cause children to attach too much importance to material things."

"Poor little beasts! It's rather rough luck to be a modern child."

Muriel suddenly smiled at him, with an aggravating and invulnerable radiance that seemed to break from within. "I won't argue with you," she said. "We speak to one another from such different planes that it is useless, and controversy is almost negative in its effects upon the soul. I like the little book; it was dear of you to bring it. It is more interesting to me than you can understand. Tell me more about this woman. What is she like, and how much does she really know about psychic things?"

[page 57]

"Oh, she's tall—dark—rather solid!" answered Andrew. "Looks as if she did Swedish gymnastics after her bath; that sort of type, don't you know? Very good teeth and nice complexion—" He caught Muriel's expression and stopped.

"Don't you know anything about her that matters?" said his wife patiently.

"Not much. I haven't a ghost of an idea who her people are, or where she comes from. But she's all right, don't you know. One can see that in a second. She was rather queer this morning; a bit upset by the damp weather, perhaps. It must be chilly work in that shop at times, with the door wide open all day. I'd always looked upon her as a bright, business-like sort of woman; full of sense; no frills. But she said some extraordinary silly things about this book."

Muriel became interested, leaned forward a little, and said, "Tell me."

"Well, she really seemed almost inclined to take it seriously. Absurd, of course. Can't think what she was driving at. Said it was like a lot of chemists' prescriptions; useful to the professional who knew what to do with them, but dangerous to amateurs who didn't."

"How curious!" exclaimed Muriel. "She must have an interesting mind. Perhaps she is a practical occultist. One finds them in the most unexpected places: even on the Stock Exchange, I hear."

"Oh, she's not such a fool as that."

His wife hardly heard him. There was a glow of excitement in her eyes. She had caught a glimpse of a transcendental novelty; and, eager for the chase, [page 58] entirely forgot to be grateful to the man who had put her on the scent. She said almost peremptorily, "What is the address of the shop?"

Vince gave it to her; he had no alternative. But it seemed a little hard that Muriel, who took so much, should now annex this slight yet singularly satisfactory friendship. No doubt she would subjugate Miss Tyrrel. Few women could resist her; for they all, in Andrew's experience, wished to be clever, and Muriel invariably attributed this quality to those persons who shared her spiritual and educational views. Constance would be taken in hand, patronized, taught to sit on cushions on the floor. She would soon cease to laugh at his jokes.


CHAPTER VI: THREE SORTS OF IGNORANCE

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." —BLAKE: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Now and again, when a footstep caught her attention and suggested the possibility of an early customer, she turned for a moment and glanced [page 60] downwards. Then she obtained an excellent view of the establishment, and also of the landscape which was framed by the open door: a little patch of pavement, some bits of dirty paper in the gutter, the skirts and trousers of pedestrians, the tail tips of the many passing dogs. These, because they were living, moving things, exhilirated her. She longed to touch them and feel their delightful warmth: the exquisite children in white gaiters; their nurses, who hastened to Kensington Gardens with a novelette peeping under the perambulator rug; the active, prosperous girls, taking their terriers for a morning walk.

She was alone, and therefore wholly under the dominion of the Watcher. So constant was his presence, so rare were the moments in which she obtained possession of herself, that this state of things had begun to seem almost natural. She was getting accustomed to his point of view; to the curious mixture of ignorance and arrogance, the breadth and pettiness that he displayed. She regretted her experiment, for his companionship was not pleasant; and he gave as yet no illumination in return for his lodging. She, as she divined, must teach him the earth: he was busy with his lessons, probing, guessing, questioning all the while. But he had nothing to impart about the heavens in exchange, and this was disappointing. Seeking a greater freedom, she had been caught in a peculiarly exasperating slavery.

But the thing was done. With the fatalism that was an aspect of her general acceptance of life, she acquiesced quietly enough in the queer rearrangement [page 61] of things; and this so completely that her outward demeanour was unchanged by it. Mr. John had not even suspected her of neuralgia; much less of demoniac possession. The dust that she was had dignity; it was not easily thrown into turmoil by the breezes of the abyss. She took up her existence and dealt with it day by day, with her old solidity and calm.

