The Forgotten Threshold Part 1

The Forgotten Threshold.

by Arthur Middleton.

PREFATORY NOTE

Before Arthur Middleton died he gave me this record among others in the belief that it would help to tell me what he had always known in the silences, yet could never in life trans.m.u.te into the friendly counters of speech. During the last years of his all too brief experience of his friends, more than once he shyly sought to tell what he knew, yet always silence claimed him, and nothing but the wonder of his eyes revealed the dream that consumed his heart. Because beauty claims these words in a deeper knowledge than we had before, I have transcribed this fragment of them here, confident that in these white intuitions of his youth there is a revelation of the Light behind beauty beyond our poor knowledge and still poorer faith. I have omitted only what was most sacred to the privacies of his heart and our affection. He was of the old faith and would have wished had he published these pages to have expressed his entire and pa.s.sionate loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church in faith and deed, and to have disclaimed any word therein which conflicted with the intimacies of its truth. I can do no more than to echo his wish, and mourn the unhappy chance which took him from us on an April tide, though it befell on the Easter that he loved and at that hour when the flaming symbol of the Divine Sacrifice was setting in the west. So the pa.s.sion of the sun and tide which reflected his belief witnessed the consummation of his great desire.--THE EDITOR.

THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD

THE JOURNAL

(N.B.--On the opening pages of the blank book in which this journal is contained there is a short fragment which bears no relation that I can discover to the entries that follow, and I am inclined to believe that it is the beginning of an autobiography which Middleton never continued. In my uncertainty, however, I print it, and accordingly it is transcribed below.--THE EDITOR.)

_Fragment_.--I was not more than three years old when the sunlight first made me happy as it stole through the curtains and over the coverlet till it kissed my lips and wrapped me in its warm embrace.

Then I would fall asleep again and my dreams, if I dreamed at all, were white and faintly stirred me to a smile. I never tried to catch the sunbeams, for I felt their gold in my heart, nor could they have been nearer than they were, being a.s.sociated with my mother's watchfulness as she stole in to smile upon my slumbers and claim the second silent unconscious kiss. On Sunday morning they would be freighted with a quiet whiter light, more peaceful and hushed to the feeling of the day, and somehow the peace was guarded with finger on lip throughout the house, so that it was implicit in my nest of images long before reason took note of it or sought to explain it to my consciousness. Once again as a boy of fifteen I knew it with a catch of delighted and almost tearful surprise when I stroked the breast of a wounded pigeon who found shelter in my room. The world is not as quiet in these days, nor is the hum of traffic in the mart attuned so kindly to the flow of light as when it ran so gently by the bedside of the dreaming boy. ...

(The journal now follows, written in a small cramped hand, without paragraphing or division. I omit the first few entries as purely personal. Middleton had gone to a group of remote western islands, and these notes are the fruit of his sojourn there.)--THE EDITOR.

July 5.

Yesterday found me on the island with its silences, and last night the host was red and sacrificial and rode on a thunder cloud. This afternoon the planets go singing through my flesh and my song of praise has widened to the arches of the sun. The sea is moaning slowly on the sand. I stripped to the cool salt air for the first time. ...

Walking I found my way out on the long gray dunes.

July 6.

On the dunes today with my mother. My hand swept idly over the soft white sand, s.h.i.+fting the order of many thousands of starry worlds.

What a chord of music if one could but hear it in its entirety! As it was, I caught wonderful echoes that would light the beauties of many a sunrise. The silent man reminds me of Synge in his drifting life and the fires glowing in his eyes. Today I saw the-beauty of a flower. ...

Some day I shall write a play about the stars. The action will burn in their seedtime and blow on the winds of Fate with all its ironies. ...

Tonight in the sitting room I heard in my heart the singing of the sands. It is on the s.h.i.+fting desert, I feel, that we shall discover the secret origin of language. How the infinitely aspiring music must sound tonight along the dunes!

