“One night, between three and four in the morning, as I lay sleepless, it came into my head to go pray at the Holy Sepulchre.20 I went, prayed, grew somewhat calmer, until I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ does not understand my despair, He belongs to order and reason’. The day after, an old Arab walked unannounced into my room. He said that he had been sent, stood where the Speculum lay open at the wheel marked with the phases of the moon, described it as the doctrine of his tribe, drew two whorls working one against the other, the narrow end of one in the broad end of the other, showed that my single wheel and his two whorls had the same meaning. He belonged to a tribe of Arabs who called themselves Judwalis or Diagrammatists because their children are taught dances which leave upon the sand traces full of symbolical meaning.21 I joined that tribe, accepted its dress, customs, morality, politics, that I might win its trust and its knowledge. I have fought in its wars and risen to authority. Your young Colonel Lawrence never suspected the nationality of the old Arab fighting at his side.²² I have completed my life, balanced every pleasure with a danger lest my bones might soften.”

III

Three months later, Huddon, Denise, O’Leary and I sat in silence round the same fire. For the last few days we had slept and eaten in the house that Robartes might teach us without interruption. Robartes came in carrying a little chest of carved ivory and sat down, the chest upon his knees. Denise, who had been in a state of suppressed excitement all day, said, “Nobody knows why I call myself Denise de L’Isle Adam, but I have decided to tell my story”. “You told that story”, said Huddon, “half a dozen times at the Café Royal and should be satisfied.”²³

At that moment, to my great relief, Aherne ushered in a pale slight woman of thirty-five and a spectacled man who seemed somewhat older. When Aherne had found them chairs, Robartes said: “This is John Bond and this is Mary Bell.²⁴ Aherne has brought John Bond from Ireland that you may hear what he has to say, and Mary Bell because I think her a suitable guardian for what I carry in this box. Before John Bond tells his story, I must insist upon Denise telling hers; from what I know of her, I feel certain that it will be a full and admirable introduction.”

Denise began:²⁵ “I was reading Axel in bed. It was between twelve and one on the 2nd June last year. A date that I will never forget, because on that night I met the one man I shall always love. I was turning the pages of the Act where the lovers are in the vault under the castle. Axel and Sarah decide to die rather than possess one another. He talks of her hair as full of the odour of dead rose leaves—a pretty phrase—a phrase I would like somebody to say to me; and then comes the famous sentence: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’.²⁶ I was wondering what made them do anything so absurd, when the candle went out. I said, ‘Duddon, I heard you open the window, creep over the floor on your toes, but I never guessed that you would blow the candle out’. ‘Denise,’ he said, ‘I am a great coward. I am afraid of unfamiliar women in pyjamas.’ I said: ‘No, my dear, you are not a coward, you were just shy, but why should you call me unfamiliar? I thought I had put everything right when I told you that I slept on the ground floor, that there was nobody else on that floor, and that I left the window open.’ Five minutes later I said: ‘Duddon, you are impotent, stop trembling; go over there and sit by the fire. I will give you some wine.’ When he had drunk half a tumbler of claret, he said: ‘No, I am not really impotent, I am a coward, that is all. When Huddon tires of a girl, I make love to her, and there is no difficulty at all. He has always talked about her, but if he had not, it would not make much difference. He is my greatest friend, and when she and he have been in the same bed, it is as though she belonged to the house. Twice I have found somebody on my own account, and been a failure, just as I have to-night. I had not indeed much hope when I climbed through the window but I had a little, because you had made it plain that I would be welcome.’ I said: ‘Oh, my dear, how delightful; now I know all about Axel. He was just shy. If he had not killed the Commander in the Second Act—and it would have been much more dramatic at the end of the play—he could have sent for him and all would have come right. The Commander was not a friend, of course; Axel hated him; but he was a relation, and afterwards Axel could have thought of Sarah as a member of the family. I love you because you would not be shy if you had not so great respect for me. You feel about me what I feel about a Bishop in a surplice. I would not give you up now for anything.’ Duddon said, wringing his hands: ‘Oh, what am I to do’. I said: ‘Fetch the Commander’. He said, getting cheerful at once: ‘I am to bring Huddon?’

