CHAPTER XIII
_The Last Words of Mr. Secretan_
"I slept ill that night I awoke again and again from uneasy M dreams,and I seemed in my sleep to hear strange calls and noises and a sound ofmurmurs and beatings on the door. There were deep, hollow voices, too,that echoed in my sleep, and when I woke I could hear the autumn wind,mournful, on the hills above us. I started up once with a dreadfulscream in my ears; but then the house was all still, and I fell againinto uneasy sleep.
"It was soon after dawn when I finally roused myself. The people in thehouse were talking to each other in high voices, arguing about somethingthat I did not understand.
"'It is those damned gipsies, I tell you,' said old Griffith.
"'What would they do a thing like that for?' asked Mrs. Griffith. 'If itwas stealing now--'"
"'It is more likely that John Jenkins has done it out of spite,' saidthe son. 'He said that he would remember you when we did catch himpoaching.'"
"They seemed puzzled and angry, so far as I could make out, but not atall frightened. I got up and began to dress. I don't think I looked outof the window. The glass on my dressing-table is high and broad, and thewindow is small; one would have to poke one's head round the glass tosee anything.
"The voices were still arguing downstairs. I heard the old man say,'Well, here's for a beginning anyhow,' and then the door slammed.
"A minute later the old man shouted, I think, to his son. Then there wasa great noise which I will not describe more particularly, and adreadful screaming and crying inside the house and a sound of rushingfeet. They all cried out at once to each other. I heard the daughtercrying, 'it is no good, mother, he is dead, indeed they have killedhim,' and Mrs. Griffith screaming to the girl to let her go. And thenone of them rushed out of the kitchen and shot the great bolts of oakacross the door, just as something beat against it with a thunderingcrash.
"I ran downstairs. I found them all in wild confusion, in an agony ofgrief and horror and amazement. They were like people who had seensomething so awful that they had gone mad.
"I went to the window looking out on the farmyard. I won't tell you allthat I saw. But I saw poor old Griffith lying by the pond, with theblood pouring out of his side.
"I wanted to go out to him and bring him in. But they told me that hemust be stone dead, and such things also that it was quite plain thatany one who went out of the house would not live more than a moment. Wecould not believe it, even as we gazed at the body of the dead man; butit was there. I used to wonder sometimes what one would feel like if onesaw an apple drop from the tree and shoot up into the air and disappear.I think I know now how one would feel.
"Even then we couldn't believe that it would last. We were not seriouslyafraid for ourselves. We spoke of getting out in an hour or two, beforedinner anyhow. It couldn't last, because it was impossible. Indeed, attwelve o'clock young Griffith said he would go down to the well by theback way and draw another pail of water. I went to the door and stood byit. He had not gone a dozen yards before they were on him. He ran forhis life, and we had all we could do to bar the door in time. And then Ibegan to get frightened.
"Still we could not believe in it. Somebody would come along shouting inan hour or two and it would all melt away and vanish. There could not beany real danger. There was plenty of bacon in the house, and half theweekly baking of loaves and some beer in the cellar and a pound or so oftea, and a whole pitcher of water that had been drawn from the well thenight before. We could do all right for the day and in the morning itwould have all gone away.
"But day followed day and it was still there. I knew Treff Loyne was alonely place--that was why I had gone there, to have a long rest fromall the jangle and rattle and turmoil of London, that makes a man aliveand kills him too. I went to Treff Loyne because it was buried in thenarrow valley under the ash trees, far away from any track. There wasnot so much as a footpath that was near it; no one ever came that way.Young Griffith had told me that it was a mile and a half to the nearesthouse, and the thought of the silent peace and retirement of the farmused to be a delight to me.
"And now this thought came back without delight, with terror. Griffiththought that a shout might be heard on a still night up away on theAllt, 'if a man was listening for it,' he added, doubtfully. My voicewas clearer and stronger than his, and on the second night I said Iwould go up to my bedroom and call for help through the open window. Iwaited till it was all dark and still, and looked out through the windowbefore opening it. And then I saw over the ridge of the long barn acrossthe yard what looked like a tree, though I knew there was no tree there.It was a dark mass against the sky, with wide-spread boughs, a tree ofthick, dense growth. I wondered what this could be, and I threw open thewindow, not only because I was going to call for help, but because Iwanted to see more clearly what the dark growth over the barn reallywas.
