The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley
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for stranger symbols yet. I became a Witch-Doctor presiding over a cannibal feast, driving the yellow mob of murderers into a fiercer Comus-rout, as the maddening beat of the tom-tom and the sinister scream of the bull-roarer destroy every human quality in the worshippers and make them elemental energies ; Valkyrie-vampires surging and shrieking on the summit of the storm.
I do not even know whether to call this a vision, or how to classify it psychologically. It was simply happening to me-and to Lou-though we were sitting decorously enough in our compartment. It became increasingly certain that Haide', low-class, commonplace, ignorant girl that she was, had somehow been sucked into a stupendous maelstrom of truth.
The normal actions and reactions of the mind and the body are simply so many stupid veils upon the face of Isis.
What happened to them didn't matter. The stunt was to find some trick to make them shut up.
I understood the value of words. It depended, not on their rational meaning, but upon their hieratic suggestion.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-house decree."
The names mean nothing definite, but they determine the atmosphere of the poem. Sublimity depends upon unintelliaibility.
I understood the rapture of the names in Lord Dunsany's stories. I understood how the " barbarous names of evocation " used by magicians, the bellowings and whistlings of the Gnostics, the Mantras of Hindoo devotees, set their souls spinning till they became giddy with glory.
Even the names of the places that we were passing in the train excited me just as far as they were unfamiliar and sonorous.
I became increasingly excited by the sight of the Italian words, " E pericoloso sporgersi." That wouldn't mean much, no doubt, to any one who spoke Italian. To me, it was a master-key of magic. I connected it somehow with my love for Lou. Everything was a symbol of my love for Lou except when that idiotic nuisance, knowledge, declared the contrary.
We were whirling in this tremendous trance all the morning. There kept on coming into my mind the title of a picture I had once seen by some crazy modern painter: "Four red monks carrying a black goat across the snow to Nowhere."
It was obviously an excuse for a scheme of colour but the fantastic imbecility of the phrase, and the subtle suggestion of sinister wickedness, made me pant with suppressed exaltation.
The " first call for lunch " came with startling suddenness. I woke up wildly to recognise the fact that Lou and I had not spoken to each other for hours, that we had been rushing through a Universe of our own creation with stupendous speed and diabolical delight. And at the same time I realised that we had been automatically " coking up " without knowing that we were doing so.
The material world had become of so little importance that I no longer knew where I was. I completely mixed up my present journey with memories of two or three previous Continental excursions.
It was the first time tliat Lou had ever been farther than Paris, and she looked to me for information as to time and place. With her, familiarity had not bred contempt, and I found myself unable to tell her the most ordinary things about the journey. I didn't even know in which direction we were travelling, whether the Alps came next, or which tunnel we were taking ; whether we passed through Florence, or the difference between Geneva and Genoa.
Those who are familiar with the route will realise how hopelessly my mind was entangled. I hardly knew morning from evening. I have described things with absolute confidence which could not possibly have taken place.
We kept on getting up and looking at the map on the panels of the corridor, and I couldn't make out where we were. We compared times and distances only to make confusion worse confounded.
I went into the most obstruse astronomical calculations as to whether we ought to put our watches on an hour or back an hour at the frontier ; and I don't know to this day whether I came to any correct conclusion. I had an even chance of being right; but there it stopped.
I remember getting out to stretch our legs at Rome, and that we had a mad impulse to try to see the sights during the twenty minutes or so we had to wait.
I might have done it ; but on the platform at Rome I was brought up with a shock. An impossible thing had happened.
"Great Scot," cried a voice from the window of a coach three ahead of our own. Of all the extraordinary coincidences I How are you
We looked up, hardly able to believe our ears. Who should it be but our friend Feccles !
Well, of course, I'd rather have seen the devil himself. After all, I'd behaved to the man rather shabbily; and, incidentally, made a great fool of myself. But what surprised me on second glance was that he was travelling very much incognito. He was hardly recognisable.
I don't think I mentioned he had fair hair with a bald patch, and was clean shaven. But now his hair was dark ; and a toupde silently rebuked Nature's inclemency. A small black moustache and imperial completed the disguise. But in addition, his manner of dressing was a camouflage in itself. In Paris he had been dressed very correctly. He might have been a man about town of very good family.
But now he was dressed like a courier, or possibly a high-class commercial traveller. His smartness had an element of commonness very well marked. I instinctively knew that he would prefer me not to mention his name.
At this moment the train began to move, and we had to hop on. We went at once to his compartment. It was a coupe', and he was its sole occupant.
I have already described the shock which the reappearance of Feccles had administered to my nerves.
Normally, I should have felt very awkward indeed, but the cocaine lifted me easily over the fence.
The incident became welcome; an additional adventure in the fairy tale which we were living. Lou herself was all gush and giggles to an extent which a month earlier I should have thought a shade off. But everything was equally exquisite on this grand combination honeymoon.
Feccles appeared extremely amused by the encounter. I asked him with the proper degree of concern if he had had my note. He said no, he'd been called suddenly away on business, I told him what I had written, with added apologies.
The long journey had tired me deep down. I took things more seriously, though the cocaine prevented my realising that this was the case.
" My dear fellow," he protested. " I'm extremely annoyed that you should have troubled yourself about the business at all. As a matter of fact, what happened is this. I went round to see those men at four o'clock, as arranged on the 'phone, and they were really so awfully decent about the whole thing that I had to let them in for five thousand, and they wrote me their cheque on the spot. Now, of course, you mustn't imagine that I'd let an old pal down. Any time you find yourself with a little loose cash, just weigh in. You can have it out of my bit."
"Well, that's really too good of you," I said, " and "I won't forget it. It'll be all right, I suppose, now you've got the thing through, to wait till I get back to England."
"Why, of course," he replied. " Don't think about business at all. It was really rotten of me to talk shop to a man on his honeymoon."
"Lou took up the conversation. " But do tell us," she began, " why this thusness. It suits you splendidly, you know. But after all, I'm a woman."
Feccles suddenly became very solemn. He went to the door of the coupe' and looked up and down the corridor ; then he slid the door to and began to speak in a whisper.
"This is a very serious business," he said, and paused. He took out his keys and played with them, as if uncertain how far to go. He thrust them back into his pocket with a decisive gesture.
" Look here, old chap," he said, " I'll take a chance on you. We all know what you did for England during the war-and take one thing with another, you're about my first pick."
He stopped short. We looked at him blankly, though we were seething with some blind suppressed excitement whose nature we could hardly describe.
He took out a pipe,