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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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IT was not often that people attempted to 'use' Taverner for their own ends, and it was only because the Countess of Cullan was so sure of her powers that the attempt was made. She was a very great lady, though somewhat blown upon as to reputation, and she had reason to believe in her power over men, and never doubted that Taverner and I, given sufficient encouragement, would worship at her well-served shrine. She was a neighbour of ours, the grounds of the nursing home, in fact, being carved out of the Cullan estate during the days when the old earl was using capital as income. The present earl was a man of a very different type, so different, in fact, from what might have been expected of a scion of the house of Cullan, that rumour had it that he was 'not quite all there.' Be that as it might, he was at least 'there' enough to keep a tight hand on the family finances and insisted on allowing the goose of capital to lay the golden eggs of interest instead of having it killed then and there to assuage the family hunger. This, rumour added, was a very sore point, and productive of much rancour in the home life.
The opening move in the game took place when Taverner and I were invited to a garden party at Cullan Court, and needless to say, did not go. The next move was when the Countess drove over in a two-seater and insisted that I should return forthwith to make up a set at tennis. I was cornered and could not escape, and, having been assigned my flapper, duly patted balls over the net at the Honourable John, a younger brother of the Earl, and his flapper, who returned them in a resigned kind of fashion, till we came to the conclusion that a single might not, after all, be without its charms, deposited our flappers in the shade, and set to work in earnest.
Having a long reach, a steady eye, and a good wind, I take kindly to games, though they are not my enthusiasm as they are with some people who are able to acquit themselves adequately; to the Honourable John, however, sport took the place of religion, and in whatever game he played he had to excel; and to give him his due, he generally succeeded in doing so.
In the first set he beat me after a struggle; in the second set I beat him in a thrilling contest, and in the third we settled down to a life and death battle. All his debonair charm was gone, and the face that looked at me across the net was positively malignant as the score slowly turned against him, and when the game concluded in my favour, it was all he could do to remember his manners. The cloud soon blew away, however, and after a pleasant tea on the terrace, the Countess drove me home again with her own fair hands, much more inclined to accept future invitations.
But, although I was quite willing to play the Honourable John at tennis, I was distinctly anxious to steer clear of the Countess, for, though old enough to be my aunt, if not my mother, she blatantly flirted with me.
A DINNER party was arranged shortly after that, and Taverner
could not escape it, even with all his wiliness, and duly led in
the Countess, who, to my intense amusement, flirted with him also
while I had the very pretty daughter (who seemed to take after
her mother in more than her looks) for my partner. But while the
mother appeared bent on making an impression on Taverner, the
daughter seemed equally bent on making me realize that I had made
an impression on her, and each glanced at the other occasionally
to see how she was getting on. It gave me an odd and unpleasant
feeling to see these two women of a great family making a 'dead
set' at a couple of commoners like Taverner and myself; and as I
saw Taverner succumbing to the lure I got more and more
disgusted, sulky, and silent with my companion until it struck me
that there might be a method in Taverner's madness; he was, at
the best of times, the least impressionable of men, and very
unlikely to be attracted by this over-blown rose of a woman who
was wooing him so blatantly. So I in my turn allowed myself to
succumb to the daughter, and received in exchange the confidence
that there was a great sorrow in their life and that she herself
was under the shadow of fear and felt dire need of the protection
of a masculine arm. Did I ever ride out on the moors? She did,
every morning, so perhaps, I might be able to help her with a
little advice, for she felt the need of a man's advice. For
nothing more than advice did she ask upon this occasion, and then
she changed the subject.
They disgusted me, these women! They were so blatant and sure of their power to charm. It also struck me as strange that the master of the house not only never appeared, but was never referred to: he might have been non-existent for all the part he played in this elaborate ménage, which seemed to be run by the mother for the exclusive benefit of herself and her two younger children.
'Taverner,' I said as we drove away, 'what do you suppose they want with us?'
'They have not shown their hand yet,' he answered, 'but I do not fancy we shall be kept long in suspense. They are not exactly backward in coming forward.'
As we came out of the park gates Taverner suddenly swerved the car just in time to avoid someone who was entering, and I saw for a moment in the glare of the headlights a strange-looking face, high-cheekboned, hook-nosed, and haggard, with a rough crop of unkempt black hair surmounting it. The darkness swallowed him up and he vanished without a word spoken, yet he left upon me the impression that I had seen someone who mattered. I cannot express it more clearly than that nor give a reason for my feeling, yet he impressed me as being far more than a random pedestrian whom we had nearly run down. His face haunted me, I could not get it out of my mind. I had a curious feeling that I had seen it somewhere before—and then it suddenly came to me where I had seen it—in a neighbouring village lived an old parson who had a very similar cast of countenance—probably the stranger was a son, or even a grandson of his, but what was he doing, going hatless up to Cullan Court at that hour of the night, I could not imagine.
I did not ride with that scion of nobility, the Lady Mary, but Taverner hobnobbed shamelessly with her formidable parent.
