The Sea Priestess Read online

  Table of contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  The Sea Priestess

  Dion Fortune

  First digital edition 2016 by Anna Ruggieri

  INTRODUCTION

  IF one wishes to write a book that is not cut according to any of the standard patterns, it appears to be necessary to be one's own publisher; therefore this book has not got the imprint of any publishing house to lend it dignity, but must stand upon its own feet as a literary Mekhizedek. I once had the entertaining experience of receiving one of my own books for review, but if I were called upon to review this one, I should find it difficult to know how to set about it. It is a book with an undercurrent; upon the surface, a romance; underneath, a thesis upon the theme: "All women are Isis, and Isis is all women," or in the language of modern psychology, the anima-animus principle. Various criticisms have been levelled at it by those who have read it in manuscript, and as they will probably be repeated by those who read it in print, I may as well take the opportunity of a preface to deal with them, especially as there is no production-manager to say to me: "You must cut fifty pages if we are to get it out at seven-and-six." It was said by a reviewer of one of my previous books that it is a pity I make my characters so unlikeable. This was a great surprise to me, for it had never occurred to me that my characters were unlikeable. What kind of barber's blocks are required in order that readers may love them? In real life no one escapes the faults of their qualities, so why should they in fiction? There are many drawbacks to my hero as a son, a brother, a husband and a business partner, and he makes no attempt to minimise them; nevertheless I retain my affection for him, though I am quite alive to the fact that he could not compete with the creations of the late Samuel Smiles. But then I do not know that I particularly want him to. It has often seemed to me that as one cannot please everybody, one may as well please oneself, especially as I have. God be thanked, no publisher to consider, who would naturally expect my book to contribute its quota towards his overhead expenses and errors of judgment. It was said of this book by a publisher's reader, who ought to know what he is talking about, that the style is uneven, rising to heights of lyric beauty (his expression, not mine), and on the same page descending to colloquialisms. This raises a pretty point in technique. My story is written in the first person; it is therefore a monologue, and the same rule applies to it that applies to dialogue--that the speakers must speak in character. As my hero's mood changes, his narrative style therefore changes. Any writer will agree that narrative in the first person is a most difficult technique to handle. The method of presentation is in actuality that of drama, though maintaining the appearance of narrative; moreover everything has to be seen not only through the eyes, but through the temperament of the person who is telling the story. A restraint has to be observed in the emotional passages lest the blight of self-pity appear on the hero. He must, at all costs, keep the reader's respect while evoking his sympathy, and this he cannot do if he wallows in his emotions. Consequently in the most telling scenes, where an author would normally pull out the tremolo stop and tread on the loud pedal, only curt, brief Anglo-Saxon may be used, for no one employs elaborate English when in extremis. All effects have to be obtained by "noises off". Therefore unless the reader has imagination and can read constructively, the effects are lost. And this brings me to the question of constructive reading. Everybody knows how much the audience contributes to the performance of a play, but few people realise how much a reader must contribute to the effect of a work of fiction. Perhaps I ask too much of my readers: that is a point I am not competent to judge, and can only say with Martin Luther: "God help me, I can do no otherwise." After all, the style is the man, and short of castration, cannot be altered. And who wants to be a literary eunuch? Not me, anyway, which is perhaps the reason why I have to do my own publishing. People read fiction in order to supplement the diet life provides for them. If life is full and varied, they like novels that analyse and interpret it for them; if life is narrow and unsatisfying, they supply themselves with mass production wishfulfilments from the lending libraries. I have managed to fit my book in between these two stools so neatly that it is hardly fair to say that it falls between them. It is a novel of interpretation and a novel of wish-fulfilment at the same time. Yet after all, why should not the two be combined? They have to be in psycho-therapy, where I learnt my trade. The frustration that afflicts my hero is the lot, in some degree at any rate, of a very considerable proportion of human beings, as my readers doubtless can confirm from their own experience. It is too well known to need emphasis that readers, reading for emotional compensation, identify themselves with the hero or heroine as the case may be, and for this reason the writers who cater for this class of taste invariably make the protagonist of the opposite sex to themselves the oleographic representation of a wish-fulfilment. The he-men who write for he-men invariably provide as heroine either a glutinous, synthetic, saccharine creature and call the result romance, or else combine all the incompatibles in the human character and think they have achieved realism. Equally the lady novelist will provide her readers with such males as never stepped into a pair of trousers; on whom, in fact, trousers would be wasted. It is difficult for me to judge of my own characters; naturally I think the world of them, but such partiality is probably no more justified than that of any other doting parent. The late Charles Garvice was convinced he wrote literature and was bitterly jealous of Kipling. How far my creations are wish-fulfilments is a matter on which I am the last person to be able to express an impartial opinion. It has often been said of me that I am no lady, and I have myself had to tell the secretary of a well-known club which craved my membership that I am no gentleman, so we will leave the mystery of sex wrapped in decent obscurity, like that of the parrot. Nevertheless, I think that if readers in their reading will identify themselves with one or another of the characters according to taste, they will be led to a curious psychological experience--the experience of the therapeutic use of phantasy, an unappreciated aspect of psycho-therapy. The psychological state of modern civilisation is on a par with the sanitation of the medieval walled cities. Therefore I lay my tribute at the feet of the great goddess Cloacina.