"I saw in the depth of the dark of it points of fire, and colors inlight, all glowing and moving, and the air trembled. I stared out intothe night, and the dark tree lifted over the roof of the barn and roseup in the air and floated towards me. I did not move till at the lastmoment when it was close to the house; and then I saw what it was andbanged the window down only just in time. I had to fight, and I saw thetree that was like a burning cloud rise up in the night and sink againand settle over the barn.
"I told them downstairs of this. They sat with white faces, and Mrs.Griffith said that ancient devils were let loose and had come out of thetrees and out of the old hills because of the wickedness that was on theearth. She began to, murmur something to herself, something that soundedto me like broken-down Latin.
"I went up to my room again an hour later, but the dark tree swelledover the barn. Another day went by, and at dusk I looked out, but theeyes of fire were watching me. I dared not open the window.
"And then I thought of another plan. There was the great old fireplace,with the round Flemish chimney going high above the house. If I stoodbeneath it and shouted I thought perhaps the sound might be carriedbetter than if I called out of the window; for all I knew the roundchimney might act as a sort of megaphone. Night after night, then, Istood in the hearth and called for help from nine o'clock to eleven. Ithought of the lonely place, deep in the valley of the ashtrees, of thelonely hills and lands about it. I thought of the little cottages faraway and hoped that my voice might reach to those within them. I thoughtof the winding lane high on the Allt, and of the few men that came thereof nights; but I hoped that my cry might come to one of them.
"But we had drunk up the beer, and we would only let ourselves havewater by little drops, and on the fourth night my throat was dry, and Ibegan to feel strange and weak; I knew that all the voice I had in mylungs would hardly reach the length of the field by the farm.
"It was then we began to dream of wells and fountains, and water comingvery cold, in little drops, out of rocky places in the middle of a coolwood. We had given up all meals; now and then one would cut a lump fromthe sides of bacon on the kitchen wall and chew a bit of it, but thesaltness was like fire.
"There was a great shower of rain one night. The girl said we might opena window and hold out bowls and basins and catch the rain. I spoke ofthe cloud with burning eyes. She said 'we will go to the window in thedairy at the back, and one of us can get some water at all events,' Shestood up with her basin on the stone slab in the dairy and looked outand heard the plashing of the rain, falling very fast. And sheunfastened the catch of the window and had just opened it gently withone hand, for about an inch, and had her basin in the other hand. 'Andthen,' said she, 'there was something that began to tremble and shudderand shake as it did when we went to the Choral Festival at St. Teilo's,and the organ played, and there was the cloud and the burning closebefore me.'
"And then we began to dream, as I say. I woke up in my sitting-room onehot afternoon when the sun was shining, and I had been looking andsearching in my dream all through the house, and I had gone down to theold cellar that wasn't used, the cellar wit
h the pillars and the vaultedroom, with an iron pike in my hand. Something said to me that there waswater there, and in my dream I went to a heavy stone by the middlepillar and raised it up, and there beneath was a bubbling well of cold,clear water, and I had just hollowed my hand to drink it when I woke. Iwent into the kitchen and told young Griffith. I said I was sure therewas water there. He shook his head, but he took up the great kitchenpoker and we went down to the old cellar. I showed him the stone by thepillar, and he raised it up. But there was no well.
"Do you know, I reminded myself of many people whom I have met in life?I would not be convinced. I was sure that, after all, there was a wellthere. They had a butcher's cleaver in the kitchen and I took it down tothe old cellar and hacked at the ground with it. The others didn'tinterfere with me. We were getting past that. We hardly ever spoke toone another. Each one would be wandering about the house, upstairs anddownstairs, each one of us, I suppose, bent on his own foolish plan andmad design, but we hardly ever spoke. Years ago, I was an actor for abit, and I remember how it was on first nights; the actors treadingsoftly up and down the wings, by their entrance, their lips moving andmuttering over the words of their parts, but without a word for oneanother. So it was with us. I came upon young Griffith one eveningevidently trying to make a subterranean passage under one of the wallsof the house. I knew he was mad, as he knew I was mad when he saw medigging for a well in the cellar; but neither said anything to theother.
"Now we are past all this. We are too weak. We dream when we are awakeand when we dream we think we wake. Night and day come and go and wemistake one for another; I hear Griffith murmuring to himself about thestars when the sun is high at noonday, and at midnight I have foundmyself thinking that I walked in bright sunlit meadows beside cold,rushing streams that flowed from high rocks.
