 Column of Dust, by Evelyn Underhill, 1909. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To see more titles or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Josh Middledorf. Oh, dust, have faith according to the term of this life's lease. Where the corrupting worm have power to destroy the dust thou art, ere the dark rust of death can clog the engine of thy heart. Great is thine honour, though thou walk in night, for fringes of thy darkness feel the light which was ordained to be when God the just, from shadow shaping thee, put trust in dust. Formed by Lawrence Hausmann. Chapter 1. The dangers of curiosity. Oh, loveless, hate-less, past the sense of kindly-eyed benevolence, to what tune dances this immense. Hardy, the dynasts. I choose for the first act of my comedy the spectacle of a complete freedom, cruelly mated with an unquenchable curiosity. Such a liberty, clearly impossible to those who are fettered by the illusions of sense, is no natural prerogative, even of the intangible and spiritual populations constrained by the unceasing pull and push of that love which moves the worlds. These are drawn forward to the joys of a selfless adoration, or downward to the weary miseries of individual self-fulfillment. Those eternally opposing attitudes which in old-fashioned and clear-sighted theology has cruelly classified as heaven and hell. This is the story of a being, a thing, a spirit, if you will, who loved nothing and therefore was free. It wished to serve neither its own interests nor those of the supernal light, and had no aim, only an aching inquisitiveness, now the itch to know, coupled with the inability to care, produces there as here that restless and unsociable disposition which we classify as the result of an imperfect and egotistical education, there as here it of course frustrates itself since those who do not love can never understand. Hence this thing which was free was also ignorant and very wretched. The essence of this wretchedness was that because it, its ignorance and curiosity, had never been born, they could never die. They existed in the unchanging idea without hope of release. Fortunately, it did not know this, for a spirit is as unable to conceive ending as man to conceive endlessness. This something, then, was alive and utterly alone, with a loneliness that is only possible to the disinterested and discarnate. There was nothing for it to do since it could neither create, combine, nor destroy. It could think, but possessed no medium of self-expression, no apparatus by which it could be linked up with other lives, for it did not love, and being immaterial lacked the senses, those oblique and clumsy substitutes for love by which men reach out toward each other's souls. It came storming through eternity, through the crystalline spaces of that which is spaceless, and down the immeasurable periods of that which transcends time. It was isolated, energetic, and desirous of adventure, hungry, restless, and alert, a very vagrant of the invisible. Avert of all knowledge it perceived with a certain enjoyment the general movement and direction of things, the mighty figures of that dance of angels at which philosophy has tried to peep. But in the midst of the great pageant which the uncreated has dreamed for his own delight, it suffered a crescent and incessant irritation because of its own lack of understanding. The figures of the dance might be comprehensible, but the steps defied analysis. This uninstructed, and therefore skeptical observer was angrily aware of certain complicated knots, turbulent manifestations of being, which rudely disturbed the symmetry of the whole. These he could not explain to himself, for they were ugly, disorderly, irrelevant, because they were inexplicable, because he held them to be infringements of the plan. They attracted whilst they disgusted him. He wondered and watched, forgot himself in the occupation, a dangerous business for egotists of every grade. Hence there was born a moment in which he saw the many worlds and planes of being, which from the standpoint of eternity are perceived under an aspect of great and serene simplicity, interpenetrating one another, and the world of matter, turbulent and many-tinted, crossing them all. Deep in this world of matter he identified that lawless and inconsistent element which had disturbed his first placid classification of things. It was the faint, distressedful cry of life, which came in a wailing cadence from that writhing, tossing corner of the dream, and broke the profound silence of reality. Within this disagreeable and meaningless maze of noise, chaos, corruption, he presently perceived the Earth as a peculiarly hideous and unresting tangle, an irreducible blot upon that perfect process of evolving will whose shadow is the universe. He saw it teeming with horrible little organisms, which devoured one another in their ceaseless effort to preserve a visible and independent life. But in spite of all their care and cruelty, broke down after a few moments of meaningless activity and were dissolved into the dust from which they had come. The sight was at once fascinating and revolting. He wondered incessantly and with a growing irritation why being should manifest itself like that. Once the image of the Earth expanded, until it filled his horizon in a fashion that he knew to be absurd. His consciousness was concentrated upon it, and the great and free vision slipped away from him, as happens to us when we turn from the largeness of landscape to contemplate the inexplicable civilization of the hive. Thus this stupendous victim of petty curiosity, growthless, sexless, eternal, brooded over that absurd paradox of creation, a temporal world founded upon the considerations supported by the illusions of matter, growth, and sex. He heard the thud and surge of life which echoed through it, and gazing into its heart saw the countless souls that clustered upon its surface each locked inexorably within the transparent walls of a flesh. These he could understand, for they too were spirits, sexless and solitary things. Being as yet impervious to the false suggestions of appearance, he was peculiarly susceptible to the currents which swayed them, circulating in and about the visible world, the subtle movements of expansion and contraction, the loves and hate of the entangled souls. He felt the curious withdrawal, like the ebbing of a strong tide with which many drew back from life, refused it as if dreading the impact of their waves of being against its shattering cliffs. He felt the deadening stagnation of those others, unconscious of life, who drifted through it inert. Here and there he felt the pull of a vortex of power amongst these negative forces, the eager vitality of those true lovers of life who accepted it, rejoiced in it, making a whirlpool in the spiritual sea. Crossing all these there was still another influence by which he was bewildered and abashed, out of the turmoil dragged or distilled from it, as it seemed by the very conflict of the idea, with the horrible enigma of material things. There was poured forth a strange ecstasy, a vivid and penetrating love, which pierced its way to the very heart of that divine reality, whose calm, as he had ignorantly thought, was disturbed by the fretfulness of the world which lay upon its breast. This love passed easily by the status of those spiritual orders to which he belonged, and merged itself in that end of being for which all creation hungers eternally. That such splendor and such fragrance should come from this loathsome and complicated dance of beauty and ugliness, growth and decay, was an exasperating paradox, an indication of essential lawlessness which he watched with disapproval yet, with a growing fascination. He could not understand it, could not leave it alone. It excited him, as life excites the virgin who watches it with amazement and distrust. But presently the nemesis of the specialist overtook him, the transparent cell walls thickened beneath his curious gaze, and hid the dwellers within. The illusion of solidarity surged mist-like across the landscape, dimming his sight. He had drawn to near, and could no longer see the life in its depths. That life was surely there, and the adorable idea behind it. But looking sedulously at that disconcerting appearance, its ineptitude, its cruelty, its unrest, he lost that consciousness of the idea which is the prerogative of the spiritual life. He was caught in the chains of his own inquisitiveness, and waded by those chains sank from plane to plane of perception ever narrowing the field of vision as he fell. The desire to know that mortal enemy of the power to be had forced him to accept the illusions that he despised. He was slowly and inevitably pressed into their deeps, concentrated in spite of himself on one point in the turmoil where, as it seemed, a tiny and individual fight was going on. There was a little furry thing that lived, and an agonized spirit which looked out at him through two green windows, solitary in the midst of all the other life, and greatly frightened. Something in the furry bag which held the spirit hurt dreadfully, he wondered what it could be and why the prisoner within should mind so much. Whilst he was still absorbed in his own curiosity and the strangeness of this experience, there was a struggle and a tremor that passed over the bag of fur, and then a faint cry. The light left the green windows, a small matter in itself, but bringing to this immortal water the appalling knowledge of things that could come to an end. What a loathsome dream I am looking at, he said, and very naturally he determined forthwith to cease this foolish looking at a nasty and unprofitable world. He turned toward the great spaces, the empty and majestic real. But the real had withdrawn beyond his range, then horror fell on him, and with it an utter helplessness, for he perceived that he could not leave off looking at the dream, because he was no longer looking, he was there. A cry came from him, a very bitter cry of wrath and fear. Ah, what has happened! I am caught! I cannot get away! He had seen death, and suddenly felt on him the weight of the strange and dreadful fetters of mortality. Chapter 2 of The Column of Dust by Evelyn Underhill, How Something Came From Somewhere This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Josh Middledorf. Une pratique, même superstitieuse, même insensée, est efficace parce que c'est une réalisation de la volonté. Il y fasse les vies, rituelle de la haute