The Great Fog (21 page)

My guide still stood his ground, so we were face to face, though I had to look up at him. And it was a look up in more than a physical sense. For I could see clearly now that what I had taken for theatricality or, at the best, a certain self-consciousness of drama, of presentation, now struck me as an actual authentic dignity.

“I know when we met you thought I was a busybody—an odd organist who wanted also to ape the antiquarian.”

I saw further, whoever he might be, that he was not the man to be put off by courteous disavowals.

He hardly waited for the conclusion to form in my mind before adding, “I know, also, that under the antiquarian's dread of deceit, the fear of being taken in, is a real desire to decode the truth, to be taken in, in another sense, into the authentic arcana. Yet there are tides …”

Indeed, there are, and my sudden turn from suspicion to trust had passed its flood and was as rapidly ebbing. I felt that my strange sensation could only have been a slight vertigo, brought on by his really quite impertinent handling. I wished only to get away.

This feeling became acute when he went on, “Any other day of the year you might have missed everything.”

“Because I should not have had the privilege of your guidance?” I questioned. The question was, of course, only a “discourtesy” question. I can say such a recoil was not normal to me, and—as a reaction or recoil—I believe it is partial evidence that, in the moments before, I had undergone some psychophysical experience from which temperament was attempting an “overbalanced” recovery. My opponent—I had almost said—well, my companion, refused to be challenged and thrown back to the part of a beaten-off boarding party.

He continued to remark quietly, more to himself than to me, “There is no chance; so to say ‘coincidence' is to say nothing. I will therefore only note that it happens that only on this afternoon of the year—an afternoon naturally often overclouded, since it is the twenty-ninth of September—does the sun as it declines cast a ray at the precise angle which, striking obliquely on the stone you have been scanning, permits the pattern scored on it to be visible through the weathering of centuries. And this is the very day on which a visitor catches sight of the second clue in the topmost trefoil of the southwestern clerestory window. You will own that I owed you my services, considering the day.” His voice was now specifically addressing me.

“What day?” The ignorance of my answer was due also, I suppose, to the slight giddiness I had suffered, as a slight shock will disturb one's memory momentarily.

His answer: “That's all the better. If you did not come here ‘to keep the day,' then I may take it that others arranged it,” left me even more bewildered. But when he added, “Now, to clinch it, let's step back into the cathedral,” I was awake enough by then to point out, “The door was locked for the night almost as soon as we left.”

He only answered, over his shoulder, “To one who knows a cathedral it is never locked—as, to the ignorant, it is never open. Like all true mysteries it is locked only to outsiders.”

The last part of the sentence I would probably have resented because of its sententiousness, if something more remarkable had not caught my attention; the speaker had disappeared. I could, however, still hear distinctly enough the words which followed, “Come over to this south side of the porch.”

I moved into the shadow of its deeply recessed clusters of shafting. Still I couldn't see him. “Now, stand on the ramp.” I stepped up on the low stone benching. A hand touched me and drew me behind a pillar into a dark coving. I heard a latch click and hinges turning. “The passage is sufficiently narrow, you need not be afraid of stumbling, and won't want a light. So close the door as you pass through.”

I passed in, and the small door, which I felt but could not see, at once hasped itself behind me. Ahead of me the voice went on talking gently and, in the stone cleft in which we were moving, every word, though not much above a whisper, came clearly back to me. The back of my hands brushed a smooth stone wall at each side. It was not groping, when touch was so unbroken and footing so level. And, even when the floor began to rise, each step seemed to meet one's foot as surely as a ladder's rungs. So we covered some three hundred steps perhaps. Once we turned at right angles. This unexpected and literal penetration into the structure of the great silent building had quite restored my mood of open, if somewhat amazed, interest. Whatever unsubstantiated theories might be held by the strange fellow ahead of me, there was no doubt he knew his way about the cathedral and was giving me an unexpected insight. I heard another latch click ahead, and light poured down past us. When, however, we stood out in it, it was really a twilight, an afterglow thrown from a huge window whose massive mullions sprang from a broad sill level with our heads. We had emerged, I could judge from the sense of space given by exhausted echoes and faint perspectives of light, onto the extreme western end of the south clerestory passage. I guessed his purpose but doubted its use. “That top trefoil can be seen better from the nave floor.” I remarked.

