The Great Fog (18 page)

The eyes opened and gazed steadily, absent-mindedly, as a baby will stare when absorbed in taking its bottle. That would do. Jones gazed out through the very short-ranged Mather-eyes into the two pupils opposite him. He felt his heart begin to quieten: slower and slower it beat. He felt relaxed and easy. Then he felt his heart rise in its beats again—not distressingly but with a series of rapid, strong strokes. And then, once again, it began to smooth out its emphasis and become as steady as before. He rested back comfortably. The face opposite him drew away. He was able to look past it and idly read the titles on the book backs across the room.

Suddenly Mather's voice broke on his ear: “It's not a safe method. But I own it's the quickest I've ever come across for hypnosis.”

Jones sat up.

“It put you under deeper than it put me. You're hardly around yet,” Mather's voice continued, “but one would expect that. A trained psychologist is always the most difficult of all people to put under.”

Jones got to his feet. Yes, they were his own familiar, comfortable, cornless feet. “Well,” he remarked, “thank you for trying it out with me.”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” said Mather airily. “But, take my advice, and leave such experimenting to trained psychologists. I don't mind telling you that you're looking pretty queer.” He paused. Then he went on, with a note of grudging curiosity coming into his voice: “I may as well tell you that when I was a student I was hypnotized a number of times, for experimental purposes. But I don't remember ever having had any dreams at all like those I had during our little experiment. Did you have any queer fancies?”

Jones gave a noncommittal grunt. Mather stood for a moment, uncertain whether or not to probe further. Finally he said to himself, It must have been the Freudian “transference” working in dream-imagery form. But, I must say, I never expected the feeling-provoked fantasy could be so convincing. It is certainly not safe. Certainly not.

He walked to the door. “Well, good-by; and you'll take my advice, won't you? No more experimenting of this sort.” Jones shook hands with him and got rid of him with another series of thanks.

When he returned from letting the little man out, he stood for a moment, still and silent in the middle of the room. Then he remarked to himself in a soft voice: “Maybe he is right. Really, it could only have been a dream.” But, after another moment, he turned, went out of the room, through the passage, and into the bathroom. He bent down. Behind the bathroom seat lay the hypodermic syringe. He pulled up his left sleeve. On the lower forearm was a big, clumsy puncture with a small scrap of reddened cotton still adhering to it. He looked at his watch.

“Well,” he muttered, “if it
was
a dream, it not only took its time about it, but it troubled to produce quite a lot of circumstantial evidence. It was certainly a dream that cared enough for verisimilitude to dress the part. It was a dream with such a sense of the dramatic that it first nearly pushed me right out of the basic dream of this life, but, having taken me to the brink, it swung me back again. I've never heard of a patient who overslept the time of his injection long enough to bring himself to the verge of collapse and then, in his dream, not only sleepwalked and gave himself the dose in the nick of time, but who also troubled to invent another character, taken from one of his colleagues. And this character is brought in not only to give him the dose but, with a novelist's love for accuracy of character, the colleague is made to give the injection so damn badly that the dreamer deals himself a sore arm for two weeks! Anyhow, that's what I'm in for!”

He paused and then went on to himself. “But it'll be more than two weeks before I'll be able to decide if that was a dream or really a switch-over for a while. If it really was, if one actually saw from the other side, well, then it was worth the discomfort and the risk. But there's the rub: one never
will
be quite sure—at least, till one has gone to the other side for good—and then it'll be too late to make a report of the sort that any of my colleagues would even listen to. However, I suppose Mather is right: whether it was hypnosis or a real transference, one shouldn't try it again. But if only I wasn't a diabetic, I think I'd have another try!”

DROMENON

The origin of religion is in something done. Around that doing, that process, that performed pattern, there grows up the structure so outlined. Religion is a dromenon, a pattern of dynamic expression in which the performers express something larger than themselves, beyond their powers of speech to express and a therapeutic rhythm in which they find release and fulfillment.

Jane Harrison
ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL

Civilized man thinks out his difficulties, at least, he thinks he does. Primitive man dances out his difficulties.