'I have had my instructions,' he said, and no other explanation would he give; but for me nowadays no other explanation was needed, for I knew quite well that there were Those under whom Taverner worked, just as I worked under him, though They were not of this plane of existence. I do not think that at the time Taverner himself had any inkling of what was afoot, he merely knew that here was a matter in which Those to whom he looked desired him to take a hand, and so he gave the Countess of Cullan opportunity to develop her intrigues in her own way, biding his time.
THE intrigue took longer than we expected to develop, and I
began to suspect that the Countess was as anxious for its
conclusion as we were. At last the opportunity for which she had
been waiting arrived, and she phoned for us to come at once. Her
eldest son, it seems, was having one of his attacks, and she
wanted Taverner to see him actually in the throes of it, and was
therefore anxious for his speedy arrival lest the invalid should
recover and cease to be interesting, and she expressly desired
that I should come too, the reason for this she would explain
upon our arrival as she did not care to confide it to the
telephone.
Ten minutes in the car brought us to Cullan Court, and we were shown forthwith into the boudoir of the Countess, a room as pink and overblown as she. In a few seconds she came in, clad in filmy black, followed by her daughter in virginal white; they made a lovely picture for those who like stage effects, but I am afraid I despised the two women too heartily to appreciate them. A minute later the Honourable John came in also, and supported by her family, the Countess opened her heart to us.
'We have a great sorrow in our lives, Dr. Taverner, upon which we want to ask your advice and help—and yours, too, Dr. Rhodes,' she added, including me as an afterthought.
I was of the opinion that exasperation rather than sorrow would best describe their condition, but I bowed politely and said nothing.
'You are so sympathetic,' she continued to my partner, my existence having once more slipped her memory. 'You have such wonderful insight. I knew as soon as I met you that you would understand, and I was sure also—' here she lowered her voice to a whisper—'that you would help.' She laid her hand upon Taverner's sleeve and gazed back. The Honourable John turned his back and looked out of the window, and I felt pretty certain that he shared with me an irresistible desire to burst out laughing.
'It is my eldest son, poor Marius,' continued the Countess. 'I am afraid we have got to face the fact that he is quite, quite insane.' She paused, and dabbed her eyes. 'We have delayed and delayed as long as ever we could, perhaps too long. Perhaps, if we had had him treated earlier we might have saved him. Don't you think so, John?'
'No, I don't,' said John. 'He has been mad as a March hare ever since I can remember, and ought to have been locked up before he got big enough to be dangerous.'
'Yes, I am afraid we have not acted rightly by him,' said the Countess, taking refuge in her handkerchief again. 'We should have had him certified long ago.'
'Certification is not a form of treatment,' said Taverner drily.
The Honourable John darted a somewhat unpleasant look at my colleague, opened his mouth as if to speak, thought better of it, and shut it again.
'The time has come,' said the Countess, 'when we have got to face it. I must part with my poor darling for the sake of my other children.'
We bowed sympathetically.
'Would you like to see him?' she asked.
We bowed again.
Up the heavily carpeted stairs we went, and along a far wing to a bedroom which I should imagine the owner had occupied as a boy. We crossed the worn oilcloth on the floor, and saw before us, lying insensible upon a narrow iron bedstead, the man whom we had nearly run over at the park gates, and whom I had set down as the son or grandson of the old cleric in the neighbouring village.
Taverner stood gazing down upon the unconscious form for some time without speaking, while the Countess and her son watched him closely and with increasing uneasiness as the moments lengthened out.
At last he said, 'I cannot certify a man because I find him unconscious.'
'We can tell you all his symptoms, if that is what you want,' said the Honourable John.
'Neither would that be enough,' said Taverner, 'I must see for myself.'
'Then you doubt our word?' said John, looking ugly.
'Not at all,' said Taverner, 'but I must fulfil the requirements of the law and certify from observation, not hearsay.'
He turned suddenly to the Countess. 'Who is your usual medical man?' he demanded.
She hesitated a moment. 'Dr. Parkes,' she said reluctantly.
'What does he say about the case?'
'We are not satisfied with his treatment. We—we don't think he is sufficiently careful.'
I thought to myself that Dr. Parkes had probably also been asked to certify and had also declined.
'If you want to see,' said the Honourable John, 'we can soon show you,' and he dipped the fringe of a towel in the water-jug, tore open the pajama jacket, and began to flick the chest of the unconscious man. His action revealed a body wasted to skeleton thinness on which angry red weals sprang up at each blow of the knotted threads. The end of a fringed towel, weighted with water, is a cruel weapon, as I well knew from my school days, and it was all I could do to keep myself from interfering; but Taverner remained immobile, watching, and I let myself be guided by his example.
This drastic method of resuscitation soon produced twitchings of the unconscious form and then spasmodic movements of the limbs, which finally co-ordinated themselves into definite attempts at self-defence. It was like the struggles of a sleeper fighting in nightmare, and when the eyes at last opened, they had the dazed, bewildered look of a man suddenly roused from deep sleep in strange surroundings. He plainly did not know where he was, neither did he recognize the people standing around him, and he was evidently prepared to resist to the limits of his strength all efforts to control him. Those limits were soon reached, however, and he lay immobile in the powerful hands of his brother, watching us with strange, filmy eyes and uttering neither word nor sound.