Nevertheless, she had had a hard week of it. There was her ordinary work to perform, and the spring publishing season was now upon them. There was Vera to attend at the opening and the close of every day. There were the innumerable small duties, the makings and mendings, letting out of tucks, inserting of clean collars, which wage-earning women can never delegate. These things had always filled the routine side of life to overflowing. Now, there was added to them the entertainment of the sleepless Watcher, whose passionate domination of her senses left her exhausted and bewildered every night. He had a ceaseless eagerness to see, hear, touch, and smell the odd and clumsy world into which he had pushed his way. So her eyes, ears, and hands did the work of two; and whenever her will was dormant for a moment, his seized the helm and drove the tired body on to fresh experience, and the tired mind to fresh interpretation.

There were no more visual hallucinations, no apparent interferences with the laws of external life; only the constant presence of an alien point of view, and of a Self, a Thing, an actual if intangible personality, that put the machinery of her brain to [page 62] its own purposes. This personality infected her, gave her a new flavour, a new relation to the other constituents of life; as, when an aromatic herb is introduced into the casserole, its real spirit enters into a permanent union with the chicken. Thus, very often, she hardly knew whether the thoughts she had and the words she said were symbols of the Watcher's ideas or of her own. Already, she had almost forgotten what the dear and natural world had been used to look like, before her powers of perception received this disagreeable twist. Now, unnaturalness had become the standard of reality.

There was only one escape from his overpowering companionship, only one door of return to her true self. When other people entered into communication with her, when life—real life—put in a peremptory claim, and she responded, there was civil war; her will to live struggling with his will to know. Then, if the external forces of life were strong enough, the human drove back the inhuman, and the social, normal Constance emerged with a great sense of relief. But even so, she was always acutely conscious of the besieger at her gates, waiting till the reinforcements should be withdrawn. Then he was back again; unfriendly, egotistical, rather contemptuous. Life, for him, was an odd and interesting exhibition, and she the show-woman. He had a right to her services.

He had recovered from the first horror of his fall, and was prepared to enjoy himself. But he could not understand existence, nor could she explain it; for she had never before noticed that it stood in need of explanation. Violently and passionately he [page 63] demanded the grammar of life; and she, who had always spoken the language, of course knew nothing of the rules.

He found some difficulty in trimming perceptions which had been framed for eternity to the narrow outlook of a bookseller's manager in a West-End street. Bit by bit, he was learning the uses of her senses; eagerly practising these new, delightful tricks of sight and hearing on every little object within range. But all manifestations of energy seemed to him to be much upon a level. They were but moments in the movement of the dream: and there was nothing in his idea of things which could help him to distinguish the trivial from the important incidents of life.

Birth and death, trade and traffic, food and clothes, each raised in him astonished curiosity. Hence he assumed, absurdly, that all these new objects of his knowledge must equally and of necessity be worth the knowing; and concentrated eagerly upon the plots of novels, the flavour of food, the very names of the streets, trying to find out the meaning, or—with a more annoying particularity—their use. Worse; when she, or those whom he viewed through her eyes, acted, he presumed a reason for the act. She was helpless before the misconceptions of a creature who applied the standards of the infinite to civilized daily life.

He was amazed by all that he saw: by that love of the aboriginal burrow which constrains the Londoner, whenever possible, to perform the secret operations of storage, cookery, and travel underground: by the teeming streets in which our urban populations are everlastingly content to fidget. He [page 64] could not comprehend the incessant pouring to and fro of people by all the spacious highways and plaited alleys. Seen from his universe, they were like mercury scattered on a disc, which runs without reason in a hundred little processions and solitary drops, unites into a formless, wriggling mass, and breaks away again to an unending repetition of the process.

Now, from the top of the ladder, as he caught glimpses of the eternal crawl of women past the shops, the eternal vacant hurry of the men, his questions began to besiege her: came between her and the orderly and satisfying work on which she longed to concentrate her weary mind.

"They are all alive, all conscious, I suppose, these little creatures that I see run by? At least, they like to think that they are alive. But why should they be always on the move? What is the use of it? Are they not able to be still? Their bodies first run one way, and then they run the other. I see them do it with a strange determination, as if it mattered a great deal. But it makes no difference, really; does it? They cannot get away yet. Life means staying here, does it not? being glued to the ground? And death means getting away? However much they run about, they cannot get out of the knot until they die. Is this restlessness the beginning of their dying; the creeping of something that is already corrupt?"