"Then at the dawn figures in black robes, carrying lighted tapers intheir hands pass slowly about and about; and I hear great rolling organmusic that sounds as if some tremendous rite were to begin, and voicescrying in an ancient song shrill from the depths of the earth.
"Only a little while ago I heard a voice which sounded as if it were atmy very ears, but rang and echoed and resounded as if it were rollingand reverberated from the vault of some cathedral, chanting in terriblemodulations. I heard the words quite clearly.
* * * * *
"_Incipit liber irae Domini Dei nostri._ (Here beginneth The Book of theWrath of the Lord our God.)
"And then the voice sang the word _Aleph,_ prolonging it, it seemedthrough ages, and a light was extinguished as it began the chapter:
"_In that day, saith the Lord, there shall be a cloud over the land, andin the cloud a burning and a shape of fire, and out of the cloud shallissue forth my messengers; they shall run all together, they shall notturn aside; this shall be a day of exceeding bitterness, withoutsalvation. And on every high hill, saith the Lord of Hosts, I will setmy sentinels, and my armies shall encamp in the place of every valley;in the house that is amongst rushes I will execute judgment, and in vainshall they fly for refuge to the munitions of the rocks. In the grovesof the woods, in the places where the leaves are as a tent above them,they shall find the sword of the slayer; and they that put their trustin walled cities shall be confounded. Woe unto the armed man, woe untohim that taketh pleasure in the strength of his artillery, for a littlething shall smite him, and by one that hath no might shall he be broughtdown into the dust. That which is low shall be set on high; I will makethe lamb and the young sheep to be as the lion from the swellings ofJordan; they shall not spare, saith the Lord, and the doves shall be aseagles on the hill Engedi; none shall be found that may abide the onsetof their battle._
"Even now I can hear the voice rolling far away, as if it came from thealtar of a great church and I stood at the door. There are lights veryfar away in the hollow of a vast darkness, and one by one they are putout. I hear a voice chanting again with that endless modulation thatclimbs and aspires to the stars, and shines there, and rushes down tothe dark depths of the earth, again to ascend; the word is _Zain._"
Here the manuscript lapsed again, and finally into utter, lamentableconfusion. There were scrawled lines wavering across the page on whichSecretan seemed to have been trying to note the unearthly music thatswelled in his dying ears. As the scrapes and scratches of ink showed,he had tried hard to begin a new sentence. The pen had dropped at lastout of his hand upon the paper, leaving a blot and a smear upon it.
Lewis heard the tramp of feet along the passage; they were carrying outthe dead to the cart.
CHAPTER XIV
_The End of the Terror_
Dr. Lewis maintained that we should never begin to understand the realsignificance of life until we began to study just those aspects of itwhich we now dismiss and overlook as utterly inexplicable, andtherefore, unimportant.
We were discussing a few months ago the awful shadow of the terror whichat length had passed away from the land. I had formed my opinion, partlyfrom observation, partly from certain facts which had been communicatedto me, and the pass-words having been exchanged, I found that Lewis hadcome by very different ways to the same end.
"And yet," he said, "it is not a true end, or rather, it is like allthe ends of human inquiry, it leads one to a great mystery. We mustconfess that what has happened might have happened at any time in thehistory of the world. It did not happen till a year ago as a matter offact, and therefore we made up our minds that it never could happen; or,one would better say, it was outside the range even of imagination. Butthis is our way. Most people are quite sure that the BlackDeath--otherwise the Plague--will never invade Europe again. They havemade up their complacent minds that it was due to dirt and bad drainage.As a matter of fact the Plague had nothing to do with dirt or withdrains; and there is nothing to prevent its ravaging England to-morrow.But if you tell people so, they won't believe you. They won't believe inanything that isn't there at the particular moment when you are talkingto them. As with the Plague, so with the Terror. We could not believethat such a thing could ever happen. Remnant said, truly enough, thatwhatever it was, it was outside theory, outside our theory. Flatlandcannot believe in the cube or the sphere."
I agreed with all this. I added that sometimes the world was incapableof seeing, much less believing, that which was before its own eyes.
"Look," I said, "at any eighteenth century print of a Gothic cathedral.You will find that the trained artistic eye even could not behold in anytrue sense the building that was before it. I have seen an old print ofPeterborough Cathedral that looks as if the artist had drawn it from aclumsy model, constructed of bent wire and children's bricks.