“A fortnight later Duddon and I were in Florence. We had plenty of money, for Huddon had just bought a large picture, and were delighted with each other. I said: ‘I am going to send Huddon this little cigarette-case’. It was one of those pretty malachite things they sell in Florence.27 I had had it engraved with the words: ‘In memory of the 2nd June’. He said: ‘Why put into it only one cigarette?’ I said: ‘Oh, he will understand’.

“And now you know,” said Denise, “why I have named myself after the author of Axel.” I said: “You wish always to remember that upon that night I introduced you to Huddon”. She said: “What a fool you are. It is you that I love, and shall always love.” I said: “But you are Huddon’s mistress?” She said: “When a man gives me a cigarette, and I like the brand, I want a hundred, but the box is almost empty”.

“Now”, said Robartes, “the time has come for John Bond.” John Bond, after fixing a bewildered eye, first upon Denise and then upon me, began. He had evidently prepared his words beforehand. “Some fifteen years ago this lady married an excellent man, much older than herself, who lived in a large house on the more peaceable side of the Shannon. Her marriage was childless but happy and might have continued so had she not in its ninth year been told to winter abroad. She went alone to the South of France, for her husband had scientific and philanthropic work that he could not leave. I was resting at Cannes after completing the manuscript of a work on the migratory birds, and at Cannes we met and fell in love at first sight. Brought up in the strictest principles of the Church of Ireland, we were horror-struck and hid our feelings from one another. I fled from Cannes to find her at Monaco, from Monaco to find her at Antibes, from Antibes to find her at Cannes, until chancing upon the same hotel we so far accepted fate that we dined at the same table, and after parting for ever in the garden accepted fate completely. In a little while she was with child. She was the first woman that had come into my life, and had I not remembered an episode in the life of Voltaire I had been helpless.28 We were penniless; for the child’s sake and her own she must return to her husband at once.

“As Mary Bell left my letters unanswered I concluded that she meant me to drop out of her life. I read of our child’s birth, heard nothing more for five years. I accepted a post in the Dublin Museum, specialised in the subject of the Irish migratory birds, and at four o’clock one afternoon an attendant brought her into my office.²⁹ I was greatly moved, but she spoke as if to a stranger. I was ‘Mr. Bond’, she was ‘sorry to intrude upon my time’ but I was ‘the only person in Ireland who could give her certain information’. I took the hint and became the courteous Curator, I was there ‘to help the student’. She wished to study the nests of certain migratory birds, thought the only exact method was to make their nests with her own hands. She had found and copied nests in her own neighbourhood, but as progress, entirely dependent on personal observation, was slow, wanted to know what had been published on the subject. Every species preferred some special materials, twigs, lichens, grasses, mosses, bunches of hair and so on, and had a special architecture. I told her what I knew, sent her books, proceedings of learned societies, and passages translated from foreign tongues. Some months later she brought me swift’s, swallow’s, corncrake’s, and reed-warbler’s nests made by her own hands and so well that, when I compared them with the natural nests in the cases of stuffed birds, I could see no difference. Her manner had changed; it was embarrassed, almost mysterious, as though she were keeping something back. She wanted to make a nest for a bird of a certain size and shape. She could not or would not name its species but named its genus. She wanted information about the nesting habits of that genus, borrowed a couple of books, and saying that she had a train to catch, went away. A month later a telegram called me to her country house. I found her waiting at the little station. Her husband was dying, and wished to consult with me about a scientific work he had carried on for many years; he did not know that we knew each other but was acquainted with my work. When I asked what his scientific work was, she said that he would explain, and began to speak of the house and its surroundings. The deplorable semi-gothic gate-way we had passed a moment before was the work of her husband’s father, but I must notice the great sycamores and lucombe oaks and the clump of cedars, and there were great plantations behind the house. There had been a house there in the seventeenth century, but the present house was made in the eighteenth century, when most of the trees were planted. Arthur Young had described their planting and spoken of the great change it would make in the neighbourhood.30 She thought a man who planted trees, knowing that no descendant nearer than his great-grandson could stand under their shade, had a noble and generous confidence. She thought there was something terrible about it, for it was terrible standing under great trees to say ‘Am I worthy of that confidence?’