Constance answered, "No; it is a proof of their vitality. They cannot rest, cannot be idle, because they are alive and have so many things to do." She could think of no better explanation. [page 65] He retorted at once, "But there are no real things to do. Reality does not change; it is perfect, and very quiet. I have always existed in it, and therefore I know. This activity is a loathsome illusion; it has no relation to the real."

"They think that it has."

"How can they think it? They know about death. They know that they are crumbling all the time."

"They don't think about death. This is life, and they want to live it whilst they can."

"What a foolish and unreasonable wish! Surely one may live, taste life, be in it, even acquiesce in the decay, without the eternal fretfulness of doing things?"

"I do not know," said Constance, "but it seems to be implicit in the game. We are pushed, you know, for the most part. We don't do very much of it ourselves. Perhaps if you played the game you would understand. You see, when these people die, they will leave things behind them; children, perhaps, whom they must set going in life. Humanity is a chain, not a lot of little spots. When people run to and fro, they are pulled by the other links."

"But the children will die in their turn. They will all die. Then they will exist in the Real for ever and ever, without earning or eating or any kind of fuss. Why undertake this weariness and struggle, just to stay a few more hours within the dream? It is so ugly, miserable, and meaningless! Why do they not all try to die as soon as they can? Why do not you try to die—now, at once? Disentangle yourself from the dream?"

Constance replied, to her own surprise, "That is [page 66] against the rules." She had not known it before; now, she was certain of it. It was as if he, coming behind, had pushed her on, beyond her normal standpoint as well as his own, till she saw involuntarily things which were yet below his horizon.

"That is comprehensible," said the Watcher; "but if there are rules the game must be real, and there must be a meaning in it. The game that I see with your eyes and your brain is lawless. It has no prize and no object. Nothing happens within it which is real."

Glancing back on her own experience, Constance said, "Real things do happen, even in this corner; but only to one's self. I think that you would hardly notice them; they look so little, so unimportant, to outsiders, compared with the beginning and strange ending of the game."

"But they are hideous, these things," replied the Watcher. "They are like the bubbles of putrescence, which happen and die, but cause nothing, leave no trace. They confuse the game, if there is one; hide the meaning. I suppose it is concealed somewhere beneath the froth of action. If it is there, I must find it. I will, and I shall."

Then Constance suddenly realized that the thing which he was judging so harshly was not Life, the great goddess, but her own life, the little circle of sensation in which she moved and he with her. Seen with a stranger's eye, it was indeed squalid, senseless. She thought with shame of her breakfast table; the dingy, threadbare cloth, which had to last a week in spite of many brown and greasy stains, the smutty, chipped and unpleasant appearance [page 67] of the milk jug, the smears and the sloppiness, Vera's face when she had finished eating her egg. Then she thought of the dreary streets, and the bookshop, and Miss Reekyn, the next-door milliner, who often offered her a cup of tea. That was really all. Day by day she went round this little ring of experience, with the docility and regularity of a circus horse.

And she offered this to the Watcher, who had been dragged out of infinity by his passionate curiosity, his determination to know that mystery of life which she saw—even from the lodging-house window—as the lustrous and many-coloured garment of her God. This was the thing that, with all her opportunities, with the fierce flame of adventure burning in her heart, she offered to Eternity as her rendering of existence. She was ashamed, feeling herself guilty of a lack of patriotism in that she had shown this foreign guest no better thing.

She said to him suddenly, "Go! Go! find all the wonders, look for the thread. Don't stay in this corner with me."

But he answered, almost in anger, "I cannot go for no one else will receive me; and without a habitation how am I to stay within the dream?"

Her eyes were opened for an instant then. The cliff of books fled far away; and she saw the tideless and everlasting sea of spiritual existence, and Life, like a little iridescent ball of foam, blown across the surface of the waves. She was an infinitesimal bubble in that unsubstantial mass. In an instant it would be dissolved, reabsorbed in the ocean; all its cherished separateness for ever gone. Meanwhile, [page 68] the Watcher nested within her bubble, and was blown with her over the deeps. She shared in this moment his contemptuous bewilderment, confronted with the little coloured evanescent world of sense, even admitted a hateful doubt when he murmured: "I suppose you are alive—real, eternal—somewhere: inside, behind it all? Only caught much tighter than I am, and able to believe in nothing but the dream."

