Petrus Peregrinus had removed his hand from the magnet beneath his clothes; but he still kept using his short sword in its black scabbard to assist his steps and to play one part of a third leg. The arm and hand and fingers, however, which, like the wind-tossed branches sprouting from a tree that had the power of motion, belonged to whatever activity he chose to exert on his left hand, were entirely free during their rapid ascent to that expectant Cerne Giant.
It must indeed have been a profoundly religious, as well as a profoundly sacrilegious, instinct in more than a thousand generations of Wessex men and women, that had preserved this defiant superhuman figure, thus exposed in the chalk-grown grass on that particular hill. Never once, from beginning to end of their association, would Pierre de Maricourt, have been able to say that any movement he ever made in connection with Lilith, whether in his mind or with any portion of his body, was ever made on his own initiative. Everything he did or said or thought would have struck him, had he ever tried to recapture it, as pure and simple obedience to Lilith.
And yet, always there, close to his side, was his magic lodestone, ready to be brought into contact with every motion of his will, whether towards exertion or relaxation, whether towards attraction or repulsion, whether towards love or hate.
Plug! Plug! Plod! Plod! thudded his short black-sheathed sword-dagger into that grass-grown chalk hill. He could hear the sound of a bell tolling in the bell-tower of a monastic church at the foot of the hill behind him; and he found himself taking a queer satisfaction in mixing the sound of this monotonous bell with the feeling of pressure in the palm of his right hand from each step he took supported by his leather-covered weapon.
Wild, strange, weird, and often quite mad, are the thoughts and fancies of every one of us with regard to each other; but, when we come to face it, the most crazy and indeed the most disturbing and upsetting of all our imaginative excursions are when, as a man, we have a woman, or as a woman, we have a man at whom to let fly.
Plod! Plod! Plod! But while he ascended that hill, to the sound of the holy bell of Cerne, Peter’s left hand and active fingers found time to untie every knot, loosen every tape, release every pin, disentangle every fold of the most intimate garments of the lovely creature at his side; with the result that, when their four feet and his plodding stick finally touched the chalk-white base of the Giant’s throne, there was nothing for it but a mutual collapse beneath the generative tool of that gigantic figure and an unavoidable union of their two bodies then and there.
No man will ever know what thoughts, and still less what feelings, passed through the consciousness of Lilith, while Petrus wreaked upon her the full measure of his unconscionable lust; but the thoughts and feelings of our great specialist in magnetism were very definite. Although with his face buried in the disordered tangles of Lilith’s hair, he could not see the sea, nor the Isle of the Slingers, nor that majestic beach of semi-precious stones that has come to be named Chesil, Petrus was in some curious and peculiar way conscious of these things.
As he merged his life with Lilith’s, it seemed to him as though the whole cosmos were being cleft in twain. It seemed to him as if he were himself all the oceans and seas and lakes and channels and estuaries and rivers in the world, and as if the slender form he was clasping were all the continents and capes and promontories and islands, round which, and across which, and into the heart of which, all these waters, salter than tears, were pouring their life.
And as these desperate paroxysms of ecstatic union went on beneath that shameless symbol of primeval audacity, it seemed to Petrus as if he were something more than those wave-curves and wave-spoutings. It seemed to him as if he were at that transcendant moment a real, actual, living incarnation of all the creative semen of human life from the day of Adam, the first man.
He felt as if beneath their united bodies the whole of that haunted West Country, from the furthest promontory of the Isle of Slingers to the furthest shoals of the mist-darkened Severn, were heaving up towards the Moon.
Was it, he thought in his nerve-dazed trance, that ever since Joseph of Arimathea brought the blood of Jesus to this coast, consecrating thereby the Mystery of Virginity and throwing a strange and desecrating shadow upon the greater Mystery of Procreation, there had been a craving, a longing, a hungering and thirsting, in the whole earthy substance of this portion of the West, so that the actual soil and sand and stones and rocks and gravel and pebbles of Wessex, along with the very slime of the worms beneath and the slugs above and the spawn of the frogs and the scum of the newts, and the cuckoo-spit of the smallest insect, had been roused to revolt against this preposterous edict of unnatural purity.
And Petrus of Maricourt swore within himself that it was upon him, and upon him alone of all men living or dead, that the burden of the tremendous deliverance was laid.
“I am the one,” he cried to the very tune of his embraces of Lilith, “appointed from the dawn of history to lead the revolt of all natural earthly life, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, against this accurst inhibition, inspired by these mad religious teachers from Palestine. Anti-Christ! Antichrist! Anti-christ! That is what I am. And the crazy joke of it is that this Jesus, whom they call the Second Person of this Trinity they’ve invented, always said that we were all the Sons of God.”
At this point Petrus of Picardy scrambled to his feet, and bending down modestly and courteously over his companion arranged and tidied her disturbed garments.
It was nearly dark by the time Peter of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers passed that glen of the Welsh Tinker which was so near the gate of the Convent. They were on their way to the Priory, where they hoped to waylay Albertus Magnus, who had — so local rumour informed them — been invited that night to dine with the Prior. It was in the mind of Petrus Peregrinus that they might encounter young John there too, setting off for home from his daily visit to the imprisoned Friar. This possibility however Petrus refrained from communicating to Lilith, though exactly what his motive was for this particular piece of rather curious reticence he would have been himself puzzled to say, although it might enter the head of a mean-minded chronicler that it had something to do with the good looks and youth of the person in question.
It was in any case much less of a surprise to the girl from Lost Towers than to the man from Maricourt when up from the Tinker’s Cave, where these children of Israel had been stealing between their separate duties a celestial hour of delicious happiness without troubling their heads about Welsh gods or Welsh tinkers or Welsh witches, came the giant Peleg holding his Ghosta by the hand.
The path upward of the ascending pair crossed irrevocably the path of the couple who were skirting the edge of the declivity, so that an encounter was inescapable. Any aboriginal spirit at this juncture, whether that of a deity, or a tinker, or a witch, who possessed the power of reading the thoughts in alien brains, would have been fascinated, as it darted like a sand-martin from cavity to cavity in these unusual skulls, to note the absolute difference between what was going on in all four heads.
Lilith was wondering whether she lost anything by the fact that the deliciously wicked delight, which she derived from leading people into mischief while she satisfied her senses with their erotic embraces, had never been, even to the faintest wafture of such a thing, touched by the breath of romantic love. “What the devil can that feeling be like?” she wondered irritably.