And, indeed, that was understating the fact. The coving of the stone tracery was itself so thick that, standing, as we were now, immediately under it, those uppermost fragments of mysterious glass were quite invisible to us. We could see only a faint mottling of color thrown on the upper lip of the stone mouth, deep in which the medallion jewelry was fixed, filtering obliquely the last western light. His reply, however, was to repeat the ancient maxim, “As above, so below.” And as he said it a small ellipse of light appeared on the breastwork which screened the narrow wall on which we stood from the nave, forty feet below. I looked at the little elongated disk of light (it was thrown from a small flashlight which my guide was holding), and, sure enough, there was cut in the broad chamfer of the balustrade, which faced us like a stone reading desk, an engraved reproduction of the medallion maze-pattern up out of sight in the trefoil above us. The ellipse shifted.

“And here”—the light darted and paused, first on one side of the central engraving and then on the other—“Here are the even more obscure patterns which you saw in the right and left trefoils.” He was certainly correct in that, for my memory is very retentive of pattern, and was helped in this question by the fact which I had noted when on the nave floor—these two “supporting” patterns were similar—the only difference between them being that the pattern of one was a pattern in which the line came in from the left, while in the other the line began its involutions from the right. They were “mirror images” of each other.

“They were kind, the original masons,” went on the soft tone, in this fluted place more like an echo of very distant speaking than a face-to-face voice. “They do not wish to exclude anyone who will show real interest. In fact, they are always looking out for those they may welcome. Once you are really responsive to the signal flown aloft, then, when you have climbed as close as you can to its call, they leave the message where you, but no casual curioso, can find it.”

“But,” I questioned, “even now?” For though the graven lines were unmistakably sharp (here were no doubts introduced by the weather's random palimpsests), yet the whole enigma was not a whit more communicative when one stood gazing at it, less than eighteen inches from one's nose, than when one craned up at its rendering in glass almost eighty feet above one's head.

“
Solvitur ambulando
,” the voice was nearly a whisper now or a sigh. “And that will prove the final solution, in the deepest sense. But the first step to that is
solvitur circulando
. Permit me again to direct your attention.”

This time I voluntarily submitted. “Please place your right and left index fingers on the beginnings of the two engraved coils to your right and left.” I obeyed. “Follow these by touch,” he said. Meanwhile he kept the ellipse of light on the central pattern with one hand, and with his other gently manipulated my neck, so that, following these impulses, my head swung, repeating the lines of the maze. Almost at once I felt come over me again the strangely significant, soothing effect. But this time it was far stronger. Perhaps it was because I was now following a curved rather than a rectangular pattern; perhaps because while my head swung, my hands and arms were counterpointing the central theme. I can only say that whereas on the porch I had felt as though a new sense of mental balance was controlling and ordering my body, now the whole body, trunk and limbs as well as head, seemed to be taking part in the new expressive pattern. Then I was balanced and felt as though I could never slump, lounge, or shuffle again. But now I felt as though the body would never again have to be borne, however athletically. It would bear itself: it was an imponderable, a field of force, not a coil of machinery. As to my mind, I might almost say that after a few rhythms I felt as though it had passed into the maze. I was not an outsider tracing a pattern—rather, I was one of the rhythms of that pattern, given meaning and purpose by moving within its comprehensive order. I was living, moving, and having my being in the actual dynamic design which keeps all things, from atom to heart-beat, in an interwoven dance.

