Summon the Bright Water Read online

  Right up my street! But I doubt if the trade figures for Tyre can even be conjectured. However, it would be an amusing exercise for a wet Sunday afternoon.

  It was a brilliant example of what he meant, and I told him so. As intimacy was growing, I ventured to ask him what service he himself remembered.

  ‘It may have been I who discovered that the gold which oozed from nuggets in the fire could be made to take any shape that the craftsman wished. Or it may be that the liquid gold, easiest of metals, led me to try the smelting of copper and tin. I cannot be sure and it is not important. Our first belief is in reincarnation. Our second is that service to man is what is remembered. Our third is that we must prepare for such service.’

  I objected that if, say, an expert in genetic engineering were to be reincarnated with his memory of service, it would be only a nightmare when the technology to use his science didn’t exist.

  ‘That is why we stick to the most primitive crafts – the wheel, the lathe, the sail and the working of gold.’

  That was a craft I had not been shown. I took him to be quite sincere. I now know that he is not only sincere but fanatically possessed. Murder for the sake of religion has never been a problem for the fanatic. Look at Hindu and Mohammedan in India or the bloodthirsty sects of the Middle East or, nearer to our own cultural aberrations, that fellow Jones who fascinated his entire colony in Guyana into committing suicide.

  ‘You envisage that sooner or later we are bound to return to a neolithic era?’

  ‘Exactly. As Einstein said, the fourth world war will be fought with stones and clubs. Then it is time for the teachers of agriculture and worship who later are remembered as gods. We are training to be those gods.’

  A shattering conception! But given the highly dubious premises, the conclusion follows. I wanted to ask him about the worship, but before I could do so he said very cordially, ‘Stay with us as long as you like. My niece and I will be delighted.’

  I thanked him and replied that I would indeed like to see more of their commune.

  Both of them had a disturbing charm, disturbing because it defied analysis. Elsa, I found, always wore the black robe when on her many duties in the house. The sweater and slacks in which I had first seen her were for farm and garden.

  That afternoon and evening, helping to turn the hay and mixing with the colonists afterwards, I encouraged them to consider me as a possible convert and to talk freely. All the details of their bizarre faith are irrelevant to my narrative. Mostly they seemed fairly orthodox theosophists, speaking of the body as a temporary illusion. Meanwhile, the illusion worked nobly at filling wheelbarrows with unsuitable clay for making bricks.

  This core of solid Englishmen and a few women greatly respected Simeon Marrin. The Freedom of the Forest meant to them something more than the ancient rights of free miners and of shepherds who owned flocks but no land. It was as if this outpost of the oaks between the Severn and the Welsh Marches formed for them a spiritual island where the inexorable Wheel – a pleasanter name than the rat-race – forgot to turn, and left body and soul at peace with each other. One of the busy haymakers put it very well. ‘I love the Forest,’ he said. ‘I would like to become a tree.’ I don’t know whether adepts of theosophy consider a tree as a possible stopping place on the way up or down, but now that the trees share my bed in silence and, without eyes, see from their topmost branches moonlight on the shoals of the Severn, I appreciate what he meant.

  Besides these honest colonists who found a spiritual peace among the oaks without worrying overmuch about past and future lives, there was this inner circle of tonsured mystics. They had a courteous habit of inclining their heads whenever they met Marrin, and he acknowledged their bows gravely as a high priest among his people. Nobody commented on this, accepting that they had an arcane reason of their own for such respect. I was told that they followed a tradition which descended from the Druids, who also believed in the transmigration of souls. I wish that Roman historians could have told us how the doctrine travelled from the east to the mists of the Atlantic.

