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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35611 ***
+
+THE GREAT RETURN
+
+By
+
+ARTHUR MACHEN
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
+
+PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH
+PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM
+STREET, STRAND, W.C.
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+  THE BOWMEN
+  THE HILL OF DREAMS
+  THE HOUSE OF SOULS
+     [including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]
+  HIEROGLYPHICS
+  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
+  DR. STIGGINS
+
+
+
+ To
+
+D.P.M.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  I.   THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+  II.  ODOURS OF PARADISE
+  III. A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+  IV.  THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+  V.   THE ROSE OF FIRE
+  VI.  OLWEN'S DREAM
+  VII. THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+
+GREAT RETURN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+
+
+There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
+newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
+intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
+London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
+I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.
+
+The circumstances necessary--not to the understanding of this paragraph,
+for that is out of the question--but, we will say, to the understanding
+of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
+and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
+personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
+went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
+to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
+thus the morning paper.
+
+     His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
+     transfigured.--Reuter.
+
+That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
+explanation or comment on this amazing statement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
+he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
+done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
+to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
+meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
+the matter; and so this strange event--if there were any such event--was
+exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
+spectacles.
+
+This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
+flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
+concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
+intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
+stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
+_poltergeists_. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
+to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
+thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
+cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
+kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
+and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
+ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
+sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
+writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
+paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
+explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
+for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
+an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
+suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
+reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
+question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
+not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
+world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
+queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
+instant. Then--for an instant--we see; but the personages whom Mr.
+Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
+too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
+things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
+distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
+Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the _poltergeist_ are
+evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
+on--to poetry or to statistics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
+reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
+Reuter, was not transfigured, and the _poltergeist_, in spite of the
+late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
+servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
+be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
+with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
+not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
+Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
+it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
+visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
+understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
+stand alone, for even if the _poltergeist_ be a real _poltergeist_, it
+merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
+region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
+lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
+Arfonshire.
+
+Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
+it--reads as follows:--
+
+     LLANTRISANT.--The season promises very favourably: temperature of
+     the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
+     supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
+     have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest."
+
+The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
+that the figure called, I think, _tmesis_, or cutting, had been
+generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
+pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
+but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
+blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?
+
+That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
+how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
+again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
+explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
+scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
+lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
+been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
+lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
+lately.
+
+I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
+treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
+do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
+came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
+it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
+possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
+wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
+conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
+way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
+"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
+me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
+newspaper paragraph.
+
+After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
+utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
+evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
+assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
+has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
+say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
+she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
+do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
+magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
+I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
+somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
+because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
+occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
+this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
+them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
+to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.
+
+But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
+doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
+that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
+Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
+clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
+Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
+are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
+set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
+that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
+grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
+confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
+corroborates, explains each separate piece.
+
+So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
+about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
+who was taking an early holiday in those regions.
+
+"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
+ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
+day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
+positively reeking with incense."
+
+I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
+rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
+could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
+weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
+occurrence at Llantrisant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ODOURS OF PARADISE
+
+
+I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
+wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
+such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
+mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
+sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
+then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
+the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
+storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
+upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
+weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
+without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.
+
+It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
+Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
+figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
+peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
+sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
+sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
+bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
+hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
+to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
+many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
+in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
+refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
+them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
+marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
+of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
+noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
+unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
+voices in the caverns of the rocks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
+blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
+there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
+investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
+be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
+commissioner's?--reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
+been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
+had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
+All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
+occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
+spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
+incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
+rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
+angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
+incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.
+
+But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
+to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
+still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
+there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
+most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
+across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
+cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
+there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
+the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
+Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
+began to give me, the stranger, a resume--somewhat of a shaky and
+uncertain resume, I found afterwards--of the various debates and
+questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
+and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
+that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
+and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
+question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
+rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
+demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
+brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
+me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
+the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
+as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
+with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
+the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.
+
+I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
+young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
+upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
+of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
+avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
+I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
+surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.
+
+"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
+You use incense now?"
+
+The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.
+
+"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
+church. I should not venture to do so."
+
+"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
+been sung there, and--"
+
+He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
+that struck me almost with awe.
+
+"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
+old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
+railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
+contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
+derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
+himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
+Hezekiah, _ffeiriad coch yr Castletown_--the Red Priest of
+Castletown--was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
+people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
+was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
+told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
+Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
+nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
+that has been done here."
+
+I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
+rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
+one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
+had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
+my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
+knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
+pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.
+
+But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
+Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
+incense and odours of paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
+harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
+coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
+lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
+one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
+heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
+outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
+hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
+were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies--their mothers, I
+suppose--talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
+little distance from me.
+
+At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
+talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
+period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
+topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
+side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
+my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
+nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.
+
+"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
+make out what is come to the people."
+
+This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
+consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
+the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
+a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
+friendships are common, at small seaside places.
+
+"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
+been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
+we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
+of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
+perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
+something a little queer?"
+
+"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
+write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
+know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
+the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
+so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
+the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
+alarming things!"
+
+"What sort of things?
+
+"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
+not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
+and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
+of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
+drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
+appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
+garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
+And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."
+
+"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
+in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
+Dissenters are very queer in their ways."
+
+"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
+whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
+distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
+bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+
+
+Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
+broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
+as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
+little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
+talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
+at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
+earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
+got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
+causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
+climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
+was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
+and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
+strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
+had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
+bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
+because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
+drink."
+
+For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
+through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
+green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
+a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
+from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
+hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
+be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
+the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
+sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
+of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
+secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
+it.
+
+It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
+feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
+long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
+and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
+those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
+welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
+face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
+hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.
+
+He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
+clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
+might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
+there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
+rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
+thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
+from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
+place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
+looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
+and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
+that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
+darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
+immortal gladness--even into paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
+still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
+happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
+there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
+offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
+there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
+judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
+The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
+friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
+all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
+palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
+river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
+peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
+explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
+the outrageous--according to our established habit of thought, which we
+deem final.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
+to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
+early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
+before me, and--to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
+though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
+significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
+the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
+that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
+farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
+all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
+lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
+the wood, with light about him.
+
+But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
+to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
+heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
+means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
+the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
+that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
+fragments of dreams--they seemed such then--might, perhaps, be gathered
+into the clearness of vision.
+
+It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
+last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
+path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
+justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
+I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
+to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
+ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
+across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
+track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
+often.
+
+It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
+the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
+the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
+to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
+farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
+and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
+plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
+the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
+glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
+with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
+the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
+awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
+wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
+changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
+cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
+my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
+had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
+climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
+stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
+harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
+of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
+country, and was staying for a few days with relations--at the white
+farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
+his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
+doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
+Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
+second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.
+
+So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
+Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
+a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
+had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
+the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
+well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
+thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
+Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
+out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
+have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
+dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
+very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.
+
+They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
+Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
+of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.
+
+"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
+lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
+and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
+his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
+you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
+there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
+that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
+of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
+saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
+that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
+And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
+Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
+hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
+in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.
+
+"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
+and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
+voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
+churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
+friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
+everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
+were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
+Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
+it had been in a whirl-wind."
+
+I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:
+
+"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
+Llantrisant? What men?"
+
+"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."
+
+And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
+legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+
+
+So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
+rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
+and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
+bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
+inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
+key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
+you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
+mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
+oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
+occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
+as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
+Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
+
+It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
+can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
+woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
+so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
+morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
+her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
+eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
+about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
+side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
+into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
+Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
+Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
+nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
+"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."
+
+"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
+amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
+Williams, and as well as your whispers either."
+
+And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
+deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
+who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years--the defect had always
+been in her family--could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
+anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
+time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
+about the bell.
+
+It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
+gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
+And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
+trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
+something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
+and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
+fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
+off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
+these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
+chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
+once."
+
+They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
+asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
+composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."
+
+"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
+can't make out why they would be ringing like that."
+
+"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.
+
+"Then where do you think it was ringing?"
+
+"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
+the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
+Parry had got back her hearing suddenly--such things did happen now and
+then--and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
+explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
+other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
+for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
+and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
+account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
+enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
+opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
+expected.
+
+"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
+of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
+this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
+violent character."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
+high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
+stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
+one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
+of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
+the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
+And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
+not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
+ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
+together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
+joy."
+
+And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
+returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
+heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
+little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
+"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
+song upon the water that was like heaven."
+
+And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
+out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
+strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
+interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
+of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
+remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
+extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
+were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
+has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
+comment on it.
+
+Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
+which the sound of the bell was heard--or supposed to be heard. There
+are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
+that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
+London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
+workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
+particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
+till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
+was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
+Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
+hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
+inaccurately, called the supernatural order.
+
+For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears--or hearts. Deaf
+Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
+sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
+little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
+household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
+baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
+fawr"--the great bells, the great bells--and his mother wondered what he
+was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
+swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
+tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
+heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
+and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
+of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
+true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
+but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
+fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
+something had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
+were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
+me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
+will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
+fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
+glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
+I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
+not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
+remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
+another language, that is, from the Welsh.
+
+So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
+their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
+uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
+were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
+comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
+suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
+thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
+ladies in silken côtehardies.
+
+So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
+stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
+winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
+wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
+from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
+ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."
+
+Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
+evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
+far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
+offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
+of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ROSE OF FIRE
+
+
+It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
+June the first Saturday in June, as I believe--that Llantrisant and all
+the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
+hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.
+
+This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
+possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
+is open to systematic investigation.
+
+But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
+life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
+right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
+wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."
+
+This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
+that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
+reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
+both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
+glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
+oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
+existence, this much is certain--it is not in the least like our
+conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
+that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
+them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
+incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.
+
+Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
+stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
+coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
+night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
+is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
+between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
+they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
+a.m. And the story?
+
+A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
+the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
+Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
+be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
+developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
+knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
+that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
+distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
+time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
+all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
+of the world had come," one of the sailors said.
+
+And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
+say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
+of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
+rocks.
+
+And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
+not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
+science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
+marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
+conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
+thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
+men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
+doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
+were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
+governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
+difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
+but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
+glory of the fiery rose had been about them.
+
+For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
+would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
+and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
+themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
+of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
+have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
+certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
+of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
+more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
+in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
+the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
+air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
+what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
+question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
+just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
+or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
+falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
+observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
+that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
+for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
+coast last June.
+
+And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
+it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.
+
+They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
+truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
+in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
+venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
+He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
+air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
+Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
+abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
+if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
+gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.
+
+And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
+It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
+again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
+is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
+possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
+and fire hot.
+
+"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
+myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
+didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
+big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."
+
+I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
+it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
+agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
+external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
+impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
+assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
+on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
+irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
+bell, by the sharp closing of a book.
+
+But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
+impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
+Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
+impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
+far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
+drank water and stared as if they had been _fins gourmets_ tasting an
+amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
+exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.
+
+And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
+and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
+between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
+heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
+fools they had been.
+
+"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
+said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
+you fight for fivepence?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
+before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."
+
+This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
+none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediæval
+freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
+of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
+Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
+executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
+secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
+went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
+Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
+It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
+country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
+the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
+distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.
+
+The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
+chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
+equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
+rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
+centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
+sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
+altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.
+
+The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
+here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
+him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
+the town and district.
+
+On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
+not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
+expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
+rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
+and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."
+
+And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
+the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
+nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
+the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.
+
+Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
+tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
+going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
+windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
+one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
+anything at all.
+
+"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
+man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
+glass left in the eastern lancets.
+
+But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
+speaking beyond the veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+OLWEN'S DREAM
+
+
+The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
+chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
+no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
+had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
+secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
+that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
+like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
+with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
+or interpret it to themselves.
+
+And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
+transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
+_bien être_ but a _bien être_ raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
+young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
+world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
+rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
+behind all things.
+
+And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
+an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
+shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
+there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
+dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
+it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
+of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
+broken hints.
+
+It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
+years I kept by me an article from the _Lancet_ or the _British Medical
+Journal_--I forget which--in which a doctor gave an account of certain
+experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
+Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
+he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
+incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
+that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
+to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
+and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
+gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
+stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
+were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
+hues that the mortal eye had never seen.
+
+That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
+transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
+quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
+all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
+of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
+"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
+assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
+incense that filled the place from end to end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
+wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
+farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
+death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
+laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
+tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
+recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
+been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
+vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
+bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
+was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
+two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
+morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
+sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
+wake from it.
+
+The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
+her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
+Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
+Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
+It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
+but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
+Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
+could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
+rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
+faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
+mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."
+
+Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
+knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
+world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
+death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
+voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
+to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
+in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
+knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
+fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
+and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
+mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
+there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
+mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
+felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
+and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
+she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
+it was not a dream.
+
+She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
+fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
+to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
+instant the whole world would fall from her--her heart was full of
+agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
+faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
+away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
+even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
+her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
+all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
+trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
+reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
+standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
+faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
+held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
+jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
+of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
+were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
+it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
+with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
+washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
+like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
+blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
+heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
+of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
+from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
+Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."
+
+The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
+pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
+the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
+He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
+found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
+morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
+condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
+the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
+in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
+flowing from an unending well.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now this is the place to ask one of those questions--there are many
+such--which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
+tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
+Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
+over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
+of Latin mediævalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
+flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
+may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
+series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
+their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
+broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
+"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
+precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
+in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
+students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
+birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
+another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
+discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
+his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
+Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
+memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
+of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
+of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
+called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
+harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
+said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
+to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.
+
+Then for my part--I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
+say--I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
+landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
+the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
+very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
+his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
+"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
+north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.
+
+There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
+is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
+the Holy Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+"_FFEIRIADWYR Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!_" shouted the old
+Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard. "Priesthood of
+Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!"
+
+And he went on:
+
+"The Bell that is like _y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys_--the joy of the
+angels in Paradise--is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no
+men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned,
+the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the
+church of the _tri sant_, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and
+their net is full. _Gogoniant, gogoniant_--glory, glory!"
+
+Then another Methodist began to recite in Welsh a verse from Wesley's
+hymn.
+
+     God still respects Thy sacrifice,
+     Its savour sweet doth always please;
+     The Offering smokes through earth and skies,
+     Diffusing life and joy and peace;
+     To these Thy lower courts it comes
+     And fills them with Divine perfumes.
+
+The whole church was full, as the old books tell, of the odour of the
+rarest spiceries. There were lights shining within the sanctuary,
+through the narrow archway.
+
+This was the beginning of the end of what befell at Llantrisant. For it
+was the Sunday after that night on which Olwen Phillips had been
+restored from death to life. There was not a single chapel of the
+Dissenters open in the town that day. The Methodists with their minister
+and their deacons and all the Nonconformists had returned on this Sunday
+morning to "the old hive." One would have said, a church of the Middle
+Ages, a church in Ireland today. Every seat--save those in the chancel
+--was full, all the aisles were full, the churchyard was full; everyone
+on his knees, and the old rector kneeling before the door into the holy
+place.
