“Well, then, it’s nearly over,” I said.
My hands were cold with that freezing uncanny coldness that one associates with ghosts and ghost stories and sitting in a circle in the dark when they told the story of the man who died of fright because he had nailed his coat to a coffin and thought a skeleton hand had got him. That was a delicious tremor of expectancy, at a party sitting in a circle in the dark. Well, hadn’t this been a sort of party on a grand scale, on, you might say, almost a cosmic scale?
Being shut up in a cupboard in the dark was really associated with games of hide-and-seek and the skeleton hand of death was something to be scared of at a party and to watch other people being scared of, afterwards at the next party. Going down and down in the dark was a sensation to be watched, to be enjoyed even if I had touched rock bottom. I had gone down under the wave and I was still alive, I was breathing. I was not drowning though in a sense, I had drowned; I had gone down, been submerged by the wave of memories and terrors repressed since the age of ten and long before, but with the terrors, I had found the joys, too.
On the opposite wall, the mirror was still set at its correct angle. It was a smallish square of glass set in a wide frame of Neapolitan or Pompeian inlaid wood of different colors. It was set square and solid against the wall and we had not thought it necessary to take it down when we put away the china and had the glass over the doors blocked in. The mirror frame did not budge, although there was a slightly different pitch or tone to the new reverberations.
“I don’t know whether they’re flying higher or lower or whether it’s them or whether it’s us,” I said.
“It’s not us,” Bryher said, though my remark had not required an answer. But even if she had not answered it, it would have been immediately answered by the short, staccato perfectly measured beat of a new utterance.
“I don’t know where that comes from.” I said. “I thought we knew all the gun positions.”
“It must be a mobile gun,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Anyway, it’s the third wave,” she said.
But I was not afraid. The noise was outside. Death was outside. The terror had a name. It was not inchoate, unformed. Wunden Eiland? Was that this island, England, pock-marked with formidable craters, with Death stalking one at every corner?
It is very quiet. My knees are trembling and I am so cold. I am terribly cold, but though my knees are trembling, I seem to be sitting here motionless, not frozen into another dimension but here in time, in clock-time. “I wonder what time it is,” I say to Bryher. “It wasn’t a very long raid,” I say to Bryher, “I wish we could talk to someone.”
They told us that gravity or something of that sort would keep the stars from falling. But their wisdom and their detachment hadn’t kept the stars from falling. The bombers had gone now, but the reaction after the prolonged battle is sometimes more shattering than the raids themselves. But the terror and the tension and the disassociation must come to an end sometimes.
Bryher is standing in the door. We will open all the doors now, and I will, with an effort, get out of this chair and stagger into the kitchen and fill a kettle and strike a match and arrange a tea tray.
“I’ll get tea now,” I say. …
I push open the kitchen door and turn round. I stand by the kitchen door opposite the mirror, in a glass darkly. But now face to face. We have been face to face with the final realities. We have been shaken out of our ordinary dimension in time and we have crossed the chasm that divides time from time-out-of-time or from what they call eternity.
I heard Christian Renatus saying:
Wound of Christ,
Wound of God,
Wound of Beauty,
Wound of Blessing,
Wound of Poverty,
Wound of Peace
and it went on and on, while underneath it there was the deep bee-like humming of the choir of Single Brothers and then the deeper sustained bass note that must have been Christian David who had a voice like my great-grandfather who made clocks and kept bees and was called princeps facile of musicians. Princeps facile they called him in Latin and then there was another language about passing the tomb. L’amitié passe même le tombeau, that was; that was French and it was the motto on the seal that the old great-great uncle had, and it was the writing at the head of the parchment that my other grandfather, Christian Henry Seidel, found.
L’amitié passe même le tombeau.
Now Golden Eagle with his arrows, has driven off the enemy; it is a cry and it is a liturgy, the litany of the wounds; pity us, sings Christian David deep deep down so that the even flow of the subdued bee-like humming of the choir of Single Brothers seems like a swarm of bees around the deep bell ringing, ringing in Christian David’s throat; pity us, he says every time that the young Count Christian Renatus pronounces another one of his single strophes of his liturgy of the wounds. Our earth is a wounded island as we swing round the sun.
Harken to us, sings the great choir of the strange voices that speak in a strange bird-like staccato rhythm, but I know what they are saying though they are speaking Indian dialects. The two voices answer one another and the sound of Anna von Pahlen’s voice as she reads the writing on the strip of paper from the woven basket that Cammerhof has just handed her, is pure and silver and clear like a silver trumpet.
I will give him the Morning Star reads Anna, and the head of the Indian priests, who is Shooting Star, later to be baptized Philippus, answers in his own language, Kehelle and then Hail, and they call together to the Great Spirit and the Good Spirit who is the God of the Brotherhood and the God of the Initiates…
… it comes nearer, it is the shouting of many horsemen, it is Philippus, Lover-of-horses, it is Anna, Hannah or Grace, who is answering. Now they call together in one voice … the sound accumulates, gathers sound … “It’s the all-clear,” says Bryher. “Yes,” I say.
London
1941
1943