  After dinner Marrin took me to his own quarters at the back of the western wing, where he had a formal estate office on the ground floor and above it a workshop which was far from formal, approached by open stairs from the office. It was a circular room, contained in a squat but imposing tower, with windows high up in the wall. In the centre was an electric furnace and a long laboratory table with a number of crucibles and all the usual equipment. Cabinets held a range of cream-coloured ceramic pots, each marked with its chemical symbol. I noticed mercury, lead and sulphur. There were skeletons of a large salmon and a small Severn-caught dolphin. A third skeleton, standing on its own pedestal, was of some four-footed long-tailed beast, covered with a carapace. I guessed that it was a species of turtle. The whole display was slightly theatrical. I mentioned that his laboratory resembled an alchemist’s den.

  ‘I know it does,’ he replied, ‘but that is inevitable when I am experimenting with gold and its alloys. Also, I am studying the development of life in the water and all its implications. The tideway of the Severn has much to offer the mystic, from the lamprey, most primitive of fish, to the leaping, splendid salmon and the muscles of its tail.’

  ‘And the turtle,’ I asked, ‘if it is one?’

  ‘Oh, he was put in for fun! Since the place looked like an alchemist’s den, as you called it, I made a proper job of the decorations.’

  Much later when I was puzzled by the gold and its origin it occurred to me that there was no better disguise for the alchemist than admitting to a stranger that he amused himself by pretending to be one.

  He opened a velvet-lined drawer and showed me some of his work: bracelets, pendants and ash trays like little scallop shells, which were delicate enough for the butt ends of a millionairess. He had a genius for pure form rather than decoration. When I praised his simple and effective taste, he obviously thought that I had chosen the right words and was pleased.

  ‘Form!’ he said. ‘Yes, form is essential for craftsmanship, but not enough. There must also be inspiration.’

  He hesitated and then added almost reluctantly, ‘Mr Colet, I cannot resist showing you what I mean.’

  I had noticed that between two of the windows was a short crimson curtain over a curved shelf. He pulled a string which drew back the curtain and exposed a casket of ebony and ivory with both the Cross and the Pentacle – an odd combination – engraved on the door. He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked the casket, revealing a two-handled vessel of gold. I had never seen anything like it, nor could I guess its function. It was too tall for an amphora or bowl and most resembled a cauldron, swelling out from the base and in again to a slight neck above the handles and below the rim. It stood about a foot high, with its smooth womb a little less. The curves of pure gold seemed to provide their own light and were as near perfection as any Chinese masterpiece of jade or porcelain. Since it was well above eye level I could not judge its weight, but felt sure he was justified in claiming to be inspired – certainly by some ancient style.

  I had only time to exclaim my admiration before he shut and locked the casket, closing as it were all further comment. I didn’t attempt any. I came down to earth and asked him if he had a market for such pieces.

  ‘Yes. Every so often I go up to London with my wares and sell them. If buyers do not think them saleable they can always melt them down.’

  In that case he could not make a profit after buying his gold, but I gave the question no further thought. Profit was of no importance if he were only training himself and preparing a memory which, according to him, would be preserved from one existence to another. An absurd faith, but no madder than some. At least it was service which was remembered, not the erotic adventures of some oriental princess.

  Verging on comedy rather than mystery was the spiritual pilgrimage of Major Matravers-Drummond. Since he was the only other guest, and his room was next door to mine, we were able to relax together a
t the day’s end with his private bottle of whisky. He was Gloucestershire born and bred, with his home in a valley of the dark line of the Cotswolds which closed the eastern horizon across the river. Retired from the Household Cavalry, he had taken to religion and even entered a seminary to be trained as a parson.

  ‘Threw me out, Piers! Quite right too! My view of eternity was too far from the Book of Revelations.’

  ‘But what are you doing in this nest of reincarnationists when you are an earnest Christian?’ I asked.

  ‘I search, old boy. Look on me as a wandering friar! If Simeon chooses to believe that he is training to be a human god, I don’t argue. At bottom he and his disciples long for ways of life that have been lost. No harm in that – I do myself. Started as a child. Something in me is still a British Roman of the age of Arthur, watching Christianity and civilisation collapse around him.’