+
+Yet they can say but very little of what was done beyond the veil. There
+was no attempt to perform the usual service; when the bells had stopped
+the old deacon raised his cry, and priest and people fell down on their
+knees as they thought they heard a choir within singing "Alleluya,
+alleluya, alleluya." And as the bells in the tower ceased ringing, there
+sounded the thrill of the bell from Syon, and the golden veil of
+sunlight fell across the door into the altar, and the heavenly voices
+began their melodies.
+
+A voice like a trumpet cried from within the brightness.
+
+_Agyos, Agyos, Agyos._
+
+And the people, as if an age-old memory stirred in them, replied:
+
+_Agyos yr Tâd, agyos yr Mab, agyos yr Yspryd Glan. Sant, sant, sant,
+Drindod sant vendigeid. Sanctus Arglwydd Dduw Sabaoth, Dominus Deus._
+
+There was a voice that cried and sang from within the altar; most of the
+people had heard some faint echo of it in the chapels; a voice rising
+and falling and soaring in awful modulations that rang like the trumpet
+of the Last Angel. The people beat upon their breasts, the tears were
+like rain of the mountains on their cheeks; those that were able fell
+down flat on their faces before the glory of the veil. They said
+afterwards that men of the hills, twenty miles away, heard that cry and
+that singing, roaring upon them on the wind, and they fell down on
+their faces, and cried, "The offering is accomplished," knowing nothing
+of what they said.
+
+There were a few who saw three come out of the door of the sanctuary,
+and stand for a moment on the pace before the door. These three were in
+dyed vesture, red as blood. One stood before two, looking to the west,
+and he rang the bell. And they say that all the birds of the wood, and
+all the waters of the sea, and all the leaves of the trees, and all the
+winds of the high rocks uttered their voices with the ringing of the
+bell. And the second and the third; they turned their faces one to
+another. The second held up the lost altar that they once called
+Sapphirus, which was like the changing of the sea and of the sky, and
+like the immixture of gold and silver. And the third heaved up high over
+the altar a cup that was red with burning and the blood of the offering.
+
+And the old rector cried aloud then before the entrance:
+
+_Bendigeid yr Offeren yn oes oesoedd_--blessed be the Offering unto the
+age of ages.
+
+And then the Mass of the Sangraal was ended, and then began the passing
+out of that land of the holy persons and holy things that had returned
+to it after the long years. It seemed, indeed, to many that the
+thrilling sound of the bell was in their ears for days, even for weeks
+after that Sunday morning. But thenceforth neither bell nor altar nor
+cup was seen by anyone; not openly, that is, but only in dreams by day
+and by night. Nor did the people see Strangers again in the market of
+Llantrisant, nor in the lonely places where certain persons oppressed by
+great affliction and sorrow had once or twice encountered them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that time of visitation will never be forgotten by the people. Many
+things happened in the nine days that have not been set down in this
+record--or legend. Some of them were trifling matters, though strange
+enough in other times. Thus a man in the town who had a fierce dog that
+was always kept chained up found one day that the beast had become mild
+and gentle.
+
+And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
+sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
+out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
+were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
+"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
+farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
+wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
+multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.
+
+More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
+this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
+marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
+was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
+things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
+not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
+would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday--that
+was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
+James, were reconciled--and this John Williams, without money or credit,
+could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
+poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
+his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
+fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
+money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
+a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
+dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
+the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
+all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
+daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
+feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
+she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
+after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
+years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
+rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
+lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
+wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
+as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
+horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
+have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
+know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
+cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
+was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.
+
+All this, of course, may have been altogether in the natural order; the
+"glow," as they call it, seems more difficult to explain. For they say
+that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended,
+there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the
+country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the
+mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as
+strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before,
+so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.
+
+And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness,
+with love to follow it. There were meetings of old enemies in the
+market-place and in the street that made the people lift up their hands
+and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But as to the "phenomena," the occurrences for which, in ordinary talk,
+we should reserve the word "miraculous"? Well, what do we know? The
+question that I have already stated comes up again, as to the possible
+survival of old tradition in a kind of dormant, or torpid,
+semi-conscious state. In other words, did the people "see" and "hear"
+what they expected to see and hear? This point, or one similar to it,
+occurred in a debate between Andrew Lang and Anatole France as to the
+visions of Joan of Arc. M. France stated that when Joan saw St. Michael,
+she saw the traditional archangel of the religious art of her day, but
+to the best of my belief Andrew Lang proved that the visionary figure
+Joan described was not in the least like the fifteenth-century
+conception of St. Michael. So, in the case of Llantrisant, I have stated
+that there was a sort of tradition about the Holy Bell of Teilo Sant;
+and it is, of course, barely possible that some vague notion of the
+Graal Cup may have reached even Welsh country folks through Tennyson's
+Idylls. But so far I see no reason to suppose that these people had ever
+heard of the portable altar (called Sapphirus in William of Malmesbury)
+or of its changing colours "that no man could discern."
+
+And then there are the other questions of the distinction between
+hallucination and vision, of the average duration of one and the other,
+and of the possibility of collective hallucination. If a number of
+people all see (or think they see) the same appearances, can this be
+merely hallucination? I believe there is a leading case on the matter,
+which concerns a number of people seeing the same appearance on a church
+wall in Ireland; but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may
+be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others,
+telepathically.
+
+But at the last, what do we know?
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35611 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen.
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35611 ***</div>
+
+<h1>THE GREAT RETURN</h1>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>ARTHUR MACHEN</h2>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"</h4>
+
+<h5>PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH</h5>
+
+<h5>PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM</h5>
+
+<h5>STREET, STRAND, W.C.</h5>
+
+<h5>1915</h5>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<p class="caption"><span style="margin-left: 15em;">By the same author</span></p>
+
+<p class="small">
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE BOWMEN</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE HILL OF DREAMS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE HOUSE OF SOULS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16.5em;">[including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">HIEROGLYPHICS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">DR. STIGGINS</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h4>To</h4>
+
+<h4>D.P.M.</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">I.&nbsp;  <a href="#CHAPTER_I">THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">II.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_II">ODOURS OF PARADISE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">III. <a href="#CHAPTER_III">A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">IV.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">THE RINGING OF THE BELL</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">V.&nbsp;  <a href="#CHAPTER_V">THE ROSE OF FIRE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">VI.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">OLWEN'S DREAM</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">VII. <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h4>
+
+<h3>THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
+newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
+intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
+London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
+I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances necessary&mdash;not to the understanding of this paragraph,
+for that is out of the question&mdash;but, we will say, to the understanding
+of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
+and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
+personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
+went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
+to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
+thus the morning paper.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
+transfigured.&mdash;Reuter. </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
+explanation or comment on this amazing statement.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
+he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
+done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
+to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
+meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
+the matter; and so this strange event&mdash;if there were any such event&mdash;was
+exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
+spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
+flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
+concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
+intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
+stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
+<i>poltergeists</i>. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
+to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
+thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
+cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
+kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
+and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
+ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
+sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
+writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
+paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
+explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
+for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
+an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
+suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
+reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
+question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
+not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
+world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
+queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
+instant. Then&mdash;for an instant&mdash;we see; but the personages whom Mr.
+Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
+too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
+things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
+distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
+Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the <i>poltergeist</i> are
+evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
+on&mdash;to poetry or to statistics.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
+reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
+Reuter, was not transfigured, and the <i>poltergeist</i>, in spite of the
+late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
+servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
+be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
+with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
+not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
+Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
+it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
+visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
+understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
+stand alone, for even if the <i>poltergeist</i> be a real <i>poltergeist</i>, it
+merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
+region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
+lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
+Arfonshire.</p>
+
+<p>Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
+it&mdash;reads as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>LLANTRISANT.&mdash;The season promises very favourably: temperature of
+the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
+supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
+have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest." </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
+that the figure called, I think, <i>tmesis</i>, or cutting, had been
+generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
+pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
+but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
+blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?</p>
+
+<p>That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
+how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
+again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
+explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
+scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
+lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
+been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
+lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
+lately.</p>
+
+<p>I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
+treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
+do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
+came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
+it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
+possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
+wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
+conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
+way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
+"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
+me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
+newspaper paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
+utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
+evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
+assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
+has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
+say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
+she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
+do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
+magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
+I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
+somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
+because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
+occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
+this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
+them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
+to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.</p>
+
+<p>But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
+doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
+that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
+Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
+clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
+Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
+are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
+set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
+that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
+grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
+confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
+corroborates, explains each separate piece.</p>
+
+<p>So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
+about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
+who was taking an early holiday in those regions.</p>
+
+<p>"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
+ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
+day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
+positively reeking with incense."</p>
+
+<p>I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
+rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
+could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
+weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
+occurrence at Llantrisant.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h4>
+
+<h3>ODOURS OF PARADISE</h3>
+
+
+<p>I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
+wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
+such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
+mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
+sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
+then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
+the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
+storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
+upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
+weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
+without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
+Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
+figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
+peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
+sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
+sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
+bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
+hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
+to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
+many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
+in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
+refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
+them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
+marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
+of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
+noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
+unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
+voices in the caverns of the rocks.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
+blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
+there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
+investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
+be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
+commissioner's?&mdash;reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
+been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
+had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
+All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
+occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
+spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
+incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
+rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
+angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
+incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.</p>
+
+<p>But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
+to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
+still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
+there.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
+most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
+across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
+cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
+there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
+the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
+Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
+began to give me, the stranger, a resume&mdash;somewhat of a shaky and
+uncertain resume, I found afterwards&mdash;of the various debates and
+questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
+and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
+that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
+and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
+question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
+rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
+demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
+brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
+me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
+the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
+as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
+with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
+the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.</p>
+
+<p>I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
+young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
+upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
+of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
+avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
+I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
+surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.</p>
+
+<p>"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
+You use incense now?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
+church. I should not venture to do so."</p>
+
+<p>"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
+been sung there, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
+that struck me almost with awe.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
+old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
+railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
+contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
+derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
+himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
+Hezekiah, <i>ffeiriad coch yr Castletown</i>&mdash;the Red Priest of
+Castletown&mdash;was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
+people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
+was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
+told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
+Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
+nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
+that has been done here."</p>
+
+<p>I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
+rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
+one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
+had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
+my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
+knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
+pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.</p>
+
+<p>But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
+Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
+incense and odours of paradise.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
+harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
+coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
+lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
+one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
+heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
+outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
+hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
+were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies&mdash;their mothers, I
+suppose&mdash;talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
+little distance from me.</p>
+
+<p>At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
+talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
+period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
+topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
+side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
+my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
+nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.</p>
+
+<p>"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
+make out what is come to the people."</p>
+
+<p>This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
+consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
+the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
+a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
+friendships are common, at small seaside places.</p>
+
+<p>"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
+been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
+we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
+of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
+perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
+something a little queer?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
+write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
+know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
+the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
+so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
+the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
+alarming things!"</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of things?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
+not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
+and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
+of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
+drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
+appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
+garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
+And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."</p>
+
+<p>"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
+in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
+Dissenters are very queer in their ways."</p>
+
+<p>"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
+whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
+distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
+bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h4>
+
+<h3>A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
+broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
+as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
+little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
+talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
+at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
+earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
+got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
+causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
+climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
+was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
+and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
+strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
+had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
+bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
+because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
+drink."</p>
+
+<p>For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
+through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
+green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
+a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
+from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
+hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
+be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
+the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
+sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
+of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
+secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
+it.</p>
+
+<p>It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
+feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
+long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
+and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
+those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
+welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
+face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
+hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
+clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
+might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
+there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
+rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
+thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
+from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
+place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
+looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
+and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
+that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
+darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
+immortal gladness&mdash;even into paradise.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
+still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
+happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
+there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
+offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
+there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
+judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
+The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
+friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
+all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
+palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
+river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
+peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
+explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
+the outrageous&mdash;according to our established habit of thought, which we
+deem final.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
+to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
+early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
+before me, and&mdash;to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
+though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
+significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
+the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
+that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
+farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
+all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
+lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
+the wood, with light about him.</p>
+
+<p>But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
+to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
+heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
+means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
+the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
+that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
+fragments of dreams&mdash;they seemed such then&mdash;might, perhaps, be gathered
+into the clearness of vision.</p>
+
+<p>It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
+last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
+path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
+justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
+I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
+to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
+ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
+across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
+track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
+often.</p>
+
+<p>It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
+the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
+the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
+to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
+farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
+and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
+plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
+the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
+glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
+with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
+the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
+awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
+wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
+changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
+cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
+my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
+had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
+climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
+stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
+harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
+of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
+country, and was staying for a few days with relations&mdash;at the white
+farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
+his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
+doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
+Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
+second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.</p>
+
+<p>So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
+Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
+a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
+had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
+the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
+well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
+thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
+Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
+out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
+have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
+dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
+very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.</p>
+
+<p>They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
+Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
+of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.</p>
+
+<p>"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
+lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
+and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
+his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
+you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
+there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
+that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
+of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
+saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
+that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
+And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
+Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
+hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
+in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
+and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
+voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
+churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
+friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
+everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
+were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
+Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
+it had been in a whirl-wind."</p>
+
+<p>I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:</p>
+
+<p>"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
+Llantrisant? What men?"</p>
+
+<p>"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
+legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h4>
+
+<h3>THE RINGING OF THE BELL</h3>
+
+
+<p>So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
+rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
+and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
+bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
+inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
+key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
+you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
+mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
+oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
+occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
+as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
+Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.</p>
+
+<p>It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
+can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
+woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
+so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
+morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
+her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
+eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
+about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
+side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
+into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
+Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
+Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
+nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
+"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
+amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
+Williams, and as well as your whispers either."</p>
+
+<p>And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
+deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
+who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years&mdash;the defect had always
+been in her family&mdash;could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
+anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
+time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
+about the bell.</p>
+
+<p>It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
+gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
+And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
+trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
+something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
+and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
+fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
+off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
+these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
+chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
+once."</p>
+
+<p>They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
+asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
+composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
+can't make out why they would be ringing like that."</p>
+
+<p>"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.</p>
+
+<p>"Then where do you think it was ringing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
+the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
+Parry had got back her hearing suddenly&mdash;such things did happen now and
+then&mdash;and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
+explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
+other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
+for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
+and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
+account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
+enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
+opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
+expected.</p>
+
+<p>"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
+of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
+this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
+violent character."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
+high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
+stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
+one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
+of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
+the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
+And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
+not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
+ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
+together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
+joy."</p>
+
+<p>And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
+returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
+heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
+little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
+"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
+song upon the water that was like heaven."</p>
+
+<p>And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
+out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
+strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
+interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
+of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
+remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
+extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
+were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
+has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
+comment on it.</p>
+
+<p>Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
+which the sound of the bell was heard&mdash;or supposed to be heard. There
