The Forgotten Threshold

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Middleton
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Title: The Forgotten Threshold
Author: Arthur Middleton
Release Date: August 8, 2004 [eBook #13138]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD***
E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD
A Journal of Arthur Middleton
TO W.S.B.
FOR SUBSTANTIAL EMBODIMENT
PREFATORY NOTE
Before Arthur Middleton died he gave me this record among others in
the belief that it would help to tell me what he had always known in the
silences, yet could never in life transmute into the friendly counters of
speech. During the last years of his all too brief experience of his
friends, more than once he shyly sought to tell what he knew, yet

always silence claimed him, and nothing but the wonder of his eyes
revealed the dream that consumed his heart. Because beauty claims
these words in a deeper knowledge than we had before, I have
transcribed this fragment of them here, confident that in these white
intuitions of his youth there is a revelation of the Light behind beauty
beyond our poor knowledge and still poorer faith. I have omitted only
what was most sacred to the privacies of his heart and our affection. He
was of the old faith and would have wished had he published these
pages to have expressed his entire and passionate loyalty to the Roman
Catholic Church in faith and deed, and to have disclaimed any word
therein which conflicted with the intimacies of its truth. I can do no
more than to echo his wish, and mourn the unhappy chance which took
him from us on an April tide, though it befell on the Easter that he
loved and at that hour when the flaming symbol of the Divine Sacrifice
was setting in the west. So the passion of the sun and tide which
reflected his belief witnessed the consummation of his great
desire.--THE EDITOR.
THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD
THE JOURNAL
(N.B.--On the opening pages of the blank book in which this journal is
contained there is a short fragment which bears no relation that I can
discover to the entries that follow, and I am inclined to believe that it is
the beginning of an autobiography which Middleton never continued.
In my uncertainty, however, I print it, and accordingly it is transcribed
below.--THE EDITOR.)
Fragment.--I was not more than three years old when the sunlight first
made me happy as it stole through the curtains and over the coverlet till
it kissed my lips and wrapped me in its warm embrace. Then I would
fall asleep again and my dreams, if I dreamed at all, were white and
faintly stirred me to a smile. I never tried to catch the sunbeams, for I
felt their gold in my heart, nor could they have been nearer than they
were, being associated with my mother's watchfulness as she stole in to
smile upon my slumbers and claim the second silent unconscious kiss.
On Sunday morning they would be freighted with a quiet whiter light,

more peaceful and hushed to the feeling of the day, and somehow the
peace was guarded with finger on lip throughout the house, so that it
was implicit in my nest of images long before reason took note of it or
sought to explain it to my consciousness. Once again as a boy of fifteen
I knew it with a catch of delighted and almost tearful surprise when I
stroked the breast of a wounded pigeon who found shelter in my room.
The world is not as quiet in these days, nor is the hum of traffic in the
mart attuned so kindly to the flow of light as when it ran so gently by
the bedside of the dreaming boy. ...
(The journal now follows, written in a small cramped hand, without
paragraphing or division. I omit the first few entries as purely personal.
Middleton had gone to a group of remote western islands, and these
notes are the fruit of his sojourn there.)--THE EDITOR.
July 5.
Yesterday found me on the island with its silences, and last night the
host was red and sacrificial and rode on a thunder cloud. This afternoon
the planets go singing through my flesh and my song of praise has
widened to the arches of the sun. The sea is moaning slowly on the
sand. I stripped to the cool salt air for the first time. ...