Goose of Hermogenes (6 page)

‘Blest night of wandering
In secret, where by none might I be spied,
Nor I see anything;
Without a light or guide,
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.’

–
Saint John of the Cross.

Tears flowed into any eyes, and this not only on account of the delicate pathos of the tale. For the first time since living in my Uncle’s house, I wept. Heaven knows, I had had enough disquieting experiences to puzzle and distress me, yet until this moment I had only half-believed that they were true. I had expected shortly to awake from a nightmare—disagreeable enough while it lasted through the day’s earliest hours, but sure to flee at the first real light of dawn. Now, however, the full significance of my plight towered over me with dismal weight; and a wave of utter loneliness overwhelmed me. I realised that I was completely and, it seemed, permanently isolated from all help; with a frigidly-tyrannous Uncle for sole companion, whose intentions towards me were certainly not benevolent, and the more disquieting because unknown. I was by this time convinced that he was mad; but I was none the less sure that he was possessed of powers beyond the common range, and this, perhaps just because he had deliberately pressed beyond the borders of sanity. I could not count on the presence of the Anchorite for friendly intervention, since his enigmatic caprices were hardly more consoling than the vagaries of my Uncle. What I longed for was a companion of my own age, someone discreet and sensitive in whom I could confide; in fact, for such a relationship as was described in the story. I longed above all for flight from my grievous present and for some such escape into well-being as that which the end of the romance, however mixed with poignancy, promised.

Too restless to sleep, I rose from my bed and went over to the open window, which gave upon a particularly sinister region of my Uncle’s demesne.

Surrounded by spectral poplars there lay a choked-up mere, so thickly grown with rushes that the water was all but invisible. A low earthy dyke ran around it, and within this rim the dry ooze of its margin was spoored with the footprints of dinosaur and mastodon. Occasionally the rushes swayed and rustled with the movement of some huge sinuous creature and a strange cry might be heard, but whether of bird or animal one could not tell. The lineage of the spot could be traced in that most antique of plant-forms, the horsetail, which vied here with the suffocating rushes to obscure the pool. Once the horsetail, rich in silicon, grew as tall as now the poplars; to-day a vestige only of its pristine abundance, the jointed stems swayed in a smaller world.

This was a monstrous country—even the park-lands were alive with beings earlier than man. Tortured oak-trees stood or lay, piercing or hollow; a single ancient, near a Templars’ site, reared a herd of ancestral horns and opened its side in a Gothick window. Does the Maiden sometimes look out? I wondered. Clumps of the druidic tree recalled that mysterious Nightingale who nested in nine oaks; the Russian ‘Bylinay’ sing of him, but whether he is bird or hero or demon they do not say.

Every copse was scarred by the passage of some tempestuous force:    trees were torn up by the roots, limbs wrenched off, masses of twiglets crushed and broken. This destruction did not seem to be the work of any known wind, but rather of a sudden wanton downrush from the air, chaotic and convulsive.

Knuckles of flint broke as outcrops through the soil of the rougher fields beyond, their shape echoing a goddess’ torso or the curves of some unnamed beast. They seemed to be uncarved, but among them might there not be stones that the Templars treasured?

A feather like one of the primaries from a rook’s wing much magnified was growing out of the landscape into the sky. The contrast between the quill, which was as thick as a tree-trunk, and the delicate branch-plumes that sprang from it, was terrible. A few of these plumes, chiefly the ones emerging near the base, were grey or whitish, reminding one of freak-blackbirds, frost, sere leaves, old age, and ultimately, I suppose, of dissolution.

The rest of the landscape was gay with the prismatic sheen of a thinly-veiled moon; and hilly fields hedged with clumps of woodland seem to invite me to walk among them. But how to avoid the feather? It dominated everything, and whichever way I turned my eye was led towards it, as if it were the magnetic north. What if one were drawn so close to it that one would have to touch it? The only consolation was the fact – I assumed it was a fact, though surrounding vegetation obscured my view – that the tip of the quill was buried in the earth, whitely, so that the most frightening part could not be seen.