  "In jesting guise, but ye are wise, Ye know what the jest is worth."

  dion fortune

  CHAPTER I

  THE keeping of a diary is usually reckoned a vice in one's contemporaries though a virtue in one's ancestors. I must plead guilty to the vice, if vice it is, for I have kept a fairly detailed journal for a good many years. Loving observation but lacking imagination, my real role was that of a Boswcll, but alas, no Johnson has been forthcoming. I am therefore reduced to being my own Johnson. This is not my choice. I would far rather have been the chronicler of the great, but the great never came my way. Therefore it was myself or nothing. I am under no delusion that my journal is litera
ture, but it served its purpose as a safety-valve at a time when a safety-valve was badly needed. Without it, I think I would have blown the lid off on more than one occasion. They say that adventures are to the adventurous; but one can hardly go seeking adventure with persons dependent upon one. Had I had a young wife to face the adventure of life with me, it might have been a different story, but my sister was ten years my senior and my mother an invalid, and the family business only just enough to keep the three of us during my salad days. Adventure, therefore, was not for me, save at a risk to others which I did not feel was justifiable. Hence the need for a safety-valve. These old journals, volume upon volume of them, lie in a tin trunk in the attic. I have dipped into them occasionally, but they are dreary reading; all the pleasure lay in the writing of them. They are an objective chronicle of things seen through the eyes of a provincial business man. Very small beer indeed, if I may be allowed to say so. But at a certain point there comes a change. The subjective becomes objective. But where, and exactly how, I cannot say for certain. It was in an endeavour to elucidate the whole business that I began to read through the later journals systematically, and finally to write the whole thing out. It makes a curious story, and I do not pretend to understand it. I had hoped it would come clear in the writing, but it has not. In fact it has become more problematical. Had I not had the diarykeeping habit, much would have safely disappeared into the limbo of things forgotten; the mind could then have arranged matters in a pattern after its own liking, to suit its prc-conceived ideas, and the incompatibles would have slipped into the discard unnoticed. But with things down in black and white, this could not be done, and the affair had to be faced up to as a whole. I record it for what it is worth. I am the last person to be able to assess its value. It appears to me to be a curious chapter in the history of the mind, and as such, to be of interest as data if not as literature. If I learn as much from the re-living of it as I learnt from the living of it, I shall be well repaid. The whole thing began with a dispute over money matters. Our business is an estate agent's business which I inherited from my father. It has always been a good business, but was heavily embarrassed by speculation. My father had never been able to resist the temptation to pick up a bargain. If a house which he knew had cost ten thousand to build were going for two, he had to have it. But nobody wanted these great sprawling mansions, so I fell heir to a stablcful of white elephants. All through my twenties and well into my thirties I wrestled with these brutes, peddling them piecemeal, till finally the business assumed a healthy complexion once more and I was in a position to do what I had long wanted to do--sell it and be rid of it--for I hated it and the whole life of that deadalive town--and use the money to buy a partnership in a London publishing company. That, I thought, would give me the entree into the life that fascinated me; and it did not seem to me a particularly wild-cat scheme financially, for business is business, whether you are selling bricks or books. I had read every biography I could lay my hands on that dealt with the world of books, and it appeared to me that there was scope for someone accustomed to business methods. I may be wrong, of course, having no first-hand experience of books and their makers, but that was how it looked to me. So I mooted the idea to my mother and sister. They were not averse, provided I did not want them to come to London with me. This was a boon I had never expected, for I had quite thought I should have to get a house for them, as my mother would never have put up with a flat. I saw the way opening up before me in a manner I have never dared even to dream of. I saw myself leading a bachelor life in Bohemian circles, a club-man, and God knows what not. And then the blow fell. The offices of our firm were part of the big old Georgian house in which we had always lived. You couldn't sell the business without the premises because it was the best site in the town, and they wouldn't agree. I suppose I could have forced it through and sold the house over their heads, but I didn't like to do that. My sister came up to my room and talked to me, and told me that it would kill my mother to have her home broken up. I offered to set them up in any house they fancied that was within my means, but she said no, my mother would never settle. Surely I would