Rosa Alchemica | Page 5

mirror is broken into numberless pieces'; and then a multitude
of pale hands were reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and
half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were forgotten the moment they
were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes,
my thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise
through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in some way more
certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm,
in a little circlet of rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.
And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they had almost ceased to
be, and, having endured strange moods, melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of
many worlds, I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness
which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had ever lived seemed to
come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and I had never again known mortality or
tears, had I not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream,
and become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a night
elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and
fell, and then the wailing was but the wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to
find myself leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw the
alembic swaying from side to side in the distant corner it had rolled to, and Michael
Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever
you bid me, for I have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must come to a great
distance, for we were commanded to build our temple between the pure multitude by the
waves and the impure multitude of men.'

III

I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind was curiously
empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed to have been plucked out of the
definite world and cast naked upon a shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision
appeared on the point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy or
sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to contemplate, with a
sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly
and careful life; and then I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great
imponderable being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this feeling
passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought refuge in the only definite faith,
I feel a great tolerance for those people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the
chapels and meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits
and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio or sheer madness, if
you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake
again and drive me from my new-found peace.
When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it seemed to me I was
so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment shuddering at eternity, but eternity
weeping and laughing over a moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes
had fallen asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign of all that
had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my excited mind more like a
mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man behind it had dissolved away like
salt in water, and that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of
beings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at all: Michael Robartes is
dead; dead for ten, for twenty years perhaps,' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into
a feverish sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little town, its
slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in the cold morning light. I had been
too pre-occupied 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