Sauron Defeated (40 page)

'It's not so with you, Philip my lad; you're ignorant, but you have a heart. I dare say pants just doesn't fit your native style. So it has always been with full men: they have had their hatreds among the words, and their loves.'

'You talk almost as if you'd seen or heard Language since its beginning, Arry,' said Ramer, looking at him with some surprise. It was a long time since Lowdham had let himself go at such length.

'No! Not since its beginning,' said Lowdham, while a strange expression came over his face. 'Only since - but ... Oh well!'

He broke off and went to the window. It was dark but clear as glass in the sky, and there were many white stars.

The conversation drifted again. Starting from the beginnings of Language, we began to talk about legends of origins and cultural myths. Guildford and Markison began to have an argument about Corn-gods and the coming of divine kings or heroes over the sea, in spite of various frivolous interjections from Lowdham, who seemed curiously averse to the turn of the talk.

'The Sheaf personified,'* said Guild[ford. Here unfortunately one leaf is missing.)......

[Jeremy].... 'as you said. But I don't think one can be so sure.

Sometimes I have a queer feeling that, if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the reverse: real history becoming more mythical - more shapely, simple, discernibly significant, even seen at close quarters. More poetical, and less prosaic, if you like.

'In any case, these ancient accounts, legends, myths, about the far Past, about the origins of kings, laws, and the fundamental crafts, are not all made of the same ingredients. They're not wholly inventions. And even what is invented is different from mere fiction; it has more roots.'

'Roots in what?' said Frankley.

'In Being, I think I should say,' Jeremy answered; 'and in human Being; and coming down the scale, in the springs of History and in the designs of Geography - I mean, well, in the pattern of our world as it uniquely is, and of the events in it as seen from a distance. A sort of parallel to the fact that from far away the Earth would be seen as a revolving sunlit globe; and that is a remote truth of enormous effect on us and all we do, though not immediately discernible on earth, where practical men are quite right in regarding the surface as flat and immovable for practical purposes.

'Of course, the pictures presented by the legends may be partly symbolical, they may be arranged in designs that compress, expand, foreshorten, combine, and are not at all realistic or photographic, yet they may tell you something true about the Past.

'And mind you, there are also real details, what are called facts, accidents of land-shape and sea-shape, of individual men and their actions, that are caught up: the grains on which the stories crystallize like snowflakes. There was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle.'

(* [See Night 66, p. 236.])

'Perhaps!' said Frankley. 'But that doesn't make such things as the Arthurian romances real in the same way as true past events are real.'

'I didn't say in the same way,' said Jeremy. 'There are secondary planes or degrees.'

'And what do you know about "true past events", Philip?'

asked Ramer. 'Have you ever seen one, when once it was past?

They are all stories or tales now, aren't they, if you try to bring them back into the present? Even your idea of what you did yesterday - if you try to share it with anyone else? Unless, of course, you can go back, or at least see back.'

'Well, I think there's a difference between what really happened at our meetings and Nicholas's record,' said Frankley. 'I don't think his reports erase the true history, whether they're true in their fashion to the events or not. And didn't you claim to be able sometimes to re-view the past as a present thing?

Could you go back into Guildford's minutes?'

'Hmm,' Ramer muttered, considering. 'Yes and no,' he said.

'Nicholas could, especially into the scenes that he's pictured or re-pictured fairly solidly and put some mental work into. We could, if we did the same. People of the future, if they only knew the records and studied them, and let their imagination work on them, till the Notion Club became a sort of secondary world set in the Past: they could.'

'Yes, Frankley,' said Jeremy, 'you've got to make a distinction between lies, or casual fiction, or the mere verbal trick of projecting sentences back by putting the verbs into the past tense, between all that and construction. Especially of the major kind that has acquired a secondary life of its own and passes from mind to mind.'

'Quite so!' said Ramer. 'I don't think you realize, I don't think any of us realize, the force, the daimonic force that the great myths and legends have. From the profundity of the emotions and perceptions that begot them, and from the multiplication of them in many minds - and each mind, mark you, an engine of obscured but unmeasured energy. They are like an explosive: it may slowly yield a steady warmth to living minds, but if suddenly detonated, it might go off with a crash: yes: might produce a disturbance in the real primary world.'

'What sort of thing are you thinking of?' said Dolbear, lifting his beard off his chest, and opening his eyes with a gleam of passing interest.

'I wasn't thinking of any particular legend,' said Ramer. 'But, well, for instance, think of the emotional force generated all down the west rim of Europe by the men that came at last to the end, and looked on the Shoreless Sea, unharvested, untraversed, unplumbed! And against that background what a prodigious stature other events would acquire! Say, the coming, apparently out of that Sea, riding a storm, [of] strange men of superior knowledge, steering yet unimagined ships. And if they bore tales of catastrophe far away: battles, burned cities, or the whelming of lands in some tumult of the earth - it shakes me to think of such things in such terms, even now.'

'Yes, I'm moved by that,' said Frankley. 'But it's large and vague. I'm still stuck a good deal nearer home, in Jeremy's casual reference to King Arthur. There you have a sort of legendary land, but it's quite unreal.'

'But you'll allow, won't you,' said Ramer, 'that the Britain of Arthur, as now imagined, even in a debased when-knights-were-bold sort of form, has some kind of force and life?'

'Some kind of literary attraction,' said Frankley. 'But could you go back to King Arthur's Camelot, even on your system? Of which, by the way, I'm not yet convinced: I mean, what you've told us seems to me very likely no more than an exceptionally elaborate, and exceptionally well-remembered form of what I call "dreaming" simply: picture-and-story-spinning while asleep.'