magique. Any practice, even if it is superstitious, even if it makes no sense, can be effective just because it is an expression of the will. Within the bookshop, a dusty darkness was made noticeable by the existence of one low-lying patch of light. At ten p.m. business hours were long over, and the place revenged itself upon intrusion by the uncanny air of peopled solitude, the suggestion that all trespassers will be prosecuted, with circumstances of occult terror, which lurks in empty houses, deep forests, and solitary shrines. Commerce was cast out, and seven other devils took her place. A woman stood within the patch of light, and also within a small circle which she had traced with charcoal upon the imperfectly scrubbed floor. She seemed a healthy and a solid woman, body and brain well balanced, soul asleep. She was studying a stained and coarsely printed door decimaux which lay upon the desk beside her. It was a rare old English translation of the Grand Limoire, which, having recently been re-backed with new brown Morocco by strenuous and unsympathetic hands, was now kept open with difficulty by a heavy stamp moistener and two bulldog letter clips. The light was produced by two candles of that brownish-yellow wax which Catholics always burn about the beers of their dead. Since the agents of death and birth are always one, it is hardly strange that these should be the lights assigned by antique tradition to help the incoming of another life. The candles stood upon the floor. With the spot on which the woman was, they marked the point of a triangle which had been carefully drawn within the charcoal ring. Hence they at once proclaimed themselves as instruments of ceremony, not of illumination. They belonged rather to the saucer full of incense, a little pan of charcoal that stood on the gas stove, then to the daily apparatus of ledger, order-book and publishers' catalogs which crowded the neighbouring desk. A small mirror hung high up between the book-shelves. It was tilted forward, giving an excellent view of the floor. The flames of the candle were reflected in it, two shining points exhibiting with a horrible thoroughness the vast and lonely dusk in which they shone. Thus seen, winking and glittering out of the greyness, they seemed intimately, unpleasantly alive. Constance Tyrell, in spite of a sound classical education and much inherited and carefully fostered common sense, felt them to be watchful personalities, companions full of eerie suggestion, poisoning her essential solitude by their hint of terrible companionship. She began instinctively to calculate the shortest possible time in which her present business could be accomplished. Then, detecting in this operation the first symptom of oncoming panic, she deliberately looked away from the mirror and again forced her attention to the grimoire and to the grotesque and varied objects which were ranged upon her desk, ready for use. There was a piece of cardboard on which the pentagram, the tetragrammaton and the caduceus, had been traced by collared inks according to the recipe of Eliphas Levy. Symbols in outline are seldom impressive and I am afraid that this talisman had failed to affect her imagination as it should. She hung it upon her breast with a piece of string and, noting the effect, wondered whether this were or were not the ancestor of her scapular. There was also a forked, hazel twig, its tips covered with little thimbles of steel, the magicians wanded. She took it in her hand and, staying always within the circle, reached out for the pan of charcoal and placed it on the ground before her. The childishness of these proceedings would have amused her had it not been for the intense silence, the loneliness of the bookshop, its dim uncertain corners and the horrible impression of looking out into infinite and cruel darkness, only possible to those who stand in a restricted patch of light, which she received when she raised her eyes from the ground. This darkness was made the more hateful by its very incompleteness by the radiant mirror which swam out from it, reflecting the two candle flames like the glowing eyes of some vigilant animal eternally imprisoned in its depths. Now and then she heard footsteps in the street, the rattle and the hoot of a motor, the barking of dogs. These noises reminded her that she was shut in with another world, another century, where she could claim no aid but that afforded by her own curiosity and courage. She took a little incense from her saucer and threw it on the charcoal. The perfumed smoke ascended in a thick white cloud, veiling the disconcerting mirror in the surrounding bookshelves, inappropriately filled with county histories, educational works and cheap reprints. It placed itself between constants and these objects of her daily toil, shut her more closely within her undertaking. She was in the midst of it now, this visible sign of transcendental ambitions assured her of that. Its scent in her nostrils assured her too of the solemnities of the undertaking. It lapped her into the atmosphere of ceremony, opened vistas of dream. She turned with a new confidence to the Grimoire and began to read aloud the ritual of conjuration. It was her first attempt to force the lock of that door, which has no key. Ego cant stantia conjuro ti perdeum vivum, perdeum virum perdeum sanctum et regniatum. She said it bravely, yet in the very act of reading her judgment sat aloof, it refused to capitulate before the fragrance, the darkness, the amazing phrases. It reminded her that the thing was silly, whilst her imagination murmured that the words were, at any rate, stupendous. She read them, this long, elaborate spell, in the high-pitched, shaky and shame-stricken voice of one who rehearses some pretentious piece of rhetoric alone, and dreads the mortification of being overheard. Also, to speak clearly, seemed almost an acknowledgment that there was, after all, something present to which she could speak. It was an act which peopled the dusky corners of the shop with terrible presences. She shivered a little, and forgot to attribute her discomfort to self-suggestion or overstimulated nerves. She kept her eye fixed upon the grimoire, lest they should meet in the mirror the reflection of some life other than her own. With each fresh phrase of the strange chant, the majestic appeal to the invisible people's intangible powers, the suspicion that this life awaited the opening of her eyes increased. Te ex orkiso et nuk et sine mora apareas mi hijuksta circulum pulcla et onesta, anime et corporis forma. She paused. She wondered whether she really desired this terrific result, conceived its possibility. The smoke had cleared a little, and she could detect the opposite side of the shop and the glint of some unpleasant scarlet bindings. Standard English novels and half-rowing with decked edge. Everything was very quiet. Her nervousness had passed away. Nothing happened. Constance discovered herself to be disappointed. She believed nothing, and was therefore the more ready to believe anything. Having all the transcendental curiosity of the true materialist. Her present undertaking was either perilous or absurd. She was not disposed to take either of these risks for nothing. Her fighting instincts were aroused. If success were possible, she would not forgo it. Hence the last clauses of the incantation came from her lips with an imperious ring which was appropriate enough to that superb procession of divine names by which the student of magic really compels himself to exultation. Whilst he purports to be compelling the spirits of the air. The final phrases echoed through the empty shop in a wild and appealing cry which she hardly recognized as her own. Thus recited fresh from the book by one who knew nothing of its cipher, the necessity of discovering the truly secret words beneath their concealing signs. It would have sounded absurd enough in the ears of a professional occultist. But on this woman's lips it was at once a prayer and a command. She perceived for the first time why it was that these eccentric substantives were known as words of power. Their curious rhythms rose as it were. To waves, inexorable waves of sound, which battered the cliff of uncreated things. As she ceased she realized that she was intensely fatigued, the overpowering fatigue of a person who has worked beyond her strength and feels every limb to be invaded by the languors of her brain. It seemed to her, too, that the shop had become very cold, evidently a gusty wind had arisen outside and found its way under the ill-fitting door, for the two candle flames flickered suddenly as if blown sharply toward her, then, righted themselves to her. At the end of the avocation, said the grimoire, if the spirit, which is conjured by the magus, still fails to appear, the operator will place the steel tips of his wick on her. Constance had read these directions in this warning with some amusement during her furtive studies of the occult, but she was not afraid to say anything about it. Be not afraid, adds the rubric, though ye shall hear the loud cries and groans of the spirits who are now being forced to appear within the circle of the earth. Constance had read these directions in this warning with some amusement during her furtive studies of the occult. Upon a sunny afternoon in early spring, in the interval of serving a lady addicted to the literature of the higher health and curate, she wished to read Pierre-Louis for reasons unconnected with French prose. She had found its careful encouragements quaint and delightful. Now, oddly enough, she turned it once, though with a certain tremulousness, to look for the page upon which the strange syllables of the clavicle were drawn within their encompassing sign. She did it naturally and inevitably, as if it were now impossible to abandon this adventure whilst any path remained untried. But as she searched by the feeble light of her candles, the tightly bound leaves of the little book escaped from fingers which were no longer very steady in their grasp. It shut itself with a snap, and she caught sight between two fly-leaves of a tiny slip of paper, so thin that a breath was needed to disengage it from the page on which it lay. There were on it a few lines of faded writing and many curious signs. In her rather hasty collation of the grimoire she had not seen this paper, now because she was eager and somewhat disheartened by her non-success. Why died toward all chances of adventure? She took it from its place, held it to