'You see for yourself,' said John triumphantly. Lady Cullan dabbed her eyes with a whisp of a lace handkerchief.
'I am afraid it is hopeless,' she said. 'We cannot keep him at home any longer. Where would you advise us to send him, Doctor Taverner?'
'I would be prepared to take charge of him,' said Taverner, 'if you would be willing to entrust him to me.'
The Countess clasped her hands. 'Oh, what a relief!' she cried. 'What a blessed relief from the anxiety that has burdened us for so many years!'
'You will get the formalities through as soon as possible, won't you Doctor?' said the Honourable John. 'There are a lot of business matters that want attending to, and we shall need your certificate in order to take them over.'
Taverner dry-washed his hands and bowed unctuously.
I, MEANWHILE, had been watching the man on the bed, whom everyone else seemed to have forgotten. I could see that he was gathering together his scattered wits and was alive to the position in which he found himself. He looked at Taverner and myself as if taking our measure, and then lay still listening to the conversation.
I bent over him.
'My name is Rhodes,' I said, 'Dr. Rhodes, and that is Dr. Taverner. Lady Cullan was alarmed at your illness and sent over to the nursing-home for us.'
He looked me straight in the face, and his eyes had a keenness that seemed to go right through me.
'It appears to me,' he said, 'that you are engaged in certifying me as insane.'
I shrugged my shoulders. 'I should need to know a great deal more about a case than I know about you,' I replied, 'before I should be willing to put my name to a certificate.'
'But do you not deny that you have been called in for the purpose of certifying me?'
'No,' I said, 'I don't see why I should deny it, for it is a fact that we have.'
'Good God,' he exclaimed, 'have I not got the right to live my own life in my own way without being certified insane and having my liberty taken from me? What harm have I ever done to any one? Who has any complaint against me except my brother? And why should I sell my land to pay his debts and turn better men than he out of their holdings? I tell you, I will not sell the land. To me, land is sacred.'
He stopped abruptly, as if afraid that he had said too much, and eyed me uneasily to see how I had taken this last statement. Then he continued.
'If I am deprived of my liberty I shall not live. I do not want the money. What I have, I give them already, but I will not part with the land. I draw my life from it. Take the land from me, take me from the land, and I tell you that it will not live—and neither shall I!'
He raised his voice in his excitement, and attracted the attention of the group at the other side of the room. The face of the Honourable John was wreathed in a smile of triumphant satisfaction at this outburst, and the Countess had again occasion to apply her handkerchief to her eyes and weep crocodile tears into it.
Taverner crossed the room and stood before me, looking down at the man on the bed without speaking. Then, raising his voice so that those on the other side of the room might hear, he said, 'I have been called in by Lady Cullan, who wanted my advice as to your health, which has been causing her anxiety.'
The Countess nudged her younger son to induce silence; she was quite satisfied as to her empire over Taverner, but the Honourable John, having better brains, was not quite so sure of his man.
'I do not consider,' continued Taverner, speaking slowly and weighing each word, 'that it is wise for you to remain here, and I suggest that you should come to my nursing-home, and come now. In fact, I suggest that we should leave the house together.'
I could see what Taverner's game was. Lady Cullan meant to have her eldest son certified, and his behaviour was sufficiently eccentric to make it very likely that she would succeed; if, however, he were at our nursing-home, no other medical man would interfere; Taverner and I could use our own discretion whether we certified him or not, and we certainly should not do so unless it were in his interest as well as his family's. It was quite likely that Taverner would be able to put him on his feet and there would be no need to certify him at all; but that would not suit Lady Cullan's book, and if she had the least suspicion that we intended to do other than help her to lock the wretched man up for life, then we also should be discharged as 'not sufficiently careful'; some man with a licensed mental home would be called in, and Marius, Earl of Cullan, would speedily be under lock and key. It was for this reason that Taverner wanted to take him away then and there. But could he be induced to come? We could not constrain him unless we certified him. Would he, hounded as he had probably been all his life, trust anyone sufficiently to place himself in their hands? Would Taverner's personality sway him, or would he slip through our fingers into hands less clean? I felt as I used to feel in my student days when I saw dogs being taken up to the physiology laboratory.
But this man was as intuitive as a dog, and he sensed my feeling. He looked at me, and a faint smile curled his lips. Then he looked at Taverner.
'How do I know I can trust you?' he asked.
'You have got to trust somebody,' said Taverner. 'Look here, my dear fellow, you are in an uncommonly tight corner.'
'I know it very well,' said Lord Cullan, 'but I am not sure I should not be in an even tighter corner if I trusted you.'
It was a difficult situation. The poor chap was practically a prisoner in the hands of the most unpleasant and unscrupulous family, and unless we could protect him, would be a prisoner in good earnest behind asylum bars. And whatever he was now, he would be most indubitably mad after a short course of asylum conditions. He was probably quite right when he said that he would die if deprived of his liberty, for he was a type that easily becomes tubercular. Yet how were we to get him to trust us so that we could protect him?