'And anyway: if legend (significant on its own plane) has gathered about history (with its own importance), which would you go back to? Which would you see, if you saw back?' asked Guildford.

'It depends on what you yourself are like, and on what you are looking for, I imagine,' Ramer answered. 'If you were seeking the story that has most power and significance for human minds, then probably that is the version that you'ld find.

'Anyway, I think you could - I think I could go back to Camelot, if the conditions of my mind and the chances of travel were favourable. The chances are not, as I told you, more than very slightly affected by waking desire. An adventure of that sort would not be the same thing as re-viewing what you'ld call Fifth-century Britain. Neither would it be like making a dream-drama of my own. It would be more like the first, but it would be more active. It would be much less free than the second. It would probably be more difficult than either. I fancy it might be the sort of thing best done by one or two people in concert.'

'I don't see how that would help,' said Frankley.

'Because different people have different views, or have individual contributions to make: is that what you mean?' asked Guildford. 'But that would be just as true of historical research or "backsight".'

'No, it wouldn't,' said Jeremy. 'You're mixing up history in the sense of a story made up out of the intelligible surviving evidence (which is not necessarily truer to the facts than legend) and "the true story", the real Past. If you really had a look back at the Past as it was, then everything would be there to see, if you had eyes for it, or time to observe it in. And the most difficult thing to see would be, as it always is "at present", the pattern, the significance, yes, the moral of it all, if you like. At least that would be the case, the nearer you come to our time. As I said before, I'm not so sure about that, as you pass backward to the beginnings. But in such a thing as a great story-cycle the situation would be different: much would be vividly real and at the same time ... er... portentous; but there might be, would be, uncompleted passages, weak joints, gaps. You'ld have to consolidate. You might need help.'

'You might indeed!' said Frankley. 'Riding down from Camelot (when you had discovered just where that was) to most other places on the legendary map, you'ld find the road pretty vague.

Most of the time you'ld be lost in a fog! And you'ld meet some pretty sketchy characters about the court, too.'

'Of course! And so you would about the present court,' said Markison, 'or in any Oxford quadrangle. Why should that worry you? Sketchy characters are more true to life than fully studied ones. There are precious few people in real life that you know as well as a good writer knows his heroes and villains.'

'Riding down to Camelot. Riding out from Camelot,' murmured Lowdham. 'And there was a dark shadow over that too.

I wonder, I wonder. But it is still only a tale to me. Not all legends are like that. No, unfortunately. Some seem to have come to life on their own, and they will not rest. I should hate to be cast back into some of those lands. It would be worse than the vision of poor Norman Keeps.'

'What on earth is he talking about now?' said Guildford.

'The cork's coming out pretty soon, I think,' grunted Dolbear without opening his eyes.

Oh, Norman Keeps is our barber,'(15) said Frankley. At least that's what Arry and I call him: no idea what his real name is.

Quite a nice and moderately intelligent little man: but to him everything beyond a certain vague distance back is a vast dark barren but utterly fixed and determined land and time called The Dark Ages. There are only four features in it: Norman Keeps (by which he means baronial castles, and possibly the house of any man markedly richer than himself); Them Jameses (meaning roughly I suppose the kings One and Two); The Squires (a curious kind of bogey-folk); and The People. Nothing ever happened in that land but Them Jameses shutting up The People in the Keeps (with the help of The Squires) and there torturing them and robbing them, though they don't appear ever to have possessed anything to be robbed of. Rather a gloomy legend. But it's a great deal more fixed in a lot more heads than is the Battle of Camlan!'(16)

'I know, I know,' said Lowdham loudly and angrily. 'It's a shame! Norman Keeps is a very decent chap, and would rather learn truth than lies. But Zigur (17) pays special attention to the type. Curse him!'

Conversation stopped, and there was a silence. Ramer and Guildford exchanged glances. Dolbear opened his eyes quietly without moving his head.

'Zigur?' said Jeremy, looking at Lowdham. 'Zigur? Who is he?'

'No idea, no idea!' said Lowdham. 'Is this a new game, Jerry?

Owlamoo,(18) who's he?' He strode to the window and flung it open.

The early summer night was still and glimmering, warmer than usual for the time of year. Lowdham leant out, and we turned and stared at his back. The large window looked west, and the two towers of All Souls' stuck up like dim horns against the stars.

Suddenly Lowdham spoke in a changed voice, clear and ominous, words in an unknown tongue; and then turning fiercely upon us he cried aloud:

Behold the Eagles of the Lords of the West! They are coming over Numenor!(19)

We were all startled. Several of us went to the window and stood behind Lowdham, looking out. A great cloud, coming up slowly out of the West, was eating up the stars. As it approached it opened two vast sable wings, spreading north and south.

Suddenly Lowdham pulled away, slammed the window down, and drew the curtains. He slumped into a chair and shut his eyes.

We returned to our seats and sat there uncomfortably for some time without a sound. At last Ramer spoke.

'Numenor? Numenor?' he said quietly. 'Where did you find that name, Arundel Lowdham?'

'Oh, I don't know,' Lowdham answered, opening his eyes, and looking round with a rather dazed expression. 'It comes to me, now and again. Just on the edge of things, you know.

Eludes the grasp. Like coming round after gas. But it's been turning up more often than usual this spring. I'm sorry. Have I been behaving oddly or something, not quite my old quiet friendly self? Give me a drink!'

'I asked,' said Ramer, 'because Numenor is my name for Atlantis.'(20)