the light, and deciphered with difficulty the opening words. Lo, my beloved son and very dear disciple, I bequeath to thee this grimoire, the companion of my labours wherein are faithfully set forth the true rituals of magic, together with all things needful for the prosecution of that most divine experiment on which thou art set, to wit, the word, the sign, and the way. Guard well that secret knowledge, remembering the four oaths of thy initiation, to dare, to will, to learn, and to conceal. But as to this book have no fear lest the profane and those unlearned in philosophy discover ought therein, since, even as the ark within the temple, all truth here dwells behind a veil, which veil the priests of the hidden wisdom alone may pass. Here followed the three lines of cabalistic figures which Constance could not read. At the side there was a gloss and tiny writing, Nota, take heed that thou dost not forget to sing rightly, and according to the manner of the adepts, these most powerful and all holy names of God, and the great key of Solomon, our master, for it is very certain that upon the due observance of this matter the whole virtue of thine evocation thus depend. She replaced the paper in the grimoire, feeling herself to be little enlightened, for she had no knowledge of that right singing of the adepts, which it held essential to the work. However she turned to the clavicle, and laid the metal tips of her wand upon the brassiere carefully and efficiently, as if she were busied over some intricate operation of cookery, as accurate in her ritual actions as any priest before the altar of his god. She glanced at the mirror, and saw reflected in it her own face. The candles lit it from below, casting peculiar shadows upon the eye-sockets and chin. It seemed a stranger's face, white, peering, curious, and amazed. The contours which gave it its workaday expression of responsibility and common sense had disappeared. She began to read, and now to her amazement a third, an almost horrible change, came over her voice. It was no longer the shame-faced muttering thing of a person who suspects her own absurdity, had no more the sharp pitch of overstrong but undefeated nerves. Constance now was impelled to chant in a loud tone and with a grave intense and crescent determination, the strange old Hebrew spell. The words drew from her, she knew not for what reason, a long and rhythmic cry, a wailing music with curious, ululative prolongations of the vowel sounds. It came from some obscure corner of her spirit which thus found for the first time a language suited to its needs. She has ceased to be self-conscious, and was far away from the bookshop, her whole will pressing against the barriers of an experience which, as she had gradually and automatically come to believe, was close to her hand, and as the walls of Jericho fell before the persistent trumpets, so under the assault of her cry this barrier seemed to tremble. Therefore appear, lest I continue to torment thee with the words of power of that great Solomon, thy master. The stream of strange and twisted syllables, the unearthly, wailing song, the rhythms which made no appeal to the ear of sense, rose and lifted her with them. Then gathered the whole strength of her spirit for the supreme statement of exalted and illuminated will. Mesia solter Emanuel sab'ot adonai, te adoro et invorko! Her eyes were upon the mirror as she ended, and still it reflected her own strained face, but no other. There was no other hand laid on her shoulder, no veiled form, but there was surely something in the mirror which she had not seen before. She saw a tiny disturbance on the ground, close beyond the edge of the charcoal ring, as if the draft that blew beneath the door had disturbed a little pile of dust. It rose in the air a little way, and hung there, like a cloud. Everything was natural enough, for there is always plenty of dust in a bookshop. Nevertheless, the small movement in the dusk had jogged Constance's weary nerves. She watched it, fascinated, longing all the while to look away, and as she watched, a fresh wave of overmastering fatigue came over her. And with it, of course, a sudden gust of fear. In the impossible event of a spiritual manifestation she had but to conquer her will to lay her hand upon the pentagram and command the presence to obey, not to intimidate its conjurer. But it takes great confidence in the unseen to attribute to supernatural causes a phenomenon which may well have been produced by a drafty doer. She stared and struggled, with a rising pulse and feelings of great discomfort in her throat. Meanwhile, the little column of dust rose with a curious spiral motion, as if it were impelled from within. It hung in the air a gray, faint, cobwebby thing, and then she heard the crying of a sad and frightened voice, which said, Ah, what has happened? I am caught. I cannot get away. And again, an inarticulate cry that came in a rising cadence of anguish and dread, she exclaimed, My God, what is it? What have I done? The sound of her own voice, harsh and uncertain, convinced her that the other voice had not been heard by the outward ear. She turned from the mirror and looked with horror at the floor. The column of dust had disappeared. The candles burned clearly in the dusk. Then she remembered that she was quite alone, that there was nothing more to do, nothing that she could do. It was late and she longed to be away. She went to the back of the shop and switched on the electric light. It seemed an almost impious proceeding after all that had passed. But the nice commonplace click and the immediate radiance comforted her. She extinguished her ceremonial candles, packed away wand, pentagram and incense in her little leather bag, and carefully rubbed the circle from the floor. The physical exercise restored her to a sense of her own largeness, healthiness, solidity. She forgot the imaginary voice and remembered the real world. She left the bookshop, locking the door behind her. She held the keys for Mr. Lampton, who was of a slothful disposition, and left his manager as many responsibilities as he could. She was glad to be out in the air again and looked forward to a brisk walk through lighted streets. At this moment the mud and motor omnibuses, the drizzling rain that fell were familiar and delightful things, freckles on the beloved face of life. There was a dead kitten in the gutter, a little bag of fur. She stepped back when she saw it and crossed the road, lower down. She was not a squeamish woman, but this was hardly the moment for dead things. It was evidently true, as Eliphaz Lavey had said and modern occultists agreed, that magical operations did have some curious effects upon the mind. She could not recover her normal poise. Things wore an unusual air, and she was an alien amongst them. She decided that she would go to bed early. She was not in the mood for sitting alone that night. She had yet to realize that she would never be alone anymore. Chapter 3 Furnished Lodgings Now I know that the walls of scents that seemed so impenetrable, that seemed to loom above the heavens and to be founded below the depths, and to shut us in for evermore, or no such everlasting impassable barriers as we fancied, but thinnest and most airy veils that melt away before the seeker, and dissolve as the early mist of the morning about the brooks. Arthur Machin, The House of Souls In common with the many persons who have some imagination but small taste for mesophysics, Constance had conceived of the invisible world as situated somehow in the air, crisply defined within its own frontiers, and amenable to the usual classifications of geography. Its inhabitants were as safely bestowed as the inhabitants of the zoo. They were behind strong bars of natural phenomena, and could not get out. The spirit world of the old and the astral plane of the new occultists, each suggested to her separate cages into which the curious might sometimes look. This woman had the mania of adventure and few opportunities of gratifying her taste. For years she had moved within the dull boundaries of a wage earner's existence, which she abhorred, but could not overpass. Once she had explored the deeps of life, now heights and deeps alike seemed shut from her, she longed for new landscape, experience, danger. Hence her sudden excursion into life's uncharted outskirts, those building estates which the spirit of man has not yet decided to develop. Though she was, in her own opinion, wholly free from superstition, she had thought it possible that by deliberate recourse to the self-hypnotizing ceremonial of the old magicians she might at any rate peep into the strange, wild district beyond the barriers of sense. For much that is obviously absurd when ascribed to the agency of unforeseen forces becomes acceptable to the educated mind if interpreted in terms of psychology. Explaining the human soul with that precision which is so sadly lacking in the Pentateuch, this science had taught Constance that the release of her subliminal powers was all that was necessary if she wished to perceive the unknown, but strictly natural, world beyond the threshold as an interesting extension of the known. If you see in your incantation a method of shifting the field of consciousness and call your magic wand and autoscope, these things no longer seem silly, but take their place as part of the cosmic plan. A careful study of the work of Professor James had further convinced her that some forms of credulity were still compatible with self-respect. But the result of her temporary will to believe and of the experiment which it had prompted was, as she now felt, profoundly unsatisfactory. She was left in complete doubt as to whether or no the invocation had worked, and the skeptical state so convenient when its object is the dogma of a too strenuous religion is very uncomfortable when applied to an individual ghost. If her conjuration had indeed released supernatural powers, if it were true that something had happened, the inner eye had been opened upon a hidden plane of being, then she had seen what? An unmeaning and horrible interference with that solid earth and those respectable laws of nature which she preferred to take for granted? A column of dust that mounted and hung in the air as if endowed with some incomprehensible life. The thought of it, of the intimate and unnatural thing, was more dreadful than any phantom could have been. It seemed to make all things unsafe. She decided that it could not, must not be true. Science