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.The energy of that most secret house of God, according to the degree in which it was spoken, meant an all but absolute control; he thought, an absolute.He did not mean it for the creatures before him.To loose it on them would be to destroy them at once; he must precipitate it beyond.The time was very near, if his studies were true, at which a certain great exchange should be achieved.He would draw one from that world, but there must be no impropriety of numbers, either there or here; he would send one to that world.He would have thus a double magical link with infinity.He would begin to be worshiped there.That was why he had brought Richard in.Unknowingly, Richard’s mind might hold precisely that still vital junction and communion with the dead which might offer a mode of passage.The Clerk did not doubt his own capacity, sooner or later, to do all by himself, but he would not neglect any convenience.He stirred, by interspersed murmurs, Richard’s slumbering mind to a recollection of sensuous love, love which had known that extra physical union, that extra intention of marriage, which is still called marriage.His eyes ceased to wander and remained fixed on the round window opposite.It looked on a yard, but it looked also on that yard in its infinite relations.There the entry of spirit might be.He drew nearer to the pronunciation; and that strange double echo in his voice, of which Richard had been partly aware, now ceased, and his voice was single.He knew very well that, at that moment, those other appearances of himself in Russia and China had fallen into trance.The deathly formula could only be pronounced by the actual human voice of the single being.There was in that round building one other who knew something of this most secret thing; she sat there, away on his right, and (with all her will) believed.She too knew that the moment was near and that she too was engaged to it.But also she knew that her usefulness to him, save as one of these indistinguishable creatures who were his living spiritual food, was past.In the early days of her knowledge of him, Sara Wallingford knew he had found her useful.It was different now.He did not need her, except for convenience of guarding their daughter; when he sent their daughter fully away, she would be—what would she be? A desertion greater than most human desertions would fall on her.The time was near.He had told her of it long since; she could not complain.The time was very near.When it came and his triplicity was ended, she would be—what that painting had revealed; one of those adoring imbecilities.He had not troubled to deny it.She remembered the awful beginning of the triplicity.It had been in that house in the North, and he had come to her, as he sometimes did, along garden ways at night.It had been the night after the conception of Betty, and she had known already that she carried his child.It had not been she who desired it, nor (physically) he.But the child was to be to him an instrument she could not be.She hated it, before its conception, for that; and when she felt within her all the next day the first point of cold which grew and enlarged till after Betty’s birth—“as cold as spring-water”—she hated it the more.And her hate did not grow less for what had happened on that second night.She had known, as soon as she saw him, that he was bent on a magical operation.He did not now need, for the greater of his works, any of the lesser instruments—the wand, the sword, the lamps, the herbs, the robe.She had been in bed when he came.She was twenty-nine then and she had known him for eight years.He did not need now to tell her to believe in him or to help him; she had been committed to that all those eight years.But in some sense the night of the conception had brought a change.Ever since then, though her subordination to him had grown, his need of her had grown less.On that night, however, she had not yet understood.She lay in her bed and watched him.He drew the curtains and put out the light.There were candles on the dressing-table, and her dressing-gown, with matches in its pocket, lay on a chair by the bed.She put out a hand to see that it was convenient.He was standing between her bed and the great mirror.They had had that mirror put there for exactly such operations, and however dark the room there always seemed to be a faint gray light within the mirror, so that when she saw him in it, it was as if he himself and no mere image lived and moved there.He had put off his clothes, and he stood looking into the mirror, and suddenly the light in it disappeared and she could see nothing.But she could hear a heavy breathing, almost a panting, and almost animal, had it not been so measured and at times changed in measure.It grew and deepened, and presently it became so low a moan that the sweat broke out on her forehead and she bit her hand as she lay.But even that moan was not so much of pain as of compulsion.The temperature of the room grew hotter; a uterine warmth oppressed her.She sighed and threw the blankets back.And she prayed—to God? not to God; to him? certainly to him.She had given herself to his will to be the mother of the instrument of his dominion; she prayed to him now to be successful in this other act.In the mirror a shape of gray light grew slowly visible; it was he, but it was he dimmed.There seemed to be two images of him in one, and they slid into and out of each other, so that she could not be certain which she saw.Both were faint, and there were no boundaries; the grayness itself faded into the darkness.The moaning had ceased; the room was full of a great tension; the heat grew; she lay sweating and willing what he willed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]