"Exactly; because Gothic was outside the aesthetic theory (and thereforevision) of the time. You can't believe what you don't see: rather, youcan't see what you don't believe. It was so during the time of theTerror. All this bears out what Coleridge said as to the necessity ofhaving the idea before the facts could be of any service to one. Ofcourse, he was right; mere facts, without the correlating idea, arenothing and lead to no conclusion. We had plenty of facts, but we couldmake nothing of them. I went home at the tail of that dreadfulprocession from Treff Loyne in a state of mind very near to madness. Iheard one of the soldiers saying to the other: 'There's no rat that'llspike a man to the heart, Bill.' I don't know why, but I felt that if Iheard any more of such talk as that I should go crazy; it seemed to methat the anchors of reason were parting. I left the party and took theshort cut across the fields into Porth. I looked up Davies in the HighStreet and arranged with him that he should take on any cases I mighthave that evening, and then I went home and gave my man his instructionsto send people on. And then I shut myself up to think it all out--if Icould.
"You must not suppose that my experiences of that afternoon had affordedme the slightest illumination. Indeed, if it had not been that I hadseen poor old Griffith's body lying pierced in his own farmyard, I thinkI should have been inclined to accept one of Secretan's hints, and to
believe that the whole family had fallen a victim to a collectivedelusion or hallucination, and had shut themselves up and died of thirstthrough sheer madness. I think there have been such cases. It's theinsanity of inhibition, the belief that you can't do something which youare really perfectly capable of doing. But; I had seen the body of themurdered man and the wound that had killed him.
"Did the manuscript left by Secretan give me no hint? Well, it seemed tome to make confusion worse confounded. You have seen it; you know thatin certain places it is evidently mere delirium, the wanderings of adying mind. How was I to separate the facts from the phantasms--lackingthe key to the whole enigma. Delirium is often a sort of cloud-castle,a sort of magnified and distorted shadow of actualities, but it is avery difficult thing, almost an impossible thing, to reconstruct thereal house from the distortion of it, thrown on the clouds of thepatient's brain. You see, Secretan in writing that extraordinarydocument almost insisted on the fact that he was not in his propersense; that for days he had been part asleep, part awake, partdelirious. How was one to judge his statement, to separate delirium fromfact? In one thing he stood confirmed; you remember he speaks of callingfor help up the old chimney of Treff Loyne; that did seem to fit in withthe tales of a hollow, moaning cry that had been heard upon the Allt: sofar one could take him as a recorder of actual experiences. And I lookedin the old cellars of the farm and found a frantic sort of rabbit-holedug by one of the pillars; again he was confirmed. But what was one tomake of that story of the chanting voice, and the letters of the Hebrewalphabet, and the chapter out of some unknown Minor Prophet? When onehas the key it is easy enough to sort out the facts, or the hints offacts from the delusions; but I hadn't the key on that Septemberevening. I was forgetting the 'tree' with lights and fires in it; that,I think, impressed me more than anything with the feeling thatSecretan's story was, in the main, a true story. I had seen a likeappearance down there in my own garden; but what was it?
"Now, I was saying that, paradoxically, it is only by the inexplicablethings that life can be explained. We are apt to say, you know, 'a veryodd coincidence' and pass the matter by, as if there were no more to besaid, or as if that were the end of it. Well, I believe that the onlyreal path lies through the blind alleys."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, this is an instance of what I mean. I told you about Merritt, mybrother-in-law, and the capsizing of that boat, the _Mary Ann_. He hadseen, he said, signal lights flashing from one of the farms on thecoast, and he was quite certain that the two things were intimatelyconnected as cause and effect. I thought it all nonsense, and I waswondering how I was going to shut him up when a big moth flew into theroom through that window, fluttered about, and succeeded in burningitself alive in the lamp. That gave me my cue; I asked Merritt if heknew why moths made for lamps or something of the kind; I thought itwould be a hint to him that I was sick of his flashlights and hishalf-baked theories. So it was--he looked sulky and held his tongue.