“The doors were opened by an elderly maid who met us with the smile of the country servant. As she brought me to my room and as I mounted the stairs I noticed walls covered with photographs and engravings, Grillion Club portraits, photographs signed by celebrities of the sixties and seventies of the last century.31 I knew that Mr. Bell’s father had been a man of considerable culture, that Mr. Bell himself had been in the Foreign Office as a young man, but here was evidence that one or other had known most of the famous writers, artists and politicians of his time.³² I returned to the ground floor to find Mary Bell at the tea-table with a little boy. I had begun to discover in his face characteristics of my family when she said, ‘Everybody thinks he is so like his great-uncle, the famous Chancery lawyer, the friend of Goldsmith and of Burke, but you can judge for yourself, that is his great-uncle’s portrait by Gainsborough’.³³ Then she sent the little boy away but told him not to make a noise because of his father’s illness. I stood at a window which opened on to the garden, noticed a number of square boxes much too large to be beehives, and asked their purpose. She said, ‘They are connected with Mr. Bell’s work’, but seemed disinclined to say more. I wandered about the room studying family portraits; a Peter Lely; mezzotints, framed letters from Chatham and Horace Walpole, duelling swords and pistols arranged upon the walls by generations who did not care how incongruous the mixture that called up their own past history.³⁴ Presently an hospital nurse came to say, ‘Mr. Bell has been asking for Mr. Bond. He is very weak; very near his end; but when he has spoken what is on his mind will die happier. He wants to see Mr. Bond alone.’ I followed her upstairs and found the old man in a great four-poster, in a room hung with copies of paintings by Murillo and his contemporaries brought from Italy in the days of the Grand Tour, and one modern picture, a portrait of Mary in her early twenties, painted by Sargent.”³⁵

“The old man, who must have been animated and genial once, smiled and tried to rise from his pillow but fell back with a sigh. The nurse arranged the pillows, told me to call her when he had finished, and went into a dressing-room. He said: ‘When I left the Foreign Office because I wanted to serve God I was a very young man. I wanted to make men better but not to leave this estate, and here nobody did wrong except as children do. Providence had surrounded me with such goodness that to think of altering it seemed blasphemy. I married, and it seemed wrong to give nothing in return for so much happiness. I thought a great deal and remembered that birds and beasts, dumb brutes of all kinds, were robbing and killing one another. There at any rate I could alter without blasphemy. I have never taken Genesis literally. The passions of Adam, torn out of his breast, became the birds and beasts of Eden. Partakers in original sin, they can be partakers in salvation.36 I knew that the longest life could do but little, and wishing especially to benefit those who lacked what I possessed, I decided to devote my life to the cuckoos.³⁷ I put cuckoos in cages, and have now so many cages that they stand side by side along the whole southern wall of the garden. My great object was of course to persuade them to make nests; but for a long time they were so obstinate, so unteachable, that I almost despaired. But the birth of a son renewed my resolution and a year ago I persuaded some of the oldest and cleverest birds to make circles with matches, twigs and fragments of moss, but though the numbers who can do this are increasing, even the cleverest birds make no attempt to weave them into a structure. I am dying, but you have far greater knowledge than I and I ask you to continue my work.’ At that moment I heard Mary Bell’s voice behind me: ‘It is unnecessary, a cuckoo has made a nest. Your long illness made the gardeners careless. I only found it by chance a moment ago, a beautiful nest, finished to the last layer of down.’ She had crept unnoticed into the room and stood at my elbow holding out a large nest. The old man tried to take it but was too weak. ‘Now let Thy servant depart in peace’, he murmured.³⁸ She laid the nest upon the pillow and he turned over, closing his eyes. Calling the nurse we crept out, and shutting the door stood side by side. Neither of us spoke for almost a minute, then Mary flung herself into my arms and said amid her sobs, ‘We have given him great happiness’.

“Next morning when I came down to breakfast I learnt that Mr. Bell had died in his sleep a little before daybreak. Mary did not come down, and when I saw her some hours later she spoke of nothing but the boy. ‘We must devote our whole lives to him. You must think of his education. We must not think of ourselves.’