+are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
+that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
+London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
+workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
+particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
+till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
+was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
+Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
+hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
+inaccurately, called the supernatural order.</p>
+
+<p>For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears&mdash;or hearts. Deaf
+Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
+sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
+little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
+household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
+baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
+fawr"&mdash;the great bells, the great bells&mdash;and his mother wondered what he
+was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
+swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
+tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
+heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
+and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
+of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
+true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
+but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
+fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
+something had happened.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
+were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
+me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
+will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
+fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
+glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
+I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
+not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
+remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
+another language, that is, from the Welsh.</p>
+
+<p>So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
+their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
+uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
+were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
+comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
+suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
+thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
+ladies in silken côtehardies.</p>
+
+<p>So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
+stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
+winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
+wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
+from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
+ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."</p>
+
+<p>Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
+evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
+far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
+offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
+of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h4>
+
+<h3>THE ROSE OF FIRE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
+June the first Saturday in June, as I believe&mdash;that Llantrisant and all
+the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
+hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
+possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
+is open to systematic investigation.</p>
+
+<p>But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
+life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
+right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
+wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."</p>
+
+<p>This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
+that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
+reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
+both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
+glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
+oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
+existence, this much is certain&mdash;it is not in the least like our
+conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
+that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
+them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
+incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
+stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
+coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
+night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
+is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
+between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
+they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
+a.m. And the story?</p>
+
+<p>A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
+the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
+Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
+be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
+developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
+knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
+that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
+distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
+time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
+all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
+of the world had come," one of the sailors said.</p>
+
+<p>And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
+say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
+of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
+rocks.</p>
+
+<p>And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
+not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
+science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
+marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
+conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
+thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
+men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
+doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
+were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
+governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
+difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
+but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
+glory of the fiery rose had been about them.</p>
+
+<p>For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
+would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
+and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
+themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
+of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
+have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
+certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
+of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
+more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
+in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
+the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
+air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
+what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
+question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
+just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
+or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
+falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
+observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
+that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
+for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
+coast last June.</p>
+
+<p>And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
+it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.</p>
+
+<p>They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
+truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
+in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
+venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
+He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
+air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
+Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
+abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
+if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
+gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.</p>
+
+<p>And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
+It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
+again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
+is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
+possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
+and fire hot.</p>
+
+<p>"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
+myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
+didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
+big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."</p>
+
+<p>I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
+it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
+agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
+external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
+impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
+assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
+on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
+irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
+bell, by the sharp closing of a book.</p>
+
+<p>But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
+impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
+Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
+impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
+far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
+drank water and stared as if they had been <i>fins gourmets</i> tasting an
+amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
+exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.</p>
+
+<p>And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
+and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
+between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
+heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
+fools they had been.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
+said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
+you fight for fivepence?"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
+before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."</p>
+
+<p>This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
+none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediæval
+freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
+of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
+Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
+executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
+secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
+went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
+Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
+It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
+country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
+the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
+distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.</p>
+
+<p>The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
+chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
+equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
+rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
+centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
+sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
+altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.</p>
+
+<p>The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
+here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
+him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
+the town and district.</p>
+
+<p>On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
+not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
+expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
+rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
+and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."</p>
+
+<p>And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
+the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
+nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
+the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
+tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
+going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
+windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
+one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
+anything at all.</p>
+
+<p>"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
+man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
+glass left in the eastern lancets.</p>
+
+<p>But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
+speaking beyond the veil.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h4>
+
+<h3>OLWEN'S DREAM</h3>
+
+
+<p>The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
+chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
+no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
+had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
+secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
+that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
+like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
+with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
+or interpret it to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
+transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
+<i>bien être</i> but a <i>bien être</i> raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
+young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
+world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
+rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
+behind all things.</p>
+
+<p>And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
+an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
+shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
+there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
+dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
+it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
+of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
+broken hints.</p>
+
+<p>It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
+years I kept by me an article from the <i>Lancet</i> or the <i>British Medical
+Journal</i>&mdash;I forget which&mdash;in which a doctor gave an account of certain
+experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
+Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
+he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
+incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
+that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
+to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
+and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
+gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
+stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
+were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
+hues that the mortal eye had never seen.</p>
+
+<p>That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
+transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
+quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
+all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
+of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
+"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
+assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
+incense that filled the place from end to end.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
+wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
+farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
+death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
+laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
+tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
+recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
+been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
+vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
+bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
+was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
+two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
+morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
+sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
+wake from it.</p>
+
+<p>The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
+her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
+Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
+Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
+It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
+but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
+Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
+could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
+rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
+faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
+mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
+knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
+world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
+death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
+voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
+to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
+in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
+knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
+fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
+and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
+mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
+there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
+mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
+felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
+and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
+she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
+it was not a dream.</p>
+
+<p>She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
+fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
+to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
+instant the whole world would fall from her&mdash;her heart was full of
+agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
+faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
+away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
+even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
+her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
+all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
+trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
+reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
+standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
+faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
+held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
+jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
+of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
+were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
+it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
+with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
+washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
+like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
+blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
+heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
+of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
+from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
+Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
+pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
+the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
+He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
+found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
+morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
+condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
+the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
+in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
+flowing from an unending well.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now this is the place to ask one of those questions&mdash;there are many
+such&mdash;which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
+tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
+Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
+over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
+of Latin mediævalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
+flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
+may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
+series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
+their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
+broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
+"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
+precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
+in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
+students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
+birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
+another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
+discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
+his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
+Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
+memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
+of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
+of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
+called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
+harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
+said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
+to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.</p>
+
+<p>Then for my part&mdash;I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
+say&mdash;I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
+landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
+the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
+very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
+his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
+"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
+north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.</p>
+
+<p>There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
+is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
+the Holy Graal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h4>
+
+<h3>THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL</h3>
+
+
+<p>"<i>FFEIRIADWYR Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!</i>" shouted the old
+Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard. "Priesthood of
+Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!"</p>
+
+<p>And he went on:</p>
+
+<p>"The Bell that is like <i>y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys</i>&mdash;the joy of the
+angels in Paradise&mdash;is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no
+men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned,
+the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the
+church of the <i>tri sant</i>, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and
+their net is full. <i>Gogoniant, gogoniant</i>&mdash;glory, glory!"</p>
+
+<p>Then another Methodist began to recite in Welsh a verse from Wesley's
+hymn.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">God still respects Thy sacrifice,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Its savour sweet doth always please;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The Offering smokes through earth and skies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Diffusing life and joy and peace;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">To these Thy lower courts it comes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">And fills them with Divine perfumes.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The whole church was full, as the old books tell, of the odour of the
+rarest spiceries. There were lights shining within the sanctuary,
+through the narrow archway.</p>
+
+<p>This was the beginning of the end of what befell at Llantrisant. For it
+was the Sunday after that night on which Olwen Phillips had been
+restored from death to life. There was not a single chapel of the
+Dissenters open in the town that day. The Methodists with their minister
+and their deacons and all the Nonconformists had returned on this Sunday
+morning to "the old hive." One would have said, a church of the Middle
+Ages, a church in Ireland today. Every seat&mdash;save those in the chancel
+&mdash;was full, all the aisles were full, the churchyard was full; everyone
+on his knees, and the old rector kneeling before the door into the holy
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they can say but very little of what was done beyond the veil. There
+was no attempt to perform the usual service; when the bells had stopped
+the old deacon raised his cry, and priest and people fell down on their
+knees as they thought they heard a choir within singing "Alleluya,
+alleluya, alleluya." And as the bells in the tower ceased ringing, there
+sounded the thrill of the bell from Syon, and the golden veil of
+sunlight fell across the door into the altar, and the heavenly voices
+began their melodies.</p>
+
+<p>A voice like a trumpet cried from within the brightness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Agyos, Agyos, Agyos.</i></p>
+
+<p>And the people, as if an age-old memory stirred in them, replied:</p>
+
+<p><i>Agyos yr Tâd, agyos yr Mab, agyos yr Yspryd Glan. Sant, sant, sant,
+Drindod sant vendigeid. Sanctus Arglwydd Dduw Sabaoth, Dominus Deus.</i></p>
+
+<p>There was a voice that cried and sang from within the altar; most of the
+people had heard some faint echo of it in the chapels; a voice rising
+and falling and soaring in awful modulations that rang like the trumpet
+of the Last Angel. The people beat upon their breasts, the tears were
+like rain of the mountains on their cheeks; those that were able fell
+down flat on their faces before the glory of the veil. They said
+afterwards that men of the hills, twenty miles away, heard that cry and
+that singing, roaring upon them on the wind, and they fell down on
+their faces, and cried, "The offering is accomplished," knowing nothing
+of what they said.</p>
+
+<p>There were a few who saw three come out of the door of the sanctuary,
+and stand for a moment on the pace before the door. These three were in
+dyed vesture, red as blood. One stood before two, looking to the west,
+and he rang the bell. And they say that all the birds of the wood, and
+all the waters of the sea, and all the leaves of the trees, and all the
+winds of the high rocks uttered their voices with the ringing of the
+bell. And the second and the third; they turned their faces one to
+another. The second held up the lost altar that they once called
+Sapphirus, which was like the changing of the sea and of the sky, and
+like the immixture of gold and silver. And the third heaved up high over
+the altar a cup that was red with burning and the blood of the offering.</p>
+
+<p>And the old rector cried aloud then before the entrance:</p>
+
+<p><i>Bendigeid yr Offeren yn oes oesoedd</i>&mdash;blessed be the Offering unto the
+age of ages.</p>
+
+<p>And then the Mass of the Sangraal was ended, and then began the passing
+out of that land of the holy persons and holy things that had returned
+to it after the long years. It seemed, indeed, to many that the
+thrilling sound of the bell was in their ears for days, even for weeks
+after that Sunday morning. But thenceforth neither bell nor altar nor
+cup was seen by anyone; not openly, that is, but only in dreams by day
+and by night. Nor did the people see Strangers again in the market of
+Llantrisant, nor in the lonely places where certain persons oppressed by
+great affliction and sorrow had once or twice encountered them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But that time of visitation will never be forgotten by the people. Many
+things happened in the nine days that have not been set down in this
+record&mdash;or legend. Some of them were trifling matters, though strange
+enough in other times. Thus a man in the town who had a fierce dog that
+was always kept chained up found one day that the beast had become mild
+and gentle.</p>
+
+<p>And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
+sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
+out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
+were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
+"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
+farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
+wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
+multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.</p>
+
+<p>More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
+this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
+marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
+was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
+things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
+not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
+would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday&mdash;that
+was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
+James, were reconciled&mdash;and this John Williams, without money or credit,
+could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
+poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
+his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
+fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
+money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
+a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
+dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
+the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
+all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
+daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
+feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
+she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
+after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
+years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
+rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
+lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
+wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
+as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
+horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
+have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
+know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
+cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
+was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, may have been altogether in the natural order; the
+"glow," as they call it, seems more difficult to explain. For they say
+that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended,
+there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the
+country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the
+mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as
+strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before,
+so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.</p>
+
+<p>And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness,
+with love to follow it. There were meetings of old enemies in the
+market-place and in the street that made the people lift up their hands
+and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But as to the "phenomena," the occurrences for which, in ordinary talk,
+we should reserve the word "miraculous"? Well, what do we know? The
+question that I have already stated comes up again, as to the possible
+survival of old tradition in a kind of dormant, or torpid,
+semi-conscious state. In other words, did the people "see" and "hear"
+what they expected to see and hear? This point, or one similar to it,
+occurred in a debate between Andrew Lang and Anatole France as to the
+visions of Joan of Arc. M. France stated that when Joan saw St. Michael,
+she saw the traditional archangel of the religious art of her day, but
+to the best of my belief Andrew Lang proved that the visionary figure
+Joan described was not in the least like the fifteenth-century
+conception of St. Michael. So, in the case of Llantrisant, I have stated
+that there was a sort of tradition about the Holy Bell of Teilo Sant;
+and it is, of course, barely possible that some vague notion of the
+Graal Cup may have reached even Welsh country folks through Tennyson's
+Idylls. But so far I see no reason to suppose that these people had ever
+heard of the portable altar (called Sapphirus in William of Malmesbury)
+or of its changing colours "that no man could discern."</p>
+
+<p>And then there are the other questions of the distinction between
+hallucination and vision, of the average duration of one and the other,
+and of the possibility of collective hallucination. If a number of
+people all see (or think they see) the same appearances, can this be
+merely hallucination? I believe there is a leading case on the matter,
+which concerns a number of people seeing the same appearance on a church
+wall in Ireland; but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may
+be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others,
+telepathically.</p>
+
+<p>But at the last, what do we know?</p>
+
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 35611 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #35611 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35611)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Return
+
+Author: Arthur Machen
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2011 [EBook #35611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT RETURN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe at
+http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously made
+available by the Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT RETURN
+
+By
+
+ARTHUR MACHEN
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
+
+PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH
+PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM
+STREET, STRAND, W.C.
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+  THE BOWMEN
+  THE HILL OF DREAMS
+  THE HOUSE OF SOULS
+     [including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]
+  HIEROGLYPHICS
+  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
+  DR. STIGGINS
+
+
+
+ To
+
+D.P.M.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  I.   THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+  II.  ODOURS OF PARADISE
+  III. A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+  IV.  THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+  V.   THE ROSE OF FIRE
+  VI.  OLWEN'S DREAM
+  VII. THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+
+GREAT RETURN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+
+
+There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
+newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
+intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
+London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
+I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.
+
+The circumstances necessary--not to the understanding of this paragraph,
+for that is out of the question--but, we will say, to the understanding
+of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
+and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
+personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
+went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
+to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
+thus the morning paper.
+
+     His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
+     transfigured.--Reuter.
+
+That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
+explanation or comment on this amazing statement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
+he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
+done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
+to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
+meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
+the matter; and so this strange event--if there were any such event--was
+exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
+spectacles.
+
+This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
+flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
+concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
+intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
+stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
+_poltergeists_. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
+to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
+thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
+cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
+kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
+and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
+ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
+sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
+writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
+paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
+explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
+for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
+an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
+suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
+reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
+question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
+not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
+world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
+queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
+instant. Then--for an instant--we see; but the personages whom Mr.
+Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
+too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
+things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
+distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
+Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the _poltergeist_ are
+evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
+on--to poetry or to statistics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
+reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
+Reuter, was not transfigured, and the _poltergeist_, in spite of the
+late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
+servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
+be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
+with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
+not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
+Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
+it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
+visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
+understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
+stand alone, for even if the _poltergeist_ be a real _poltergeist_, it
+merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
+region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
+lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
+Arfonshire.
+
+Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
+it--reads as follows:--
+
+     LLANTRISANT.--The season promises very favourably: temperature of
+     the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
+     supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
+     have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest."
+
+The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
+that the figure called, I think, _tmesis_, or cutting, had been
+generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
+pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
+but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
+blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?
+
+That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
+how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
+again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
+explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
+scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
+lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
+been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
+lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
+lately.
+
+I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
+treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
+do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
+came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
+it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
+possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
+wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
+conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
+way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
+"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
+me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
+newspaper paragraph.
+
+After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
+utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
+evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
+assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
+has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
+say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
+she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
+do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
+magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
+I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
+somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
+because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
+occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
+this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
+them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
+to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.
+
+But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
+doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
+that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
+Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
+clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
+Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
+are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
+set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
+that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
+grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
+confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
+corroborates, explains each separate piece.
+
+So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
+about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
+who was taking an early holiday in those regions.
+
+"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
+ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
+day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
+positively reeking with incense."