  I could understand that. Brought up on those rich and gentle hills, surrounded by the shards of Roman villas and travelling still by Roman roads, an obsession with the farming, the fighting and the decaying towns at the end of the Empire was natural enough.

  ‘And you think that collapse will come again?’

  ‘If it is the will of God. All I feel is great sympathy with the past, which might be memory.’

  As bad as the rest of them, I thought. He’s going to tell me that he rode with Arthur’s cavalry which smashed the Saxons at Badon and became – though no one knows why – a legend.

  ‘And what were you?’

  ‘I am. That’s all. No beginnings, no ends. After death one is present both in past and future. Sometimes in life too!’

  A bold and compassionate man he turned out to be, but at that first intimate chat with him I feared he was too preoccupied with the violence of his former profession and more likely to have been a carrion crow than a proconsul. He had no patience with the druidical drop-outs who showed such exaggerated respect for Marrin.

  ‘Druids! Pah!’ he snorted. ‘You say you’ve seen his golden chalice. What do you think of it?’

  ‘Remarkable workmanship.’

  ‘Blasphemy – that’s what I think of it! Some of those chaps believe that Simeon has remade the Grail!’

  I couldn’t at first see what he meant. If the Grail ever existed, it couldn’t be remade. But yes, he said, it could. It was the holiest symbol of Christianity after the Cross. Its spiritual meaning was eternal. Its physical form could be fashioned again and again.

  ‘I suspect those fellows use it in vile heathen rites,’ he exclaimed.

  My Arthurian major was of course tempted to dream of Marrin’s cauldron as the Grail, but it seemed to me that his logic was just as fantastic. If the Grail was an eternal symbol of human longing, the heathen could benefit from its power as well as anyone else. For the first time it occurred to me – then only as a flight of fancy – that the cauldron could be older than the traditional Grail and the memory of it perhaps the origin of the myth. In that case Marrin had not made it, but found it.

  I stayed on at Broom Lodge. My interest was not only in subsistence agriculture and monastic industry. I dislike writing of the other interest, for details would be in the worst taste if they became public. But this confession is for the police, should it ever be necessary for me to defend myself. Otherwise it will be seen only by the red squirrel which has discovered me and suspects that I turn over the white leaves of my notebook to look for nuts. He at least will forgive me if I show my delight in love under the oaks.

  I think that other guests at Broom Lodge must have been intimidated by the abbess or in a hurry to get away or, like the major, too perplexed by the past in the present and the future in the past. I am not, I know, particularly attractive to women. I have a narrow, thin-lipped, dark face and a lean body hardened by travel in search of evidence which archaeologists are too busy with tombs and temples to discover. I have also a lean mind which fails to notice birthdays, moods, hair and other surface femininities when deeply engaged in what has been called dream statistics: a fair description though intended to hurt. So I was surprised to notice – some things I do notice – that Elsa was unmistakably trying to draw attention to herself and, like an awkward young girl, interrupting conversations.

  ‘You must come and see the mines,’ she said to me on the third afternoon.

  The main collieries of the Forest are abandoned, leaving remarkably little industrial mess behind. The seams were rich and there was no gas but, as the shafts deepened, the costs and difficulties of pumping out the water became prohibitive. The shape of the Forest is an irregular crater, not at all obvious to the eye among sharply contoured wooden hillocks but pulling into itself any stream on its way to the Severn.

  Free mines, however, are still worked, and anywhere in a clearing you may come upon a syndicate of two or three exploiting their shallow shaft with pick, shovel and a little tramway to the surface. Dells and hollows which seem a pleasant freak of nature were once mines, some of them worked by Celts and Romans for iron, before it was discovered that the black rock close to the surface would burn.

  I had thought it was an abandoned pit which Elsa wanted me to see; but, as we walked along the green bridle path into the heart of the Forest, chatting of nothing and aware of everything, she in that attractive black robe hanging prettily straight from the shoulder and chastely outlining high breasts and long legs, she turned aside several times to show me these hidden depressions where the bracken gave way to wild flowers and coarse grass and glimpses of bare rock. At last she settled down in one of these pastoral hollows, a dancing ground for nymphs.