"But a few minutes later I was called out by a man who had found hislittle boy dead in a field near his cottage about an hour before. Thechild was so still, they said, that a great moth had settled on hisforehead and only fluttered away when they lifted up the body. It wasabsolutely illogical; but it was this odd 'coincidence' of the moth inmy lamp and the moth on the dead boy's forehead that first set me on thetrack. I can't say that it guided me in any real sense; it was more likea great flare of red paint on a wall; it rang up my attention, if I maysay so; it was a sort of shock like a bang on the big drum. No doubtMerritt was talking great nonsense that evening so far as his particularinstance went; the flashes of light from the farm had nothing to do withthe wreck of the boat. But his general principle was sound; when youhear a gun go off and see a man fall it is idle to talk of 'a merecoincidence.' I think a very interesting book might be written on thisquestion: I would call it 'A Grammar of Coincidence.'
"But as you will remember, from having read my notes on the matter, Iwas called in about ten days later to see a man named Cradock, who hadbeen found in a field near his farm quite dead. This also was at night.His wife found him, and there were some very queer things in her story.She said that the hedge of the field looked as if it were changed; shebegan to be afraid that she had lost her way and got into the wrongfield. Then she said the hedge was lighted up as if there were a lot ofglow-worms in it, and when she peered over the stile there seemed to besome kind of glimmering upon the ground, and then the glimmering meltedaway, and she found her husband's body near where this light had been.Now this man Cradock had been suffocated just as the little boy Robertshad been suffocated, and as that man in the Midlands who took a shortcut one night had been suffocated. Then I remembered that poor JohnnieRoberts had called out about 'something shiny' over the stile justbefore he played truant. Then, on my part, I had to contribute the veryremarkable sight I witnessed here, as I looked down over the garden; theappearance as of a spreading tree where I knew there was no such tree,and then the shining and burning of lights and moving colors. Like thepoor child and Mrs. Cradock, I had seen something shiny, just as someman in Stratfordshire had seen a dark cloud with points of fire in itfloating over the trees. And Mrs. Cradock thought that the shape of thetrees in the hedge had changed.
"My mind almost uttered the word that was wanted; but you see thedifficulties. This set of circumstances could not, so far as I couldsee, have any relation with the other circumstances of the Terror. Howcould I connect all this with the bombs and machine-guns of theMidlands, with the armed men who kept watch about the munition shops byday and night. Then there was the long list of people here who hadfallen over the cliffs or into the quarry; there were the cases of themen stifled in the slime of the marshes; there was the affair of thefamily murdered in front of their cottage on the Highway; there was thecapsized _Mary Ann_. I could not see any thread that could bring allthese incidents together; they seemed to me to be hopelesslydisconnected. I could not make out any relation between the agency thatbeat out the brains of the Williams's and the agency, that overturnedthe boat. I don't know, but I think it's very likely if nothing more hadhappened that I should have put the whole thing down as an unaccountableseries of crimes and accidents which chanced to occur in Meirion in thesummer of 1915. Well, of course, that would have been an impossiblestandpoint in view of certain incidents in Merritt's story. Still, ifone is confronted by the insoluble, one lets it go at last. If themystery is inexplicable, one pretends that there isn't any mystery. Thatis the justification for what is called free thinking.
"Then came that extraordinary business of Treff Loyne. I couldn't putthat on one side. I couldn't pretend that nothing strange or out of theway had happened. There was no getting over it or getting round it. Ihad seen with my eyes that there was a mystery, and a most horriblemystery. I have forgotten my logic, but one might say that Treff Loynedemonstrated the existence of a mystery in the figure of Death.
"I took it all home, as I have told you, and sat down for the eveningbefore it. It appalled me, not only by its horror, but here again by thediscrepancy between its terms. Old Griffith, so far as I could judge,had been killed by the thrust of a pike or perhaps of a sharpened stake:how could one relate this to the burning tree that had floated over theridge of the barn. It was as if I said to you: 'here is a man drowned,and here is a man burned alive: show that each death was caused by thesame agency!' And the moment that I left this particular case of TreffLoyne, and tried to get some light on it from other instances of theTerror, I would think of the man in the midlands who heard the feet ofa thousand men rustling in the wood, and their voices as if dead men satup in their bones and talked. And then I would say to myself, 'and howabout that boat overturned in a calm sea?' There seemed no end to it, nohope of any solution.
"It was, I believe, a sudden leap of the mind that liberated me from thetangle. It was quite beyond logic. I went back to that evening whenMerritt was boring me with his flashlights, to the moth in the candle,and to the moth on the forehead of poor Johnn
ie Roberts. There was nosense in it; but I suddenly determined that the child and Joseph Cradockthe farmer, and that unnamed Stratfordshire man, all found at night, allasphyxiated, had been choked by vast swarms of moths. I don't pretendeven now that this is demonstrated, but I'm sure it's true.