+
+I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
+rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
+could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
+weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
+occurrence at Llantrisant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ODOURS OF PARADISE
+
+
+I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
+wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
+such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
+mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
+sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
+then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
+the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
+storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
+upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
+weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
+without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.
+
+It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
+Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
+figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
+peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
+sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
+sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
+bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
+hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
+to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
+many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
+in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
+refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
+them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
+marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
+of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
+noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
+unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
+voices in the caverns of the rocks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
+blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
+there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
+investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
+be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
+commissioner's?--reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
+been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
+had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
+All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
+occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
+spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
+incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
+rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
+angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
+incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.
+
+But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
+to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
+still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
+there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
+most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
+across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
+cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
+there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
+the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
+Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
+began to give me, the stranger, a resume--somewhat of a shaky and
+uncertain resume, I found afterwards--of the various debates and
+questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
+and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
+that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
+and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
+question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
+rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
+demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
+brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
+me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
+the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
+as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
+with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
+the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.
+
+I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
+young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
+upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
+of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
+avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
+I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
+surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.
+
+"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
+You use incense now?"
+
+The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.
+
+"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
+church. I should not venture to do so."
+
+"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
+been sung there, and--"
+
+He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
+that struck me almost with awe.
+
+"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
+old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
+railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
+contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
+derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
+himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
+Hezekiah, _ffeiriad coch yr Castletown_--the Red Priest of
+Castletown--was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
+people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
+was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
+told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
+Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
+nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
+that has been done here."
+
+I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
+rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
+one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
+had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
+my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
+knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
+pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.
+
+But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
+Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
+incense and odours of paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
+harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
+coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
+lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
+one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
+heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
+outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
+hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
+were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies--their mothers, I
+suppose--talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
+little distance from me.
+
+At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
+talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
+period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
+topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
+side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
+my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
+nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.
+
+"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
+make out what is come to the people."
+
+This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
+consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
+the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
+a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
+friendships are common, at small seaside places.
+
+"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
+been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
+we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
+of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
+perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
+something a little queer?"
+
+"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
+write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
+know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
+the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
+so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
+the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
+alarming things!"
+
+"What sort of things?
+
+"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
+not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
+and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
+of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
+drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
+appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
+garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
+And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."
+
+"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
+in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
+Dissenters are very queer in their ways."
+
+"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
+whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
+distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
+bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+
+
+Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
+broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
+as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
+little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
+talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
+at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
+earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
+got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
+causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
+climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
+was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
+and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
+strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
+had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
+bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
+because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
+drink."
+
+For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
+through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
+green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
+a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
+from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
+hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
+be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
+the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
+sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
+of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
+secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
+it.
+
+It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
+feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
+long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
+and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
+those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
+welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
+face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
+hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.
+
+He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
+clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
+might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
+there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
+rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
+thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
+from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
+place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
+looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
+and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
+that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
+darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
+immortal gladness--even into paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
+still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
+happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
+there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
+offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
+there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
+judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
+The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
+friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
+all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
+palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
+river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
+peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
+explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
+the outrageous--according to our established habit of thought, which we
+deem final.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
+to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
+early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
+before me, and--to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
+though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
+significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
+the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
+that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
+farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
+all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
+lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
+the wood, with light about him.
+
+But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
+to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
+heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
+means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
+the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
+that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
+fragments of dreams--they seemed such then--might, perhaps, be gathered
+into the clearness of vision.
+
+It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
+last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
+path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
+justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
+I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
+to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
+ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
+across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
+track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
+often.
+
+It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
+the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
+the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
+to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
+farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
+and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
+plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
+the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
+glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
+with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
+the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
+awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
+wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
+changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
+cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
+my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
+had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
+climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
+stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
+harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
+of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
+country, and was staying for a few days with relations--at the white
+farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
+his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
+doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
+Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
+second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.
+
+So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
+Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
+a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
+had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
+the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
+well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
+thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
+Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
+out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
+have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
+dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
+very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.
+
+They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
+Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
+of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.
+
+"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
+lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
+and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
+his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
+you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
+there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
+that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
+of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
+saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
+that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
+And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
+Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
+hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
+in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.
+
+"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
+and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
+voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
+churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
+friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
+everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
+were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
+Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
+it had been in a whirl-wind."
+
+I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:
+
+"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
+Llantrisant? What men?"
+
+"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."
+
+And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
+legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+
+
+So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
+rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
+and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
+bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
+inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
+key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
+you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
+mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
+oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
+occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
+as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
+Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
+
+It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
+can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
+woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
+so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
+morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
+her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
+eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
+about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
+side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
+into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
+Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
+Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
+nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
+"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."
+
+"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
+amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
+Williams, and as well as your whispers either."
+
+And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
+deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
+who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years--the defect had always
+been in her family--could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
+anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
+time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
+about the bell.
+
+It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
+gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
+And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
+trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
+something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
+and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
+fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
+off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
+these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
+chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
+once."
+
+They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
+asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
+composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."
+
+"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
+can't make out why they would be ringing like that."
+
+"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.
+
+"Then where do you think it was ringing?"
+
+"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
+the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
+Parry had got back her hearing suddenly--such things did happen now and
+then--and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
+explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
+other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
+for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
+and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
+account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
+enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
+opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
+expected.
+
+"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
+of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
+this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
+violent character."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
+high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
+stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
+one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
+of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
+the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
+And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
+not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
+ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
+together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
+joy."
+
+And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
+returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
+heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
+little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
+"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
+song upon the water that was like heaven."
+
+And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
+out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
+strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
+interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
+of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
+remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
+extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
+were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
+has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
+comment on it.
+
+Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
+which the sound of the bell was heard--or supposed to be heard. There
+are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
+that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
+London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
+workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
+particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
+till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
+was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
+Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
+hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
+inaccurately, called the supernatural order.
+
+For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears--or hearts. Deaf
+Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
+sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
+little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
+household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
+baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
+fawr"--the great bells, the great bells--and his mother wondered what he
+was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
+swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
+tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
+heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
+and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
+of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
+true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
+but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
+fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
+something had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
+were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
+me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
+will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
+fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
+glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
+I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
+not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
+remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
+another language, that is, from the Welsh.
+
+So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
+their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
+uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
+were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
+comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
+suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
+thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
+ladies in silken côtehardies.
+
+So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
+stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
+winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
+wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
+from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
+ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."
+
+Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
+evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
+far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
+offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
+of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ROSE OF FIRE
+
+
+It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
+June the first Saturday in June, as I believe--that Llantrisant and all
+the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
+hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.
+
+This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
+possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
+is open to systematic investigation.
+
+But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
+life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
+right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
+wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."
+
+This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
+that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
+reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
+both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
+glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
+oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
+existence, this much is certain--it is not in the least like our
+conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
+that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
+them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
+incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.
+
+Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
+stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
+coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
+night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
+is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
+between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
+they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
+a.m. And the story?
+
+A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
+the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
+Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
+be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
+developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
+knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
+that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
+distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
+time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
+all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
+of the world had come," one of the sailors said.
+
+And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
+say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
+of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
+rocks.
+
+And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
+not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
+science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
+marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
+conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
+thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
+men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
+doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
+were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
+governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
+difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
+but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
+glory of the fiery rose had been about them.
+
+For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
+would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
+and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
+themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
+of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
+have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
+certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
+of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
+more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
+in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
+the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
+air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
+what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
+question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
+just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
+or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
+falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
+observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
+that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
+for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
+coast last June.
+
+And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
+it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.
+
+They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
+truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
+in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
+venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
+He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
+air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
+Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
+abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
+if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
+gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.
+
+And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
+It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
+again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
+is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
+possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
+and fire hot.
+
+"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
+myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
+didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
+big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."
+
+I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
+it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
+agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
+external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
+impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
+assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
+on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
+irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
+bell, by the sharp closing of a book.
+
+But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
+impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
+Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
+impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
+far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
+drank water and stared as if they had been _fins gourmets_ tasting an
+amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
+exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.
+
+And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
+and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
+between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
+heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
+fools they had been.
+
+"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
+said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
+you fight for fivepence?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
+before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."
+
+This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
+none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediæval
+freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
+of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
+Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
+executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
+secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
+went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
+Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
+It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
+country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
+the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
+distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.
+
+The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
+chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
+equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
+rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
+centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
+sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
+altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.
+
+The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
+here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
+him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
+the town and district.
+
+On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
+not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
+expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
+rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
+and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."
+
+And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
+the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
+nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
+the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.
+
+Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
+tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
+going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
+windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
+one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
+anything at all.
+
+"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
+man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
+glass left in the eastern lancets.
+
+But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
+speaking beyond the veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+OLWEN'S DREAM
+
+
+The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
+chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
+no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
+had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
+secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
+that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
+like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
+with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
+or interpret it to themselves.
+
+And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
+transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
+_bien être_ but a _bien être_ raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
+young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
+world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
+rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
+behind all things.
+
+And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
+an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
+shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
+there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
+dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
+it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
+of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
+broken hints.
+
+It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
+years I kept by me an article from the _Lancet_ or the _British Medical
+Journal_--I forget which--in which a doctor gave an account of certain
+experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
+Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
+he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
+incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
+that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
+to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
+and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
+gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
+stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
+were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
+hues that the mortal eye had never seen.
+
+That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
+transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
+quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
+all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
+of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
+"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
+assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
+incense that filled the place from end to end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
+wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
+farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
+death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
+laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
+tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
+recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
+been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
+vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
+bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
+was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
+two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
+morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
+sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
+wake from it.
+
+The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
+her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
+Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
+Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
+It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
+but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
+Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
+could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
+rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
+faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
+mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."
+
+Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
+knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
+world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
+death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
+voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
+to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
+in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
+knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
+fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
+and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
+mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
+there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
+mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
+felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
+and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
+she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
+it was not a dream.
+
+She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
+fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
+to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
+instant the whole world would fall from her--her heart was full of
+agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
+faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
+away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
+even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
+her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
+all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
+trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
+reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
+standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
+faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
+held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
+jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
+of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
+were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
+it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
+with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
+washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
+like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
+blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
+heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
+of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
+from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
+Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."
+
+The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
+pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
+the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
+He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
+found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
+morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
+condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
+the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
+in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
+flowing from an unending well.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now this is the place to ask one of those questions--there are many
+such--which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
+tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
+Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
+over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
+of Latin mediævalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
+flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
+may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
+series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
+their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
+broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
+"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
+precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
+in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
+students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
+birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
+another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
+discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
+his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
+Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
+memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
+of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
+of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
+called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
+harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
+said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
+to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.
+
+Then for my part--I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
+say--I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
+landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
+the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
+very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
+his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
+"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
+north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.
+
+There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
+is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
+the Holy Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+"_FFEIRIADWYR Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!_" shouted the old
+Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard. "Priesthood of
+Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!"
+
+And he went on:
+
+"The Bell that is like _y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys_--the joy of the
+angels in Paradise--is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no
+men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned,
+the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the
+church of the _tri sant_, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and
+their net is full. _Gogoniant, gogoniant_--glory, glory!"
+
+Then another Methodist began to recite in Welsh a verse from Wesley's
+hymn.
+
+     God still respects Thy sacrifice,
+     Its savour sweet doth always please;
+     The Offering smokes through earth and skies,
+     Diffusing life and joy and peace;
+     To these Thy lower courts it comes
+     And fills them with Divine perfumes.
+
+The whole church was full, as the old books tell, of the odour of the
+rarest spiceries. There were lights shining within the sanctuary,
+through the narrow archway.
+
+This was the beginning of the end of what befell at Llantrisant. For it
+was the Sunday after that night on which Olwen Phillips had been
+restored from death to life. There was not a single chapel of the
+Dissenters open in the town that day. The Methodists with their minister
+and their deacons and all the Nonconformists had returned on this Sunday
+morning to "the old hive." One would have said, a church of the Middle
+Ages, a church in Ireland today. Every seat--save those in the chancel
+--was full, all the aisles were full, the churchyard was full; everyone
+on his knees, and the old rector kneeling before the door into the holy
+place.
+
+Yet they can say but very little of what was done beyond the veil. There
+was no attempt to perform the usual service; when the bells had stopped
+the old deacon raised his cry, and priest and people fell down on their
+knees as they thought they heard a choir within singing "Alleluya,
+alleluya, alleluya." And as the bells in the tower ceased ringing, there
+sounded the thrill of the bell from Syon, and the golden veil of
+sunlight fell across the door into the altar, and the heavenly voices
+began their melodies.
+
+A voice like a trumpet cried from within the brightness.
+
+_Agyos, Agyos, Agyos._
+
+And the people, as if an age-old memory stirred in them, replied:
+
+_Agyos yr Tâd, agyos yr Mab, agyos yr Yspryd Glan. Sant, sant, sant,
+Drindod sant vendigeid. Sanctus Arglwydd Dduw Sabaoth, Dominus Deus._
+
+There was a voice that cried and sang from within the altar; most of the
+people had heard some faint echo of it in the chapels; a voice rising
+and falling and soaring in awful modulations that rang like the trumpet
+of the Last Angel. The people beat upon their breasts, the tears were
+like rain of the mountains on their cheeks; those that were able fell
+down flat on their faces before the glory of the veil. They said
+afterwards that men of the hills, twenty miles away, heard that cry and
+that singing, roaring upon them on the wind, and they fell down on
+their faces, and cried, "The offering is accomplished," knowing nothing
+of what they said.
+
+There were a few who saw three come out of the door of the sanctuary,
+and stand for a moment on the pace before the door. These three were in
+dyed vesture, red as blood. One stood before two, looking to the west,
+and he rang the bell. And they say that all the birds of the wood, and
+all the waters of the sea, and all the leaves of the trees, and all the
+winds of the high rocks uttered their voices with the ringing of the
+bell. And the second and the third; they turned their faces one to
+another. The second held up the lost altar that they once called
+Sapphirus, which was like the changing of the sea and of the sky, and
+like the immixture of gold and silver. And the third heaved up high over
+the altar a cup that was red with burning and the blood of the offering.
+
+And the old rector cried aloud then before the entrance:
+
+_Bendigeid yr Offeren yn oes oesoedd_--blessed be the Offering unto the
+age of ages.
+
+And then the Mass of the Sangraal was ended, and then began the passing
+out of that land of the holy persons and holy things that had returned
+to it after the long years. It seemed, indeed, to many that the
+thrilling sound of the bell was in their ears for days, even for weeks
+after that Sunday morning. But thenceforth neither bell nor altar nor
+cup was seen by anyone; not openly, that is, but only in dreams by day
+and by night. Nor did the people see Strangers again in the market of
+Llantrisant, nor in the lonely places where certain persons oppressed by
+great affliction and sorrow had once or twice encountered them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that time of visitation will never be forgotten by the people. Many
+things happened in the nine days that have not been set down in this
+record--or legend. Some of them were trifling matters, though strange
+enough in other times. Thus a man in the town who had a fierce dog that
+was always kept chained up found one day that the beast had become mild
+and gentle.
+
+And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
+sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
+out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
+were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
+"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
+farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
+wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
+multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.
