No More Learning

I had been
too preoccupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets
Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the direction of the
sun that we were going westward; and presently I knew also, by the way
in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars
flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approaching the
western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills
upon the left, its dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and
set out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed some
mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my mind, for
the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming,
fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed to a square
ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer building under its
lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier,
and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, I was possessed with
the phantasy that the sea, which kept covering it with showers of white
foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life,
which had begun to war upon our orderly and careful days, and was about
to plunge the world into a night as obscure as that which followed
the downfall of the classical world. One part of my mind mocked this
phantastic terror, but the other, the part that still lay half plunged
in vision, listened to the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at
unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
and as I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.
'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do
some desperate thing against you? '

'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being
incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the
consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people
also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other
fish to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the
Dagda, with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in
poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle, Aengus, with the three
birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic
children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their
reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe
still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their
sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build
their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and
perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig. '

Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward side,
to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every moment
to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the door of the
square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key, on which I
saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare passage and
up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with bookshelves.
A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must submit to a
tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with it a book on
the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was to spend what
remained of the winter daylight.
He then left me, promising to return
an hour before the ceremony. I began searching among the bookshelves,
and found one of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries I have ever
seen. There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body
under a shirt of hair-cloth; of Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet
controlled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many
spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in
deadly trance as he would; of Lully, who transformed himself into the
likeness of a red cock; of Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved
the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in
Arabia among the Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very
few mystics but alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of
the devotion to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense
of beauty, which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I
did notice a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of
William Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew. ' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us, as
a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in their
fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been handsome,
but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had I seen her
anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for pleasure,
instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the imagination and
a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question concerning the ceremony,
but getting no answer except a shake of the head, saw that I must await
initiation in silence. When I had eaten, she came again, and having
laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the table, lighted the candles,
and took away the plates and the remnants. So soon as I was alone,
I turned to the box, and found that the peacocks of Hera spread out
their tails over the sides and lid, against a background, on which were
wrought great stars, as though to affirm that the heavens were a part
of their glory. In the box was a book bound in vellum, and having upon
the vellum and in very delicate colours, and in gold, the alchemical
rose with many spears thrusting against it, but in vain, as was shown
by the shattered points of those nearest to the petals. The book was
written upon vellum, and in beautiful clear letters, interspersed
with symbolical pictures and illuminations, after the manner of the
_Splendor Solis_.

The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent,
gave themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one
the mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,
another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.
What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,
the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the
garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked together
the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual distillation of
the contents of the soul, until they were ready to put off the mortal
and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling among the vine-leaves
overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning upon a stick, and,
sitting close to them, took up the thought where they had dropped it.
Having expounded the whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid
them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among
them, and when they would have followed was nowhere to be seen.