Taverner joined me at the bedside, our two broad backs, for we are both burly individuals, completely blocking out the rest of the party. He looked steadily at the man on the bed for a moment, then he said in a low voice, as if uttering a password.
'I am a friend of your people.'
The dark eyes took on again their curious filmy look.
'What are my people like?'
'They are very beautiful,' replied Taverner.
A snigger from the other end of the room showed how the rest of the family summed up the situation, but to my mind came the words of a seer—'How beautiful they are—the Lordly Ones, in the hills, in the hollow hills—'
'How do you know about my people?' said the man on the bed.
'Should I not know my own kind?' said Taverner.
I looked at him in amazement. I knew he never lied to a patient, yet what had he—cultured, urbane, eminent—in common with the wretched man lying on the bed, an outcast, for all his rank? And then I thought of the solitariness and secrecy of Taverner's soul; none knew him, not even I who worked with him day and night; and I remembered also the sympathy he had with the abnormal, the sub-human, and the pariah. Whatever mask he might elect to wear before his fellow men, there was some trait in Taverner's nature that gave him the right of way across the threshold into that strange hinterland of existence where dwell the lunatic and the genius, the former in its slums, and the latter in its palaces.
Taverner raised his voice. 'I have been called in,' he said, 'by Lady Cullan, who desired my advice as to your health, which had been causing her anxiety. I am of the opinion that you are of an unusual heredity, and this has made it difficult for you to adapt yourself to human society.' (I saw that Taverner was picking his words carefully, and that they meant one thing to the man on the bed, and another to the Countess and her other son.)
'I am also of the opinion,' Taverner went on, 'that I could help you to make that adaptation because I understand your—heredity.'
'In what way does his heredity differ from mine?' demanded the Honourable John, looking puzzled and suspicious.
'In every way,' said Taverner. A peal of elfin laughter from the bed showed that one person at least knew what Taverner meant.
Taverner turned his back on the others and spoke to the man on the bed. 'Will you come with me?' he said.
'Certainly,' replied Lord Cullan, 'but I should like to put some clothes on first.'
At which hint we withdrew.
WE seated ourselves in the broad window-seat of the oriel at
the end of the passage, whence we could watch the door of Lord
Cullan's room and so prevent our patient from giving us the slip.
My medical training would have told me not to leave him alone at
all, but apparently Taverner was quite certain he would not cut
his throat and the rest of the family did not care if he did.
We had hardly seated ourselves before the Honourable John returned again to the question of the certification of his brother.
'I wish you would let us have that certificate now, Doctor,' he said. 'There are a number of matters in connection with the estate that urgently need attention.'
Taverner shook his head. 'Things cannot be done in this hasty fashion,' he replied. 'I must have your brother under my observation for a time before I can say whether he should be certified or not.'
The three of them gazed at him, speechless with horror, this was an unexpected turn for affairs to take. The certification of a well-to-do eccentric is painfully easy if he remains in the bosom of his family, but it would be impossible to snaffle Marius out from under Taverner's nose if he once went to the nursing- home; he might remain there indefinitely, still retaining control of his affairs, effectually preventing his family from laying their hands on the cash, and he even might—awful thought—recover!
The Honourable John's mind worked quicker than his mother's who still seemed to have some vague idea that Taverner was safely in love with her; he saw plainly that they had been 'had,' and that Taverner not only had no intention of being their tool, but was prepared to stand by the unfortunate wretch against whom they were scheming, and see fair play. He lost no time in acting on his convictions.
'Well, Doctor,' he said with the bullying insolence that lies so near the polished surface of men of this type, 'we have heard your opinion, and we don't think very much of it, and should certainly not be guided by it. I told you all along, Mother, that we ought to have a first-class opinion on Marius and not depend on these local practitioners. We will not detain you any longer, Doctor,' and he rose to show that the interview was at an end.
But Taverner sat like a hen, smiling sweetly.
'I have not expressed any opinion about yourself, Mr. Ingles, which is the only one you are entitled to ask me for; though if I had, I could quite understand your showing me the door in this somewhat brusque fashion. It is Lord Cullan who has done me the honour to place himself in my hands, and it is from him, and from no one else, that I shall take my dismissal, whether as his medical adviser or as a visitor to his house.'
During the altercation the bedroom door had opened and Lord Cullan came up behind us, moving silently over the thick carpet. He had brushed his rough dark hair straight back from his forehead, revealing the fact that it grew in a peak, and this made him look even more elfin than the tangled black mat had done. Taverner's strictures on his family were evidently much to his taste, and his wide mouth, with its strangely unhuman thin red lips, was curled up on one side and down the other in a smile of puckish merriment. Lob-lie-by-the-fire, I christened him then, and the name has stuck to him ever since in that queer friendship into which we ultimately drifted.