came to the assistance of its child and helped her to put a proper interpretation on an adventure which refused to square itself with any known theory of the unseen, but ranged itself easily amongst the accredited varieties of optical and auditory hallucination. To look at it in any other way would have been too horrible to connect the strange and tormented voice which, as she assured herself, she had not really heard, with that vision of the writhing, twisting, misty yet living thing which rose one knew not how and vanished one knew not where. This was to knock the bottom out of all her past experience, to acquiesce in the unreality of all real things, even of life. Constance adored life. She had clutched it and been stung by it, but in spite of this rebuff she remained its lover, adoring the wonders which she never tasted, passionately credulous of charms which she was not permitted to enjoy. The world which she lived, unconscious of life, as children sit upon the knee of their mother and play indifferently with little toys never pausing to look into her face, this normal, practical, earning and spending world had always seemed strange to her its scales of values unreal and remote. She had silently refused to acknowledge that scale of values, the importance of demeanor and propriety, of buying and selling, of food, furniture, games, change of air, and of all this little sterile daily act. Watching other women in their attitude towards life, she was reminded of persons who, suddenly confronted by a goddess, could find their attention to the fact that she twiddles her thumbs. But in spite of brave theories of curiosity, boredom, and eternal readiness for the adventures which so seldom came, she was invaded now by a longing for ordinary, trivial, homely things. The instinctive human fear of the unseen had been awakened by the evening's performance. As she walked she looked for a dog who might be persuaded to lick her hand. She would have liked to gossip with her landlady, or struggle for bargains at a sale. A beggar accosted her, and she, who had so few pennies to spare, took out her purse. She made a remark about the weather, eagerly, thirsting for the little contact with humanity, which would obliterate the memory of that other contact with something, perhaps, which was not human at all. But the beggar was taciturn. He took the money and went away. Constance's eyes followed him with regret. The mood of adventure was over, and the reactive had come. In the midst of her solitary and uncongenial life, which a cultivated skepticism did little to cheer, she had wished so much to open a new door to satisfy latent but passionate curiosities, add new territory to her domain. Now that wish had departed, leaving behind it the insecure sensation of one who was peeped for a moment through a forbidden door in the ramparts, and obtained from this glimpse a permanent memory of great precipices all about her dwelling-place of the black gulf and soundless moat below. She dreaded the four walls of her room, shutting her in to a tetatet with her own imagination. Presently she came to those four walls by way of a grained door and three flights of linoleum-covered stairs. She fumbled for matches and lighted her duplex lamp. It smelt as usual and in refreshingly real way. The dingy mantle-border maroon cloth with a faded embroidery of old gold chrysanthemums further reassured her. But she avoided the mirror and would have liked to cover it up had it not been that she was afraid of despising herself. Her own contempt was the only humiliation that she could not bear. Vero's toy is lay everywhere. Constance picked up a doll-frock upon which the child had evidently wiped her mouth after eating bread and jam for tea. Actuality was there, ready to encourage and support its worshipper. She dropped the frock and went to the window, looking out from her empty, bright and hideous room which distressed her into the dim and attractive night. The soft rain, which was hardly more than a determined dampness, had given a delicate sheen to the sloping roof next to her own, and she enjoyed it with that cultivated taste for appearance which is the prerogative of solitary lives. Her rooms, for cheapness' sake, were high up, and the vista was all of slates, parapets, and chimney-pots, delightfully various, full of quaint and unreasonable irregularities, with that character of ruggedness which is peculiar to the tops of things. The moist roof comforted Constance. It gave to her suddenly an image of the whole, safe and mighty city, and shrouded in a benevolent mist of rain, all the bright eyes of its million houses, peering with the utmost assurance into the dusk, all the vivid streaks of trains and trams running in and under its roads without fear or hesitation. That solid, sharply-lit, assertive city was full of living creatures, real ones. It was so compact, so assured, so full of itself, that there could be no room for the invisible populations to creep between its close networks of shops and souls. She heard the jingle of a handsome in the street behind her, the scrape and clatter of the hooves, as it drew up. The iron cried, real, real, real, as it struck the ground. Constance knew the sound very well. Once night had fallen, many handsoms came to the house in the street behind. Sometimes the noise and all that was implied by it saddened and disgusted her. Somehow it echoed the beloved music of the town and brought her an inexplicable sense of companionship and consolation. For years of intense loneliness had taught her to extract from human noises, human sights, something of the social warmth for which she longed. She suddenly found that it was quite easy to turn back into the glaring and solitary room. That was part of the sheltering town, a cell, her cell, in the great hive, and therefore as friendly to her, as protective as the streets. There was nothing, nothing real, to differentiate this evening from other evenings. No reason why she should not make her cocoa as usual. Read a while and go to bed. She went to the china cupboard and discovered with vexation that her favorite cup had been used for painting water and left unwashed. She turned and glanced round the room, searching for further disagreeable results of Vera's activity. Then she saw near the fireplace a little column of dust that rose and hung in the air. She stared at it with the dull and bewildered stare of a backward child who was given a difficult task. It was far beyond her power of assimilation, but she perceived it to be hence-forward a part of her life, added to experience by her own act and desire. Her nature rose then of its own accord to meet it, as usually happens when the great things of life break abruptly upon the soul. She was not particularly astonished. She was hardly afraid. She began to walk up and down the room, trying to argue with herself, recalling to her remembrance all that she had ever read upon self-suggestion and hallucination. These considerations, however, wore a hopelessly academic air and brought no conviction with them. At intervals her mind returned with a jerk to the actualities of the moment, and she glanced tasteily and furtively at the corner of the room. Always the cloud of dust hung in the air. She knew it in her heart to be a sign of life, of something that would communicate with her if it could. She felt it there as lonely and as curious as herself, but she was not softened by its need. She set her whole will as a barrier against its coming. She was determined to ward off this horrible companionship which pressed toward her with a certain wistfulness like some desperate and desolate creature exiled in a foreign town. She felt the assault of its desire and resisted with all her strength. The room grew cold as she stood there with clenched hands and rigid knees. This time she recognized the symptom as one that was proper to her state. Then the little gray thing wavered and leaned toward her. It was like a sudden sally from an invested citadel. Constance wavered too and knew the battle to be lost. She screamed and was not even ashamed of herself. There was an answering scream from the next room. Vera cried out, Tanta, Tanta, what's the matter, I want you, it's dark and I'm awake. She went to the child. Herself the more terrified, the more child life. She too was awake in the dark and accepted with gratitude the comforting presence of a fellow victim. There was a feeble gas jet in the passage and by its light Vera's small dark face convulsed with fear was discernible as a shadowy patch amongst the tossed bedclothes. Constance gathered the little warm body to her own lap. It shook with the terror of an animal which scents panic in its neighborhood. She said with unusual tenderness, what's the matter, my little one? For the spur of fear had touched her human instincts on the quick. Vera cried, oh I don't know but it's dark, it's dreadful and I heard a boogie scream in my alone. There are no boogies darling, you are dreaming. As she said it she wished that it were true. Vera curled herself tightly against the broad firm shoulder. You hold me tight and then they won't come. She said, Constance, sitting in the darkness on the uncomfortable bedroom chair with the child's heavy body in her arms, the quarrelous little voice in her ears saying, hold me tight, you mustn't go, you shant. Wished that she might thus sit forever with the protective influence of the flesh between her and the invading foe. It was a new sensation for Vera was not an attractive child and her many claims upon attention had never included a sentimental appeal. She seemed to present no promise of a future womanhood but rather, in some elusive way, a condensed history of those animal natures through which her spirit had presumably climbed on its way toward life. The squat stature, the heavy limbs, the lowering brow, the wide and formless mouth were adapted to be the agents of instinct rather than of character and instinct, elemental appetites and uncontrolled passions had already sealed them. But at this moment Constance forgot those things. She looked at the clumsy little body with a new eagerness, a new possessive sense. She cuddled it against her bosom, concentrated on its helplessness, its happy ignorance, its warmth. By her own act, her own arrogant curiosity, strangeness and terror had been admitted to her universe. They must not be permitted to infect this scrap of life which was in her keeping. She perceived that she must endure them alone, must never