She thought, "Suppose that I were not real? Suppose that I, too, were a dream?" She turned from that vision in horror and fear.

The collector, who had been making up the order-list in the back office, here passed through the shop and said to her, "Torrington's traveller is here, miss; the governor says will you please see him as soon as you are disengaged?"

"Send him in," said Constance; and she descended the ladder with a feeling of gratitude for unexpected rescue from a thickening web.

Mr. John came with the traveller; a bearded, intelligent person carrying a small black bag, who might have been mistaken for an unsuccessful doctor had he looked more convincingly antiseptic.

"I think," said Mr. John to his manager, "that we can do with a dozen of their mixed poets in quarter-vellum?"

"They come three-and-nine apiece if you take a quantity," interrupted the traveller. "Marvellous value. Artistically tooled backs and assorted labels; the best thing our firm has done in presentation poets. You won't regret them. A splendid window line, and safe at five-and-six in this district."

[page 69]

Mr. John threw down the catalogue upon Constance's desk. "Just make a good selling selection, Miss Tyrrel," he said. The action looked dignified, and he knew that it was judicious.

"Burns? Scott? Whittier?" suggested the traveller eagerly.

She shook her head. "No good to us. I'll take Keats two, Shelley two, Milton one. We don't do much in Miltons lately. Browning? Only the earlier works, of course? Oh, yes; I had better have three Robert and one Mrs. Four more to make up the dozen. Put me in some Longfellows; we shall want them for the school prize season later on."

"You're a good buyer, miss," said the traveller grudgingly.

His voice was succeeded by a very sweet and gentle one, which murmured, "See, Felix, that is how they order the books we buy to read. Is it not interesting? This must be the lady whom Father knows, I think. How sad—and how surprising—to find that Longfellow still sells so well!"

"Why?" said Felix.

Muriel answered, "He had bourgeois ideals, darling. You will understand that when you are a bigger boy."

Constance, catching this reply, at once divined a customer of the more fastidious sort, assumed that air of understanding which seemed so sympathetic and was really so business-like, and said in a reassuring tone, "He is not generally read of course, but we have a large educational [page 70] connection, and I am obliged to buy for that."

"Nothing, I think," said the lady firmly, "exerts a worse influence on the developing emotions of children than the feebler poetry of the Victorian era. One should give them myth—the myth of all the religions—for religions were invented in the childhood of the world, were they not?"

Miss Tyrrel, whom these statements merely amazed, glanced at the new customer, and was at once wholly subjugated by her appearance; being one of those women for whom the crucial encounter and the overmastering appeal must always come from one of her own sex. As she put it to herself, men were interesting animals, but women mattered most. This brilliant, young, absurd, self-conscious creature, with her serene expression, embroidered dress and artistically unusual hat, was like a pretty novelty suddenly exhibited in the shop-window of life. She revived Constance's drooping belief in the resources of the establishment; so that she at once became interested, wanted the delightful thing, and did not stop to ask the price.

Muriel, who often found it prudent to adopt a deferential tone when speaking to those whom she believed to be her inferiors, now said to her,

"I really ought to apologize for coming in and troubling you like this; and just, I am afraid, at the busy time of the day. But, you see, my husband mentioned you in connection with a very curious little book on magic that he bought here lately. He seemed to think that you would be kind enough to [page 71] tell me something about it; and, in fact, it was he who advised me to come."

She thought, "As Andrew is such a good customer, she will have to be civil to me after that."

As for Constance, she at once perceived that this must be the wife of the Mid-day Friend; and was amazed that a creature who was at once beautiful, intelligent, and ridiculous could fail to satisfy the demands of any reasonable man. She had pictured Mrs. Vince as austere, flat-waisted, even Early Italian in type. But Andrew evidently possessed a fascinating toy, and would not be content because it refused to be turned into a companion. This was foolish of him. Where he would not play, Constance, whose toy-cupboard life had not furnished very richly, was willing enough to enjoy the opportunity of a game. At this moment she felt a desperate need of something to fall in love with; something that would restore her lost confidence in the world of sense; and Muriel, being both silly and pretty; seemed specially adapted to this purpose.