He came up between Taverner and myself as we stood there, and threw his arms across our shoulders in a strange, un-English gesture expressive of affection. It seemed rather as if he took us under his protection than placed himself under ours, and it was in that light that our relationship has always stood, so defenceless on the physical plane, so potent in the realms of the Unseen, did Marius, Earl of Cullan always show himself to be.
'Come!' he cried. 'Let us get out of this house of evil; it is full of cruelty. It is a prison. These people are not real, they are unclean masks, there is nothing behind them. When the wind blows through them it sounds like words, but they cannot speak real words, for they are unensouled. Come, let us go away and forget them, for they are only bad dreams. But you (touching Taverner) have a soul; and he (his hand fell upon my shoulder) has also got a soul, though he doesn't know it. But I will give his soul to him, and make him know that it is his own, and then he will live, even as you and I live. Come, let us go! Let us go!'
Away he went down the long passage, swinging us with him by the compulsion of his magnetism, chanting 'Unclean, unclean!' in that high, thrilling voice of his that seemed to curse the house as he went through it.
WHEN we got him into the car, however, the reaction set in, and he was as unnerved as a child that suddenly finds itself alone on a stage before a great audience. Some unknown power had flowed through him a moment before, sweeping us all, friend and foe, along with irresistible force, but now he had lost his grip on it; it had left him, and he was defenceless, horrified at his own temerity, and watching us with furtive, anxious eyes to see what we were going to do to him now that he had betrayed himself by his outburst.
I thought that he was physically exhausted by the excitement through which he had passed, and therefore incapable of giving any trouble; but these queer cases in which Taverner specialized were very deceptive as to their physical condition; they have access to unsuspected reserves of strength which enabled them to rise as if from the dead. I am afraid that I was not watching our patient as closely as I should have done, for as the car slowed down to negotiate the park gates he gave a sudden spring, leaped clean out of the car, and vanished into a thicket.
Taverner gave a long whistle.
'That is awkward,' he said, 'but not altogether to be wondered at. I thought he came a little too quietly to be altogether wholesome.'
I rose up to jump out of the car and go in pursuit of our fugitive, but Taverner checked me.
'Let him go if he wants to,' he said. 'We have no power to coerce him, and are more likely to win his confidence by leaving him perfectly free to do as he pleases than by trying to persuade him to do what he has not got a mind to. It will do him no harm to sleep out in the open in this weather, and I have great faith in the power of the dinner-gong. Cullan Court is the last place he is likely to make for, and they will be none the wiser as to his disappearance if we do not enlighten them. But here we are at Shottermill. Let us call in and see Parkes and hear what he has to say about the case. There are several points I want clearing up.'
DR. PARKES, the family physician of the Cullans, was one of
the best of our local friends. He knew something of Taverner's
speculations and was more than half inclined to sympathize,
though fear for his practice kept him from identifying himself
too openly with us.
He was an elderly bachelor, and welcomed us to his frugal lunch of cold mutton and beer. Taverner, who never wasted time in coming to the point if he had anything to say, opened the question of the mental condition of Lord Cullan. It was as we had suspected. For some time past Parkes had stood between him and certification, and was furious when he learnt that Lady Cullan had gone behind his back and called in Taverner; but he was also of the opinion that it would do our patient no harm to take to the heather, in fact, it was a thing that he frequently did, even in the winter, when family relations became especially difficult.
'You are the one man, Taverner,' said our host, 'who will be able to do anything in this matter. I have often thought over the case in the light of your theories, and they render explicable what would otherwise simply be a very odd coincidence, and science does not recognize coincidence, but only causation. I brought Marius into the world, and saw him through his measles and whooping-cough and all the rest of it, and I daresay I know him as well as any one does, which is not saying much, and the more I see of him, the less I understand him and the more he fascinates me. It is a queer thing—the fascination that lad has for fogies like myself; you would think we were poles asunder and would repel each other, but not a bit of it. To get friendly with Marius is like taking to drink, once you start, you can't stop.'
This interested me, for I had an inkling of the same thing.
'The first time I saw Lord Cullan,' I said, 'I was very struck by his likeness to the old parson at Handley village. Is there any relationship between them?'
'Ah,' said the doctor, 'there you have put your finger upon a very curious thing. There is absolutely no connection between the two families save that the Cullans are the patrons of the living and inducted the old man into it, and I expect both parties heartily wish they hadn't. Mr. Hewins hates Marius like poison and made a great scandal once by refusing him the Sacrament; but what the relationship between them may be on what Taverner would call the Inner Planes—well, I might hazard a guess. Is there such a thing as being the spiritual grandfather of a person?'
'Generalizations are untrustworthy,' said Taverner. 'Give me some facts and I will be able to tell you more.'
'Facts?' said Parkes, 'there aren't any, save that the lad grows more like a caricature of Hewins year by year, and those who know the old story remark on it, yes, and make use of it, too. Now there is a farmer over at Kettlebury who won't turn the first furrow of a ploughing unless Marius leads the team—'
'Wait a bit,' said Taverner. 'Begin at the beginning, and tell us the old story.'
'The old story,' replied Parkes, 'has nothing whatever to do with the matter, but here it is, for what it is worth.