let her live out her old age in peace? It couldn't be for long now. (It is five years ago, and she's still going strong, so I think she would probably have transplanted all right if I had been firm.) Then my mother called me into her room, and said that to give up the house would completely disorganise all my sister's work, for all her meetings were held in our big drawing-room, and the Girls' Friendly had their headquarters in the basement, and my sister had given her whole life to her work, and it would all collapse if the house were given up, because then there would be nowhere where she could do it. I did not feel justified in going my own way in the face of all that, so I made up my mind to stick to the estate agenting. Life had its compensations. My work took me about the country in my car, and I have always been a great reader. It was the lack of congenial friends that had really been my trouble, and the prospect of making them had attracted me to the publishing idea. Still, books are no bad substitute, and I dare say I should have been pretty badly disillusioned if I had gone to London and tried to make friends. In fact, as it turned out, it was a good thing I did not make the venture, for it was just after this that my asthma started, and I should probably not have been able to stand the racket of life in London. The firm I should have sold to set up a branch office in the town, and after that the opportunity for a good sale was over, so the choice was no longer mine. All this does not sound much like a row over business matters. Neither was there any row over the actual decision. The row came after everything was settled and I had written turning down both offers. It was at Sunday evening supper. Now, I dislike cold suppers in any case, and the vicar had preached a particularly silly sermon that evening; so I thought, at any rate, though my mother and sister liked it. They were discussing it, asked my opinion, which I would not have volunteered, and I, being a fool, said what I thought and got sat on, and then, for no reason that I have ever been able to discover, I went in off the deep end, and said that as I paid for the food on the table, I could say what I pleased at the table. Then the fun began. My womenfolk had never been talked to like that in their born days, and they didn't like it. They were both experienced parish workers, and after the first burst I was no match for them. I walked out and slammed the door, shot up the stairs three at a time, with that dreadful cold Sunday supper inside me, and had my first go of asthma on the halflanding. They heard me, and came out to find me hanging on to the banisters and were scared. I was scared too. I thought my last hour had come. Asthma is an alarming thing, even when one is used to it, and this was my first attack. However, I survived; and it was to the time I was lying in bed after the attack that I can trace the fountain-head of all that followed. I suppose I had been pretty drastically drugged; at any rate I was only semi-conscious and seemed to be half in and half out of my body. They had forgotten to draw the blind, and the moonlight was blazing in right on to the bed and I was too weak to get up and shut it out. I lay watching the full moon sliding across the night-sky through a light haze of cloud, and wondering what the dark side of the moon was like, that no man has ever seen, or ever will see. The night-sky has always had an intense fascination for me, and I never grow used to the marvel of the stars and the greater marvel of interstellar space, for it seems to me that in inter-stellar space must be the beginning of all things. The making of Adam from the red clay had never appealed to me; I preferred that God should geometrise. As I lay there, doped and exhausted and half hypnotised by the moon, I let my mind range beyond time to the beginning. I saw the vast sea of infinite space, indigo-dark in the Night of the Gods; and it seemed to me that in that darkness and silence must be the seed of all being. And as in the seed is infolded the future flower with its seed, and again, the flower in the seed, so must all creation be infolded in infinite space, and I along with it. It seemed to me a marvellous thing that I should lie there, practically helpless in mind, body and estate, and yet trace my lineag
e to the stars. And with the thought there came to me a strange feeling, and my soul seemed to go forth into the darkness, yet it was not afraid. I wondered if I had died as I thought I should die when I clung to the banisters, and I was glad, for it meant freedom. Then I knew that I had not died, and should not die, but that with the weakness and the drugs the bars of my soul had been loosened. For there is to every man's mind a part like the dark side of the moon that he never sees, but I was being privileged to see it. It was like inter-stellar space in the Night of the Gods, and in it were the roots of my being. With this knowledge came a profound sense of release; for I knew that the bars of my soul would never wholly close again, but that I had found a way of escape round to the dark side of the moon that no man could ever see. And I remembered the words of Browning-- "God be thanked, the meanest of His mortals, Has two soul-sides, one to face the world with; One