“At the funeral Mary noticed an old, unknown man among the neighbours and dependents, and when the funeral was over he introduced himself as Mr. Owen Aherne. He told us of scenes that had risen before Mr. Robartes’ eyes on several successive mornings as he awaited his early tea. These scenes being part of our intimate lives, our first meeting in the South of France, our first meeting in the museum, the four-poster with the nest on the pillow, so startled us that we set out for London that very evening. All afternoon we have talked with Mr. Robartes, that inspired man, and Mary Bell has at his bidding undertaken a certain task. I return to Ireland to-morrow to take charge until her return of the estate and of her son.”

IV

Said Robartes, “I have now two questions to ask, and four of you must answer. Mary Bell and John Bond need not, for I have taught them nothing. Their task in life is settled.” Then he turned towards O’Leary, Denise, Huddon and myself, and said, “Have I proved by practical demonstrations that the soul survives the body?” He looked at me and I said, “Yes”; and after me the others, speaking in turn, said, “Yes”. He went on: “We have read Swift’s essay upon the dissensions of the Greeks and Romans; you have heard my comments, corrections, amplifications.39 Have I proved that civilisations come to an end when they have given all their light like burned-out wicks, that ours is near its end?” “Or transformation”, Aherne corrected. I said, speaking in the name of all, “You have proved that civilisations burn out and that ours is near its end”. “Or transformation”, Aherne corrected once more. “If you had answered differently”, said Robartes, “I would have sent you away, for we are here to consider the terror that is to come.”

Mary Bell then opened the ivory box and took from it an egg the size of a swan’s egg, and standing between us and the dark window-curtains, lifted it up that we might all see its colour. “Hyacinthine blue, according to the Greek lyric poet”, said Robartes.⁴⁰ “I bought it from an old man in a green turban at Teheran; it had come down from eldest son to eldest son for many generations.”⁴¹ “No”, said Aherne, “you never were in Teheran.” “Perhaps Aherne is right”, said Robartes. “Sometimes my dreams discover facts, and sometimes lose them, but it does not matter. I bought this egg from an old man in a green turban in Arabia, or Persia, or India. He told me its history, partly handed down by word of mouth, partly as he had discovered it in ancient manuscripts. It was for a time in the treasury of Harun Al-Rashid and had come there from Byzantium, as ransom for a prince of the imperial house.42 Its history before that is unimportant for some centuries. During the reign of the Antonines tourists saw it hanging by a golden chain from the roof of a Spartan temple.⁴³ Those of you who are learned in the classics will have recognised the lost egg of Leda, its miraculous life still unquenched.⁴⁴ I return to the desert in a few days with Owen Aherne and this lady chosen by divine wisdom for its guardian and bearer. When I have found the appointed place, Owen Aherne and I will dig a shallow hole where she must lay it and leave it to be hatched by the sun’s heat.” He then spoke of the two eggs already hatched, how Castor and Clytaemnestra broke the one shell, Helen and Pollux the other, of the tragedy that followed, wondered what would break the third shell.⁴⁵ Then came a long discourse founded upon the philosophy of the Judwalis and of Giraldus, sometimes eloquent, often obscure. I set down a few passages without attempting to recall their context or to arrange them in consecutive order.

“I found myself upon the third antinomy of Immanuel Kant, thesis: freedom; antithesis: necessity; but I restate it.⁴⁶ Every action of man declares the soul’s ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul’s disappearance in God; declares that reality is a congeries of beings and a single being; nor is this antinomy an appearance imposed upon us by the form of thought but life itself which turns, now here, now there, a whirling and a bitterness.”⁴⁷

“After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war. Has our age burned to the socket?”

“Death cannot solve the antinomy: death and life are its expression. We come at birth into a multitude and after death would perish into the One did not a witch of Endor call us back, nor would she repent did we shriek with Samuel: ‘Why hast thou disquieted me?’ instead of slumbering upon that breast.”⁴⁸

“The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy, and were more than symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep. That sleep is the same as the sleep of death.”

“Dear predatory birds, prepare for war, prepare your children and all that you can reach, for how can a nation or a kindred without war become that ‘bright particular star’ of Shakespeare, that lit the roads in boyhood?49 Test art, morality, custom, thought, by Thermopylae; make rich and poor act so to one another that they can stand together there.⁵⁰ Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilisation renewed. We desire belief and lack it. Belief comes from shock and is not desired. When a kindred discovers through apparition and horror that the perfect cannot perish nor even the imperfect long be interrupted, who can withstand that kindred? Belief is renewed continually in the ordeal of death.”