"Now suppose you encounter a swarm of these creatures in the dark.Suppose the smaller ones fly up your nostrils. You will gasp for breathand open your mouth. Then, suppose some hundreds of them fly into yourmouth, into your gullet, into your windpipe, what will happen to you?You will be dead in a very short time, choked, asphyxiated."
"But the moths would be dead too. They would be found in the bodies."
"The moths? Do you know that it is extremely difficult to kill a mothwith cyanide of potassium? Take a frog, kill it, open its stomach. Thereyou will find its dinner of moths and small beetles, and the 'dinner'will shake itself and walk off cheerily, to resume an entirely activeexistence. No; that is no difficulty.
"Well, now I came to this. I was shutting out all the other cases. I wasconfining myself to those that came under the one formula. I got to theassumption or conclusion, whichever you like, that certain people hadbeen asphyxiated by the action of moths. I had accounted for thatextraordinary appearance of burning or colored lights that I hadwitnessed myself, when I saw the growth of that strange tree in mygarden. That was clearly the cloud with points of fire in it that theStratfordshire man took for a new and terrible kind of poison gas, thatwas the shiny something that poor little Johnnie Roberts had seen overthe stile, that was the glimmering light that had led Mrs. Cradock toher husband's dead body, that was the assemblage of terrible eyes thathad watched over Treff Loyne by night. Once on the right track Iunderstood all this, for coming into this room in the dark, I have beenamazed by the wonderful burning and the strange fiery colors of the eyesof a single moth, as it crept up the pane of glass, outside. Imagine theeffect of myriads of such eyes, of the movement of these lights andfires in a vast swarm of moths, each insect being in constant motionwhile it kept its place in the mass: I felt that all this was clear andcertain.
"Then the next step. Of course, we know nothing really about moths;rather, we know nothing of moth reality. For all I know there may behundreds of books which treat of moth and nothing but moth. But theseare scientific books, and science only deals with surfaces; it hasnothing to do with realities--it is impertinent if it attempts to dowith realities. To take a very minor matter; we don't even know why themoth desires the flame. But we do know what the moth does not do; itdoes not gather itself into swarms with the object of destroying humanlife. But here, by the hypothesis, were cases in which the moth had donethis very thing; the moth race had entered, it seemed, into a malignantconspiracy against the human race. It was quite impossible, nodoubt--that is to say, it had never happened before--but I could see noescape from this conclusion.
"These insects, then, were definitely hostile to man; and then Istopped, for I could not see the next step, obvious though it seems tome now. I believe that the soldiers' scraps of talk on the way to TreffLoyne and back flung the next plank over the gulf. They had spoken of'rat poison,' of no rat being able to spike a man through the heart; andthen, suddenly, I saw my way clear. If the moths were infected withhatred of men, and possessed the design and the power of combiningagainst him; why not suppose this hatred, this design, this power sharedby other non-human creatures.
"The secret of the Terror might be condensed into a sentence: theanimals had revolted against men.
"Now, the puzzle became easy enough; one had only to classify. Take thecases of the people who met their deaths by falling over cliffs or overthe edge of quarries. We think of sheep as timid creatures, who alwaysran away. But suppose sheep that don't run away; and, after all, inreason why should they run away? Quarry or no quarry, cliff or nocliff; what would happen to you if a hundred sheep ran after you insteadof running from you? There would be no help for it; they would have youdown and beat you to death or stifle you. Then suppose man, woman, orchild near a cliff's edge or a quarry-side, and a sudden rush of sheep.Clearly there is no help; there is nothing for it but to go over. Therecan be no doubt that that, is what happened in all these cases.