She said, "I think the little book that you mean must be the Grimoire that Mr. Vince bought here a few days ago. I am afraid I cannot tell you very much about that. It was bought in with a number of other old books at a country sale, and has no history."

It was Felix who replied, "We don't want to ask about history, thank you. Mummie knows about that. We've really come because she doesn't know about Undines, and if they are real. You see, it's rather important, because, of course, if they are real, [page 72] I shall have to know about them when I'm a bigger boy. Father said you knew about everything."

"My husband," said Mrs. Vince, "is hardly what one would call a bookish man, though he tells me that he often comes here for novels and so on. But I am interested in these subjects; they are most curious, as I dare say you know, from the psychological point of view, and I find few things so satisfying to the intuitive sense as subliminal psychology. I fancied, from what he told me, that you also were a student of psychic things, and of their relation to the mystical and occult."

Constance fell. She did not seriously suppose that Muriel's charming appearance indicated any understanding of transcendental matters; but she was in the mood which makes a shipwrecked man drink sea-water, knowing that it will only induce a more maddening thirst, but unable to resist the momentary consolation. She therefore said, "I told Mr. Vince when he bought the little book that it was not so absurd as it seemed. I am afraid that he thought me very silly and credulous; but evidently you are more inclined to agree with me?"

As she spoke, the troubled movements of the Watcher reminded her that she was dealing disingenuously—even frivolously—with one of the sparsely distributed realities which had enabled him to forge a link between infinity and earth.

"You must not let my husband's remarks annoy you," said Muriel. "All men are materialists; and really, I don't know that one wants them to be anything else. But I do so entirely agree with you! Few things are so absurd as they seem, I think [page 73] and even if they were, one should keep an open mind towards the unseen. In the light of modern thought, we are learning to understand these subjects more and more."

Constance replied, "Modern thought makes no difference, you know, really. The thing is there, and always has been. At the most, we have only given it new names, and invented a new explanation."

"How interesting of you to say so!" exclaimed Muriel. "I see that you are a Medievalist. And you are really inclined to take magic seriously? You believe that the old occultists were justified in the claims that they made? That there is something in it beyond self-suggestion and hypnosis?"

"I don't believe," said Constance, "because I know. It's the people who don't know who have to try and believe: and I should think they would find it rather difficult."

She stopped; but it was too late. Muriel, whom unorthodox dogmatism always delighted, invited her to tea with enthusiasm. The astonished voice of the Watcher cried in its turn, "Go, go!" and Constance, amazed by the suddenness of the event, consented.

As they left the shop, Felix said to his mother, "Mummie, I think this is a new kind of lady."

Muriel misunderstood him. "Darling," she answered, "lots of ladies wear pinafores and do work."

"Different inside, I mean," said Felix firmly.

Muriel, who shared the opinion of the best modern authorities on family life, that we can learn more from our children than they can ever learn from us, [page 74] looked back at Miss Tyrrel with renewed interest. She felt that her careful development of the boy's subconscious mind was already having its reward. She would be able to use him as a terrier in seeking out those abnormal persons whose presence in her drawing-room gave her so much delight.

She caught Constance's eye as she turned. The Watcher had come back to the windows, and Muriel noticed with surprise their wild and strange expression of bewilderment, loneliness, and curiosity.

"Poor thing!" she thought. "I expect she has a very dull time of it. Commercial society must be most trying to such an intelligent woman as that. My visit has been quite an excitement. I am glad that I asked her to call."


CHAPTER VII: THE STREET AND THE DRAWING-ROOM

"The key of the great mysteries lies hidden in all things around us, but the perplexities of the convention hinder us from finding it." —A. E. WAITE: A Book of Mystery and Vision.

This happened to her with a rush upon the Saturday afternoon on which she went to tea with Mrs. Vince. She had set out with eagerness: a little excited, as always when adventure or new experience was on hand, and therefore perhaps the more ready to open her eyes on strange truth. It was early in May, and there were moments of a shy and exquisite [page 76] sunshine between the passing of the fluffy clouds. Constance, alighting from her omnibus, came down a steep and tree-planted street with her face to the south. She was in a superior residential neighbourhood; and the houses upon either hand were built of red brick and had many large, clean windows, all opened at the top, and furnished with casement curtains of soft silk. Expensive tulips of discordant tints grew in the little gardens. There were fantastic knockers on many of the doors.