Further away I noticed a goddess sitting cross-legged with her back to a cliff, the water at its base circling her loins. A passing giant smudged away her clavicles; her right breast detached itself, slithered down her torso, its tubular nipple pointing towards the lake, flopped in and melted. In its place appeared a great eye, lustrous as an owl’s but clear-coloured like a bubble, surrounded with a foamy-white cornea. Her left breast remained some time, clinging to the surface of her ribs and shrinking gradually. It was finally washed away by a brief storm of thundery rain-drops; and the eye was put out by a flash of summer-lightning as if it had been pricked with a pin.

Alarmed by the seeming approach of a storm, I retreated from the window and again sought rest on the bed. I could hear no sound of thunder, but I sensed a tension in the atmosphere that might have but little to do with the weather outside. Was my room haunted? As an infant has difficulty in believing that it has left the womb, so a new ghost has difficulty in believing that it has left the world. Sometimes the ghost feels, acts, decides as though it were still blown-through by the breath of life. It has to remind itself constantly, and concentrate its attention upon the fact that it is no longer alive: otherwise hauntings occur. Those ghosts return most persistently who have never known that they were dead; others come back fitfully when they have known, and then again forgotten. When they fully realise it at last, their haunting ceases. A ghost must keep always before it a vision of that end which it has reached, and only allow itself to be worked on by the breath of death.

Certain ghosts feel little of that attraction of haunting which so powerfully influences many others, for these former leave upon the earth a physical manifestation in a human being. Sometimes this counterpart appears among their descendants; but when this is not so, another being is chosen and possessed, though perhaps this one is never wholly alien in a physical sense. The chosen one looks henceforth to the ghost as to an illustrious ancestor, and draws from it authority and inspiration.

The chosen being may be singled out in various ways, either before or after the death of the possessor. It may happen that those two halves of Plato’s sphere cannot join on earth, but must be parted by a dividing dimension before they can work as one, the earth too narrow to hold them. One of them has to die. They struggle to decide which is to be the victim, and at last one of them kills the other. The survivor acts in self-defence, and there are thus many murders and suicides that go unrecognised by law. But this being feels, mixed with pain and remorse, a subtle triumph, for it knows that from now onwards it drinks life at a double spring. That very identity which separated it from its inspirer during the day, at night draws them together. They are undivided but working in a manner both hidden and expressed, like an exoteric cult and the secret tradition which it both embodies and conceals. I am not here any longer, I am dead, it is only my unhappy ghost that wanders through my Uncle’s mansion and demesne. I am lying in a small graveyard at the edge of a thirsty plain, the dust is on my eyelids I cannot see, the earth is in my nostrils I cannot breathe, the pebbles are in my ears I cannot hear, the stones are on my feet I cannot move. We two have lain there a single corpse under rocky hills since the beginning of time, and one ghost is still walking, and one has ceased to walk.

I wonder how it was that I never lived in that room at the top of the house, the room with a large window and a view of the acropolis like a shout. Yes, like a shout I say – you could hear the triumphant noise it made striding upwards in the purple light. Why of course I remember now, someone else was living there, some tenant with a prior claim who did not want to leave. And then I was afraid that if I took that room I would go to Olympia with her and she would die there as she said she would if she ever went back to her birthplace. And he dying near by, dying in life, living in death, spending and wasting and dying each time he was with me, each time a step nearer death and death a thought dearer. He was hungry once with that phosphorescent look about him and asked to be kept alive and I gave him stony gifts; I heaped those stones above him, I laid him in that bed of boulders. We were held together at last by slanderous bonds, by ridicule, hatred, contempt, but there were older bonds than those, the sulphur, the phosphor, the salt. Now lying in a small graveyard near bones of kings and beaten gold, he is learning the length of the horizon and drawing perhaps where the worms twine a straighter line than ever before; drawing perhaps the straight wand of Hermes, with the snakes making spirals around it to right and left, the red and the blue, gyres that I must try to compas. Lying there far from the shrine of a pillow he is echoing that distant day when the first words he spoke were Listen to me! And crying a far cry out of a six-foot cradle he is saying again Listen!

I am listening O I am listening now at last I have ears to hear.

