CHAPTER III
THE RAVEN
I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as when
one cannot distinguish between fog and field, between cloud and
mountain-side. One fact only was plain--that I saw nothing I knew.
Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that touch would
correct sight, I stretched my arms and felt about me, walking in
this direction and that, if haply, where I could see nothing, I
might yet come in contact with something; but my search was vain.
Instinctively then, as to the only living thing near me, I turned
to the raven, which stood a little way off, regarding me with an
expression at once respectful and quizzical. Then the absurdity
of seeking counsel from such a one struck me, and I turned again,
overwhelmed with bewilderment, not unmingled with fear. Had I
wandered into a region where both the material and psychical
relations of our world had ceased to hold? Might a man at any
moment step beyond the realm of order, and become the sport of the
lawless? Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, and
heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me!
"How DID I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question
was immediately answered.
"You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice.
I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape. The
terror that madness might be at hand laid hold upon me: must
I henceforth place no confidence either in my senses or my
consciousness? The same instant I knew it was the raven that had
spoken, for he stood looking up at me with an air of waiting. The
sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed to cast a shadow, and
the shadow seemed part of himself.
I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour to make myself
intelligible--if here understanding be indeed possible between us.
I was in a world, or call it a state of things, an economy of
conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the
ways and modes of this world--which we are apt to think the only
world, that the best choice I can make of word or phrase is but
an adumbration of what I would convey. I begin indeed to fear that
I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I
cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in
my mind. Already I have set down statements I would gladly change
did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as often as I
try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger
of losing the things themselves, and feel like one in process of
awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar gradually
yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its very
nature is no longer recognisable.
I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have
the right of a man to a civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a
greater claim.
A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but
his voice was not disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying
little enlightenment, did not sound rude.
"I did not come through any door," I rejoined.
"I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!"
asserted the raven, positively but not disrespectfully.
"I never saw any door!" I persisted.
"Of course not!" he returned; "all the doors you had yet seen--and
you haven't seen many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out!
The strange thing to you," he went on thoughtfully, "will be, that
the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in!"
"Oblige me by telling me where I am."
"That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only
way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at
home."
"How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?"
"By doing something."
"What?"
"Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are
at home, you will find it as difficult to get out as it is to get
in."
"I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I
shall not try again!"
"You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether
you have got in UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen."
"Do you never go out, sir?"
"When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is
such a half-baked sort of place, it is at once so childish and so
self-satisfied--in fact, it is not sufficiently developed for an
old raven--at your service!"
"Am I wrong, then, in presuming that a man is superior to a bird?"
"That is as it may be. We do not waste our intellects in
generalising, but take man or bird as we find him.--I think it
is now my turn to ask you a question!"
"You have the best of rights," I replied, "in the fact that you
CAN do so!"
"Well answered!" he rejoined. "Tell me, then, who you are--if
you happen to know."
"How should I help knowing? I am myself, and must know!"
"If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody
else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you
are not your own father?--or, excuse me, your own fool?--Who are
you, pray?"
I became at once aware that I could give him no notion of who
I was. Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who!
Then I understood that I did not know myself, did not know what I
was, had no grounds on which to determine that I was one and not
another. As for the name I went by in my own world, I had forgotten
it, and did not care to recall it, for it meant nothing, and what
it might be was plainly of no consequence here. I had indeed almost
forgotten that there it was a custom for everybody to have a name!
So I held my peace, and it was my wisdom; for what should I say to a
creature such as this raven, who saw through accident into entity?
"Look at me," he said, "and tell me who I am."
As he spoke, he turned his back, and instantly I knew him. He was
no longer a raven, but a man above the middle height with a stoop,
very thin, and wearing a long black tail-coat. Again he turned,
and I saw him a raven.
"I have seen you before, sir," I said, feeling foolish rather than
surprised.
"How can you say so from seeing me behind?" he rejoined. "Did you
ever see yourself behind? You have never seen yourself at all!
--Tell me now, then, who I am."
"I humbly beg your pardon," I answered: "I believe you were once
the librarian of our house, but more WHO I do not know."
"Why do you beg my pardon?"
"Because I took you for a raven," I said--seeing him before me as
plainly a raven as bird or man could look.
