Things near & far Chapter 21: Part 21

pleasure; I could not so much as place my hand on the table before me without experiencing a thrill of delight which was not merely sensuous, but carried with it, mysteriously and wonderfully, the message of a secret and interior joy. And one more instance. I had always been subject to headaches which visited me at intervals of five, six or seven weeks, and invariably lasted for twenty-four hours. The pain was distressing, and any movement of the head raised it into a racking, throbbing agony; I should imagine that I suffered from a kind of migraine or megrims. Late one night during the time of which I am speaking I felt the first approaches of one of these tiresome attacks. I said to myself: “I wonder whether I can stop it,” and I placed the tip of the forefinger of the left hand upon my forehead. I felt the sense as of a dull shock: and the pain was gone. And though I have had my share of pains and aches since then, I have never been revisited by that particular kind of headache from that day to this. And there was yet another matter. In a little book of mine called “The Great Return,” which nobody has heard of, I have told how the Holy Grail came back for a brief while to Britain after long years. And describing some of the things that were seen and known during that happy visitation, I have written: “The ‘glow’ as they call it seems more difficult to explain (than certain other matters duly related). For they say that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended, there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before, so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him, as if it were sport and play.” Thus in the story, and thus it was with me in fact, in that autumn and winter of 1899–1900. It was with a singular surprise that I read, in St. Adamnan, many years afterwards, how St. Columba’s monks, toiling in the fields, experienced now and again the very sensation--if it be just to speak of it as a sensation--that I have described. They, too, weary with their work of reclaiming the barren land of their isle, would know that sudden glow of joy and strength and courage; and they believed that it was the prayer of their Father in God, Columba, strengthening them and inspiring them, as he knelt before the altar of the Perpetual Choir. And lest it be said that I had read Adamnan when I was a boy and had forgotten all about it consciously though I had retained it subconsciously, I must solemnly declare that this was not the case; and that when this strange experience first befell me, I was overwhelmed with astonishment, and could scarcely credit that which was actually happening. I have hesitated as to whether it should be, in strictness, called a sensation, and I still hesitate. It seems to me, and I think that I can trust my recollection, that the two worlds of sense and spirit were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from the inward and spiritual grace. _Magnum vere sacramentum._ And all this, be it remembered, would fall out in dim Bloomsbury squares, in noisy, clattering Gray’s Inn Road, in a train on the Underground, amongst hustling crowds in common streets. I mention this, not forgetful of a pretty severe rebuke which I received from a very high literary quarter on account of that little book, “The Great Return,” which I have just cited. The critic noted the fact that in my book the Holy Grail was manifested to the common people, to common modern people, to Welsh tradesmen and farmers. He seemed to think this very low. It may be low, but perhaps things happen in this way sometimes; and so with me: I, by no manner of means a knight, received joys and knew wonders while the trams clanged along the Clerkenwell Road in the grey winter afternoon. So it was, and it appears to me necessary to tell the truth. As Coventry Patmore says, quoting from an earlier writer: “Let us not deny in the darkness that which we have known in the light.” And beyond all this, beyond these experiences in which things of the body and things of the spirit were mingled, there was a better world of which I saw the verges. There was no more grief; there was no more resentment, there was no more anger. The griefs that flood the heart with agony, the great sorrows of life, these were seen to be but passing trifles of no moment, like the sorrow of a little child which is past and forgotten before its tears are dry. I remember tearing up an old diary which I had kept in the bitter days of Clarendon Road, a record of struggles and starvings and desolations; I tore it up because it no longer signified anything to me. The words, I daresay, were strong enough, but the tale had become of no meaning at all. I glanced at one page and another of the tattered old notebook before I rent it, with a kind of mild curiosity as to the state of mind of the silly stranger who had written all this, and had whined so dismally. At all events, it had nothing to do with me, and so it went into fragments and into the fire. If it could be restored to me now, I should read it all with interest and whine again and foam again _sæva indignatione_; but then I have long returned into that darkness in which, I suppose, most of our lives are spent. * * * * * There is one thing that I hope I may be spared, that is the comment of the Oriental Occult Ass. I confess that I have written all this with difficulty, and with doubt as to the decency of writing it at all, especially when the tale, if it is to be a true tale, makes it necessary for me to seem to compare, for one little moment, the saints of the company and following of St. Columba with myself. But I do hope that nobody will say: “Why, this is only Ruja-Puja! You get it all in the first chapter of the Anangasataga Raja! It’s all perfectly elementary. Little Hindu children learn their A B C out of it in the Svanka Visatvara. Why, when the Swami Vishnakanandaram Jam Ghosh was over here last summer he mentioned all these phenomena as things you have to forget before you set out on the Way. As he put it so beautifully: ‘The sun arises. It gleams on the Lotus. The petals of the _bhulji_ flower expand. The stars are no longer seen.’ Yes, isn’t he wonderful? Fancy anybody still bothering about Keats and those silly people!” I hope, I say, that I shall be spared that. I can bear better I think the (more or less) Occidental Idiot, who will speak of Shin--the letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, not the delicate portion of our anatomy--attribute it to the Tarot Trump called the Fool, and just throw in a reference to Salt, Sulphur and Mercury. As for me, I make no deductions, I infer nothing, I refrain from saying “therefore.” Like Sancho Panza: “I come from my own vineyard; I know nothing.” Perhaps I may venture to say that I have seen a lousy, lazy tramp drinking from a roadside stream that drips cold and pure from the rock in burning weather. Then the wastrel passes on his ill way, refreshed indeed, but as lousy and lazy as ever. _De torrente in via bibet: propterea exaltabit caput._ _Chapter X_ MR. CHARLES O’MALLEY, Castle O’Malley, Co. Galway. That was the inscription of a card which had just been placed in my hand, as I walked along Southampton Row--on which I found myself stupidly gazing in real old Southampton Row, not the staring, blatant street that bears the name now--one fine day in the summer of 1900. Ten minutes or so before I had been taking my morning stroll in the company of my bulldog, Juggernaut. I was accosted very politely by a stoutish, youngish, clean-shaven gentleman, well dressed, with the mere suspicion of an Irish accent. He had said without preface of any kind: “A fine dog you’ve got, sir. I should be very glad if you’d come up with me and show it to a lady I know who lives in the flats opposite.” I assented at once, feeling thoroughly in the scene, as they say on the stage. I followed him and we displayed the dog Juggernaut, certainly a noble specimen of his noble race, to the lady who, I may say at once, was a lady, and appeared to be on terms of polite acquaintance with the gentleman. Jug was admired, and the gentleman and I went down into the street again. The lady had not evinced the faintest astonishment at the introduction of a total stranger with a bulldog into her flat. When we were both down on the pavement of Southampton Row, the amateur of bulldogs gave me his card, and told me that I should be welcome and more than welcome if ever I found myself near Castle O’Malley, in County Galway. And so he vanished--if he ever were there, as to which I held and still hold, in a fantastic sort of way, vague doubts. No, the flat was a perfectly quiet and unostentatious one. Nothing to drink was produced; there were no K.O. drops. The lady did not ask me to look in again some evening for a quiet game of cards with a few congenial friends. Mr. O’Malley did not say that he had salvaged a Spanish galleon wrecked beneath the rocks on which Castle O’Malley was built, and that in consequence he had more money than he knew what to do with. And I missed nothing from my pocket. That is one of the reasons why I hate rationalism, since, when it is called in, in a little difficulty or perplexity, its advices and explanations are always so stupid, so wide of