Dr. R. R. Marrett
ANTHROPOLOGY

Preface by Mark Jocelyn, F.S.A
.

Sylvester Shelbourne's sudden death has laid on me a very great responsibility. As his literary executor I had expected I should have had to undertake considerable labor, labor which I had naturally hoped would be postponed for many years. But, now, not only has it come upon me prematurely; unexpectedly it has presented me with a problem even more unexpected, even more painful. The shock which I have experienced is the more severe for two reasons: in the first place, I saw him but a week before his death. I was struck, and not only with his apparent health. Always a vital man, I was so impressed with his vitality that day as to remark on it to him, saying that I hoped it presaged the completion of his great work. He replied, with quiet assurance, that he believed it did. That could only mean for me, or for any who knew him, that he was ready to issue his magnum opus, on
The Essential Ideas of Gothic Architecture
, a subject in which he deserved the title of a triumphant revolutionary and wherein, as all scholars know, he had brought his studies to the point at which even his most stubborn critics had to own his proofs were nearly clinched.

We spoke of a visit which he had lately made to reinvestigate some outlying and neglected evidence, and, though he went into no particulars, I left with the assurance that his great work was achieved. Alas: his work was over, but in another sense than I had dreamed. Nor can I have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that he closed his case with his life. Thence sprang the second shock I have sustained. I turned to my sad task sustained by the thought that I should, at least, be permitted to present to the world the triumphant vindication of my honored friend's lifework. I found, instead of a final series of proofs, needing only to be assembled—a narrative, a narrative of an experience so strange that, had I not known of his sanity from having visited him after the event he records and only a few days before he made his record, I would have been impelled to suspect mental derangement.

I have suffered greatly in my effort to decide what was best to be done. Finally I have resolved to obey the letter of my charge. As his literary executor I am not permitted to suppress documents which the testator considered of vital importance. I do not believe that he was insane. In these circumstances, painful though it is to me—very jealous as I am of our science's prestige in general, and of his reputation in particular—I believe I have no choice. Publish I must. My one comfort lies in the fact, often illustrated in the past in antiquarian studies, that evidence, preserved in the face of ridicule and dismay has not infrequently (after those who bore the obloquy of bearing such undesired witness have died in ignorance of their service) given rise to new inquiries which have revolutionized the science which they served.

It only remains for me to complete my evidence by saying that Sylvester Shelbourne was found, seated at his desk, with the actual manuscript—the text of which follows—before him; the final page uppermost, his pen laid beside: he had evidently died as he read the last page through. Medical and legal inspection succeeded only in disclosing one other fact of any possible significance. The body was found in perfect condition. There was no known cause of death. The fact concerned his surroundings. On his desk there had always stood, on a small ebony plinth, a large crystal ball some four inches in diameter. It was gone. Instead, the desk was covered with a fine dust made of minute quartz fragments. Careful inspection showed, however, that none of these had entered the mouth or nasal passages.

Journal and Memorandum of my last

Examination of the Cathedral and Collegiate

Church of St. Aidans
.

St. Aidans is little visited by tourists for three reasons. Firstly, it is out of the way. Secondly, it lacks any richness of decoration—a large collegiate church out on the Celtic marshes naturally suffered a “denudation” and “dereliction” more thorough and prolonged than did those nearer the Continent and the Counter Reformation. Thirdly and finally, it suffered last of the cathedrals. Restoration, as we know, went through three stages: a first stage of agreed iconoclasm in the name of a wholly inadequate knowledge; a second, of agreed preservation in the name of scholarly agnosticism; and a third stage, when all agreement vanished and every chapter did what was right in its own eyes. St. Aidans felt the full force of this final attack. A rich brewer gave the money; a dictatorial dean the impetus. With St. Aidans the synoptic warning was reversed: to him that hath nothing, to him shall be given even that which he never could have had.