Aherne said:

“Even if the next divine influx be to kindreds why should war be necessary? Cannot they develop their characteristics in some other way?”⁵¹ He said something more which I did not hear, for I was watching Mary Bell standing motionless with ecstatic eyes. Denise whispered: “She has done very well, but Robartes should have asked me to hold it, for I am taller, and my training as a model would have helped”.

Robartes put the egg in its box again, and said good-bye to us one after the other.

JOHN DUDDON

Dear Mr. Yeats,

I have access to records of Robartes’ thought and action. There are diaries kept by my brother Owen during their tramps in Ireland in 1919, 1922 and 1923. Should I live, and my brother consent, I may publish some part of these, for they found themselves, as always, where life is at tension, and met, amidst Free State soldiers, irregulars, country gentlemen, tramps and robbers, events that suggest, set down as they are without context or explanation, recent paintings by Mr. Jack Yeats where one guesses at the forms from a few exciting blotches of colour.⁵² There is a record made by Robartes’ pupils in London that contains his diagrams and their explanations, and John Duddon’s long narrative. You have sent me three poems founded upon “hearsay” as you put it, “The Phases of the Moon”, “The Double Vision”, and “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”.⁵³ The first two compared with what I find in the diaries are sufficiently accurate. One has to allow of course for some condensation and heightening. “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” seems to have got the dates wrong, for according to the story Robartes told my brother, the Founder of the Judwali Sect, Kusta ben Luka, was a young or youngish man when Harun Al-Rashid died.54 However, poetic licence may still exist.

I have compared what you sent of your unpublished book⁵⁵ with the diagrams and explanations recorded by his pupils, and find no essential difference. That you should have found what was lost in the Speculum or survives in the inaccessible encampments of the Judwalis, interests me but does not astonish. I recall what Plato said of memory, and suggest that your automatic script, or whatever it was, may well have been but a process of remembering.⁵⁶ I think that Plato symbolised by the word “memory” a relation to the timeless, but Duddon is more literal and discovers a resemblance between your face and that of Giraldus in the Speculum. I enclose a photograph of the woodcut.⁵⁷

You ask if Robartes and my brother are as hot as ever about that old quarrel and exactly what is the quarrel. This is what I found after questioning various people. Some thirty years ago you made “Rosa Alchemica”, “The Tables of the Law” and “The Adoration of the Magi”, out of “a slight incident”.⁵⁸ Robartes, then a young man, had founded a society, with the unwilling help of my brother Owen, for the study of the Kabbala Denudata and similar books, invented some kind of ritual and hired an old shed on Howth Pier for its meetings.⁵⁹ A foolish rumour got out among the herring or mackerel sorters, and some girls (from Glasgow, my brother says, for they come from all parts) broke the window. You hatched out of this the murder of Robartes and his friends, and though my brother incorporated Christ in the ritual, described a sort of orgy in honour of the pagan gods. My brother is very bitter about the pagan gods, but is so, according to Robartes, to prove himself an orthodox man. Robartes makes no complaint about your description of his death and says nobody would have thought the Aherne and Robartes of such fantastic stories real men but for Owen’s outcry.⁶⁰ He is, however (and this I confirm from my own knowledge), bitter about your style in those stories and says that you substituted sound for sense and ornament for thought. What happened immediately before his separation from Europe must stand out with an unnatural distinction. I wrote once to remonstrate. I said that you wrote in those tales as many good writers wrote at the time over half Europe, that such prose was the equivalent of what somebody had called “absolute poetry” and somebody else “pure poetry”; that though it lacked speed and variety, it would have acquired both, as Elizabethan prose did after the Arcadia, but for the surrender everywhere to the sensational and the topical; that romance driven to its last ditch had a right to swagger.61 He answered that when the candle was burnt out an honest man did not pretend that grease was flame.⁶²

JOHN AHERNE⁶³

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I. As a child I pronounced the word as though it rhymed to “dairy”.