+
+More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
+this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
+marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
+was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
+things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
+not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
+would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday--that
+was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
+James, were reconciled--and this John Williams, without money or credit,
+could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
+poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
+his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
+fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
+money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
+a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
+dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
+the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
+all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
+daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
+feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
+she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
+after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
+years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
+rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
+lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
+wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
+as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
+horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
+have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
+know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
+cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
+was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.
+
+All this, of course, may have been altogether in the natural order; the
+"glow," as they call it, seems more difficult to explain. For they say
+that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended,
+there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the
+country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the
+mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as
+strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before,
+so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.
+
+And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness,
+with love to follow it. There were meetings of old enemies in the
+market-place and in the street that made the people lift up their hands
+and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But as to the "phenomena," the occurrences for which, in ordinary talk,
+we should reserve the word "miraculous"? Well, what do we know? The
+question that I have already stated comes up again, as to the possible
+survival of old tradition in a kind of dormant, or torpid,
+semi-conscious state. In other words, did the people "see" and "hear"
+what they expected to see and hear? This point, or one similar to it,
+occurred in a debate between Andrew Lang and Anatole France as to the
+visions of Joan of Arc. M. France stated that when Joan saw St. Michael,
+she saw the traditional archangel of the religious art of her day, but
+to the best of my belief Andrew Lang proved that the visionary figure
+Joan described was not in the least like the fifteenth-century
+conception of St. Michael. So, in the case of Llantrisant, I have stated
+that there was a sort of tradition about the Holy Bell of Teilo Sant;
+and it is, of course, barely possible that some vague notion of the
+Graal Cup may have reached even Welsh country folks through Tennyson's
+Idylls. But so far I see no reason to suppose that these people had ever
+heard of the portable altar (called Sapphirus in William of Malmesbury)
+or of its changing colours "that no man could discern."
+
+And then there are the other questions of the distinction between
+hallucination and vision, of the average duration of one and the other,
+and of the possibility of collective hallucination. If a number of
+people all see (or think they see) the same appearances, can this be
+merely hallucination? I believe there is a leading case on the matter,
+which concerns a number of people seeing the same appearance on a church
+wall in Ireland; but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may
+be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others,
+telepathically.
+
+But at the last, what do we know?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
+
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+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
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+Title: The Great Return
+
+Author: Arthur Machen
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2011 [EBook #35611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT RETURN ***
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+Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe at
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+available by the Internet Archive)
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+
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+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>THE GREAT RETURN</h1>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>ARTHUR MACHEN</h2>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"</h4>
+
+<h5>PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH</h5>
+
+<h5>PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM</h5>
+
+<h5>STREET, STRAND, W.C.</h5>
+
+<h5>1915</h5>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<p class="caption"><span style="margin-left: 15em;">By the same author</span></p>
+
+<p class="small">
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE BOWMEN</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE HILL OF DREAMS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE HOUSE OF SOULS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16.5em;">[including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">HIEROGLYPHICS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">DR. STIGGINS</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h4>To</h4>
+
+<h4>D.P.M.</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">I.&nbsp;  <a href="#CHAPTER_I">THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">II.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_II">ODOURS OF PARADISE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">III. <a href="#CHAPTER_III">A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">IV.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">THE RINGING OF THE BELL</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">V.&nbsp;  <a href="#CHAPTER_V">THE ROSE OF FIRE</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">VI.&nbsp; <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">OLWEN'S DREAM</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">VII. <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h4>
+
+<h3>THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
+newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
+intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
+London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
+I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.</p>
+
+<p>The circumstances necessary&mdash;not to the understanding of this paragraph,
+for that is out of the question&mdash;but, we will say, to the understanding
+of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
+and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
+personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
+went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
+to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
+thus the morning paper.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
+transfigured.&mdash;Reuter. </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
+explanation or comment on this amazing statement.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
+he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
+done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
+to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
+meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
+the matter; and so this strange event&mdash;if there were any such event&mdash;was
+exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
+spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
+flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
+concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
+intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
+stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
+<i>poltergeists</i>. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
+to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
+thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
+cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
+kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
+and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
+ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
+sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
+writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
+paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
+explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
+for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
+an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
+suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
+reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
+question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
+not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
+world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
+queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
+instant. Then&mdash;for an instant&mdash;we see; but the personages whom Mr.
+Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
+too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
+things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
+distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
+Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the <i>poltergeist</i> are
+evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
+on&mdash;to poetry or to statistics.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
+reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
+Reuter, was not transfigured, and the <i>poltergeist</i>, in spite of the
+late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
+servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
+be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
+with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
+not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
+Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
+it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
+visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
+understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
+stand alone, for even if the <i>poltergeist</i> be a real <i>poltergeist</i>, it
+merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
+region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
+lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
+Arfonshire.</p>
+
+<p>Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
+it&mdash;reads as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>LLANTRISANT.&mdash;The season promises very favourably: temperature of
+the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
+supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
+have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest." </p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
+that the figure called, I think, <i>tmesis</i>, or cutting, had been
+generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
+pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
+but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
+blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?</p>
+
+<p>That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
+how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
+again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
+explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
+scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
+lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
+been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
+lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
+lately.</p>
+
+<p>I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
+treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
+do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
+came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
+it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
+possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
+wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
+conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
+way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
+"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
+me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
+newspaper paragraph.</p>
+
+<p>After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
+utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
+evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
+assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
+has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
+say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
+she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
+do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
+magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
+I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
+somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
+because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
+occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
+this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
+them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
+to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.</p>
+
+<p>But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
+doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
+that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
+Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
+clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
+Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
+are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
+set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
+that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
+grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
+confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
+corroborates, explains each separate piece.</p>
+
+<p>So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
+about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
+who was taking an early holiday in those regions.</p>
+
+<p>"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
+ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
+day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
+positively reeking with incense."</p>
+
+<p>I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
+rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
+could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
+weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
+occurrence at Llantrisant.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h4>
+
+<h3>ODOURS OF PARADISE</h3>
+
+
+<p>I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
+wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
+such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
+mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
+sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
+then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
+the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
+storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
+upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
+weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
+without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
+Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
+figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
+peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
+sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
+sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
+bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
+hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
+to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
+many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
+in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
+refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
+them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
+marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
+of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
+noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
+unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
+voices in the caverns of the rocks.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
+blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
+there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
+investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
+be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
+commissioner's?&mdash;reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
+been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
+had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
+All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
+occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
+spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
+incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
+rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
+angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
+incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.</p>
+
+<p>But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
+to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
+still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
+there.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
+most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
+across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
+cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
+there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
+the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
+Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
+began to give me, the stranger, a resume&mdash;somewhat of a shaky and
+uncertain resume, I found afterwards&mdash;of the various debates and
+questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
+and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
+that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
+and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
+question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
+rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
+demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
+brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
+me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
+the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
+as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
+with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
+the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.</p>
+
+<p>I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
+young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
+upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
+of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
+avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
+I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
+surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.</p>
+
+<p>"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
+You use incense now?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
+church. I should not venture to do so."</p>
+
+<p>"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
+been sung there, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
+that struck me almost with awe.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
+old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
+railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
+contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
+derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
+himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
+Hezekiah, <i>ffeiriad coch yr Castletown</i>&mdash;the Red Priest of
+Castletown&mdash;was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
+people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
+was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
+told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
+Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
+nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
+that has been done here."</p>
+
+<p>I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
+rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
+one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
+had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
+my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
+knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
+pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.</p>
+
+<p>But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
+Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
+incense and odours of paradise.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
+harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
+coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
+lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
+one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
+heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
+outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
+hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
+were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies&mdash;their mothers, I
+suppose&mdash;talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
+little distance from me.</p>
+
+<p>At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
+talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
+period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
+topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
+side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
+my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
+nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.</p>
+
+<p>"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
+make out what is come to the people."</p>
+
+<p>This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
+consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
+the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
+a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
+friendships are common, at small seaside places.</p>
+
+<p>"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
+been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
+we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
+of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
+perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
+something a little queer?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
+write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
+know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
+the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
+so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
+the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
+alarming things!"</p>
+
+<p>"What sort of things?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
+not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
+and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
+of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
+drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
+appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
+garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
+And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."</p>
+
+<p>"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
+in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
+Dissenters are very queer in their ways."</p>
+
+<p>"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
+whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
+distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
+bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h4>
+
+<h3>A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
+broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
+as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
+little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
+talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
+at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
+earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
+got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
+causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
+climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
+was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
+and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
+strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
+had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
+bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
+because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
+drink."</p>
+
+<p>For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
+through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
+green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
+a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
+from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
+hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
+be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
+the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
+sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
+of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
+secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
+it.</p>
+
+<p>It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
+feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
+long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
+and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
+those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
+welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
+face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
+hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
+clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
+might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
+there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
+rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
+thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
+from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
+place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
+looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
+and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
+that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
+darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
+immortal gladness&mdash;even into paradise.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
+still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
+happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
+there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
+offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
+there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
+judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
+The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
+friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
+all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
+palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
+river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
+peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
+explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
+the outrageous&mdash;according to our established habit of thought, which we
+deem final.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
+to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
+early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
+before me, and&mdash;to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
+though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
+significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
+the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
+that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
+farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
+all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
+lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
+the wood, with light about him.</p>
+
+<p>But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
+to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
+heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
+means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
+the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
+that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
+fragments of dreams&mdash;they seemed such then&mdash;might, perhaps, be gathered
+into the clearness of vision.</p>
+
+<p>It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
+last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
+path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
+justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
+I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
+to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
+ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
+across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
+track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
+often.</p>
+
+<p>It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
+the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
+the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
+to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
+farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
+and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
+plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
+the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
+glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
+with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
+the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
+awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
+wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
+changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
+cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
+my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
+had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
+climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
+stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
+harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
+of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
+country, and was staying for a few days with relations&mdash;at the white
+farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
+his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
+doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
+Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
+second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.</p>
+
+<p>So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
+Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
+a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
+had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
+the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
+well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
+thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
+Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
+out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
+have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
+dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
+very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.</p>
+
+<p>They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
+Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
+of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.</p>
+
+<p>"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
+lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
+and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
+his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
+you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
+there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
+that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
+of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
+saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
+that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
+And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
+Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
+hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
+in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.</p>
+
+<p>"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
+and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
+voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
+churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
+friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
+everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
+were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
+Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
+it had been in a whirl-wind."</p>
+
+<p>I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:</p>
+
+<p>"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
+Llantrisant? What men?"</p>
+
+<p>"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."</p>
+
+<p>And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
+legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h4>
+
+<h3>THE RINGING OF THE BELL</h3>
+
+
+<p>So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
+rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
+and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
+bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
+inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
+key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
+you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
+mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
+oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
+occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
+as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
+Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.</p>
+
+<p>It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
+can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
+woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
+so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
+morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
+her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
+eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
+about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
+side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
+into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
+Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
+Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
+nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
+"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
+amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
+Williams, and as well as your whispers either."</p>
+
+<p>And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
+deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
+who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years&mdash;the defect had always
+been in her family&mdash;could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
+anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
+time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
+about the bell.</p>
+
+<p>It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
+gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
+And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
+trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
+something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
+and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
+fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
+off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
+these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
+chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
+once."</p>
+
+<p>They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
+asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
+composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
+can't make out why they would be ringing like that."</p>
+
+<p>"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.</p>
+
+<p>"Then where do you think it was ringing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
+the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
+Parry had got back her hearing suddenly&mdash;such things did happen now and
+then&mdash;and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
+explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
+other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
+for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
+and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
+account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
+enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
+opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
+expected.</p>
+
+<p>"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
+of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
+this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
+violent character."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
+high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
+stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
+one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
+of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
+the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
+And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
+not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
+ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
+together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
+joy."</p>
+
+<p>And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
+returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
+heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
+little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
+"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
+song upon the water that was like heaven."</p>
+
+<p>And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
+out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
+strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
+interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
+of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
+remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
+extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
+were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
+has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
+comment on it.</p>
+
+<p>Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
+which the sound of the bell was heard&mdash;or supposed to be heard. There
+are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
+that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
+London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
+workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
+particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
+till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
+was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
+Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
+hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
+inaccurately, called the supernatural order.</p>
+
+<p>For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears&mdash;or hearts. Deaf
+Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
+sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
+little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
+household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
+baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
+fawr"&mdash;the great bells, the great bells&mdash;and his mother wondered what he
+was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
+swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
+tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
+heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
+and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
+of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
+true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
+but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
+fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
+something had happened.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
+were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
+me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
+will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
+fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
+glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
+I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
+not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
+remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
+another language, that is, from the Welsh.</p>
+
+<p>So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
+their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
+uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
+were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
+comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
+suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
+thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
+ladies in silken côtehardies.</p>
+
+<p>So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
+stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
+winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
+wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
+from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
+ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."</p>
+
+<p>Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
+evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
+far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
+offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
+of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h4>
+
+<h3>THE ROSE OF FIRE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
+June the first Saturday in June, as I believe&mdash;that Llantrisant and all
+the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
+hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
+possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
+is open to systematic investigation.</p>
+
+<p>But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
+life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
+right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
+wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."</p>
+
+<p>This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
+that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
+reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
+both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
+glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
+oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
+existence, this much is certain&mdash;it is not in the least like our
+conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
+that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
+them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
+incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
+stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
+coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
+night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
+is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
+between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
+they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
+a.m. And the story?</p>
+
+<p>A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
+the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
+Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
+be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
+developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
+knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
+that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
+distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
+time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
+all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
+of the world had come," one of the sailors said.</p>
+
+<p>And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
+say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
+of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
+rocks.</p>
+
+<p>And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
+not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
+science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
+marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
+conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
+thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
+men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
+doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
+were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
+governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
+difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
+but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
+glory of the fiery rose had been about them.</p>
+
+<p>For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
+would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
+and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
+themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
+of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
+have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
+certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
+of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
+more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
+in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
+the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
+air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
+what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
+question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
+just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
+or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
+falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
+observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
+that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
+for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
+coast last June.</p>
+
+<p>And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
+it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.</p>
+
+<p>They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
+truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
+in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
+venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
+He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
+air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
+Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
+abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
+if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
+gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.</p>
+
+<p>And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
+It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
+again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
+is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
+possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
+and fire hot.</p>
+
+<p>"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
+myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
+didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
+big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."</p>
+
+<p>I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
+it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
+agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
+external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
+impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
+assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
+on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
+irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
+bell, by the sharp closing of a book.</p>
+
+<p>But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
+impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
+Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
+impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
+far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
+drank water and stared as if they had been <i>fins gourmets</i> tasting an
+amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
+exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.</p>
+
+<p>And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
+and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
+between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
+heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
+fools they had been.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
+said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
+you fight for fivepence?"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
+before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."</p>
+
+<p>This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
+none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediæval
+freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
+of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
+Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
+executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
+secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
+went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
+Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
+It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
+country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
+the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
+distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.</p>
+
+<p>The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
+chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
+equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
+rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
+centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
+sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
+altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.</p>
+
+<p>The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
+here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
+him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
+the town and district.</p>
+
+<p>On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
+not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
+expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
+rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
+and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."</p>
+
+<p>And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
+the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
+nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
+the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
+tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
+going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
+windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
+one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
+anything at all.</p>
+
+<p>"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
+man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
+glass left in the eastern lancets.</p>
+
+<p>But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
+speaking beyond the veil.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h4>
+
+<h3>OLWEN'S DREAM</h3>
+
+
+<p>The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
+chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
+no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
+had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
+secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
+that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
+like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
+with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
+or interpret it to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
+transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
+<i>bien être</i> but a <i>bien être</i> raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
+young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
+world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
+rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
+behind all things.</p>
+
+<p>And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
+an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
+shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
+there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
+dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
+it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
+of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
+broken hints.</p>
+
+<p>It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
+years I kept by me an article from the <i>Lancet</i> or the <i>British Medical
+Journal</i>&mdash;I forget which&mdash;in which a doctor gave an account of certain
+experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
+Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
+he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
+incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
+that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
+to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
+and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
+gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
+stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
+were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
+hues that the mortal eye had never seen.</p>
+
+<p>That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
+transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
+quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
+all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
+of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
+"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
+assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
+incense that filled the place from end to end.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
+wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
+farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
+death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
+laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
+tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
+recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
+been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
+vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
+bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
+was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
+two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
+morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
+sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
+wake from it.</p>
+
+<p>The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
+her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
+Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
+Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
+It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
+but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
+Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
+could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
+rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
+faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
+mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
+knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
+world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
+death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
+voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
+to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
+in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
+knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
+fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
+and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
+mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
+there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
+mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
+felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
+and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
+she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
+it was not a dream.</p>
+
+<p>She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
+fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
+to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
+instant the whole world would fall from her&mdash;her heart was full of
+agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
+faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
+away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
+even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
+her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
+all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
+trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
+reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
+standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
+faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
+held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
+jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
+of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
+were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
+it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
+with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
+washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
+like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
+blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
+heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
+of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
+from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
+Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
+pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
+the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
+He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
+found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
+morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
+condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
+the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
+in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
+flowing from an unending well.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Now this is the place to ask one of those questions&mdash;there are many
+such&mdash;which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
+tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
+Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
+over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
+of Latin mediævalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
+flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
+may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
+series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
+their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
+broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
+"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
+precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
+in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
+students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
+birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
+another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
+discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
+his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
+Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
+memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
+of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
+of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
+called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
+harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
+said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
+to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.</p>
+
+<p>Then for my part&mdash;I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
+say&mdash;I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
+landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
+the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
+very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
+his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
+"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
+north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.</p>
+
+<p>There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
+is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
+the Holy Graal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h4>
+
+<h3>THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL</h3>
+
+
+<p>"<i>FFEIRIADWYR Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!</i>" shouted the old
+Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard. "Priesthood of
+Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!"</p>
+
+<p>And he went on:</p>
+
+<p>"The Bell that is like <i>y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys</i>&mdash;the joy of the
+angels in Paradise&mdash;is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no
+men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned,
+the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the
+church of the <i>tri sant</i>, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and
+their net is full. <i>Gogoniant, gogoniant</i>&mdash;glory, glory!"</p>
+
+<p>Then another Methodist began to recite in Welsh a verse from Wesley's
+hymn.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">God still respects Thy sacrifice,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Its savour sweet doth always please;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The Offering smokes through earth and skies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Diffusing life and joy and peace;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">To these Thy lower courts it comes</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">And fills them with Divine perfumes.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The whole church was full, as the old books tell, of the odour of the
+rarest spiceries. There were lights shining within the sanctuary,
+through the narrow archway.</p>
+
+<p>This was the beginning of the end of what befell at Llantrisant. For it
+was the Sunday after that night on which Olwen Phillips had been
+restored from death to life. There was not a single chapel of the
+Dissenters open in the town that day. The Methodists with their minister
+and their deacons and all the Nonconformists had returned on this Sunday
+morning to "the old hive." One would have said, a church of the Middle
+Ages, a church in Ireland today. Every seat&mdash;save those in the chancel
+&mdash;was full, all the aisles were full, the churchyard was full; everyone
+on his knees, and the old rector kneeling before the door into the holy
+place.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they can say but very little of what was done beyond the veil. There
+was no attempt to perform the usual service; when the bells had stopped
+the old deacon raised his cry, and priest and people fell down on their
+knees as they thought they heard a choir within singing "Alleluya,
+alleluya, alleluya." And as the bells in the tower ceased ringing, there
+sounded the thrill of the bell from Syon, and the golden veil of
+sunlight fell across the door into the altar, and the heavenly voices
+began their melodies.</p>
+
+<p>A voice like a trumpet cried from within the brightness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Agyos, Agyos, Agyos.</i></p>
+
+<p>And the people, as if an age-old memory stirred in them, replied:</p>
+
+<p><i>Agyos yr Tâd, agyos yr Mab, agyos yr Yspryd Glan. Sant, sant, sant,
+Drindod sant vendigeid. Sanctus Arglwydd Dduw Sabaoth, Dominus Deus.</i></p>
+
+<p>There was a voice that cried and sang from within the altar; most of the
+people had heard some faint echo of it in the chapels; a voice rising
+and falling and soaring in awful modulations that rang like the trumpet
+of the Last Angel. The people beat upon their breasts, the tears were
+like rain of the mountains on their cheeks; those that were able fell
+down flat on their faces before the glory of the veil. They said
+afterwards that men of the hills, twenty miles away, heard that cry and
+that singing, roaring upon them on the wind, and they fell down on
+their faces, and cried, "The offering is accomplished," knowing nothing
+of what they said.</p>
+
+<p>There were a few who saw three come out of the door of the sanctuary,
+and stand for a moment on the pace before the door. These three were in
+dyed vesture, red as blood. One stood before two, looking to the west,
+and he rang the bell. And they say that all the birds of the wood, and
+all the waters of the sea, and all the leaves of the trees, and all the
+winds of the high rocks uttered their voices with the ringing of the
+bell. And the second and the third; they turned their faces one to
+another. The second held up the lost altar that they once called
+Sapphirus, which was like the changing of the sea and of the sky, and
+like the immixture of gold and silver. And the third heaved up high over
+the altar a cup that was red with burning and the blood of the offering.</p>
+
+<p>And the old rector cried aloud then before the entrance:</p>
+
+<p><i>Bendigeid yr Offeren yn oes oesoedd</i>&mdash;blessed be the Offering unto the
+age of ages.</p>
+
+<p>And then the Mass of the Sangraal was ended, and then began the passing
+out of that land of the holy persons and holy things that had returned
+to it after the long years. It seemed, indeed, to many that the
+thrilling sound of the bell was in their ears for days, even for weeks
+after that Sunday morning. But thenceforth neither bell nor altar nor
+cup was seen by anyone; not openly, that is, but only in dreams by day
+and by night. Nor did the people see Strangers again in the market of
+Llantrisant, nor in the lonely places where certain persons oppressed by
+great affliction and sorrow had once or twice encountered them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But that time of visitation will never be forgotten by the people. Many
+things happened in the nine days that have not been set down in this
+record&mdash;or legend. Some of them were trifling matters, though strange
+enough in other times. Thus a man in the town who had a fierce dog that
+was always kept chained up found one day that the beast had become mild
+and gentle.</p>
+
+<p>And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
+sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
+out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
+were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
+"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
+farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
+wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
+multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.</p>
+
+<p>More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
+this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
+marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
+was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
+things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
+not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
+would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday&mdash;that
+was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
+James, were reconciled&mdash;and this John Williams, without money or credit,
+could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
+poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
+his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
+fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
+money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
+a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
+dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
+the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
+all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
+daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
+feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
+she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
+after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
+years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
+rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
+lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
+wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
+as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
+horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
+have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
+know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
+cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
+was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, may have been altogether in the natural order; the
+"glow," as they call it, seems more difficult to explain. For they say
+that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended,
+there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the
+country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the
+mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as
+strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before,
+so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.</p>
+
+<p>And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness,
+with love to follow it. There were meetings of old enemies in the
+market-place and in the street that made the people lift up their hands
+and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>But as to the "phenomena," the occurrences for which, in ordinary talk,
+we should reserve the word "miraculous"? Well, what do we know? The
+question that I have already stated comes up again, as to the possible
+survival of old tradition in a kind of dormant, or torpid,
+semi-conscious state. In other words, did the people "see" and "hear"
+what they expected to see and hear? This point, or one similar to it,
+occurred in a debate between Andrew Lang and Anatole France as to the
+visions of Joan of Arc. M. France stated that when Joan saw St. Michael,
+she saw the traditional archangel of the religious art of her day, but
+to the best of my belief Andrew Lang proved that the visionary figure
+Joan described was not in the least like the fifteenth-century
+conception of St. Michael. So, in the case of Llantrisant, I have stated
+that there was a sort of tradition about the Holy Bell of Teilo Sant;
+and it is, of course, barely possible that some vague notion of the
+Graal Cup may have reached even Welsh country folks through Tennyson's
+Idylls. But so far I see no reason to suppose that these people had ever
+heard of the portable altar (called Sapphirus in William of Malmesbury)
+or of its changing colours "that no man could discern."</p>
+
+<p>And then there are the other questions of the distinction between
+hallucination and vision, of the average duration of one and the other,
+and of the possibility of collective hallucination. If a number of
+people all see (or think they see) the same appearances, can this be
+merely hallucination? I believe there is a leading case on the matter,
+which concerns a number of people seeing the same appearance on a church
+wall in Ireland; but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may
+be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others,
+telepathically.</p>
+
+<p>But at the last, what do we know?</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Great Return
+
+Author: Arthur Machen
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2011 [EBook #35611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT RETURN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Haren and Marc D'Hooghe at
+http://www.freeliterature.org (From images generously made
+available by the Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT RETURN
+
+By
+
+ARTHUR MACHEN
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BOWMEN"
+
+PUBLISHED IN LONDON BY THE FAITH
+PRESS, AT THE FAITH HOUSE, 22, BUCKINGHAM
+STREET, STRAND, W.C.
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+  THE BOWMEN
+  THE HILL OF DREAMS
+  THE HOUSE OF SOULS
+     [including "The Great God Pan" and "The Three Impostors"]
+  HIEROGLYPHICS
+  THE CHRONICLE OF CLEMENDY
+  DR. STIGGINS
+
+
+
+ To
+
+D.P.M.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  I.   THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+  II.  ODOURS OF PARADISE
+  III. A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+  IV.  THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+  V.   THE ROSE OF FIRE
+  VI.  OLWEN'S DREAM
+  VII. THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+
+GREAT RETURN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE RUMOUR OF THE MARVELLOUS
+
+
+There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the
+newspaper. I often think that the most extraordinary item of
+intelligence that I have read in print appeared a few years ago in the
+London Press. It came from a well known and most respected news agency;
+I imagine it was in all the papers. It was astounding.
+
+The circumstances necessary--not to the understanding of this paragraph,
+for that is out of the question--but, we will say, to the understanding
+of the events which made it possible, are these. We had invaded Thibet,
+and there had been trouble in the hierarchy of that country, and a
+personage known as the Tashai Lama had taken refuge with us in India. He
+went on pilgrimage from one Buddhist shrine to another, and came at last
+to a holy mountain of Buddhism, the name of which I have forgotten. And
+thus the morning paper.
+
+     His Holiness the Tashai Lama then ascended the Mountain and was
+     transfigured.--Reuter.
+
+That was all. And from that day to this I have never heard a word of
+explanation or comment on this amazing statement.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no more, it seemed, to be said. "Reuter," apparently, thought
+he had made his simple statement of the facts of the case, had thereby
+done his duty, and so it all ended. Nobody, so far as I know, ever wrote
+to any paper asking what Reuter meant by it, or what the Tashai Lama
+meant by it. I suppose the fact was that nobody cared two-pence about
+the matter; and so this strange event--if there were any such event--was
+exhibited to us for a moment, and the lantern show revolved to other
+spectacles.
+
+This is an extreme instance of the manner in which the marvellous is
+flashed out to us and then withdrawn behind its black veils and
+concealments; but I have known of other cases. Now and again, at
+intervals of a few years, there appear in the newspapers strange
+stories of the strange doings of what are technically called
+_poltergeists_. Some house, often a lonely farm, is suddenly subjected
+to an infernal bombardment. Great stones crash through the windows,
+thunder down the chimneys, impelled by no visible hand. The plates and
+cups and saucers are whirled from the dresser into the middle of the
+kitchen, no one can say how or by what agency. Upstairs the big bedstead
+and an old chest or two are heard bounding on the floor as if in a mad
+ballet. Now and then such doings as these excite a whole neighbourhood;
+sometimes a London paper sends a man down to make an investigation. He
+writes half a column of description on the Monday, a couple of
+paragraphs on the Tuesday, and then returns to town. Nothing has been
+explained, the matter vanishes away; and nobody cares. The tale trickles
+for a day or two through the Press, and then instantly disappears, like
+an Australian stream, into the bowels of darkness. It is possible, I
+suppose, that this singular incuriousness as to marvellous events and
+reports is not wholly unaccountable. It may be that the events in
+question are, as it were, psychic accidents and misadventures. They are
+not meant to happen, or, rather, to be manifested. They belong to the
+world on the other side of the dark curtain; and it is only by some
+queer mischance that a corner of that curtain is twitched aside for an
+instant. Then--for an instant--we see; but the personages whom Mr.
+Kipling calls the Lords of Life and Death take care that we do not see
+too much. Our business is with things higher and things lower, with
+things different, anyhow; and on the whole we are not suffered to
+distract ourselves with that which does not really concern us. The
+Transfiguration of the Lama and the tricks of the _poltergeist_ are
+evidently no affairs of ours; we raise an uninterested eyebrow and pass
+on--to poetry or to statistics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Be it noted; I am not professing any fervent personal belief in the
+reports to which I have alluded. For all I know, the Lama, in spite of
+Reuter, was not transfigured, and the _poltergeist_, in spite of the
+late Mr. Andrew Lang, may in reality be only mischievous Polly, the
+servant girl at the farm. And to go farther: I do not know that I should
+be justified in putting either of these cases of the marvellous in line
+with a chance paragraph that caught my eye last summer; for this had
+not, on the face of it at all events, anything wildly out of the common.
+Indeed, I dare say that I should not have read it, should not have seen
+it, if it had not contained the name of a place which I had once
+visited, which had then moved me in an odd manner that I could not
+understand. Indeed, I am sure that this particular paragraph deserves to
+stand alone, for even if the _poltergeist_ be a real _poltergeist_, it
+merely reveals the psychic whimsicality of some region that is not our
+region. There were better things and more relevant things behind the few
+lines dealing with Llantrisant, the little town by the sea in
+Arfonshire.
+
+Not on the surface, I must say, for the cutting I have preserved
+it--reads as follows:--
+
+     LLANTRISANT.--The season promises very favourably: temperature of
+     the sea yesterday at noon, 65 deg. Remarkable occurrences are
+     supposed to have taken place during the recent Revival. The lights
+     have not been observed lately. "The Crown." "The Fisherman's Rest."