entertain company in that dreadful room of windows which looked out upon the timeless, spaceless wilds. Everything, after all, had to be attempted and endured alone once childhood was passed. The hive-like city of a myriad cells which seemed so social and so warm was really a city of myriad prisons. Each inhabitant, in some unendurable hour when the view from the windows was too clear, the solitude of the four walls too keen would fling himself as she had done upon this door to find that an inexorable hand had turned the key. But in some of the cells two were shut together and they protected one another from the impact of solitude and fear so that the prison straight away became a home. There was no one who would do this for her, no one in all the world to whom she could tell her adventure, to whom she could appeal for the sheltering love, the dear human presence, the foolish comforting platitudes of common sense. She had got to see it out and when she had seen it out no one would know, no one would blame her curiosity or admire her courage. This fact added to the old monotonous loneliness in which she had lived so long, a new and bitter sense of isolation. Vera was quickly comforted. Soon she fell asleep. Constance put her into bed very gently, left a lighted candle and a chocolate cream by her side and returned to the sitting room. As she entered she glanced quickly toward the corner. But the column of dust was not there. She was reassured and shut the door softly. Then she perceived that there was a figure sitting by the fireplace. It was perhaps less a figure than a form, an impressionist sketch of humanity without detail and without sex. That unnerved her and she shrank with beating heart against the closed door, hid her face with her hands and stayed in that comforting and self-imposed darkness for a period which seemed to have no relation to ordinary intervals of time. At last she heard within her mind the sad and wailing voice which had first attacked her in the bookshop. But it had lost its original accent of fear and grief. It said, If they are all cowards, what am I to do? And how shall I ever understand? Because she could not endure the taunt of cowardice even from a voice which she suspected was her own, she raised her head and looked again. Then she saw two brilliant wild and hungry eyes which gazed into hers from the recesses of some alien life that had caught them in its folds. She said, What are you? What have I done? And again the silent voice replied, You know. She exclaimed, No, I do not understand. It seemed to her that it was a sad and lost thing which had answered her with difficulty, and picking its way as it were amongst the strange periods of a foreign tongue. It said, Nor do I, but I think that you have got to see me as a shape, as something which has a limiting edge, because otherwise you will not let me enter your experience. You are dreaming so deeply that you cannot recognize spirit unless it enters into the unreasonable illusions of your dream, so I must attack your consciousness on its ordinary, earthly plane, because I will get in, I will know, I have got to understand. She cried out suddenly, Oh, it isn't real, it can't be real! The voice said, No. A picture built of your dream stuff, that is all. But do not be deceived, all pictures represent realities. I am here, within the appearance, as you are there, within your clothes. What does the shape matter? It is only a little dust. But there was no one sitting by the fire. She exclaimed in her astonishment, I thought I saw. And there was again a voice that replied, and you think you know, and you think you feel, what strange and meaningless dreams. Then the last scrap of courage deserted her, and she seized the lamp and fled in gloriously from the room. But she turned at the door and looked swiftly and furtively at the corner of the fireplace from which she fled. It was a coward's glance, and met a coward's retribution. There was a little eddy of dust that rose from the floor, and hung suspended in the air. Constance undressed hastily, and lay wakeful, with Vera held tightly in her arms. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of The Column of Dust by Evelyn Underhill The Day's Work This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Josh Middeldorf. Little by little, he had penetrated a greater number of psychic elements, the tendons, so to speak, of his own color. And here is your point of view on all the things you seem to have changed, Bergson. Little by little, he had penetrated a greater number of the psychic elements, regarded them for thus to discern with his own coloration. It was here that your point of view on the entirety of such things seemed now to have changed. Bergson, the imminent gifts of conscience. This one rift in the solid stuff out of which he had built her universe, this hateful and inconsistent thing which her senses reported, left Constance poised solitary in the midst of terrific spaces. All that she called reality had been shattered, and only consciousness remained as a certain fact. She had seen, abruptly, the insecurity of those defenses which protect our illusions and ward off the horrors of truth. She had found a little hole in the wall of appearance, and peeping through had caught a glimpse of that seething pot of spiritual forces once, now and then, a bubble rises to the surface of things. There were beings there, living and full of horror because devoid of shape. She had opened a door for them, and now they could press in on her, and she loathing their companionship could not resist. All her robust and eager enjoyment of life fled from her. It was not real anymore. Only that invisible and intangible eternity behind the Shadow Show was real. That, and its detestable inhabitants. She had one consolation. She felt herself to be unique in so perceiving the true proportion of things many teachers she knew had referred to it, but she shared the conviction of all other tasters of supreme experience that no one had seen reality face to face before. It made this poor, visible life seem futile, its discipline absurd, yet she was immersed in that life, and it pressed in on her, forcing itself on her attention in a peculiarly exasperating way. There were mysteries all about her, strange companions, a knowledge of some actual and densely populated world here at hand, penetrating her own body perhaps, as well as all objects of her thought. Yet Vera's bath must be faced every morning, and the shop, that little universe where souls and bodies were but the material for a profitable distribution of the real things—cloth, leather, paper, and ink. This state of things constituted a paradox which would have been amusing had it not been personal. As she went to business in the morning, automatically dodging the motor-omnibuses, staring out of her dream in amazement at the people who surged up in her path, all hurrying, all unreal, she repeated to herself continually, I have got to go on, I have got to go on. She came to the book-shop at the moment in which the last of the shutters ran up with a bang, disclosing a window in which Constance was accustomed to take a certain professional pride. She gave it, as she entered, the scrutinizing glance which a good housewife bestows on the drawing-room curtains as she goes up her garden-path. The window was wide and uncrowded, the loving aptitude of a museum, not the tightly packed practicalities of trade. It was never without its MS of the decretals, its Flemish herbals, open at a page at once decorative and decorous. Burton's Arabian knights, placed discreetly in the background, a cover entouled Laval from the Dove's Bindery, were one or two of the rarer products of the Kelmscut Press. Within topography and scandalous chronicles jostled the ancients very comfortably upon the shelves. There were also a few high-class remainders and several piles of cheap reprints. For Lamptons was one of the many establishments which stand Janus-faced between culture and commerce. One quarter was devoted to current literature. Reviewers' copies often uncut and always very cheap. Two tables stood in the wide space between the bookshelves. On one, Mr. John Lampton arranged a permanent exhibition of book-lovers' trinkets. Limited editions, pocket classics, neatly boxed marvels of limp lambskin and rough calf, Thomas a Kempis in twenty different dresses, all worldly, the Wisdom of the East in American Spelling, were the Ballad of Reading Jail, clothed with a chaste absurdity in white. The other table, which was smaller, held large, unreadable colour-books. A few works on Italian painters, and new copies of such novels as Constance felt that cultured and bookish people ought to read. She looked up as she entered at that tightly-ribbed row of books on the shelves. Little nests of words bewilderingly various. They were gay in the morning light and wide awake. She stared at them as one stares at abnormal shapes, seeing them no longer as concrete things, but as odd agglomerations of line and surface. Little nests of words, ideas, those evanescent, wandering things, caught and tucked up in paper as unruly children are tucked up in bed. She opened a book and let the soul of it gush out like perfume, invading, overwhelming the mind. This was a daily miracle, and she the purveyor of such miracles. She had never thought of it before, but at this moment the mystery of it swept her, and with amazement, that one should thus sell thoughts for money, since thoughts were real and money was not. How inconceivable an act to communicate the dream which came from the heart of Dante in three volumes limp green leather for six shillings net. In the face of this and all other paradoxes of her concrete life she was suddenly infected with an unworldly bewilderment. She looked out with astonished vision on an incredible earth. All things were made new, for it seemed that she had abruptly acquired the innocence of eye, which we snatched so easily from our children, to give back so tardily and incompletely to our artists, poets, and saints. She took off her hat, assumed her blue linen overall, and sat down at her desk. The mirror was opposite to her, she raised her eyes, sawed, and at once the scene of the past night was recreated for her, the dusk and solitude, all the ceremonial absurdities, the perfumed smoke, which was ascended like a white pillar, that other pillar of grey and shivering dust which had arisen from the floor, the urgent and tormented voice that had addressed itself to no earthly