Gregorian was Dean Bathurst's delight. As an undergraduate he had watched with the enthusiasm of a Josiah the great nineteenth-century vaudeville organs torn out like lying tongues from the cathedrals and installed in their stead those demure instruments on which Bach's polyphony may be rendered. But when he became a Canon, Gregorian chanting, the ineffectual hope of the Tractarians, made another assault from its great fortress of Solesmes. Its new champions declared its first failure as an ecclesiastical comeback in Britain was due to inadequate rendering. No one who, during the nineteenth century, heard a High Church attempting plain song, could doubt the failure.

Its new champions, among whom Dean Bathurst was a stalwart, allowed that this was so. They maintained, however, that if only the right accompaniment could be found, then we should understand why plain song was the voice of real devotion, and how it had held for two thousand and more years (the enthusiasts claimed not only David but Tubal-cain among the virtuosos of their art) the ear of mankind. All this, as every antiquarian knows, might well have remained speculation freaked with unconvincing experiment, but for the discovery of St. Guthlac's psalter. I need not recall the interest that find awoke: The oddness of the discovery itself—that in the binding of seven consecutive (and never-read) moldering volumes of Archbishop Usher's sermons (and, as they were actually moldering, I will not recall the Cathedral Library in which they were salvaged) should have been found sheet after sheet of the invaluable late Saxon manuscript.

Delicate research with ultraviolet lenses revealed that, charming as was the addition to our still far-from-complete series of great scriptory work, a greater treasure was concealed under the surface, as beneath the beautiful surface of a scenic lake may lie sunken treasure. The unique discovery was that the final page (on which now appear those knots and interlacements which scholarship—my own among them—dismissed as late attempts to imitate the full fancy of the Celtic frets from the Durrow and Kells manuscripts) that page disclosed, underneath what then seemed to us pointless decoration (now I know better) an actual scale drawing. Someone had taken the trouble, in an idle afternoon, to make a working plan of an Anglo-Saxon organ!

Of course, all scholars and semischolars had long known of the descriptions of those strange instruments given in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle—the two respectively at Winchester and Peterborough being credited with psychophysical powers, with a volume of literally heart-shaking and blood-beating sound, which has made all later readers smile. But again I must note that though I once joined in that superior humor, I do so no longer.

The find remained, for nearly everyone, simply a literary windfall, an unsuspected illustration to history. But one man decided to act on it: Dean Bathurst. He would have an organ actually made, a life-size model from the manuscript description, and he would install it in gaunt St. Aidans as the proper vehicle for the Gregorian chant.

Like the rest of my antiquarian colleagues, I treated this as the last extravagance of restoration. We boycotted the plan. Bathurst the Barbarian, the Dean was dubbed. One or two semicomic accounts appeared in the popular press, describing the sound the new organ gave. We were willing to believe it was as grotesque as the ignorant reporters said. Nevertheless, the very desolation of St. Aidans (“with the abomination standing where it should not,” said one of my clerical fellow scholars as we discussed it)—the very fact that the ordinary expert believed there was nothing above-ground to attract an intelligent sightseer, made my visit necessary. I say at once that to admit it more than repaid the effort is an utterly inadequate phrase, though that effort was far greater than any archaeological expedition I have ever taken. I never paid a visit to any—shrine (yes, I use the hackneyed word advisedly, precisely) which gave me any experience approaching what I found in that worn hull of stone. Why, then, have I not revisited it? It is partly to explain that fact that I have written this. For the questioner is right if he supposes that I did find there the final clue to my studies, and, more, far more—a solution, I believe, to the whole psychological mystery of Gothic.

As those will know who have followed my
Further Studies in the Lancet Style
, I had come to the conclusion that we should never understand the inner significance and germinal urge of that architectural form by looking at the elevations. Interesting though they may be in themselves, they are (as I believe I have shown in my last essay, and this I take to be my chief discovery) only symptoms, resultants from the plan. I can say I knew that “Gothic” is simply the marking out and covering over of certain paths, certain, as a Greek would say,
dromena
—ways of rhythm. In the sanctuary, there is the intense nuclear pattern; around it, in the ambulatory and the great processional aisles, is the outer wave of more evident movement. I knew that, and yet I really knew about it only as a man who discovered a fossilized white anthill might make a map of it and think he could, from that, understand the termite instincts.