An uneasy sleep must have drawn me into its folds, for I awoke with a start. It had come to me again, that dream; I thought it had visited me for the last time. Then she is living still. What did it say? that she was not dead, that it was strange how anyone could think so, how could the idea have arisen? As in the others, she had been away for a while—there had been no longer separation than that. There she was, smiling as in life; preparing to go away, collecting things together, I helping her. My true ancestor, the alchemists’ white woman, lunar progenitrix—it seems that some ritual is wanting. What can I do? Mother of good counsel, help me; ark of the covenant, gate of heaven. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

One of the most sinister emotions is hatred of the dead. Living, one has loved them; dead, one loves them for a while still more; then gradually one grows indifferent, and slowly one begins to hate. One conceals this as one never hides hatred of the living; their faults appear as in a beam of light, restricted but intense, that passes over a scarred surface. By this hatred one shares their death. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

Some years after the tragedy, I found in the old Trocadero museum a massive panel of stone, which had been taken from the side of a tomb in Naples. It was carved in high relief with a Pietà, of the Romanesque style; but what devil had inspired the sculptor? A first glance assumed the traditional gestures of sorrow, but a second revealed the bodies of Saints and Virgin convulsed with a soundless and satanic laughter, their faces contorted with malicious joy. Even the mouth of the Christ, falling open in death, was pinched to an ironic smile; but most strange of all, the face of the Madonna was her face. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

From a label near the ground I sought the name of the corpse thus commemorated; it was Agnés de Périgord, Empress of Byzantium, who had lived in the fourteenth century. The name conveyed little to me at the time, and later research has brought me little more. She was married to John of Gravina, Prince of Achaia, and by him had three sons. He died young, leaving her to the life of Naples’ licentious court. Perhaps, if records still exist, one could trace resemblances here and there between the two histories, but my impression is that these are nowhere striking. It is in character rather than in destiny that their likeness, identity even, must lie. Was the sculpture designed before this titular Empress died? Did she even order such a monument to mark her remains? Or was there something in her character while yet living that inspired a subtle blasphemy after her death? The meagre details of her life do nothing to unveil the mystery of her tomb. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

Did her spirit, after many wanderings perhaps, come to me from Byzance with a magian load? I remembered that the woman I knew had died unconsoled, the remnants of faith unsupported, culmination of many anguished days; that the new ghost was followed twelve hours later by blood, the blood of her husband’s suicide. The last time I saw her, one of her eyes was closed: that evening she grew worse; suddenly, early the next day she said, I can’t hear, I can’t see; then fell unconscious and died alone, unanointed, unfed.

‘It were not right ever to cease lamenting
It was like the parting of day from night.
’

During the year before her death, the only one of her life in which I knew her, she was visited by several strange visions. In the month of December, one night between sleeping and waking, she saw the gate of heaven shining out of the surrounding darkness with a multitude of gem-like colours, which like a kaleidoscope changed their shapes as they glittered, yet left the structure of the gate unchanged. This vision lasted for many minutes before it faded away. In the next month she experienced a vivid linking of the senses when some words, spoken by her husband, appeared to her mind’s eye before their sound reached her ears; they took the form of an iron grid interlaced with small ivy-leaves. In the month of June she saw, when in a dreamlike state, an image possessing both the force of reality and the charm of a picture: it was a maiden running, whom she called Atalanta, with dark hair streaming out behind in a point as her feet skimmed the tops of ilex-trees. Around her spread a snowy waste; behind her gray mountains were ranged against a sky faintly pink. Her filmy garments clung to her as she fled, her pale face straining forward, her eyes gazing outward persistently; one thinks of the old alchemical treatise called
Atalanta Fugiens.
The next vision or waking dream came to her about the same time, and concerned an appearance of the Magi moving in silhouette across a pale sky. In the same month, one hot afternoon as she lay resting, she saw me naked by her window in the guise of the goddess Saraswati holding the pose of the ‘Lotus-seat’, but with head turned over the left shoulder. This figure remained for several minutes, moving slightly like an animated statue. And nightly she would see four angelic beings round her bed, and had great joy in conversing with them, though in waking hours she kept no certain memory of their words. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.