It was in this unexpected district that she saw the Shining Tree. It sprang upon her consciousness out of the patchy, sunny world of paving-stones, window-boxes, and pale blue sky; complete, alive, a radiant personality, whose real roots, she was sure, penetrated far beyond the limitations of the material world.

She gazed, astonished, into the heart of it; saw the travail and stress of the spirit of life crying out for expression, the mysterious sap rushing through its arteries, the ceaseless and ritual dance of every speck of substance which built it—that eternal setting to partners, which constitutes the rhythm of the world. She perceived the long and eager fingers fringed with tentacles too delicate for sight, which clawed their way far into the earth; their fervid and restless search for food to nourish the arrogant and tufted tail which they sent into the upper air. It was as if, accustomed to glance carelessly at the face of an agreeable and conventionally-clothed acquaintance, that acquaintance were now revealed to her in the awful dignity of the nude.

As for the tufted tail, it was no elastic and ingenious arrangement of branch and twig, set with buds and [page 77] young leaves; no convenient perching place of innumerable sparrows. It broke, like an imprisoned angel, through the concrete prosperities of the street; its airy filaments enmeshed a light which she had never seen before. In that light it dwelt, solitary: apart, yet very near. There was something between them: something, in spite of her longing, which kept them separate. She wondered what it could be. She saw each leaf fierce and lucent as an emerald, radiant of green fire: blazing—passionate with energy—a verdant furnace, wherein transcendent life was distilled, cast into the mould of material things. Either, as she supposed for a moment, it was not there at all; or else it had always awaited the perceiving intelligence, in virtue of some amazing significance that it had; a nook which it filled, a truth that it expressed, within the Universal Dream.

Its presence obliterated the clumsy shapes of the ordinary world and their foolish limitations. It gave her a vision of another universe; of the whirl through space of countless planets, all teeming, feathery, flowering, to the angelic eye, with some such radiant inflorescence as this. She saw the Cosmos as God's flower garden, in which He strode, well content, in the cool of the day; and man as the little scuttling insect, breeding and feeding amongst the leaves.

She saw it thus for an instant, the shining, glassy, pulsating thing. Then, as it seemed, another veil was stripped from her eyes, and she saw it in its unimaginable reality, as it is seen by the spiritual sight; remote, and more wonderfully luminous, the fit object of her adoration. [page 78] The Watcher's voice cried within her, "Ah, beautiful, exquisite world! Here at last is the meaning, the Real, the Idea! Why did I not understand before?"

As for her, she had nothing to say, nothing to show him. She was too astonished and too full of joy.

He said again, "Ah, what amazing happiness you have, you little creatures! All the shapes and colours, and the sharp edges against the light, and the lovely little differences of things! What a splendid dream! What a gloss upon eternity! How satisfying! But why do you always look at the other side? How greatly you are mistaken, and how much joy you must miss, because of being busy with unreal and ugly things!"

A woman passed, dressed in Isabella-coloured rags. Her coarse hair was gathered in an unseemly knot by the help of a bit of common string. Her dingy, mottled stockings lay in folds about the ankles. Her boots were unlaced. She carried a tiny baby at her breast, and a few bunches of shabby violets in a basket. The baby was a condensed statement of human unpleasantness; the violets, in their present condition of purplish pulp, still conveyed, like kings in exile, a poignant suggestion of lost fragrance and shy grace.

This smudged sketch of womanhood came between Constance and the Tree; unconscious of the thing that was close to her, and of the parted veil through which the other woman peeped. She was wrapped closely in her own cares and discomforts: a ragged vestal-virgin to all delights save one—so busy tending [page 79] the difficult flame of life that she never had time to warm herself by its rays. The Watcher withdrew from his look-out when she came within its field; one could feel the strong contractive movement of loathing which her image had evoked.

He said, "Why do you let your earth breed such horrible things? Stamp them out! Feed the beautiful and starve the vile."

Constance answered, "I don't think one can, because it is all one."

The Watcher replied, "No, no! How foolish, how blind you are! Here is the true and lovely dream close beside you. Look at it; live in it. This is the true projection of the Will. But the ugly side of vision is all false. Leave that alone; let it die!"

The woman came nearer and said, "Violets, lady? Do buy some violets! I ain't taken nothing to-day." The hopeless effort of the myriad feeble poor, all the teeming alleys, the indistinguishable hordes, seemed to come as a wailing chorus to her words.