"And again; you know the country and you know how a herd of cattle willsometimes pursue people through the fields in a solemn, stolid sort ofway. They behave as if they wanted to close in on you. Townspeoplesometimes get frightened and scream and run; you or I would take nonotice, or at the utmost, wave our sticks at the herd, which will stopdead or lumber off. But suppose they don't lumber off. The mildest oldcow, remember, is stronger than any man. What can one man or half adozen men do against half a hundred of these beasts no longerrestrained by that mysterious inhibition, which has made for ages thestrong the humble slaves of the weak? But if you are botanizing in themarsh, like that poor fellow who was staying at Porth, and forty orfifty young cattle gradually close round you, and refuse to move whenyou shout and wave your stick, but get closer and closer instead, andget you into the slime. Again, where is your help? If you haven't got anautomatic pistol, you must go down and stay down, while the beasts liequietly on you for five minutes. It was a quicker death for poorGriffith of Treff Loyne--one of his own beasts gored him to death withone sharp thrust of its horn into his heart. And from that morning thosewithin the house were closely besieged by their own cattle and horsesand sheep; and when those unhappy people within opened a window to callfor help or to catch a few drops of rain water to relieve their burningthirst, the cloud waited for them with its myriad eyes of fire. Can youwonder that Secretan's statement reads in places like mania? Youperceive the horrible position of those people in Treff Loyne; not onlydid they see death advancing on them, but advancing with incrediblesteps, as if one were to die not only in nightmare but by nightmare. Butno one in his wildest, most fiery dreams had ever imagined such a fate.I am not astonished that Secretan at one moment suspected the evidenceof his own senses, at another surmised that the world's end had come."
"And how about the Williams's who were murdered on the Highway nearhere?"
"The horses were the murderers; the horses that afterwards stampeded thecamp below. By some means which is still obscure to me they lured thatfamily into the road and beat their brains out; their shod hoofs werethe instruments of execution. And, as for the _Mary Ann_, the boat thatwas capsized, I have no doubt that it was overturned by a sudden rushof the porpoises that were gamboling about in the water of Larnac Bay. Aporpoise is a heavy beast--half a dozen of them could easily upset alight rowing-boat. The munition works? Their enemy was rats. I believethat it has been calculated that in 'greater London' the number of ratsis about equal to the number of human beings, that is, there are aboutseven millions of them. The proportion would be about the same in allthe great centers of population; and the rat, moreover, is, on occasion,migratory in its habits. You can understand now that story of the_Semiramis_, beating about the mouth of the Thames, and at last castaway by Arcachon, her only crew dry heaps of bones. The rat is an expertboarder of ships. And so one can understand the tale told by thefrightened man who took the path by the wood that led up from the newmunition works. He thought he heard a thousand men treading softlythrough the wood and chattering to one another in some horrible tongue;what he did hear was the marshaling of an army of rats--their arraybefore the battle.
"And conceive the terror of such an attack. Even one rat in a fury issaid to be an ugly customer to meet; conceive then, the irruption ofthese terrible, swarming myriads, rushing upon the helpless, unprepared,astonished workers in the munition shops."
* * * * *
There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Lewis was entirely justified inthese extraordinary conclusions. As I say, I had arrived at pretty muchthe same end, by different ways; but this rather as to the generalsituation, while Lewis had made his own particular study of thosecircumstances of the Terror that were within his immediate purview, as aphysician in large practice in the southern part o
f Meirion. Of some ofthe cases which he reviewed he had, no doubt, no immediate or first-handknowledge; but he judged these instances by their similarity to thefacts which had come under his personal notice. He spoke of the affairsof the quarry at Llanfihangel on the analogy of the people who werefound dead at the bottom of the cliffs near Porth, and he was no doubtjustified in doing so. He told me that, thinking the whole matter over,he was hardly more astonished by the Terror in itself than by thestrange way in which he had arrived at his conclusions.
"You know," he said, "those certain evidences of animal malevolencewhich we knew of, the bees that stung the child to death, the trustedsheepdog's turning savage, and so forth. Well, I got no light whateverfrom all this; it suggested nothing to me--simply because I had not gotthat 'idea' which Coleridge rightly holds necessary in all inquiry;facts _qua_ facts, as we said, mean nothing and, come to nothing. You donot believe, therefore you cannot see.
"And then, when the truth at last appeared it was through the whimsical'coincidence' as we call such signs, of the moth in my lamp and themoth on the dead child's forehead. This, I think, is veryextraordinary."
"And there seems to have been one beast that remained faithful; the dogat Treff Loyne. That is strange."
"That remains a mystery."
* * * * *
It would not be wise, even now, to describe too closely the terriblescenes that were to be seen in the munition areas of the north and themidlands during the black months of the Terror. Out of the factoriesissued at black midnight the shrouded dead in their coffins, and theirvery kinsfolk did not know how they had come by their deaths. All thetowns were full of houses of mourning, were full of dark and terriblerumors; incredible, as the incredible reality. There were things doneand suffered that perhaps never will be brought to light, memories andsecret traditions of these things will be whispered in families,delivered from father to son, growing wilder with the passage of theyears, but never growing wilder than the truth.
