The Great Fog (23 page)

It was conscious, it was consciousness, it was the authentic vibration of imageless thought—an awareness, as intense as it is impartial, of the being of every atom of the manifold. “O,” I thought it cried. “O,” the basic registration of experience. But “O,” uncompleted, must end in poignancy. Balancing that longing, came, undergirding that vault of sound, the hum as of the dynamo of creation. “M.” The sound was passing, utterly unimpeded, through everything: everything welcomed it, as plants welcome water, as lungs welcome air. Everything was sustained, rather, shaped by it, as—the million grains of the sand-spout rear their blinding column because the invisible air current drives them.

The circuits of harmonies swept from crypt to roofrib, tempering the flaccidlike steel, making every solid clear as crystal. The circuits swept laterally also. They sped with unobstructed effortless energy around the walls from the western doors to the high altar. My eyes rested there. The tide which I had thought could brim no higher seemed still to mount. Sound and sight at this range could keep separate no longer. They were fusing. My whole and total attention was drawn to where a heart of focal intensity began to form.

I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.

As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest—this was the
consummatum est
of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.

Yet those words hardly bring back more than a faint last shudder of animal fear. What I confronted, I can at least verbally recall, was something that went beyond all animal shrinking. Everything human in me recoiled from That, as the blind racial life within us flies to the grasp of physical agony rather than be lost in that void of annihilation. Yet the real anguish was caused, I could apprehend, not by a simple unanimous wish to escape. It was due to the conflict, the peril, being within myself. One part of me longed for the last film to disappear—for eye and ear, or rather that which listened and saw, that which was apprehending already beyond any capacity of response, to comprehend, to grasp and be grasped by that which now beat, an unfathomable ocean, against this last frail sandspit of separateness. One part of me, still rooted in my individual, human, animal life, feared, with that fear which will make the resolute suicide yet struggle as the water bursts into his lungs, that in an instant more my selfhood would be lost forever.

I felt the awful spasm of a creature suddenly made to sustain the pressure of two universes, its frail twofold nature the sole link between two primal energies—that of a life force forever seeking fresh forms and new experiences, forever desiring to forget and to discover, and an utter Being, possessed of all, for being the All, instant and absolute. Temporal and Eternal, for a moment I knew both, and for an instant sustained the anguish of belonging to neither. The small weary words, Heaven and Hell, chart on a miniature globe the two poles between which my being was held, but no words or trace of remembered feeling can now recall the utter force which these two opposites exerted on the atom caught between them. In finality, I can say that only then did I understand the fundamental—maybe—the eternal strength of consciousness even when reduced to the grotesque limitations of personality: only then did I grasp why the Universe, why the Eternal Reality, requires the individual, and will not be satisfied until all that can call itself “I” will dare to rise and recognize Him who is the Whole.

The carrying note dropped—the terrible vortex contracted and closed—the visible world reformed like thick ice over a well, sealing the shaft, making it safe for men to stand secure, unaware, over the abyss. The whole great building groaned as it settled again into its accustomed dead-weightedness. My hands and feet again stung, perhaps as agonizingly, but I was too stunned to wince and dumbly took the pain. My eyes were flooded with bruised and wounded visual purple.

“Come,” said a voice beside me. A hand guided me along. We paused under a window through which a late-rising moon was throwing its light. My recovering vision rested on the lit opening. Gradually I made out the illuminated design. It showed a small dark human figure grappling with an overarching form of brightness, while underneath ran the words, “Like a Prince thou hast wrestled and hast prevailed.”

We were outside in the dim close. “You need now never forget. If you will, you may try and convey what you now know. It is lawful, but no one can say if it is possible. Nor will you be unwise. When you would see whether you may recapture and transmit in words what you have experienced, when you reach the limit to which your description and memory will go, then, if you still feel the obligation to pass on what has been given you, sound then the note you have heard. It will be echoing in the back of your mind henceforward and will come when you call. Then once again you will know directly, and not by an ever-fainter recollection. But whether at that moment you will bring down the Eternal into Time or be drawn from Time into the Eternal, it is not for us small shuttles in the weaving to say or know.”

When I reached the inn by the close gate he was gone.

Since my return I have been deciding what to do. My mind, of course, has fluctuated. There have been three principal choices. I could go back to St. Aidans and check up on my impressions—surely, I should? Such a story, even if it were all objective, should be carefully confirmed, and there was at least the chance of obtaining a witness. But somehow I knew that would serve little use. I could let the whole matter drop, treat the episode with any excuse I liked—an hallucination, a fantasy—something, anyhow, that I had a duty to disregard. Naturally, that was my strongest inclination. Indeed, I began to act on it. I actually returned to my routine, resumed my technical studies, went on with my opus, and let it be known that progress was being maintained. But it has proved vain. If a very unorthodox antiquarian may compare himself with the most orthodox of theologians, I felt myself like Aquinas after that mysterious Mass on St. Nicholas Day in the Chapel of St. Nicholas at Naples.