ear, fire and all the eternities evoked in a bookshop in that prison of a myriad cells the tangible and intangible worlds were swept up together in a plain heap of confused experience like the surging clouds in a crystal-gazer's bowl. But it was the invisible side that seemed homely and possible of comprehension, the visible that was alien and remote. When she questioned herself she found nothing save the nervous upheaval caused by her late experience to account for this state of things. She was amazed by her own topsy-turvy condition, the sense of it, and interested in it, but she seemed to have lost the useful art of taking things for granted. She stared at the strange new world of unmeaning colour and shape and wondered why it should exist at all. Then Mr. John Lampton came through the glass door from his private room and at once Constance became the normal businesswoman, the useful manager, the prudent and cultivated bibliophile. Mr. John held a catalogue in his hand. He was going to ask her advice, a circumstance much dreaded by Miss Tyrell, since it often compelled her to exhibit an intellectual superiority which Prudence advised her to keep for the sole use of her customers. It's one thing to bandy horrors with old gentlemen and another to improve inadvertently upon your employer's Latin pronunciation. Mr. Lampton had engaged Constance because an assistant who knew something about literature had become necessary to his peace of mind. He was one of those unfortunate persons whose short sight and aquiline nose suggest a culture which their conversation cannot endorse. In such a superior class of business as that of Lampton and Sons, this was particularly inconvenient. For else of years in the window or held to imply erudition behind the counter. There was scarcely a day in which some customer did not embark upon a conversation which Mr. John was obliged to terminate in a sudden and sometimes tactless way. The thing came to a head on the morning upon which a disgusted liturgiologist found Dugdale's monastacon and Heckel's monism. Side by side on the shelf labeled RC Theology. Mr. John, stung by his client's contemptuous glance, alarmed by his immediate exit, felt that the services of a well-educated inferior had become no less necessary to commercial prosperity than to personal comfort and self-respect. Miss Tyrell then found herself obliged to maintain a carefully subsidiary position whilst keeping a vigilant eye upon her employer's bibliographical aberrations. He was rather glad to find that on this morning he wished to consult her about nothing more recondite than the Romant of Sir Gawain, the large paper edition of which had just gone into remainder. Mr. John thought that it could be sold very profitably at one in six and he observed that it was fine, large book for the money and if cased in velvet calf with ribbon ties would be singularly suitable for presentation. You had better sent an order to-day, he said, or else one of the other big houses will go and buy the lot. When they come, get them bound up and put aside for the Christmas season, though fetch half a guinea then. But I think it's only a facsimile of the Burdette manuscript, answered Constance, not at all a book for general circulation, Middle English very difficult to make out and a good deal of curious matter in the notes. Mr. John replied, all the better, looks cultured, medieval and so on, people don't want to read the books they give away. Constance wrote out the order in a spirit of disgusted obedience and then remembered how little such things mattered to one who had attained to the superb generalizations which characterized her present view of life. This view had departed from her at Mr. John's entrance. Now it began to encroach slow steps upon her orderly and busy mind. She was enfranchised from that carefulness about many bibliographical things which usually obsessed her from nine to seven. But she had only cast off one set of chains to assume another. It was gradually born in on her that her senses were no longer quite her own. There was a thing which used them and she participated in that use but could not control it. She leaned, as it were, over the shoulder of a new inhabitant and peeped out of the window with him. So peeping she recognized a fellow victim of that impassioned curiosity, that cold lust of knowledge which had urged her to all the adventure of life. It seemed as though she, out of the whole phenomenal world, had attracted her antitype in the world of reality. When she turned inward and asked the persistent presence, why are you here? He, using perforce the language with which his hostess provided him, could only answer, I want to know. All through life that had been her own need. She respected it. Presently a customer who had been prowling happily in the recesses of the shop approached with a copy of Balzac's Conte de Relatique. He had unearthed it from the dark corners where those books which are catalogued curious were usually kept and was turning it over with interest. Seeing a young woman behind the desk he hesitated, but reflected the shop girl's share with nurses a certain immunity from the ordinary decencies of life and came boldly on. This, he said, seems a very quaint, uncommon sort of book, most amusing too, but it's, well, distinctly, don't you know? He thought for a moment, came to the conclusion that his French was bound to be better than hers and added firmly, Lybrique! Constance, hardly readjusted to West London ideals, answered him calmly and vaguely. He writes entirely from the medieval standpoint, puts everything down, of course, just as it really happens without leaving out the usual things, but there's nothing uncommon in it really. Nothing but life. The costume is different from the white candid, that's all. Modern married life in the suburbs is just as, she was determined to give him his word again, just as Lybrique! The customer looked at her with surprise and with a noticeable joyous anticipation, but her smooth black hair and solid figure did not suggest pleasantries. She added immediately, that copy is twelve and six. It's in very good state and has all the doré illustrations. I can give you another, with the margins rather cut down for seven shillings, if you like, but it isn't such good value for the money. The customer thanked her and said he would think it over. He left the book lying on the desk and Constance carefully reinterred it in its dark corner, returned to her ledger and glanced at the clock. It was half past twelve and a quarter to one was the hour of the mid-day friend. The shop has its gang of prowlers who pay their footing by a purchase once in a while, but have their real commercial value for the establishment in the fact that they stimulate the prowling instincts of other passers-by. These may be persons of a nicer conscience than your true adept of the business and feel that each delicious loiter and surreptitious bout of reading must be paid for, if only from the penny-box. The conscientious prowler, however, took the passing months to join the more professional and less lucrative class. It was the distinction of the mid-day friend that he had moved in the opposite direction in that slow, unnoticed way which is peculiar to great constitutional changes. His visits had ceased to be an accident and had become an institution. There had been first the involuntary glance at the wide and open entrance as he passed and then the momentary lingering to read a title or so and then the day on which he had entered the shop in chase of a colour-book whose vivid charms had forced its into remainder a little before the usual time. He had turned it over, looking with admiration at the blue trees and orange castles and the purple-margined peasants silhouetted against greenish skies. Then he had put it down with a sigh. I'm afraid I must not take it, he said. The truth is my wife doesn't like these books and it vexes her to see them lie about. You see, she has made our house very artistic. Whitewash and all that. This statement at once aroused sentiments of interest and pity in Constance. Delightful and stimulating emotions which her customers seldom provoked. She conceived of this blunt, square, bullet-headed man, wholesomely animal, poised uncomfortably upon sparse and tasteful furniture, his very weight and virility in offence, his broad-toed boots always in the way. The constant society of a wife who condemned all that one thought ingenious and beautiful seemed a more lonely business than her own solitary lodgings where there was, at any rate, no one to set up irksome and exclusive cannons of taste. On his next visit she learned that his name was Andrew, mentioned in connection with Scotland, the national thistle and the animals which feed thereon. This form of humour seemed a relief to him. She defined that it was not permitted at home. She had laughed with such evident good humour and enjoyment that he could hardly fail to index her as the sort of woman who understands and appreciates a man. He bought a book. On the next day he returned and bought another, with a pathetic air of trying to make his visits worth her while. In a week they seemed intimate friends. Upon this morning Constance looked forward almost hungrily to Andrew's visit. She turned toward the idea of his solid and unimaginative personality with that instinct for a counter-irritant which causes us to seek out our least appropriate acquaintances in seasons of grief. He did not want to be spiritual. He did not want to think. She saw at this moment much to commend in such a point of view. She loved her body. Honoured it deliberately as the medium of all great experience. The mid-day friend took the body seriously, was interested in the clothes which it wore, the games that were good for it, the things that one gave it to eat. His own body was excellently groomed, warm, efficient and compact. He would have been shocked and puzzled by the suggestion that it really had something in common with a column of dust. For outside the pages of the burial service such metaphors were clearly morbid and absurd. He came. His, morning, Miss Tyrell. Hope you're well. Beastly weather we're having. I'd once satisfied her craving for honest ordinariness, but to her surprise he did not fidget in the usual way, flick the pages of the secondhand novels or otherwise try to find a reason for his presence. He walked without hesitation towards the bookshelves and she found herself following him in the subdued but attentive attitude