Somewhere in Constance's mind an inhabitant arose who knew that music; who wrestled with the Watcher for possession of her will, saying: "Cling to the human, however loathsome. Do not refuse life in all her implications."

But the Shining Tree was there, as it seemed, with the other message, crying, "Open your eyes to the light, to a world made luminous. Leave the shadows. Come, come!" The Watcher applauded those words.

There she was, between two worlds of experience, [page 80] between the two great expressions of the Spirit of Life; the Shining Tree in its transcendental splendour and security, and the shifting agonized, pullulating deeps. Beauty called her through the parted veil of perception, casting open door after door upon the countless aspects of creation. But pain, friendly, ugly human pain, was at her elbow, whispering that this was a birthright which she would only renounce at her cost.

The unsavoury baby stirred under its shawl at this moment, and thrust out a tightly clenched and grimy fist. Then Constance saw for an instant Life the ever-lovely—fertile, heedless, generous life—springing beneath the rags; fresh and exquisite as nascent corn beneath the mould. Its champion within her acknowledged this presence; recognizing it as identical with that vision by which it had always been guided and upheld, and unconscious of its maimed, degraded face. The child and his mother became a symbol, and Love was in the air, very humble and glad, saying, "Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve!"

The woman had grown to the likeness of the Shining Tree; she too was radiant, eternal, and sublime. The spirit of life ran like a divine fire in her veins, and was given to the infant at her breast. She had become a majestic link in the process of creation; an auxiliary of the angels. A fresh door was thrown open upon reality, whereby it was seen that even the prisoners in the dungeon still wore the insignia of kings. The Tree was there, throwing, as it were, the shelter of a transcendental loveliness and knowledge about the poor efforts of those entangled [page 81] in the flesh. The woman and child, seen against it, were an image of all life.

It seemed an anticlimax to give the woman sixpence, to look with interest at the baby's moist and smutty face; but she did it. In this act that deep-seated personality within her became dominant; the baffled and disgusted Watcher loosed the reins. Acknowledging beauty, she had vindicated her humanity by paying her deepest reverence to life; a proceeding which can only seem insane to those spiritual natures which have not been passed through the furnace of love.

His civilities were automatic. He had said, "Very good of you to come to us!" before he realized that the goodness, for once, was actually on Muriel's side. She was going to be kind to Miss Tyrrel. This, he felt, would be a delicate matter; but he was obliged to acknowledge her conduct as perfect. It must clearly be a point of honour with all three of them to forget the bookshop; and Vince saw it with a painful distinctness when his friend was announced. Therefore the curious sincerity of Muriel's welcome amazed him. There were interesting people in the room; [page 82] but she turned from them all to attend on her new guest.

She said, "I've been looking forward so much to this: in fact, we all have! I know you're wonderful; oh, yes! I saw it the moment that I met you. My little boy felt it too; and you know how sensitive children are—they are near the Source, and have not had time to forget. But you shan't be teased to tell people things. I promise! They are all longing to meet you; and if you would rather, they will have to be contented with just that!"

She smiled at Constance with an air of secret intimacy, shutting her in the little circle of her own comprehension. The effect was dazzling, for Muriel was looking unusually pretty. Her hair was arranged with a laborious and becoming simplicity; her large eyes shone with spiritual enthusiasm. If gaiety could rightly be attributed to the really high-minded, she was almost gay upon this afternoon; and Andrew, watching her, was amazed that such exaltation could be produced by lectures, exclusive ideals, and a vegetarian diet. The woollen underclothing which he knew that she affected would have kept any ordinary woman from attaining that air of esoteric smartness which constituted Muriel's peculiar charm.

Constance drifted away, leaving her hostess at liberty. Miss Foster at once took her place and said softly, "Who is the big dark-haired woman in impossible brown kid gloves?"

"She is going to be interesting," answered Muriel. "At least, I hope so; but they are very tiresome sometimes. Occult things, magic and so on. Talk to her, there's a dear, and presently I'll get [page 83] Mrs. Reed to draw her out. It is her first visit. I've just been putting her at her ease. Oddly enough, it was Andrew who discovered her; and, as a matter of fact, she keeps a shop."

"Being in a shop, n