by Ethel Rolt Wheeler.
As published in Behind the Veil (David Nutt; 1906)
I was exploring the byways of the Docks at Rotherhithe for the purpose of catching local colour upon my mental palette, to be afterwards transferred to the pages of the realistic novel I was engaged upon, 'The Submerged Soul.'
I had chosen an unpropitious night, if I sought for realism. The mist, thinned and radiant with moonlight, set a haze of beauty over the commonest objects: the prosaic glare of infrequent street lamps softened into misty suggestion; the warehouses were turned to rich darkness, or glimmered with silver dreaminess ahead. I passed through woodyards whose alleys were lined with straw-coloured gold, whose turrets towered into a white immensity. I caught, up vistas, the frail lines of mast and rope intertangling spars in airy crucifixion. It was as if the souls of inanimate things had escaped from bondage, and hung, half-materialised in the medium of the moon, about the deserted wharves and ways.
I came in my wanderings upon a murky pool, back of the river, surrounded on all sides by tall warehouses, except where it communicated under a dilapidated bridge with an ancient stagnant canal. There was desolation about the place—on all sides the oppressive narrowness of blind walls, hemming in a stillness and a darkness as of death.
As I stood on the parapet looking into the murky water, there spread over its face a phosphorescence like the phosphorescence that hovers above decay. It shot from end to end, a woven splendour of confused tints, purer and more vivid than those we make out of our granular earths. And as I watched, the colours sorted themselves into familiar combinations. I caught glimpses of the pageant of life, the shows of the streets and of spring. A never-ending procession of vague flowers shifted before my eyes in the procession of the months—snowdrops, violets, primroses, bluebells; then the hues of all these were piled together, glimmering from street barrows in fog—then I saw the hurrying of vast multitudes, neutral-tinted, and gaudy traffic, half-caught suggestions of moor aflame with gorse, of moonlight-crinkled sea—the whole a shifting phantasmagoria, indeflnite, confusing, shallow.
Above all, shallow. I never lost consciousness of that murky pool, whose very murkiness gave cause to this surface-play. There seemed some secret lurking in the depth of the water which this transient flitting of impressions served only to cover. The longer I watched, the more certainly I became convinced of this hidden secret. It called to me from the bottom of the pool. I felt as if this iridescence were drawing a veil between me and some compelling reality. I moved to see if it were less disturbing where the shadow fell thickest, and so came upon an old man sitting motionless on the parapet and gazing intently into the pool.
He glanced up as I approached, and addressed me. 'Don't you think,' he said, 'that the sense-impressions are
clearing?'
He looked unearthly in the moonlight,—a small-built man with flowing white hair and beard, and an expression of such intense wistfulness in his blue eyes that he reminded me of elves and faery creatures that yearn after some sublime tragedy they can never know. His eyes were again fixed on the pool, patient and searching. There was habit in his whole attitude,—in the crouching figure, in the poise of the head; I knew he must have sat there night after night, perhaps for years.
'The pool is clearing,—it is decidedly clearing,' he murmured.
'How do you account for the extraordinary phenomenon of iridescence?' I inquired.
He answered me without moving his eyes. 'You notice,' he said, 'the thick murkiness of this pool: it is always in a material nature that the sense-impressions are most vivid, and I take it that this pool is a tangible symbol of the present material age,—perplexed and wearied by a variety of fleeting impressions, thin and substanceless as reflections in a mirror. Note how the colours change and flash,—how beautiful they are, how elusive! Yet they stifle the real life, the inner life, the life of the soul, which exists, which I wait for, which I shall one day see. Night after night I watch for the symbol of the soul of man to float up out of those murky depths ... night after night ... night after night.'
His appearance had not led me to guess that he was mad, and I felt the surge of an infinite pity. There is nothing so pathetic as the snapping of chords just because they are strung too high in our aim after the subtlest music. The strange old man seemed to have in him the instinct both of philosopher and poet, but he had gazed too long upon the dazzling mystery of the water, and in its glamour reason and reality had slowly ebbed away.
Whether it were that at this moment the moonlight increased in fervour, or that the fog lifted somewhat, there
could at least be no doubt that the colours upon the water began to pale and grow dim. The old man clutched my arm, and a glittering excitement took the place of the still patience that had previously shone from his eyes.
'I am not mistaken ... the pool is clearing?' he whispered hoarsely.
'It is clearing,' I replied.
At last the colours seemed only as a shimmer of cobweb over the glassy water; then they were gone altogether. The pool lay before us, blank, dark, inscrutable.
Something rose from the depths to the surface—something that glimmered radiant and white—rose, and sank again.
'The soul, the soul!' murmured the old man.
'The Submerged Soul. ...' The title of my book flashed involuntarily into my mind; but aloud I said, 'It is some one who has been drowned.'
'O God, O God! have we indeed killed our souls? Is this the reading of your allegory?' said the old man, rocking himself to and fro on the parapet. 'Is this the revelation of the pool? And have I waited hopeful through the years only to see a dead thing at the last? But I will not believe that the soul is dead. What we saw was asleep ... or unborn.'
'Hush!' I exclaimed.
It rose to the surface again. This time it did not seem like some one that was drowned. On the contrary, it impressed me as some essence of vitality, stripped of colour and form. The thing was too dimly seen to attain to the seat of consciousness through the senses; but it reached the inner vision independently of them, and filled it with a pale, spiritual light. Illusion, no doubt, but extraordinary, inexplicable. I peered more closely into the water, repeating the words of the old man, 'Asleep ... or unborn?'
When for the third time it rose, he stood up on the parapet.
'Bride of the world,' he cried, 'supreme Beauty, hidden too long under the tinsel of our earthly shows, wait for me! I come!'
He would have sprung into the water, but I held him back, and dragged him struggling from the spot. I do not know by what ways we went, but we reached at last a sordid, flaring little street, hideous with the noise of the closing of public-houses. Here he managed to slip from me; nor could I ever find again the murky pool, to investigate by chemical tests the cause of its strange iridescence; nor did I ever obtain tidings of the old man who had sought to elude the trammels of the senses, and wed with the submerged soul of the human race.