'Hewins' wife was a daughter of one of the broom squires. I suppose you know who they are? Men, often of gipsy extraction, who have carved a holding out of the moor and hold it by squatter's right. It is a terribly hard and wild life, and the men are as hard and wild as the moor; as for the women, the less said about them the better.
'Well, Hewins married this girl for some reason best known to himself, and a more incongruous pair it would have been hard to find—her great-grandmother, by the way, was one of the last women to be put on trial for witchcraft in England—and they had a daughter called Mary, who took after her mother and belonged to the heather rather than the glebe.
'Now this unfortunate girl, as ill-luck would have it, fell in love with the late Lord Cullan, and he with her. It was all done quite openly, and everyone thought that the engagement would be announced, but apparently family pressure was brought to bear, and the next thing we knew was that he jilted little Mary of the vicarage and was married to the present Lady Cullan, Marius's mother. The disappointment proved too much for Mary, and she went out of her head, had to be removed to an asylum, and died there within the year, and her ravings, well, it didn't do for anyone to hear them. If she had lived in her great-grandmother's time, she would probably have stood her trial for witchcraft too.
'Of course the whole incident made an unpleasant impression, and is still remembered among the country people hereabouts though the Cullans' own set have forgotten it, if they ever knew it. One baby is very much like another, and Marius attracted no attention in his infancy, save for his peculiar name, which his father insisted on giving him, and no reason assigned; but as he got big enough to show his colouring, it was remarked that although both the old earl and Lady Cullan were blondes, Marius was as dark as a little tinker. He looked most odd and out of place in the nursery at Cullan Court, but you could have seen a dozen of him sprawling outside the broom squires' cottages; and as he got older, that was where he liked to go, and as a matter of fact, that is where he has probably gone at the moment.
'He never has anything to do with his own class, but he comes and goes about these moor holdings, goes into the kitchens and has a meal or a drink of milk, or sits by the fire for hours together on stormy days; doesn't tip the people, as you would expect, just asks for what he wants, has it, and goes, and they understand his ways; in return he seems to act as a kind of mascot at harvest and ploughing-time. From farms miles away he is invited to cut the first swathe at haying or walk in the furrow at seeding.
'You can form you own theories. I say nothing, save that year by year he gets more like old Hewins, and Hewins won't give him the Sacrament.'
'I thought something of that kind must have been at the back of things,' said Taverner.
'What do you propose to do with him, supposing he could be persuaded to let you treat him? Do you think it would be possible to get him normal?' Parkes enquired.
'What do you mean by normal?' countered Taverner. 'Do you mean "average" or "harmonious"?'
But before the discussion could be developed further, a patient called and we took our leave.
'I am very much afraid,' said I, 'that they will succeed in locking that poor chap up after all if he wanders about the countryside, consorts with gipsies, and bewitches crops. Don't you think we ought to try and get hold of him?'
'I do,' said Taverner, 'but I shall use my own methods, and they will not consist of a glorified rat-hunt.'
'There is a queer sort of bond,' I said, 'between Marius and us. Did you notice it?'
'Ah,' said Taverner, 'you felt a bond, did you? Now that greatly simplifies matters. You evidently have some sort of affinity with these children of Pan. You remember Diana, and the way she took to you?'[*]
[* See 'A Daughter of Pan.']
I felt my ears get hot; I had no particular wish to be reminded of that incident.
'No,' said Taverner, perceiving my feeling, 'that had to be broken up because it would not have worked. Diana would have taken the whole of you and only satisfied a part if you had married her; but Marius, if you make friends with him, will deal with that level of your nature which belongs to his own kingdom and leave the rest free. It seldom works for people of different rays and planes of development to marry each other under our existing marriage laws, but it is an excellent thing to have a diversity of friends because they develop aspects of one's nature that lie dormant, and thereby render it incomplete.'
WE had not long to wait for the raising of the curtain on the third act. That very evening, as I came out of the gate by the pillar-box, I saw the figure of a man standing on the edge of the moor, silhouetted against the sunset glow. I knew I could not be mistaken in the poise of that figure, although I could not see the face. Remembering Taverner's advice, I did not seek to approach him, but stood motionless by the gate, watching.
He had evidently been waiting for me, for when he heard the click of the latch, he turned and advanced a few yards.
'Do you expect me to come onto the cultivated ground to meet you, or will you come onto virginal soil to meet me?' he called across the intervening space.
'I will come onto the moor to meet you,' I answered, and stepped off the paved road onto the sandy waste.
'What is your name?' he cried as I approached him.
'Rhodes,' I answered, 'Eric Rhodes.'
'Ha,' said he, 'I shall call you Giles!'
He raised his hand to the branch of a birch tree that hung just over our heads, and giving it a shake, brought down a shower of drops, for a storm had just overpast.
'In my own name,' he cried, 'I baptize thee Giles.'
(When I asked Taverner about this incident later, he said that it was the work of the witch-grandmother, but gave no further explanation.)