+
+The style was odd certainly; knowing a little of newspapers. I could see
+that the figure called, I think, _tmesis_, or cutting, had been
+generously employed; the exuberances of the local correspondent had been
+pruned by a Fleet Street expert. And these poor men are often hurried;
+but what did those "lights" mean? What strange matters had the vehement
+blue pencil blotted out and brought to naught?
+
+That was my first thought, and then, thinking still of Llantrisant and
+how I had first discovered it and found it strange, I read the paragraph
+again, and was saddened almost to see, as I thought, the obvious
+explanation. I had forgotten for the moment that it was war-time, that
+scares and rumours and terrors about traitorous signals and flashing
+lights were current everywhere by land and sea; someone, no doubt, had
+been watching innocent farmhouse windows and thoughtless fanlights of
+lodging houses; these were the "lights" that had not been observed
+lately.
+
+I found out afterwards that the Llantrisant correspondent had no such
+treasonous lights in his mind, but something very different. Still; what
+do we know? He may have been mistaken, "the great rose of fire" that
+came over the deep may have been the port light of a coasting-ship. Did
+it shine at last from the old chapel on the headland? Possibly; or
+possibly it was the doctor's lamp at Sarnau, some miles away. I have had
+wonderful opportunities lately of analysing the marvels of lying,
+conscious and unconscious; and indeed almost incredible feats in this
+way can be performed. If I incline to the less likely explanation of the
+"lights" at Llantrisant, it is merely because this explanation seems to
+me to be altogether congruous with the "remarkable occurrences" of the
+newspaper paragraph.
+
+After all, if rumour and gossip and hearsay are crazy things to be
+utterly neglected and laid aside: on the other hand, evidence is
+evidence, and when a couple of reputable surgeons assert, as they do
+assert in the case of Olwen Phillips, Croeswen, Llantrisant, that there
+has been a "kind of resurrection of the body," it is merely foolish to
+say that these things don't happen. The girl was a mass of tuberculosis,
+she was within a few hours of death; she is now full of life. And so, I
+do not believe that the rose of fire was merely a ship's light,
+magnified and transformed by dreaming Welsh sailors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now I am going forward too fast. I have not dated the paragraph, so
+I cannot give the exact day of its appearance, but I think it was
+somewhere between the second and third week of June. I cut it out partly
+because it was about Llantrisant, partly because of the "remarkable
+occurrences." I have an appetite for these matters, though I also have
+this misfortune, that I require evidence before I am ready to credit
+them, and I have a sort of lingering hope that some day I shall be able
+to elaborate some scheme or theory of such things.
+
+But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the
+doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and
+that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance.
+Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make
+clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble
+Eminent Statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that
+are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your
+set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last
+that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research
+grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form
+confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies,
+corroborates, explains each separate piece.
+
+So, it was within a week or ten days after I had read the paragraph
+about Llantrisant and had cut it out that I got a letter from a friend
+who was taking an early holiday in those regions.
+
+"You will be interested," he wrote, "to hear that they have taken to
+ritualistic practices at Llantrisant. I went into the church the other
+day, and instead of smelling like a damp vault as usual, it was
+positively reeking with incense."
+
+I knew better than that. The old parson was a firm Evangelical; he would
+rather have burnt sulphur in his church than incense any day. So I
+could not make out this report at all; and went down to Arfon a few
+weeks later determined to investigate this and any other remarkable
+occurrence at Llantrisant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ODOURS OF PARADISE
+
+
+I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
+wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
+such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
+mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
+sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
+then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
+the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
+storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
+upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
+weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
+without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.
+
+It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
+Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
+figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
+peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
+sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
+sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
+bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
+hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
+to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
+many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
+in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
+refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
+them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
+marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
+of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
+noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
+unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
+voices in the caverns of the rocks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
+blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
+there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
+investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
+be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
+commissioner's?--reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
+been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
+had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
+All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
+occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
+spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
+incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
+rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
+angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
+incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.
+
+But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
+to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
+still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
+there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
+most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
+across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
+cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
+there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
+the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
+Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
+began to give me, the stranger, a resume--somewhat of a shaky and
+uncertain resume, I found afterwards--of the various debates and
+questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
+and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
+that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
+and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
+question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
+rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
+demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
+brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
+me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
+the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
+as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
+with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
+the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.
+
+I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
+young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
+upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
+of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
+avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
+I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
+surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.
+
+"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
+You use incense now?"
+
+The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.
+
+"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
+church. I should not venture to do so."
+
+"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
+been sung there, and--"
+
+He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
+that struck me almost with awe.
+
+"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
+old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
+railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
+contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
+derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
+himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
+Hezekiah, _ffeiriad coch yr Castletown_--the Red Priest of
+Castletown--was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
+people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
+was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
+told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
+Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
+nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
+that has been done here."
+
+I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
+rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
+one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
+had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
+my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
+knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
+pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.
+
+But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
+Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
+incense and odours of paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
+harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
+coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
+lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
+one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
+heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
+outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
+hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
+were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies--their mothers, I
+suppose--talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
+little distance from me.
+
+At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
+talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
+period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
+topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
+side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
+my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
+nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.
+
+"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
+make out what is come to the people."
+
+This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
+consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
+the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
+a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
+friendships are common, at small seaside places.
+
+"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
+been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
+we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
+of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
+perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
+something a little queer?"
+
+"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
+write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
+know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
+the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
+so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
+the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
+alarming things!"
+
+"What sort of things?
+
+"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
+not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
+and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
+of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
+drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
+appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
+garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
+And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."
+
+"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
+in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
+Dissenters are very queer in their ways."
+
+"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
+whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
+distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
+bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
+
+
+Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
+broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
+as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
+little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
+talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
+at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
+earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
+got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
+causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
+climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
+was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
+and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
+strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
+had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
+bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
+because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
+drink."
+
+For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
+through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
+green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
+a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
+from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
+hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
+be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
+the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
+sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
+of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
+secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
+it.
+
+It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
+feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
+long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
+and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
+those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
+welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
+face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
+hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.
+
+He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
+clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
+might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
+there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
+rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
+thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
+from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
+place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
+looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
+and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
+that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
+darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
+immortal gladness--even into paradise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
+still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
+happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
+there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
+offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
+there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
+judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
+The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
+friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
+all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
+palaeontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
+river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
+peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
+explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
+the outrageous--according to our established habit of thought, which we
+deem final.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
+to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
+early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
+before me, and--to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
+though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
+significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
+the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
+that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
+farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
+all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
+lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
+the wood, with light about him.
+
+But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
+to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
+heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
+means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
+the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
+that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
+fragments of dreams--they seemed such then--might, perhaps, be gathered
+into the clearness of vision.
+
+It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
+last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
+path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
+justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
+I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
+to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
+ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
+across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
+track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
+often.
+
+It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
+the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
+the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
+to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
+farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
+and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
+plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
+the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
+glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
+with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
+the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
+awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
+wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
+changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
+cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
+my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
+had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
+climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
+stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
+harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
+of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
+country, and was staying for a few days with relations--at the white
+farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
+his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
+doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
+Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
+second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.
+
+So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
+Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
+a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
+had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
+the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
+well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
+thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
+Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
+out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
+have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
+dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
+very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.
+
+They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
+Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
+of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.
+
+"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
+lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
+and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
+his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
+you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
+there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
+that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
+of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
+saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
+that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
+And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
+Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
+hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
+in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.
+
+"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
+and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
+voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
+churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
+friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
+everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
+were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
+Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
+it had been in a whirl-wind."
+
+I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:
+
+"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
+Llantrisant? What men?"
+
+"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."
+
+And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
+legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RINGING OF THE BELL
+
+
+So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
+rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
+and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
+bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
+inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
+key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
+you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
+mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
+oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
+occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
+as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
+Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
+
+It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
+can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
+woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
+so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
+morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
+her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
+eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
+about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
+side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
+into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
+Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
+Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
+nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
+"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."
+
+"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
+amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
+Williams, and as well as your whispers either."
+
+And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
+deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
+who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years--the defect had always
+been in her family--could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
+anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
+time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
+about the bell.
+
+It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
+gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
+And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
+trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
+something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
+and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
+fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
+off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
+these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
+chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
+once."
+
+They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
+asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
+composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."
+
+"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
+can't make out why they would be ringing like that."
+
+"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.
+
+"Then where do you think it was ringing?"
+
+"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
+the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
+Parry had got back her hearing suddenly--such things did happen now and
+then--and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
+explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
+other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
+for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
+and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
+account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
+enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
+opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
+expected.
+
+"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
+of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
+this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
+violent character."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
+high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
+stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
+one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
+of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
+the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
+And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
+not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
+ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
+together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
+joy."
+
+And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
+returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
+heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
+little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
+"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
+song upon the water that was like heaven."
+
+And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
+out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
+strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
+interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
+of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
+remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
+extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
+were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
+has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
+comment on it.
+
+Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
+which the sound of the bell was heard--or supposed to be heard. There
+are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
+that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
+London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
+workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
+particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
+till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
+was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
+Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
+hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
+inaccurately, called the supernatural order.
+
+For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears--or hearts. Deaf
+Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
+sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
+little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
+household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
+baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
+fawr"--the great bells, the great bells--and his mother wondered what he
+was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
+swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
+tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
+heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
+and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
+of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
+true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
+but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
+fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
+something had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
+were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
+me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
+will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
+fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
+glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
+I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
+not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
+remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
+another language, that is, from the Welsh.
+
+So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
+their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
+uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
+were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
+comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
+suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
+thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
+ladies in silken cotehardies.
+
+So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
+stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
+winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
+wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
+from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
+ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."
+
+Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
+evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
+far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
+offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
+of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ROSE OF FIRE
+
+
+It was during the next nine days, counting from that Saturday early in
+June the first Saturday in June, as I believe--that Llantrisant and all
+the regions about became possessed either by an extraordinary set of
+hallucinations or by a visitation of great marvels.
+
+This is not the place to strike the balance between the two
+possibilities. The evidence is, no doubt, readily available; the matter
+is open to systematic investigation.
+
+But this may be said: The ordinary man, in the ordinary passages of his
+life, accepts in the main the evidence of his senses, and is entirely
+right in doing so. He says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone
+wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are "there."
+
+This is very well for all the practical purposes of life, but I believe
+that the metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the
+reality of the stone wall and the cow. Perhaps they might allow that
+both objects are "there" in the sense that one's reflection is in a
+glass; there is an actuality, but is there a reality external to
+oneself? In any event, it is solidly agreed that, supposing a real
+existence, this much is certain--it is not in the least like our
+conception of it. The ant and the microscope will quickly convince us
+that we do not see things as they really are, even supposing that we see
+them at all. If we could "see" the real cow she would appear utterly
+incredible, as incredible as the things I am to relate.
+
+Now, there is nothing that I know much more unconvincing than the
+stories of the red light on the sea. Several sailors, men on small
+coasting ships, who were working up or down the Channel on that Saturday
+night, spoke of "seeing" the red light, and it must be said that there
+is a very tolerable agreement in their tales. All make the time as
+between midnight of the Saturday and one o'clock on the Sunday morning.
+Two of those sailormen are precise as to the time of the apparition;
+they fix it by elaborate calculations of their own as occurring at 12.20
+a.m. And the story?
+
+A red light, a burning spark seen far away in the darkness, taken at
+the first moment of seeing for a signal, and probably an enemy signal.
+Then it approached at a tremendous speed, and one man said he took it to
+be the port light of some new kind of navy motor-boat which was
+developing a rate hitherto unheard of, a hundred or a hundred and fifty
+knots an hour. And then, in the third instant of the sight, it was clear
+that this was no earthly speed. At first a red spark in the farthest
+distance; then a rushing lamp; and then, as if in an incredible point of
+time, it swelled into a vast rose of fire that filled all the sea and
+all the sky and hid the stars and possessed the land. "I thought the end
+of the world had come," one of the sailors said.
+
+And then, an instant more, and it was gone from them, and four of them
+say that there was a red spark on Chapel Head, where the old grey chapel
+of St. Teilo stands, high above the water, in a cleft of the limestone
+rocks.
+
+And thus the sailors; and thus their tales are incredible; but they are
+not incredible. I believe that men of the highest eminence in physical
+science have testified to the occurrence of phenomena every whit as
+marvellous, to things as absolutely opposed to all natural order, as we
+conceive it; and it may be said that nobody minds them. "That sort of
+thing has always been happening," as my friend remarked to me. But the
+men, whether or no the fire had ever been without them, there was no
+doubt that it was now within them, for it burned in their eyes. They
+were purged as if they had passed through the Furnace of the Sages,
+governed with Wisdom that the alchemists know. They spoke without much
+difficulty of what they had seen, or had seemed to see, with their eyes,
+but hardly at all of what their hearts had known when for a moment the
+glory of the fiery rose had been about them.
+
+For some weeks afterwards they were still, as it were, amazed; almost, I
+would say, incredulous. If there had been nothing more than the splendid
+and fiery appearance, showing and vanishing, I do believe that they
+themselves would have discredited their own senses and denied the truth
+of their own tales. And one does not dare to say whether they would not
+have been right. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge are
+certainly to be heard with respect, and they bear witness to all manner
+of apparent eversions of laws which we, or most of us, consider far
+more deeply founded than the ancient hills. They may be justified; but
+in our hearts we doubt. We cannot wholly believe in inner sincerity that
+the solid table did rise, without mechanical reason or cause, into the
+air, and so defy that which we name the "law of gravitation." I know
+what may be said on the other side; I know that there is no true
+question of "law" in the case; that the law of gravitation really means
+just this: that I have never seen a table rising without mechanical aid,
+or an apple, detached from the bough, soaring to the skies instead of
+falling to the ground. The so-called law is just the sum of common
+observation and nothing more; yet I say, in our hearts we do not believe
+that the tables rise; much less do we believe in the rose of fire that
+for a moment swallowed up the skies and seas and shores of the Welsh
+coast last June.
+
+And the men who saw it would have invented fairy tales to account for
+it, I say again, if it had not been for that which was within them.
+
+They said, all of them, and it was certain now that they spoke the
+truth, that in the moment of the vision, every pain and ache and malady
+in their bodies had passed away. One man had been vilely drunk on
+venomous spirit, procured at "Jobson's Hole" down by the Cardiff Docks.
+He was horribly ill; he had crawled up from his bunk for a little fresh
+air; and in an instant his horrors and his deadly nausea had left him.
+Another man was almost desperate with the raging hammering pain of an
+abscess on a tooth; he says that when the red flame came near he felt as
+if a dull, heavy blow had fallen on his jaw, and then the pain was quite
+gone; he could scarcely believe that there had been any pain there.
+
+And they all bear witness to an extraordinary exaltation of the senses.
+It is indescribable, this; for they cannot describe it. They are amazed,
+again; they do not in the least profess to know what happened; but there
+is no more possibility of shaking their evidence than there is a
+possibility of shaking the evidence of a man who says that water is wet
+and fire hot.
+
+"I felt a bit queer afterwards," said one of them, "and I steadied
+myself by the mast, and I can't tell how I felt as I touched it. I
+didn't know that touching a thing like a mast could be better than a
+big drink when you're thirsty, or a soft pillow when you're sleepy."
