Chapter I. King Lamus Intervenes
Chapter III. The Voice of Virtue
Preface
This is a true story.
It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities.
It is a terrible story ; but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.
It reveals with startling clearness the abyss on which our civilisation trembles.
But the self-same Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.
This story is also true not only of one kind of human weakness, but (by analogy) of all kinds; and for all alike there is but one way of salvation.
As Glanvil says: Man is not subjected to the angels, nor even unto death utterly, save through the weakness of his own feeble will.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
- ALEISTER CROWLEY.
Book I. Paradiso
Chapter I.
A Knight Out
Yes, I certainly was feeling depressed. I don't think that this was altogether the reaction of the day. Of course, there always is a reaction after the excitement of a flight ; but the effect is more physical than moral. One doesn't talk. One lies about and smokes and drinks champagne.
No, I was feeling quite a different kind of rotten. I looked at my mind, as the better class of flying man soon learns to do, and I really felt ashamed of myself. Take me for all in all, I was one of the luckiest men alive.
War is like a wave; some it rolls over, some it drowns, some it beats to pieces on the shingle; but some it shoots far up the shore on to glistening golden sand out of the reach of any further freaks of fortune.
Let me explain.
My name is Peter Pendragon. My father was a second son; and he had quarrelled with my Uncle Mortimer when they were boys. He was a struggling general practitioner in Norfolk, and had not made things any better for himself by marrying.
However, he scraped together enough to get me some sort of education, and at the outbreak of the war I was twenty-two years old and had just passed my Intermediate for M.D. in the University of London.
Then, as I said, the wave came. My mother went out for the Red Cross, and died in the first year of the war. Such was the confusion that I did not even know about it till over six months later.
My father died of influenza just before the Armistice.
I had gone into the air service ; did pretty well, though somehow I was never sure either of myself or of my machine. My squadron commander used to tell me that I should never make a great airman.
" Old thing," he said, " you lack the instinct," qualifying the noun with an entirely meaningless adjective which somehow succeeded in making his sentence highly illuminating.
" Where you get away with it," he said, " is that you have an analytic brain."
Well, I suppose I have. That's how I come to be writing this up. Anyhow, at the end of the war I found myself with a knighthood which I still firmly believe to have been due to a clerical error on the part of some official.
As for Uncle Mortimer, he lived on in his crustacean way; a sulky, rich, morose, old bachelor. We never heard a word of him.
And then, about a year ago, he died ; and I found to my amazement that I was sole heir to his five or six thousand a year, and the owner of Barley Grange ; which is really an awfully nice place in Kent, quite near enough to be convenient for the prosperous young man about town which I had become ; and for the best of it, a piece of artificial water quite large enough for me to use for a waterdrome for my seaplane.
I may not have the instinct for flying, as Cartwright said ; but it's the only sport I care about.
Golf? When one has flown over a golf course, those people do look such appalling rotters! Such pigmy solemnities !
Now about my feeling depressed. When the end of the war came, when I found myself penniless, out of a job, utterly spoilt by the war (even if I had had the money) for going on with my hospital, I had developed an entirely new psychology. You know how it feels when you are fighting duels in the air, you seem to be detached from everything. There is nothing in the Universe but you and the Boche you are trying to pot. There is something detached and god-like about it.
And when I found myself put out on the streets by a grateful country, I became an entirely different animal. In fact, I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all ; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
Well, bother that I The plain fact is that I had become a desperate wild animal. I was too hungry, so to speak, even to waste any time on thinking bitterly about things.
And then came the letter from the lawyers. That was another new experience. I had no idea before of the depths to which servility could descend.
" By the way, Sir Peter," said Mr. Wolfe, " it will, of course, take a little while to settle up these matters. It's a very large estate, very large. But I thought that with times as they are, you wouldn't be offended, Sir Peter, if we handed you an open cheque for a thousand pounds just to go on with."
It wasn't till I had got outside his door that I realised how badly he wanted my business. He need not have worried. He had managed poor old Uncle Mortimer's affairs well enough all those years; not likely I should bother to put them in the hands of a new man.
The thing that really pleased me about the whole business was the clause in the will. That old crab had sat in his club all through the war, snapping at everybody he saw ; and yet he had been keeping track of what I was doing. He said in the will that he had made me his heir "for the splendid services I had rendered to our beloved country in her hour of need."
That's the true Celtic psychology. When we've all finished talking, there's something that never utters a word, but goes right down through the earth, plumb to the centre.
And now comes the funny part of the