'Well?' said the Earl of Cullan, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his disreputable tweeds and cocking his head on one side, 'What do you people want with me? I am not quite so mad as I look, you know, I could behave decently if it did not bore me so much. But I have been fool enough to put myself on the wrong side of the lunacy laws, and I am, as you say, in a tight corner. Would you say a man was mad because he would not release his capital in order to pay his brother's debts, with the certain knowledge that the payment of the said debts will be used as a means of obtaining further credit?'
'I shouldn't, personally,' I replied. 'But if a man combines any unusual form of behaviour with a tight hand on the family finances, it is quite likely that some one will be found sooner or later who can be induced to say so.'
'"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," seems to be my mother's motto,' said Lord Cullan. 'Now supposing I were to deposit my suitcase at your nursing-home—not that I need clean collars or any such frivolities, but just for the look of the thing—would you give me your word of honour that I should be treated as a visitor and not as a patient?'
'You must ask Dr. Taverner that,' said I. 'But if you trust him, I am sure you will not regret it.'
Lord Cullan considered this for a moment, then nodded and returned with me to the nursing-home.
'Of course I gave him the promise he required,' said Taverner when he told me of the subsequent interview. 'I promised not to treat him, and neither will I, nor must you. Instead, I have given him a patient to handle on his own account.'
'That patient being—?' said I.
'Yourself,' said Taverner.
I gave a shout of laughter. 'You're a downy bird!' I exclaimed.
'I really think I am,' said Taverner, with a smile that was a little broader than the occasion seemed to warrant. 'And I also think that I am not the only bird in the wood; there are two others, and I shall kill them both with the same stone.'
MARIUS evidently took his duties as my keeper perfectly
seriously, and I, as Taverner wished, humoured him to the top of
his bent. It was Taverner's custom, when he had a critical case,
to devote himself to it for a few days and leave me to carry on
the routine of the nursing-home, but in this case, he himself
carried on the routine, and left me to deal with Marius.
Presently, however, I began to have a suspicion that Marius was dealing with me. His quick wits and shrewd, subtle brain made him the dominant member of the pair, and I soon realized that he, by means of pure intuition, was a better psychologist than I was or could ever hope to be, with all my training. Gradually he began to join the party in the office, which was against all professional etiquette, and most indiscreet in my opinion, and I must confess to a twinge or two of jealousy at first as I heard Taverner asking his counsel and taking his advice with regard to certain cases that had puzzled us. Marius was far nearer to Taverner intellectually than I was. They both came from the same spiritual place in the hinterland of the subconscious, but in the one the scientist, and in the other, the artist, predominated. But Taverner had saved his soul by masking it, whereas Marius had very nearly lost his by exposing it to vulgar eyes. As I listened to the talk round the consulting-room fire as the autumn evenings closed in, I often used to wonder how many of their spiritual kin were at that moment languishing in jails and madhouses, and why it was that civilization must break such men as Marius on its wheel. I also realized why it is that the occultist works hidden under the protection of a fraternity sworn to secrecy, presenting to the world a mask such as Taverner wore, and hiding his real life from all save his brethren. Marius was a weaker man than Taverner, and had gone to the wall; whereas my chief, protected by the Order to which he belonged, handling by means of ritual the forces that ripped through Marius and tore him to bits, grew strong on that which consumed the other.
Taverner often threw us together in those days of early autumn that were gradually shortening into winter. Marius had a lot of estate business to transact, and it was my task to assist him in the transaction of it. In money matters he was a child, and the moment he dealt with a tradesman was right royally swindled; but fortunately for him, the Cullan property was almost wholly in land, and for this he had a perfect genius, and for him land yielded in a peculiar way. The tenants regarded him with a superstitious veneration, and were, in my opinion, more than half scared of him. They were, at any rate, very careful not to get cross with him, and to my certain knowledge he cast spells upon the fields, the farmer looking on with a sheepish grin, ashamed to admit his superstition, but desperately keen for the magic to be performed.
It could not go on forever, though, and the day came when I had to ask Taverner for a few days off in order to attend a medical conference in London. I got them readily enough, Marius, to my relief, agreeing to my departure without any fuss, and away I went, back to the haunts of men. This was the first time I had been at a gathering of my own kind since I had joined Taverner, and I was looking forward to it keenly. Here, I felt, my foot would be on my native heath; with Taverner I always felt somewhat a fish out of water.
But, as the different papers were read, and the discussions carried on, I found a peculiar sensation stealing over me. When I was with Taverner, my mind seemed to move slowly and clumsily by comparison with us, but by comparison with these men, my mind moved with a lightning speed and lucidity. As each fresh set of phenomena was described, I seemed to penetrate into the hidden life that actuated it; I did not see, as Marius saw, with clairvoyant sight, but I knew things with an unerring intuition which I could not even explain to myself.