I did not move when the exercise was finished but stood, with my fingers touching the centers of each ancillary maze, my eyes fixed on the focus of the central one. A single wish was present in my curious and complete content—not by any shift of attention to lose this amazing direct sense of wholeness, of the lack of any conflict or striving, not to step back into the old throbbing, knocking, thwarted flutter and thump of life. Now that I knew, with a profound kinesthetic intuition, I must—it was my one ordinarily conscious thought, my one contact with my old acquisitive-defensive self—hang on to this knowledge. I simply must not lose this gnosis. So, though the voice was hardly more than the sound made by a shell close to the ear, I did start a little. The words also shook the mood I was clinging to. “That is enough.”

My intellectual ego rushed back, breaking these new extensions of understanding which were lifting me to a selfless, wordless knowledge, rushed back, under the excuse of protecting me from exploitation, from ignorant patronage, from some charlatan's hypnotic trick. So pride can always blind true vision. But my guide evidently knew my limitations. Having lifted me out of the groove I had settled in, he did not provoke the aroused ego with more words. He conveyed our next step, not by tongue but by step. I heard the soft sound of his retreating feet and followed them. My critical spirit loosed its hold and, as far as I thought of anything or foresaw anything, I thought we would be returning to the west porch. But after the clerestory doorway closed behind us and we had made our descent of the internal stairway, when the lower little doorway clicked ahead it did not admit, I could see, the last glow of the day but a dusk hardly lighter than the gloom in which we had been stepping.

My guide must have taken another of the many divergent tunnel passages in the vast walls; for we had emerged, I could see, into a considerable space, dark on every hand except the right. There some sort of huge opening glowered. I should have known my bearings but I had, I suppose, lost that specific sense of direction in the sense of some much larger drift in things: as the carrier pigeon, it would seem, depends on its sensitiveness to the earth's magnetic field and so disregards and must disregard all ordinary sensory clues. My sensory clue came from another cast of the flashlight. I saw the oblique beam was thrown on the floor. The flash made it clear—we were back under the great western tower.

“This time,” said the voice which, if possible, sounded softer and more diffused away from the walls—“this time, please follow me.” The torch had been switched off and, even when my eyes had adapted to the deepened dusk, I could only see in most uncertain outline a column of darkness, which stood against gloom almost as dark. “Don't strain to see me; just look in the direction I move.” He was right. Had I tried to gauge whither his dark figure was moving I should certainly have remained in doubt but, as it was, by an almost casual glance, I was aware that he was moving and, so easy and total was my attention as I watched, that I found I was keeping pace with him. Not until I had been so “in train” for some little while did my rational mind even begin to ask what we were doing or even how. Then I realized I was moving and turning in a certain defined area. I saw the glimmer of the great arch time and again frame the figure I was following.

Yes, we were threading the full-size maze delineated in the floor stones, that maze at which we had been looking, perhaps an hour ago, perhaps less, as the sun had been setting. The pacing came to me quite naturally, so that I hardly glanced for guidance but let some inner beat tell me when to turn and when to advance. For the third time I felt, but twice as strongly, the sense of being caught up into the real basic rhythm of things—swept from the beach on which the breakers swirl in confusion out into the deep, where the swell of the ultimate ocean moves in an inexhaustible process. I heard a voice say, “Once,” and I noticed I could no longer hear the whisper of feet preceding my own; also, my eyes no longer found the faint impression of a leading figure ahead of me.

It made no difference. The rhythm, once learnt, took control itself. I ceased to look for outer confirmation of the inner prompting to pace and repace. In perfect kinesthetic knowledge, one made the curves, passes, involutions, reverses, as dancers may dance in the dark and in silence. Yet it was not merely the memory of a single lesson, rather it was one's whole ancestral frame recalling its primal rhythm and spring—swirl of the fish in water, volute of bird in air, plunge of the diver, leap of athlete. It would be impossible to say how long we paced, for, as one light wave can eclipse another and where they meet appears darkness, so, when a beat is found precisely equal to the beat of life and growth and movement, time, too, is canceled by its question being at last answered. Conscious time, I now realize, is caused only by a creature going out of step and so becoming sadly aware of Past, when things chimed, and of Future, when things will click but always being shackled in a Present where events only clash.