As I looked at my careful folios, with their data, arguments, deductions, their measurements, plans, scale charts, as I checked over my conclusions and thought of the theories I had labored half a lifetime to substantiate, and of the colleagues I had controverted, challenged, incited, informed—what did it matter if I proved my point, my pinpoint of a proposition, that Gothic was more a rite than an architecture? I repeated to myself time and again, after some kind friend had called, asking me with encouraging interest if all was going well, the famous Thomine words, “Reginald, I cannot, for such things have been shown me that all that I have written seems but chaff,” chopped hay which will nourish no one, and which a draft will scatter.

So I have come to the third choice and my final conclusion. I am availing myself of the leave given me to try and convey what I experienced. I realized, when I began this memorandum narrative, that I could hope for no reception from any scholar. Even had my antiquarian orthodoxy been unblemished, this statement must have blasted it forever. Yet knowledge is not for those who accept in its name the right to be pensioned off from life and actual contemporary experience. Outside the ranks of scholarship there may be those who, because they are human, have to face sometime what I saw and, because they have minds vital enough to sustain them exposed to the experiences of a changing world, they may be prepared to entertain new knowledge. If so, for them I make this effort, this exposure. But now, when I have written this account, I see it conveys nothing; it, too, is “but chaff.”

So, because I have decided to make this attempt, because I have not succeeded, because I was told, when permission to attempt it was given, that there is one more possible resource which can be employed and that I have not yet used, now I am about to summon that aid. It is, as I was told, sounding in the depths of my mind like a phrase ready to be remembered. I will then once again draw myself up to my desk and get ready to transmit. If it comes through, then I am sure the written words will convey, if not that, at least the way whereby those who would read openheartedly may come to the Presence. If the wire will not carry the current, then, willingly, the vehicle will be flashed back to the source of power.

I draw in my breath. I feel the answer rising—I remember.

THE CAT, “I AM”

“Do you know anything about Possession?”

“Well, it's nine points of the law.”

“I don't mean possessing; I mean being possessed.”

“By what? You don't mean …?”

“I don't know. I wish to hell I did!”

The setting was conventional; a warm wood-fire in a soundly built, open fireplace. The room finely wood-panelled, modern without flagrant departure from tradition, panels alternated with built-in bookcases filled to the floor with books, their ordered book backs making the best of wallpapers. The two men matched. They might have been supplied by the furnishers with the room; each picked to fit the big easy chair in which he lounged in tweeds cut for lounging. They even had pipes in hand and whisky on the small table that was fitted into the central wedge, which was all the two overgrown chairs permitted in the fireplace area.

Comfort, good sense, physical fitness, wide, easy interests—there wasn't an object in the large, full-furnished, well-lit, freshly warm room that did not chorus that sequence of assurances. There was nothing that looked by any possibility askance—still less uncanny. There was nothing, either, that didn't sound the same: the crackle of the fire to give the traditional sense of well-being, the murmur of a dance tune from the radio to bring the modern assurance of a world well within call—a world telling you that it was having a good time and that ease, rhythm, fun, sensible sensuality—the five senses harmonized and put to a lilt—is all there is to know and all we need to know. There was no other sound to suggest any other possibility—except that one odd, incongruous but, thank heaven, still ambiguous word, Possession.

“It all may be accident, coincidence, contingency, or whatever it is that scientists use to erase writing when it appears of itself on our walls. I hope you'll tell me it is. I know one can see cyphers everywhere, as the wilder Baconians find them in any passage of Shakespeare. And, of course, many children,” he bent forward and poked the fire with rather unnecessary force, “can see faces in the fire. Eidetic imagery, don't they call it? I hope you'll tell me it's just that or something of that sort.”

“How can I tell you what it really is until you tell me what you think you have experienced?” Dr. Hamilton thought it no harm to show a little irritation. Innes had asked him over this evening but had never warned him he was wanted for a sideline opinion. That
is
irritating to any man who has done a long day's over-the-countryside work and not reassuring to a doctor who has watched for a number of years the way a nervous breakdown may open its attack and who knows perhaps a little more of the patient than he likes. It was bad and vexing that Innes hadn't said he felt a bit queer and would like to consult his friend and doctor. No harm friend and doctor being the same, provided patient and friend did not confuse
his
two parts.

Innes had always been a fairly normal if not a very attractive type—a sound if not very remunerative patient and a friend with whom one would play golf and dine more than one would share confidences. He looked sane enough, but of course those stable quiet fellows, if they ever fell off the high poop of their sanity, were apt to go right down and not come up again. But he must listen, not run on.

Innes was apologizing. “I'm sorry to have brought you around under false pretenses—at least I hope they are false. You see, I was sure they were. Every detail in itself is nothing—but together—”

Whatever it is, reflected Hamilton, that's sufficient evidence of strain. Innes is businesslike, and that's not a businesslike opening. Aloud he said, “All right. An outsider”—he deliberately did not say doctor—“is certainly a better judge than oneself as to whether any odd series of events has a real, objective connection. Fire away; spin your yarn, and I'll pull you up when I think you're making hookups where there aren't any.” He felt he had used the right tone—not merely for Innes but for himself. For he always liked to be objective even with himself, and somehow that sudden opening of Innes', after what he'd thought was a cheerful pipe-drawing silence, had, he owned, shocked him—just the utter incongruity of the remark in this snug place from that commonplace man.