"You did me no wrong," he returned. "Calling me a raven, or
thinking me one, you allowed me existence, which is the sum of what
one can demand of his fellow-beings. Therefore, in return, I will
give you a lesson:--No one can say he is himself, until first he
knows that he IS, and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is
himself, and himself is nobody. There is more in it than you can
see now, but not more than you need to see. You have, I fear, got
into this region too soon, but none the less you must get to be at
home in it; for home, as you may or may not know, is the only place
where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into, and
places you can go out of; but the one place, if you do but find it,
where you may go out and in both, is home."
He turned to walk away, and again I saw the librarian. He did not
appear to have changed, only to have taken up his shadow. I know
this seems nonsense, but I cannot help it.
I gazed after him until I saw him no more; but whether distance hid
him, or he disappeared among the heather, I cannot tell.
Could it be that I was dead, I thought, and did not know it? Was
I in what we used to call the world beyond the grave? and must I
wander about seeking my place in it? How was I to find myself at
home? The raven said I must do something: what could I do here?--
And would that make me somebody? for now, alas, I was nobody!
I took the way Mr. Raven had gone, and went slowly after him.
Presently I saw a wood of tall slender pine-trees, and turned toward
it. The odour of it met me on my way, and I made haste to bury
myself in it.
Plunged at length in its twilight glooms, I spied before me
something with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It
had no colour, but was like the translucent trembling of the hot
air that rises, in a radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground,
vibrant like the smitten chords of a musical instrument. What it
was grew no plainer as I went nearer, and when I came close up, I
ceased to see it, only the form and colour of the trees beyond
seemed strangely uncertain. I would have passed between the stems,
but received a slight shock, stumbled, and fell. When I rose, I
saw before me the wooden wall of the garret chamber. I turned, and
there was the mirror, on whose top the black eagle seemed but that
moment to have perched.
Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret
spaces had an UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting
for something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder
went through me on the winding stair: the house had grown strange
to me! something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted
down the spiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On
the next floor I lost my way, and had gone through several passages
a second time ere I found the head of the stair. At the top of the
great stair I had come to myself a little, and in a few moments I
sat recovering my breath in the library.
Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair!
The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon
it, threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the
building, it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom
might any moment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere
safe! I would let, I would sell the dreadful place, in which an
a๋rial portal stood ever open to creatures whose life was other than
human! I would purchase a crag in Switzerland, and thereon build a
wooden nest of one story with never a garret above it, guarded by
some grand old peak that would send down nothing worse than a few
tons of whelming rock!
I knew all the time that my thinking was foolish, and was even aware
of a certain undertone of contemptuous humour in it; but suddenly it
was checked, and I seemed again to hear the croak of the raven.
"If I know nothing of my own garret," I thought, "what is there to
secure me against my own brain? Can I tell what it is even now
generating?--what thought it may present me the next moment, the
next month, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What
is behind my THINK? Am I there at all?--Who, what am I?"
I could no more answer the question now than when the raven put it
to me in--at--"Where in?--where at?" I said, and gave myself up as
knowing anything of myself or the universe.
I started to my feet, hurried across the room to the masked door,
where the mutilated volume, sticking out from the flat of soulless,
bodiless, non-existent books, appeared to beckon me, went down on
my knees, and opened it as far as its position would permit, but
could see nothing. I got up again, lighted a taper, and peeping as
into a pair of reluctant jaws, perceived that the manuscript was
verse. Further I could not carry discovery. Beginnings of lines
were visible on the left-hand page, and ends of lines on the other;
but I could not, of course, get at the beginning and end of a single
line, and was unable, in what I could read, to make any guess at
the sense. The mere words, however, woke in me feelings which to
describe was, from their strangeness, impossible. Some dreams, some
poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as
one never had before, new in colour and form--spiritual sensations,
as it were, hitherto unproved: here, some of the phrases, some of
the senseless half-lines, some even of the individual words affected
me in similar fashion--as with the aroma of an idea, rousing in me
a great longing to know what the poem or poems might, even yet in
their mutilation, hold or suggest.
I copied out a few of the larger shreds attainable, and tried hard
to complete some of the lines, but without the least success. The
only thing I gained in the effort was so much weariness that, when
I went to bed, I fell asleep at once and slept soundly.
In the morning all that horror of the empty garret spaces had left
me.