  ‘I come here when I am tired of that Broom Lodge,’ she said, patting the slope of grass as an invitation to join her.

  I was surprised. I had taken her to be as whole-hearted an enthusiast as her uncle. I remarked cautiously that perhaps it was all a bit too solemn.

  ‘There hasn’t been an Elsa before and there won’t be an Elsa again,’ she exclaimed.

  To this petulance I answered boldly that for her very individual loveliness it could be true.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I meant!’

  ‘So do you – what I meant.’

  ‘Am I “maternal”?’ She put the word in inverted commas.

  ‘I don’t know. If you don’t feel maternal you play it very well.’

  She did. There were of course no servants at Broom Lodge. Everything was done by the colonists themselves according to their abilities; for example, those who could cook took turns at it. But somebody had to keep an eye on the housekeeping and general organisation, and that was Elsa’s job.

  ‘Of course I do. They all trust me, and Simeon has no time for little things. He has done so much. We were very poor to start with.’ She went on to say that I should not misunderstand her. She loved the commune and believed it was the right way to live.

  ‘But the religion?’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, why should I spoil it for them? But my body is not an illusion, damn it!’

  Again the touch of little girl. I waited for more.

  ‘And I’m too tall for them.’

  Members of the commune were of average height, but she and her uncle – Elsa nearly six foot and he rather more – seemed to tower over them. That effect was due to their air of kindly authority rather than the slight differences of inches.

  With a sudden movement she uncoiled and got up. I did so, too, but less gracefully. When we stood facing each other, her grey eyes were on a level with mine. It was impossible to look over them and I did not want to look away from them. As four eyes so ignored the space between them, there might as well be none. I pulled her to me and kissed her. Her response showed that it was what she expected. She may have persuaded herself that standing up she was less committed.

  ‘They are all … Oh, for them I might come from another world!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Sit down and tell me about it.’

  ‘I shan’t tell you about it. It’s just that I hate it. I feel they think i
t’s wrong to touch me.’

  Myself, I felt it was a sin not to. Her voice and expression implied that ‘they’ didn’t entirely resist temptation but then snatched hands back from the fire so that affairs tended to be exasperating and awkward. She was now sitting close to me and, her head dreamily tilted back, offered her mouth again. She made no effort to stop that severe robe slipping away and then was tremulous but without protest as kisses wandered far and wide until both of us were overwhelmed by that unforgettable demand which still falls short of love but is far more beautiful than crude passion.

  ‘That was rape,’ she whispered later, with pretended indignation.

  Her face was turned away, but one arm was flung out asking to be adored. Of all the erogenous zones a cool, slender arm is to me the most alluring, for it is so lightly joined to all the rest that it seems to be in control of its own movements and has its own personality. I raped that too – in reality now, for I do not think it had experienced such desire before. Its owner was jealous. This time she was surprised at the response of her body, that illusion, and clung to me as if I were life itself.

  ‘How old do you think I am?’ she asked.

  ‘In your twenties somewhere.’

  To be honest I would have put her in her early thirties and at the very prime of her authority and beauty.

  ‘I am twenty-two.’

  ‘And you are really Simeon’s niece?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  She told me how it had all started when she had left school and had begun a course of hotel management. Both her parents had died young and she lived with her grandmother, a vaguely kind woman occupied with good works and giving little companionship. In that dull home life the visits of Uncle Simeon had been the only bright spots for her. He was always a mysterious and stimulating character earning his living as a laboratory technician and spending his evenings with what he called the Fellowship. Several times he had taken her with him to their meetings in a barren little hall. Their principles had been easy enough to understand but quite unbelievable for a girl bursting to accept with joy whatever the present life was about to offer. He had given her books to read and she had dutifully read them, though rejecting all the arguments after the first chapter. She avoided telling him so outright, since she was grateful for his interest in her.