to show a woman when he loves her." Now this was an odd experience; but it left me very happy and able to face my illness with equanimity, for it appeared to be going to open strange gates to me. I had long hours lying alone, and I did not care to read lest I should break the spell that surrounded me. By day I dozed, and as it came towards dusk I waited for the Moon, and when she came, I communed with her. Now I cannot tell what I said to the Moon, or what the Moon said to me, but all the same, I got to know her very well. And this was the impression I got of her--that she ruled over a kingdom that was neither material nor spiritual, but a strange moon-kingdom of her own. In it moved tides--ebbing, flowing, slack water, high water, never ceasing, always on the move; up and down, backwards and forwards, rising and receding; coming past on the flood, flowing back on the ebb; and these tides affected our lives. They affected birth and death and all the processes of the body. They affected the mating of animals, and the growth of vegetation, and the insidious workings of disease. They also affected the reactions of drugs, and there was a lore of herbs belonging to them. All these things I got by communing with the Moon, and I felt certain that if I could only learn the rhythm and periodicity of her tides I should know a very great deal. But this I did not learn; for she could only teach me abstract things, and the details I was unable to receive from her because they eluded my mind. I found that the more I dwelt on her, the more I became conscious of her tides, and all my life began to move with them. I could feel my vitality rise and ebb and flow and ebb again. And I found that even when I wrote of her, I wrote in time to her rhythms, as you may have noticed; whereas when I write of everyday things I write in the staccato rhythms of everyday life. At any rate, be things as they may, I lived in time to the Moon in a very curious manner while I lay ill. Presently, however, my illness ran its course, as illnesses will, and I crawled downstairs again, more dead than alive. My family were very attentive, having had a thorough scare, and everybody made a great fuss of me. However, when it began to be realised that these performances were going to be a regular routine, everybody began to get a bit tired of them, once the novelty wore off and they ceased to be so spectacular. The doctor assured them that I was not going to die in these attacks, however much I looked like it, so they began to take them more philosophically, and left me to get on with it until I had finished. All except me. I am afraid I never took them philosophically, but panicked afresh every time. One may know in theory that one will not die, but there is something very alarming in having one's air-supply cut off, and one panicks in spite of oneself. Well, as I was saying, everybody got used to it, and then began to get a bit sick of it. It was a pretty long haul with a tray from the basement to my bedroom. I began to get a bit sick of it myself, as those stairs took a lot of managing when I was wheezy. So the question arose of changing my room. The only other choice seemed to be a kind of dungeon looking into the yard--unless I dispossessed someone else--and I must say I viewed that dungeon with disfavour. Then it suddenly occurred to me that down at the bottom of the long narrow strip of what we called by courtesy a garden were the old stables, and that it might be possible to rig up a kind of bachelor flat there. The minute I thought of it, the idea took hold of me, and off I went, down through a wilderness of laurels, to see what could be done about it. Everything was abominably overgrown, but I shoved my way through, following the track of a long-lost path, and came to a small door with a pointed arch like a church door, set flush with the wall of ancient brick. It was locked, and I had no key, but a shove with the shoulder soon disposed of that, and I found myself in the coach-house. On one side were the horsestalls, and on the other the harness-room, and in the corner a corkscrew staircase led upwards into cobwebs and darkness. I climbed this cautiously, for it felt pretty rickety, and came out into the hayloft. This was all in darkness save for chinks of light that came through the shuttered windows. I opened one of the shutters, and it came away in my hand, leaving a broad gap through which sunlight and fresh air streamed into the musty gloom. I leant out, and was amazed at what I saw. I knew from the name of our town, Dickford, that it must stand on a stream of some kind; presumably the stream which came out at Dickmouth, a seaside resort of sorts ten miles away. Well, here was the stream, presumably the River Dick, whose presence I had never suspected though I was born and bred in the place. Down in a little overgrown ravine it ran, and quite a considerable stream too, from what I could see through the bushes. It evidently entered a culvert a little higher up, and the old bridge, which crossed it a little lower down, had houses built on it, so that it had never occurred to me that Bridge Street was an actual bridge, as it must be. But here was a perfectly genuine stream, some twenty feet broad, overhung by authentic willows like a Thames backwater. I had the surprise of my