Still less could I explain it to others. And after one attempt to take part in the discussion, in which, it is true, I carried all before me, I withdrew into a silence which I allowed no probings to dispel. Over my soul there came a sense of utter solitude as I moved among these, my professional brethren; I felt as if I were looking in at a window rather than sharing in the conference. Until I returned to my old haunts I had not realized how far I had come along the path that Taverner trod; living always in his atmosphere, hearing his viewpoint, my soul had become tuned to the key-note of his, and I was set apart from my fellows. I knew I could enter into no relationship outside the strange, unorganized brotherhood of those who follow the Secret Path, and yet I was not of these either; an invisible barrier shut me off from them also and I could not enter into their life.
THE conference terminated in a dinner, and I set out for this
function in great turmoil of mind. More and more was borne upon
me the fact of my isolation from those I had always regarded as
my herd and looked to for support; more and more was borne upon
me the need to push aside the veil behind which I had been
vouchsafed many a momentary glimpse. The fact that I was
Taverner's daily companion did not give me the right to pass
behind the veil, however. I had, as it were, to enter the house
of my soul and walk out through the back door. I cannot describe
it better than that—the curious inturning which I felt I
had to perform.
I had always feared that the inner depths of my soul as being full of Freudian complexes and the things that wreck careers, and this it was that constituted the barrier; but now I realized what Marius had done for me during the weeks of constant companionship with his strange mind—the absolute naturalness of his outlook and the entire absence of any of the conventional social doctrines had gradually changed my sense of values. Like a silversmith, I did not look only at the elaborate workmanship of an object, but weighed the actual metal it contained; consequently there were some things I had valued highly which I no longer feared to lose.
And as I realized that I no longer valued the things that most men value, I suddenly felt that I dared reach out towards the things of the Unseen which I had long secretly coveted in spite of all my denials but had never dared to touch lest I should wreck my career by so doing. Oblivious to the crowded room and the prosing of the chairman, lost in a brown study, I pondered these things. I looked my life squarely in the face, and when I had finished, all the values were re-assessed; I had indeed entered the house of life and passed through all its chambers.
And then, spontaneously and without effort, I opened the back door to my soul and stepped out into the wide and starry astral night. I saw infinite space crossed and re-crossed by great Rays and sensed the passage of innumerable Presences. Then one of the rays fell across me and I felt as if something in my innermost substance caught fire and shone.
The fit of abstraction passed and I became aware of my surroundings once more. The same speaker was prosing, no one had noticed my inattention. Time and space play no part in psychic experiences.
To my relief the dinner was nearing its end, and I escaped from the stewing atmosphere, heavy with reek of food and cigars, into the garish London night. There was no place here, however, where I could be alone with my thoughts, for humanity crowded about me. I had to have space and darkness for my soul to breathe in. Late as it was, I gathered up my belongings, got out the car, and set out down the Portsmouth road on the long run to Hindhead.
IT was a road of many memories for me. Those who have read
these chronicles know how often Taverner and I had raced up and
down it on one or another of the adventures into which I had been
led by my association with that strange and potent personality.
It is true that I knew very little more about Taverner than I did
at the beginning, but, ye gods, how much more I knew about
myself! Supposing, I thought, Taverner and I for any reason were
to part company, how would I manage to return to the world of men
and find my place therein? Would I not be as alien as Marius?
Those who enter the Unseen never really return, and unless I
could find companionship in the place where I had gone, I should
pass my life in spiritual solitude, with a terrible nostalgia of
the soul for the bright places I had glimpsed.
Absorbed in my thoughts, I ran on past the turn that led to the nursing-home, and it was not until the engine cried out for a change of gear that I realized that I was climbing the heights of Hindhead. Below me lay the mist-filled hollow of the Punchbowl, looking like a lake in the moonlight, and above me the great Keltic Cross that gives rest to the souls of hanged men was silhouetted against the stars; all was very still and no air moved. In that enormous stillness of the open heaths, remote from all human life and thought, I felt the presence of an unseen existence about me, like walking through invisible water. The engine had come to a standstill on the gradient, and about me was absolute silence and darkness. Something was near. I knew it, and it was reaching out towards me; yet it could not touch me, for I had to take the first step. Should I do it? Should I dare to step outside the narrow limits of human experience into the expanse of wider consciousness that was all about me? Should I open that door which never can be closed again?
Above me on the hill the great granite cross cut the stars, a Keltic cross, with the circle of eternity superimposed on the out held arms of renunciation. The mist had come up and blotted out the low-lying land over towards Frensham till I seemed to be alone on a crater of the moon. Cut off from all human influences, high up on the stark heights of the moors, I met my soul face to face while the unseen life that rose like a sea drew back as if to give me room for my decision.
And I hesitated, longing to plunge into that wonderful life, yet dreading it; when suddenly something gripped me by the heart and pulled me through. I cannot describe it better than that. I had passed an invisible barrier and was on the other side of it. Consciousness steadied again; the world was unchanged; there above my head still loomed the great cross, and yet in all things there was a profound difference, for to me, they had suddenly become alive, and not only were they alive, but I shared in their life, for I was one with them. And then I knew that, isolated though I must always be in the world of men, I had this infinite companionship all about me. I was no longer alone, for, like Taverner, Marius, and many others, I had passed over into the Unseen.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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