+
+I heard other instances of this state of things, as I must vaguely call
+it, since I do not know what else to call it. But I suppose we can all
+agree that to the man in average health, the average impact of the
+external world on his senses is a matter of indifference. The average
+impact; a harsh scream, the bursting of a motor tyre, any violent
+assault on the aural nerves will annoy him, and he may say "damn." Then,
+on the other hand, the man who is not "fit" will easily be annoyed and
+irritated by someone pushing past him in a crowd, by the ringing of a
+bell, by the sharp closing of a book.
+
+But so far as I could judge from the talk of these sailors, the average
+impact of the external world had become to them a fountain of pleasure.
+Their nerves were on edge, but an edge to receive exquisite sensuous
+impressions. The touch of the rough mast, for example; that was a joy
+far greater than is the joy of fine silk to some luxurious skins; they
+drank water and stared as if they had been _fins gourmets_ tasting an
+amazing wine; the creak and whine of their ship on its slow way were as
+exquisite as the rhythm and song of a Bach fugue to an amateur of music.
+
+And then, within; these rough fellows have their quarrels and strifes
+and variances and envyings like the rest of us; but that was all over
+between them that had seen the rosy light; old enemies shook hands
+heartily, and roared with laughter as they confessed one to another what
+fools they had been.
+
+"I can't exactly say how it has happened or what has happened at all,"
+said one, "but if you have all the world and the glory of it, how can
+you fight for fivepence?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The church of Llantrisant is a typical example of a Welsh parish church,
+before the evil and horrible period of "restoration."
+
+This lower world is a palace of lies, and of all foolish lies there is
+none more insane than a certain vague fable about the mediaeval
+freemasons, a fable which somehow imposed itself upon the cold intellect
+of Hallam the historian. The story is, in brief, that throughout the
+Gothic period, at any rate, the art and craft of church building were
+executed by wandering guilds of "freemasons," possessed of various
+secrets of building and adornment, which they employed wherever they
+went. If this nonsense were true, the Gothic of Cologne would be as the
+Gothic of Colne, and the Gothic of Arles like to the Gothic of Abingdon.
+It is so grotesquely untrue that almost every county, let alone every
+country, has its distinctive style in Gothic architecture. Arfon is in
+the west of Wales; its churches have marks and features which
+distinguish them from the churches in the east of Wales.
+
+The Llantrisant church has that primitive division between nave and
+chancel which only very foolish people decline to recognise as
+equivalent to the Oriental iconostasis and as the origin of the Western
+rood-screen. A solid wall divided the church into two portions; in the
+centre was a narrow opening with a rounded arch, through which those who
+sat towards the middle of the church could see the small, red-carpeted
+altar and the three roughly shaped lancet windows above it.
+
+The "reading pew" was on the outer side of this wall of partition, and
+here the rector did his service, the choir being grouped in seats about
+him. On the inner side were the pews of certain privileged houses of
+the town and district.
+
+On the Sunday morning the people were all in their accustomed places,
+not without a certain exultation in their eyes, not without a certain
+expectation of they knew not what. The bells stopped ringing, the
+rector, in his old-fashioned, ample surplice, entered the reading-desk,
+and gave out the hymn: "My God, and is Thy Table spread."
+
+And, as the singing began, all the people who were in the pews within
+the wall came out of them and streamed through the archway into the
+nave. They took what places they could find up and down the church, and
+the rest of the congregation looked at them in amazement.
+
+Nobody knew what had happened. Those whose seats were next to the aisle
+tried to peer into the chancel, to see what had happened or what was
+going on there. But somehow the light flamed so brightly from the
+windows above the altar, those being the only windows in the chancel,
+one small lancet in the south wall excepted, that no one could see
+anything at all.
+
+"It was as if a veil of gold adorned with jewels was hanging there," one
+man said; and indeed there are a few odds and scraps of old painted
+glass left in the eastern lancets.
+
+But there were few in the church who did not hear now and again voices
+speaking beyond the veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+OLWEN'S DREAM
+
+
+The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
+chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
+no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
+had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
+secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
+that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
+like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
+with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
+or interpret it to themselves.
+
+And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
+transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
+_bien etre_ but a _bien etre_ raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
+young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
+world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
+rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
+behind all things.
+
+And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
+an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
+shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
+there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
+dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
+it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
+of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
+broken hints.
+
+It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
+years I kept by me an article from the _Lancet_ or the _British Medical
+Journal_--I forget which--in which a doctor gave an account of certain
+experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
+Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
+he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
+incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
+that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
+to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
+and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
+gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
+stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
+were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
+hues that the mortal eye had never seen.
+
+That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
+transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
+quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
+all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
+of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
+"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
+assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
+incense that filled the place from end to end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
+wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
+farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
+death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
+laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
+tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
+recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
+been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
+vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
+bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
+was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
+two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
+morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
+sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
+wake from it.
+
+The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
+her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
+Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
+Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
+It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
+but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
+Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
+could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
+rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
+faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
+mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."
+
+Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
+knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
+world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
+death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
+voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
+to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
+in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
+knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
+fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
+and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
+mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
+there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
+mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
+felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
+and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
+she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
+it was not a dream.
+
+She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
+fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
+to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
+instant the whole world would fall from her--her heart was full of
+agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
+faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
+away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
+even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
+her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
+all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
+trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
+reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
+standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
+faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
+held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
+jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
+of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
+were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
+it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
+with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
+washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
+like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
+blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
+heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
+of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
+from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
+Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."
+
+The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
+pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
+the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
+He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
+found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
+morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
+condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
+the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
+in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
+flowing from an unending well.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now this is the place to ask one of those questions--there are many
+such--which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
+tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
+Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
+over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
+of Latin mediaevalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
+flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
+may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
+series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
+their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
+broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
+"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
+precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
+in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
+students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
+birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
+another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
+discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
+his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
+Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
+memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
+of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
+of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
+called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
+harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
+said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
+to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.
+
+Then for my part--I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
+say--I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
+landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
+the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
+very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
+his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
+"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
+north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.
+
+There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
+is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
+the Holy Graal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MASS OF THE SANGRAAL
+
+
+"_FFEIRIADWYR Melcisidec! Ffeiriadwyr Melcisidec!_" shouted the old
+Calvinistic Methodist deacon with the grey beard. "Priesthood of
+Melchizedek! Priesthood of Melchizedek!"
+
+And he went on:
+
+"The Bell that is like _y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys_--the joy of the
+angels in Paradise--is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no
+men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned,
+the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the
+church of the _tri sant_, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and
+their net is full. _Gogoniant, gogoniant_--glory, glory!"
+
+Then another Methodist began to recite in Welsh a verse from Wesley's
+hymn.
+
+     God still respects Thy sacrifice,
+     Its savour sweet doth always please;
+     The Offering smokes through earth and skies,
+     Diffusing life and joy and peace;
+     To these Thy lower courts it comes
+     And fills them with Divine perfumes.
+
+The whole church was full, as the old books tell, of the odour of the
+rarest spiceries. There were lights shining within the sanctuary,
+through the narrow archway.
+
+This was the beginning of the end of what befell at Llantrisant. For it
+was the Sunday after that night on which Olwen Phillips had been
+restored from death to life. There was not a single chapel of the
+Dissenters open in the town that day. The Methodists with their minister
+and their deacons and all the Nonconformists had returned on this Sunday
+morning to "the old hive." One would have said, a church of the Middle
+Ages, a church in Ireland today. Every seat--save those in the chancel
+--was full, all the aisles were full, the churchyard was full; everyone
+on his knees, and the old rector kneeling before the door into the holy
+place.
+
+Yet they can say but very little of what was done beyond the veil. There
+was no attempt to perform the usual service; when the bells had stopped
+the old deacon raised his cry, and priest and people fell down on their
+knees as they thought they heard a choir within singing "Alleluya,
+alleluya, alleluya." And as the bells in the tower ceased ringing, there
+sounded the thrill of the bell from Syon, and the golden veil of
+sunlight fell across the door into the altar, and the heavenly voices
+began their melodies.
+
+A voice like a trumpet cried from within the brightness.
+
+_Agyos, Agyos, Agyos._
+
+And the people, as if an age-old memory stirred in them, replied:
+
+_Agyos yr Tad, agyos yr Mab, agyos yr Yspryd Glan. Sant, sant, sant,
+Drindod sant vendigeid. Sanctus Arglwydd Dduw Sabaoth, Dominus Deus._
+
+There was a voice that cried and sang from within the altar; most of the
+people had heard some faint echo of it in the chapels; a voice rising
+and falling and soaring in awful modulations that rang like the trumpet
+of the Last Angel. The people beat upon their breasts, the tears were
+like rain of the mountains on their cheeks; those that were able fell
+down flat on their faces before the glory of the veil. They said
+afterwards that men of the hills, twenty miles away, heard that cry and
+that singing, roaring upon them on the wind, and they fell down on
+their faces, and cried, "The offering is accomplished," knowing nothing
+of what they said.
+
+There were a few who saw three come out of the door of the sanctuary,
+and stand for a moment on the pace before the door. These three were in
+dyed vesture, red as blood. One stood before two, looking to the west,
+and he rang the bell. And they say that all the birds of the wood, and
+all the waters of the sea, and all the leaves of the trees, and all the
+winds of the high rocks uttered their voices with the ringing of the
+bell. And the second and the third; they turned their faces one to
+another. The second held up the lost altar that they once called
+Sapphirus, which was like the changing of the sea and of the sky, and
+like the immixture of gold and silver. And the third heaved up high over
+the altar a cup that was red with burning and the blood of the offering.
+
+And the old rector cried aloud then before the entrance:
+
+_Bendigeid yr Offeren yn oes oesoedd_--blessed be the Offering unto the
+age of ages.
+
+And then the Mass of the Sangraal was ended, and then began the passing
+out of that land of the holy persons and holy things that had returned
+to it after the long years. It seemed, indeed, to many that the
+thrilling sound of the bell was in their ears for days, even for weeks
+after that Sunday morning. But thenceforth neither bell nor altar nor
+cup was seen by anyone; not openly, that is, but only in dreams by day
+and by night. Nor did the people see Strangers again in the market of
+Llantrisant, nor in the lonely places where certain persons oppressed by
+great affliction and sorrow had once or twice encountered them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that time of visitation will never be forgotten by the people. Many
+things happened in the nine days that have not been set down in this
+record--or legend. Some of them were trifling matters, though strange
+enough in other times. Thus a man in the town who had a fierce dog that
+was always kept chained up found one day that the beast had become mild
+and gentle.
+
+And this is odder: Edward Davies, of Lanafon, a farmer, was roused from
+sleep one night by a queer yelping and barking in his yard. He looked
+out of the window and saw his sheep-dog playing with a big fox; they
+were chasing each other by turns, rolling over and over one another,
+"cutting such capers as I did never see the like," as the astonished
+farmer put it. And some of the people said that during this season of
+wonder the corn shot up, and the grass thickened, and the fruit was
+multiplied on the trees in a very marvellous manner.
+
+More important, it seemed, was the case of Williams, the grocer; though
+this may have been a purely natural deliverance. Mr. Williams was to
+marry his daughter Mary to a smart young fellow from Carmarthen, and he
+was in great distress over it. Not over the marriage itself, but because
+things had been going very badly with him for some time, and he could
+not see his way to giving anything like the wedding entertainment that
+would be expected of him. The wedding was to be on the Saturday--that
+was the day on which the lawyer, Lewis Prothero, and the farmer, Philip
+James, were reconciled--and this John Williams, without money or credit,
+could not think how shame would not be on him for the meagreness and
+poverty of the wedding feast. And then on the Tuesday came a letter from
+his brother, David Williams, Australia, from whom he had not heard for
+fifteen years. And David, it seemed, had been making a great deal of
+money, and was a bachelor, and here was with his letter a paper good for
+a thousand pounds: "You may as well enjoy it now as wait till I am
+dead." This was enough, indeed, one might say; but hardly an hour after
+the letter had come the lady from the big house (Plas Mawr) drove up in
+all her grandeur, and went into the shop and said, "Mr. Williams, your
+daughter Mary has always been a very good girl, and my husband and I
+feel that we must give her some little thing on her wedding, and we hope
+she'll be very happy." It was a gold watch worth fifteen pounds. And
+after Lady Watcyn, advances the old doctor with a dozen of port, forty
+years upon it, and a long sermon on how to decant it. And the old
+rector's old wife brings to the beautiful dark girl two yards of creamy
+lace, like an enchantment, for her wedding veil, and tells Mary how she
+wore it for her own wedding fifty years ago; and the squire, Sir Watcyn,
+as if his wife had not been already with a fine gift, calls from his
+horse, and brings out Williams and barks like a dog at him, "Goin' to
+have a weddin', eh, Williams? Can't have a weddin' without champagne, y'
+know; wouldn't be legal, don't y' know. So look out for a couple of
+cases." So Williams tells the story of the gifts; and certainly there
+was never so famous a wedding in Llantrisant before.
+
+All this, of course, may have been altogether in the natural order; the
+"glow," as they call it, seems more difficult to explain. For they say
+that all through the nine days, and indeed after the time had ended,
+there never was a man weary or sick at heart in Llantrisant, or in the
+country round it. For if a man felt that his work of the body or the
+mind was going to be too much for his strength, then there would come to
+him of a sudden a warm glow and a thrilling all over him and he felt as
+strong as a giant, and happier than he had ever been in his life before,
+so that lawyer and hedger each rejoiced in the task that was before him,
+as if it were sport and play.
+
+And much more wonderful than this or any other wonders was forgiveness,
+with love to follow it. There were meetings of old enemies in the
+market-place and in the street that made the people lift up their hands
+and declare that it was as if one walked the miraculous streets of Syon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But as to the "phenomena," the occurrences for which, in ordinary talk,
+we should reserve the word "miraculous"? Well, what do we know? The
+question that I have already stated comes up again, as to the possible
+survival of old tradition in a kind of dormant, or torpid,
+semi-conscious state. In other words, did the people "see" and "hear"
+what they expected to see and hear? This point, or one similar to it,
+occurred in a debate between Andrew Lang and Anatole France as to the
+visions of Joan of Arc. M. France stated that when Joan saw St. Michael,
+she saw the traditional archangel of the religious art of her day, but
+to the best of my belief Andrew Lang proved that the visionary figure
+Joan described was not in the least like the fifteenth-century
+conception of St. Michael. So, in the case of Llantrisant, I have stated
+that there was a sort of tradition about the Holy Bell of Teilo Sant;
+and it is, of course, barely possible that some vague notion of the
+Graal Cup may have reached even Welsh country folks through Tennyson's
+Idylls. But so far I see no reason to suppose that these people had ever
+heard of the portable altar (called Sapphirus in William of Malmesbury)
+or of its changing colours "that no man could discern."
+
+And then there are the other questions of the distinction between
+hallucination and vision, of the average duration of one and the other,
+and of the possibility of collective hallucination. If a number of
+people all see (or think they see) the same appearances, can this be
+merely hallucination? I believe there is a leading case on the matter,
+which concerns a number of people seeing the same appearance on a church
+wall in Ireland; but there is, of course, this difficulty, that one may
+be hallucinated and communicate his impression to the others,
+telepathically.
+
+But at the last, what do we know?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Return, by Arthur Machen
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