life. Who would have thought that anyone, especially a boy, could have lived his whole life within stone-throw of a stream and never known it was there? But I had never seen a stream so completely hidden, for the backs of all the long narrow gardens abutted on the ravine and were full of trees and old overgrown shrubs, like ours. I expect all the local urchins knew it, but I had been nicely brought up, and that cramps one's style. Anyway, there it was, and one might have been in the heart of the country, for not even a chimney was visible over all the heavy-leaved trees that lined both banks as far as eye could see, leaving the water to run in a tunnel of greenery. It was probably just as well I had not discovered this stream in the days of my youth, for I should certainly have been so fascinated by it that I would have fallen in. I had a look round the place. It was a solidly-built, Queen Anne affair, like the house, and it would be no great job to fix up the roomy, dormered loft as a couple of rooms and a bathroom. There was already a chimney at one end, and I had seen a tap and a drain downstairs. Full of my discovery I returned to the house, to be met with the usual douche of cold water. It was out of the question to expect the servants to trail down there with trays if I were ill. It had got to be the dungeon or nothing. I said: damn the servants and damn the dungeon (since my illness my temper has got pretty short), got the car out, set off on a round of nominal business and left them to stew in their own wrath. The business was not altogether nominal. We had to see about getting possession of a row of cottages that were to come down to make way for a petrol-pump, and one old dame had declined to turn out and had got to be talked to. I rather like to do those jobs myself, as bailiffs and suchlike bully abominably, and I dislike hauling these old folk to court if it can be helped. It is an unpleasant job for all concerned. They were what had been country cottages, and the town had grown round them, and in the last of them was a little old dame, Sally Sampson by name, who had been there since the year dot, and move she wouldn't. We had offered her alternative accommodation and all the rest of it, and it looked as if we should have to make a court case of it, which I very much dislike with these old folk who cling to their bits of sticks. So I knocked on Sally's little green door with her little brass knocker, and made up my mind to harden my heart, which I am not very good at; but it was better me than the court bailiff. Sally opened the door about half an inch on a terrible clanking chain by which one could have pulled he
r whole cottage over, and demanded my business. I fancy she had a poker in her hand. As luck would have it I was so breathless after having walked up her rather steep garden path that I couldn't get a word out, I could only lean against her door-post and gasp like a fish. That was enough for Sally. She opened the door, and put down the poker, and hauled me in, and sat me down in her one armchair and made me a cup of tea. So I had tea with Sally instead of evicting her. And we talked things over. It came out that she had nothing but her old age pension; but in this cottage she could make a bit by doing teas for cyclists, and in the one we offered her she couldn't; and if she couldn't make a bit, she couldn't keep body and soul together, and it was her for the workhouse. So no wonder the old dame jibbed. And then I had another brain-wave. If the trouble over my bachelor flat was going to be the servant problem, here was the solution. I told Sally my ideas, and she wept copiously from sheer joy. It appeared that her dog had died recently, and that she had been very lonely by day and very nervous by night since it had gone, and she seemed to think that I would be just what she wanted to fill its place. So we fixed things up then and there. I was to get the place put into shape, and Sally and I would move in and set up housekeeping as soon as it was straight, and the petrol-pump could go up in peace. So I went home in triumph and told the family. But even that didn't please them. They said it would cause gossip. I said an old age pension was the next best thing to marriage lines, and there was no one to gossip if they didn't, as the place was invisible from the road and no one need know I had shifted my digs. They said the servants would gossip, and I said: to hell with the servants. They said, which was true, that I wouldn't have to do the housework if the servants gave notice, or I wouldn't consign them to hell so readily. I said that servants never gave notice on account of scandal, as they always wanted to stop on and see the end of it. There was no better way of keeping servants than to have a skeleton in the cupboard. My sister said she couldn't have the Friendly Girls there if I were living in all the appearance of sin with Sally at the end of the garden, even if I refrained from the actuality. I said: to hell with the Friendly Girls, and we left it at that. However, when my sister saw Sally in her best black bonnet covered with bugles, she agreed that she had been rather farfetched in her innuendoes. So we settled down. Sally had the horse-stalls and I had the loft--a kind of urban garden of Eden before the serpent.