July 7.

The night before last after I retired I felt that lifted feeling physically which represents the beating of the tides. Last night it coalesced with the singing of the sands. At Ma.s.s this morning the voices at the Credo thundered out _Et h.o.m.o factus est_ in a torrent of living sound. At the elevation I saw a thin white flame rise from the uplifted chalice and disappear. It takes a beam of light one hundred and eight years to travel from Arcturus to the earth. Are we similar traveling beams, and is death merely our arrival on another planet which we illumine? Today I read aloud on the cliffs from the glories of Plato's _Phaedrus_.

July 8.

In the morning I wandered onto the dunes leading out toward Wonder Island, but was driven off by the terns who were nesting. ... The billows of the wind today mingled in me with the sands and the tide, so that I experienced from a new angle Landor's "We are what suns and winds and waters make us." ...

July 9.

My life will see much traveling.

July 10.

Morning on the dunes. A cold clear bath while mists drove over the sands. Returning home, as I came to the deep sand on the road, I perceived the mystery of the resurrection of the body. In death there is no physical decay. The singing planets of the human body merely part to combine in other songs, recurring again in the end to their old disposal and song, exchanging other worlds for their own once more, and recurring to the first motif of the symphony. I was sad this afternoon for the will failed me in my work. Sitting on the sand this morning the singing dunes had attained to the harmony of silence. All at once a little wisp of seaweed--hardly more than a thread--started to beat time upon the sands. And then I knew and saw it to be in its happy beating the pulse that governed the music of the stars. Can the heart conduct the symphony of the body? Tonight the sun set, borne away--a Grail--by angels from the questing Galahad. There was a great silence in my heart as I sat in the crowded room.

July 11.

A day of northeast wind and upward thunder. The joy of the wind was in me, and I lost the sense of s.p.a.ce. The air was so buoyant that it was closely kin to the sea. ... Today I succeeded a little better with my will. I had a strange sensation this afternoon, which told me that bare lonely places are the only places to write drama, since there only can we find the pure dynamic forces of life disentangled from the subtle and complicated web of human ambitions and interests. The air was very thin and clear at twilight, but the sun was hidden in the clouds. ...

July 12.

... There was a great silence this evening in the crowded room.

Closing my eyes, I raised the upper lids as far as possible without seeing material things, and so saw myself in fearful wonder elevating the host and chalice on high. I know now the inner meaning of "Domine, non sum dignus _ut intres sub tecta mea_." Under these two arched roofs of the eyes hidden from all light save Light, there is a secret dwelling. ... A day of close-shrouded palling fog--a chrism confirming the strength of beauty.

July 13.

This morning the wind blew through the fields of gra.s.s like countless angels in the courts of heaven. Shadow and color and light and movement dancing before the first syllable of the Name. A gull flew down almost to my hand, and the sunlight thundered in my ears. Last night the sea was sadly purifying the earth. I now understand the Washer of the Ford. Majesty lies in darkness, and grief is only the privilege of seeing Majesty. Today on the porch with closed eyes buried in my hands the winds swept over me in a torrent of living light. A symphony is a wonderful symbol. In the first place, it is music. In the second place, it is a name of praise with four syllables. Then it completes a cycle, and returns on a higher plane to the motif with which it began. It is the history of a soul, and in its last movement typifies the resurrection of the body, by means of this very return,--a return to the order and disposal in which it was created and which it now rea.s.sumes to praise its Creator for all eternity by the harmony of the original Thought. I looked at twilight into the tiny white heart of a flower that grew among the gra.s.ses, and out of the heart pulsed the Sacred Body in wounds all glorified, with Hands outstretched conducting the music of the worlds. I know now that the flower was a chalice. The sadness of it cannot die as the Man can, and I know that it is with me ready to be shared. As I write this, there is a mist within my room. I always sleep now like one ready to soar. In the crowded room tonight I felt myself making the movements of swimming, as if the air were water and I an expert swimmer.