of the expert saleswoman. For once it appeared there was a definite object in his visit. It's my wife's birthday, he said. Forgot all about it till I'd left the house this morning. Rather awkward. I must take something home. She's a curious woman, you know, childish in a way as many are. Although clever, doesn't like these little things passed by, seems to me I may as well give her a book as anything else. She reads a good deal. The right sort of thing, of course. It occurred to me that you'd be able to find me something she would like. It had better be thoroughly up to date or else quite old-fashioned. Anything in between is no good. Constance successively suggested Neolithic pantheism. Southern Siberia the home of the soul and the duty of duties, development of self. But he thought that she was sure to have read all of those. He wandered from table to table, picking up books with an uncertain hand. She liked the air of manly helplessness with which he confronted an intellectual choice. Clearly it was important that he should avoid any mistake. Women are queer, he said. One doesn't understand them. Not that one wants to, for that matter, but it's more comfortable not to do the wrong thing if one can help it. If they really are women, just that, you can't do the wrong thing, can you? That's it, said Andrew eagerly. That's what one wants them to be, of course, but they never are nowadays, at least not in our set. Don't seem to understand what men want. Oh, very nice to us, do their duty and so on, of course. I'm not saying anything, but clever and always worrying about it as if brains and women were a sort of disease. I beg your pardon, beastly of me, I forgot. Really, you let me come chatting to you and sometimes one's tongue runs on. Constance was aware of something which picked up these utterances, looked at them curiously and laid them by with a helpless air of non-comprehension. But she resisted its companionship, expelled it as it were from the neighborhood of her mind and concentrated her will upon Andrew and his interests. His robust humanity called out hers to meet it. He found her on this morning peculiarly sympathetic and never suspected that her unusual proximity of spirit was due rather to the repulsive powers of another than to his own attractive force. He was greatly pleased by an expensive copy of Browning's Christmas Eve, printed in illegible Gothic type with fantastic bloomers and bound to naked millboards held together by linen braid. The binding, he said, is just right for our drawing-room. So bare and simple. Couldn't be better. But she wouldn't read it and I doubt if she'd even let it lie about. You see, Browning, from what I hear, is just a bit gone by in our set and our old-fashioned books are worse to them than last year's clothes. Quite isn't it, the way things come and go? When we were first married, you know, she got quite depressed because I couldn't stick him. And now he goes on the top shelf with Ruskin and George Eliot and Carlisle. He was standing by her desk and having laid down the blatantly austere Christmas Eve, he picked up a shabby duodesimo and began to flick its leaves gently and indifferently as he talked. It was grand grimoire. Now here, he said presently, is a very rummy little thing. I wonder if that would do. I shall be late for lunch if I don't find something soon. What is it? Magic, eh? That's quite a notion. A bit out of the common, I suppose. She's not likely to have seen that one before. Hardly. They are getting very scarce. This is the first copy we've had for years. He gazed vaguely at the queer woodcuts and strange garbled recipes as precise and unemotional as a cookery book. Queer notions those old chaps had. Look here, to evoke the spirit of an angel, the magic circle being drawn and the altar of incense prepared. God bless my soul, what next? For to catch your angel, eh? Oh, I'll take this. It would just suit Muriel. She's keen on spooks and things and she hates the point of view of modern science. Not much modern science here. Constance answered, on the contrary, if you know how to read its formulae, this is modern science and the things that modern science hasn't yet got to. Oh, come! said Andrew, humoring her. Modern science, you know, is practical, mental, constructive, and so on. Well, so is this. It's just a series of scientific experiments. Nothing else. And they are real enough and practical enough for those who know how to perform them. Goodness knows. Other people, of course, will find it about as enlightening as a collection of chemists' prescriptions and about as dangerous, too, if they go meddling without authority. Yes, but vampires and spells and all amanders, you know, insisted Andrew, they're all here, taking themselves quite seriously. You're not going to tell me these are scientific facts, are you? We may know much, but we are jolly well sure they don't exist. Well, you can't prove a negative. God bless my soul, what next? said Mr. Vins for the second time. Within his own mind he added, she seemed such a sensible woman, too. He felt puzzled for a moment and slightly disheartened. It was the first time that they had disagreed. Then the word angel suddenly occurred to him and suggested that the queer little book might perhaps have something to do with religion. Though it seemed on the surface to have more in common with masculine and cook, there were so many new religions now, no doubt Miss Tyrell affected one of them, a circumstance which would explain her peculiar attitude at once. She might even be a Romanist. They believed a lot of various curious things. He became shy and careful, for it was an axiom with him that one should never disturb a woman's religion. They required it, poor creatures. As for Constance, she asked herself with temper, what on earth can have made me play the fool and talk to him in that idiotic way? For two pins I should have told him the whole affair. Of course he is disgusted now and thinks I am a superstitious rotter, and very likely that is what I am. Her manner became constrained in business-like, confirming his suspicion that he had somehow shocked her by mistake. He paid for the grimoire and retired in a mood of contrition. Constance wrapped it up in brown paper and tied thin green string about it with a certain relief. She still had a vague idea that in the absence of all exciting suggestions it might be possible to banish the humiliating memory of her experiment and of the tiresome hallucinations which had induced. But the protective influence of humanity seemed to have departed with her friend and a puzzled voice which she was learning to recognize murmured in her ear. It is also very funny, what does it mean? And once more she looked out on a world which had become strange to her. Inconceivable! Grotesque! End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of The Column of Dust by Evelyn Underhill This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Josh Middledorf Chapter 5 A Domestic Interior How much more dulcet the dulcet Amaryllidis Ira when Amaryllis knows Sophocles and Hegel by heart? Coventry Patmore Reladio Poete Andrew Vince entered the drawing room carefully. The floor was highly polished and the one small rug which always skated before his advancing feet added to its deceptive qualities there was a purple sofa near the window a closed cupboard in one corner four large fat cushions were arranged upon the floor the walls were white there were no curtains and no pictures Mrs. Vince who would have resembled a Dominican nun dressed by liberty had it not been for the massive healthy-looking yellow hair which she wore with becoming austerity in a coronal plate sat upon one of the cushions and spoke with her accustomed earnestness about nothing in particular she had applied to the uses of society the journalist's trick of skimming things with an air of intensity and many men called her a wonderful little woman the blue butterfly one of them had said of her but this unusually irreverent epigram had been generally condemned though constantly repeated in her set a member of this set lounged before the fire and listened to her hostess's conversation she, like Muriel seemed at first sight too healthy to be eccentric tall and pretty with a mature and comfortable prettiness that suggested an easy disposition and an absence of tiresome ideals if Muriel was the butterfly of her circle Phoebe Foster was its bumblebee she was prosperous and well-dressed believing that luxurious surroundings and an ample diet constituted as finite discipline for the modern soul as the tedious simplicity is of the cloister of its agnostic equivalent the workman's unit adapted to the use of ladies living alone anyone, she said could be spiritual with self-denial boiled vegetables and the lives of the saints but it is much more difficult to feel that you were resting on eternity when there was a brocaded cushion in between she was speaking of purity as Andrew entered and one feels it to be characteristic but she did not think it necessary to change the conversation one is obliged, she was saying to leave the static conception the mere idle chastity behind where otherwise would be women's value to the race the courtesan is a heretic the nun is an atheist do you remember? Purity and waiford answered Mrs. Vince with the gentle didacticism appropriate to her youth that must of course be our ideal to bear one or two children of beautiful character and shed an atmosphere of peace upon the home Andrew, fresh from the tossing current of the streets the eager war with other brains which made up his daily work felt that there was something chill and horrible in the peaceful grey light which came through the curtainless windows the peaceful spaces of white walls and polished floor and the arrogant prattle of these women who sat safely ensconced as in a fortress protected from life and truth by the earnings of the men whom they despised it threw him back upon himself as the sudden entrance into a refrigerator forces the organism to draw heavily on its stock of latent heat domesticity for him had been drawn in outline with a pen of exaggerated refinement its convention was excellent was complete but it still awaited the warm tints which should give it the semblance of life however the place was his after all he spread his coattails sat down deliberately upon the purple sofa checked its recoil by planting his heels firmly on the floor and said where's the boy the ladies looked at one another and Muriel rang the bell twice