It is enough to say that the cause of the Allies was for awhile indeadly peril. The men at the front called in their extremity for gunsand shells. No one told them what was happening in the places wherethese munitions were made.
At first the position was nothing less than desperate; men in highplaces were almost ready to cry "mercy" to the enemy. But, after thefirst panic, measures were taken such as those described by Merritt inhis account of the matter. The workers were armed with special weapons,guards were mounted, machine-guns were placed in position, bombs andliquid flame were ready against the obscene hordes of the enemy, and the"burning clouds" found a fire fiercer than their own. Many deathsoccurred amongst the airmen; but they, too, were given special guns,arms that scattered shot broadcast, and so drove away the dark flightsthat threatened the airplanes.
And, then, in the winter of 1915-16, the Terror ended suddenly as it hadbegun. Once more a sheep was a frightened beast that ran instinctivelyfrom a little child; the cattle were again solemn, stupid creatures,void of harm; the spirit and the convention of malignant design passedout of the hearts of all the animals. The chains that they had cast offfor awhile were thrown again about them.
And, finally, there comes the inevitable "why?" Why did the beasts whohad been humbly and patiently subject to man, or affrighted by hispresence, suddenly know their strength and learn how to league together,and declare bitter war against their ancient master?
It is a most difficult and obscure question. I give what explanation Ihave to give with very great diffidence, and an eminent disposition tobe corrected, if a clearer light can be found.
Some friends of mine, for whose judgment I have very great respect, areinclined to think that there was a certain contagion of hate. They holdthat the fury of the whole world at war, the great passion of death thatseems driving all humanity to destruction, infected at last these lowercreatures, and in place of their native instinct of submission, gavethem rage and wrath and ravening.
This may be the explanation. I cannot say that it is not so, because Ido not profess to understand the working of the universe. But I confessthat the theory strikes me as fanciful. There may be a contagion of hateas there is a contagion of smallpox; I do not know, but I hardly believeit.
In my opinion, and it is only an opinion, the source of the great revoltof the beasts is to be sought in a much subtler region of inquiry. Ibelieve that the subjects revolted because the king abdicated. Man hasdominated the beasts throughout the ages, the spiritual has reigned overthe rational through the peculiar quality and grace of spirituality thatmen possess, that makes a man to be that which he is. And when hemaintained this power and grace, I think it is pretty clear that betweenhim and the animals there was a certain treaty and alliance. There wassupremacy on the one hand, and submission on the other; but at the sametime there was between the two that cordiality which exists betweenlords and subjects in a well-organized state. I know a socialist whomaintains that Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" give a picture of truedemocracy. I do not know about that, but I see that knight and millerwere able to get on quite pleasantly together, just because the knightknew that he was a knight and the miller knew that he was a miller. Ifthe knight had had conscientious objections to his knightly grade,while the miller saw no reason why he should not be a knight, I am surethat their intercourse would have been difficult, unpleasant, andperhaps murderous.
So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A learnedman said to me a few weeks ago: "When I have to choose between theevidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always believethe evidence of tradition. Documents may be falsified, and often arefalsified; tradition is never falsified." This is true; and, therefore,I think, one may put trust in the vast body of folklore which assertsthat there was once a worthy and friendly alliance between man and thebeasts. Our popular tale of Dick Whittington and his Cat no doubtrepresents the adaptation of a very ancient legend to a comparativelymodern personage, but we may go back into the ages and find the populartradition asserting that not only are the animals the subjects, butalso the friends of man.
All that was in virtue of that singular spiritual element in man whichthe rational animals do not possess. Spiritual does not meanrespectable, it does not even mean moral, it does not mean "good" in theordinary acceptation of the word. It signifies the royal prerogative ofman, differentiating him from the beasts.
For long ages he has been putting off this royal robe, he has beenwiping the balm of consecration from his own breast. He has declared,again and again, that he is not spiritual, but rational, that is, theequal of the beasts over whom he was once sovereign. He has vowed thathe is not Orpheus but Caliban.
But the beasts also have within them something which corresponds to thespiritual quality in men--we are content to call it instinct. Theyperceived that the throne was vacant--not even friendship was possiblebetween them and the self-deposed monarch. If he were not king he was asham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed.
Hence, I think, the Terror. They have risen once--they may rise again.
THE END
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