July 14.

_Views of the unveiled heavens alone forth bring Prophets who cannot sing_.

A day of tempestuous wind and rain with all the keen dynamic life of time poised 'mid eternities. The happiest of my days battling with the elements in wonderful silences. At Ma.s.s with wonder the s.h.i.+ning of the Host. My eyes were veiled from the chalice, but I felt two angels --guarding the acolytes. Again at the Credo the thunder of _Et h.o.m.o factus est_. With Sh.e.l.ley in the afternoon and a perilous walk on the cliffs. ... I am gaining in detachment. The desire and pa.s.sion for solitude grows and I meditate a winter on the islands. How unworthy I am to partake of mysteries! They fill me with fear, for it is hard for the body to live in eternity. In the evening with Gordon Craig. Is he right about masks? A mask is a symbol, but a face may be a sacrament.

The Ma.s.s, after all, is the supreme dream and drama of the world.

Sadness is majesty, as I found the other night, and majesty is always impenetrable, for it is a secret full of awe and mysterious silence.

Tonight I see that great drama, whether it be a tragedy or no, must reveal time poised in infinity. Beauty, I think, contains everything save the human will, and it is the ideal of the will to be thus contained and of beauty to be the container. ... In the supreme drama of Gethsemane and Calvary, Christ used the human body as the supreme visible instrument of drama.

July 15.

... Tonight the fog broke through the sunset and scattered gold across the sea. Clouds hung over the cliffs. ... I prayed through the sunset, and won a victory for the will.

July 16.

Last night in the darkness I learned many things. The human will is the unit, the core of flame which binds all elements together. It is sad because it is the force of impact tearing things from their detached and comfortable places and placing them in new relations. It is the magnet, the summoning voice, our own conscience, the expression of Majesty. It disposes reluctant and conflicting notes in harmony.

And we have control of it given into our hands. And then, too, I learnt that words are worlds. At every breath, nay, by the slightest thought, we create planets. Pray that they harmonize! They have power.

Are they angels? They convey our messages, but their harmony of inter-woven song and meaning was lost at Babel to our ears. Yet by them if our will is strong and we do not fail in deeds we may take our part in the symphony as truly as life itself. And so we must not use them idly. How can anyone dare to tell a lie? One begins to see how G.o.d is a Name. I felt before how the secret of language was to be found among the sands. It is because the sands are the nearest and most visible planets we possess. Words are planets. But planets are sands on the sh.o.r.e of eternity. Words are sands. We are little words made flesh, little echoes in the image of the great Word made Flesh.

His creation is the complete echo made flesh, His Image and likeness which He contemplates. And so we are in our measure part of the song made flesh, and the little common words that we use are our brothers.

July 17.

The sunset tonight was a glorious crucifixion after the day of clouds.

It was human in its beckoning. I cannot find the secret of the moon, but it reminds me of Lionel's phrase, if it be his, "golden mediocrities." Is it the astral embodiment of "They also serve who only stand and wait"? Why is it that the little human beauties of Nature pa.s.s me by as ent.i.ties, and that I seek bare places? Is there a parallel in my personal att.i.tude toward all but those who are specially dear to me? I thought of how I looked down on the city from the mountain in May, and felt the whole city to be my prayer. It had been given into my control for a few minutes, and the only worthy use to which I could put it was to offer it up with a prayer for my people and all the desire of my heart that the prayer would be answered. The half-million souls with all their dreams were under my care then, and their acts were mine. So little are cities, and so little I found my worthiness that I could not hide my tears. Later I crossed to the height looking down on the cemetery, the world was silent save for the flaming heart of the city pulsing below, and reflecting the Flaming Heart above as the sun set. The woodp.e.c.k.e.rs did not fear me, and I sank slowly and deeply into G.o.d. I think that some day I shall know His wounds. I cannot understand why I was delivered from temptation at the moment that the city was put into my hands.