the child who came in response was fair and languid the forces which brought him to birth had wearied before the end of their task he ran to his mother and leaned against her with a petty gesture of abandonment his hair was a little too long his socks were a little too short his smile, if a tribal superior was seraphic Vince said to his son well Felix, what have you been doing today? the boy answered and with me things of course and his mother put her arm about him as if she felt competent at any rate to protect her child from the cruder follies of fatherhood and the degrading influence of an ordinary education one of his hands was within hers with the other he began to trace the course of the black embroidery which ran over her white dress his touch was dainty and bird-like he and his mother appeared to be wholly content they had forgotten Vince's present Phoebe Foster said to him politely Felix loses none of his prettiness he's quite a little angel still she's spoken a discreet and social murmur and neither to child nor his mother caught the words Andrew replied perhaps, but he's getting rather beyond the angelic stage now he's got to be a boy before long we're at him old Nick as well as with Gabriel you know his intonation was quite clear and his intention no less so and he added he would be ready for the preparatory school in a year or two and then it's goodbye to poetry and long hair takes a man to make a man I sometimes think you ladies don't quite know what a male thing means we know, some of us what it ought to become it was noticeable that whilst Andrew's entrance had only introduced constraint that a Felix had brought with it a sense of active hostility already camps were formed the glove had been thrown down and a little encouragement would set the combatant to work this Foster rose and said goodbye she loved tranquility and believed that she had a right to it Andrew was now left with a forced option he could either change the conversation or continue it silence was impossible for he did not live in his wife's universe he therefore took the grand remoire from his pocket and wished her rather tardily many happy returns of the departing day Muriel accepted the little old book very graciously she had a keen sense of duty and except in moments of intellectual collision always treated her husband with kindness also in spite of herself she was pleased and excited by the unusual nature of his gift this is quite interesting she said only the other day someone was speaking to me about autosuggestion and willpower and the place which they occupied in medieval magic it's going to be an important subject from the point of view of historical psychology which is most interesting of course but I'm rather surprised that you Felix still leaning against her knee anticipated her exclaiming fancy father finding such a queer little thing as that he would have pulled it away but his mother kept it within her own hands holding it open firmly and cruelly the gesture of a person who feels that her act of reading is far more important than any domestic sanctities which may happen to pertain to the thing read she pressed back the covers until the new Morocco hinges gave the despairing squeak of a stout lady compelled to unsuitable athletics and said look Felix this will interest you that's called a colophon and those are woodcuts are they not rough and funny that's the way that people first began to make the pictures for their books peace might have rained in that room for Muriel was always amiable when she was imparting information but Felix watching the turning of the small torn brownish pages suddenly arrested the process and broke the spell by planting a beautifully clean little finger on the middle of a leaf what's that he said Muriel's serenity departed Felix had asked a question which she could not answer an objectionable and unheard of situation for which Andrew and his extraordinary present must certainly be blamed she was silent and cheerfully what have you got hold of old boy Felix began to read aloud carefully syllable by syllable Vaichen stimulat matan esbares tetragrammatan orioram irian estion existion erioma it's a spell darling like one of my rhythmic things answered Felix and Andrew laughed in a hearty and irritating way modern education he said does not seem to be so very modern after all I was told today that this thing was full of modern science and the things that science has not yet got to and it really begins to look rather like it who told you that the woman from whom I bought it means said Felix anxiously Andrew replied if you want to know what it means I fancy that you will have to ask mommy to take you to see the lady who sold me this book she knows all about everything so does mommy answered Felix and I don't like ladies they talk so oh mommy what does it mean Muriel left the question on one side and spoke directly to her husband where did you pick it up she said this second hand bookshop that I pass on my way to the office what made you get it was it in the window no I look in now and then said Andrew grudgingly he began to feel that he might as well have given her the shorter catechism at once Muriel became almost interested you look in she exclaimed at a bookshop what an extraordinary idea I like a novel to read with my lunch she exclaimed Vince Muriel replied indifferently oh I see I thought as they had things like this it must be a good bookshop all florts said Andrew doggy books, travels, Kipling Corelli and so on and rows of these old brown things at the back all looking as if they'd been dug out of a mousy cupboard and this woman she sounds rather interesting does she keep it curious thing she's quite a lady educated, nice manners I suppose the poor creature was left badly off and didn't find a husband ah bad luck but must be over 30 now but she is a fine woman still we've got quite chummy one way or another and it makes a bit of a change for her I dare say to have a little chat now and then Muriel sprang from the middle classes and had the eye for a minute social detail and all that is implied by it which is peculiar to that cast she thought quickly and automatically if this girl really finds it interesting to chat with a man like Andrew she cannot be quite a lady Felix had been amusing himself with a grimoire and now offered another passage for interpretation what is an Undeen? said he Muriel answered it is a very beautiful story which you shall read when you have grown a bigger boy no it's not a story it's a thing and you say prayers to it replied Felix there's one in here how funny Raymond Percy says prayers too but I don't think they are about Undeans shall I say prayers when I'm a bigger boy no dear it will not be necessary said his mother your little soul has been nurtured from earth it will I hope expands like a flower by its own innocent strength Felix recognized the language and remembered his supper a slice of bread and butter with brown sugar on it which an old fashioned and affectionate nurse administered at half past six o'clock please may I go back to the nursery he said good night father do you know mummy Raymond has got a very lovely rocking-horse now and little runny train as well as prayers why on earth don't you let that child have some toys said Andrew when his son had gone away there was almost a growl in his voice Muriel answered him gravely and patiently I have told you Andrew she said that the child's training must be left wholly in my hands if I am to undertake it at all at this point a divided influence would be fatal he has his poetry books and dancing and his singing games the newest authorities are agreed that those are the proper agents for the development of the subconscious mind they awake the sense of joy which has no rational relation to tin soldiers and mechanical ships such toys only in chain the imagination and cause children to attach too much importance to material things poor little beasts has rather rough luck to be a modern child Muriel suddenly smiled at him with an aggravating and invulnerable radiance that seemed to break from within I won't argue with you she said we speak to one another from such different planes that it is useless and controversy is almost negative in its effect upon the soul I like the little book it was dear of you to bring it it's more interesting to me than you can understand tell me more about this woman what's she like and how much does she really know about psychic things oh she's tall dark rather solid answered Andrew looks as if she did Swedish gymnastics after her bath that sort of type you know you know very good teeth and nice complexion he caught Muriel's expression and stopped don't you know anything about her that matters is that his wife patiently not much I haven't a ghost of an idea who her people are or where she comes from but she's all right you know one can see that in a second she was rather queer this morning a bit upset by the damp weather perhaps it must be chilly work in that shop at times with the door wide open all day I'd always looked upon her as a bright business like sort of woman full of sense no frills but she said some extraordinarily silly things about this book Muriel became interested leaned forward a little and said tell me well she really seemed almost inclined to take it seriously absurd of course can't think of what she was driving at said it was like a lot of chemist prescriptions useful to the professional who knew what to do with them but dangerous to amateurs who didn't curious exclaimed Muriel she must have an interesting mind perhaps she's a practical occultist one finds them in the most unexpected places even in stock exchange I hear oh she's not such a fool as that his wife hardly heard him there was a glow of excitement in her eyes she had caught a glimpse of a transcendental novelty and eager for the chase entirely forgot to be grateful to the man who had put her on the scent she said almost peremptorily what is the address of the shop Vince gave it to her he had no alternative but a little hard that Muriel who took so much should now annex this slight yet singularly satisfactory friendship no doubt she would subjugate Miss Tyrell few women could resist her for they all in Andrew's experience wished to be clever and Muriel invariably attributed this quality to those persons who shared her spiritual and educational views Constance would be taken in hand patronized taught to sit in cushions on the floor she would soon cease to laugh at his jokes End of chapter 5