The Vale of Dolour

It is already suspended in the air.

It was a strange realm, with pinewood after fir forest after a coniferous-deciduous tangle across
undulous terraces of uncharted land, - a land of weird possibility, holding a beauty and an eerie
gravity that together called forth an inarticulate mood of silent awe that the hush of those
branches and solemnity of those leafy and boled vistas invoked.
Past tearful bluebells merging with bluish fog-lands they skirted on, in vicinities which
sparkled with sluggish lakes and churling rivulets underneath a penumbral temple-like ambience
of tall palmed-out spruces and elders; then the pinewood re-emerged, and they bended onto a
succession of lush ups and downs of hills which commanded views of unwithholdable longing –
floating harbours of light teal cloud in palish and pinkish suffusions, thoughtful and crisp as it
was in the small-hour-to-dawn transition.

Mr Saften Gelmore, a traveller of fifty-eight, in coarser clothes of more lasting fabric allotted for
his vocation of choice, in something between a Norfolk jacket and a brownish-green coat for the
mildness of climate they were journeying in, over a sown vest and a pair of warm red-and-black-
striped travel trousers – was observing from his equipage ensconcement the unfurling terrain
with forest and scrubwood on either side of the road that was soon to drop off into a narrower
forest lane.
By his side, a stranger by far to himself, a Mr Selinton, a dreamy explorer of the
unknown and the unknowable on earth; a cast of juvenile aloofness worn upon his young visage
of thirty-seven, made him the covert rumination of Gelmore’s mind, which, overtaxed by the task
(‘Where did I catch him?’), would rather seek to regain composure in the eye-roamings across
the store of higher and lower botany of the passing furlongs.
What so surely similar and dissimilar as a traveller with clear and vivid geographies and
topographies within the mind’s eye over against a strange subject whose occupations in field and
thicket are not even so obvious to himself?.. It could rightfully be deduced that Gelmore and
Selinton were as much divided by their visionary and questing ‘trade’ as unite on a joint emprise.
And truly, Mr Saften Gelmore felt that though Selinton’s unobtrusiveness evaded him on the one
hand, it even more flowed into an alarming invasiveness – because he could not for the breath of
him recall how they had met, and how they had wed their pathways together in this off-white
horsedrawn carriage.
Its coachman was muffled in his clothes, his back to the body of the carriage, and but for
a silhoutte by intermittent sunlight a shadow brooded over the fine latticework of the front pane.
In carriage and four they verily sat, as Gelmore was able to notice from his seat by craning his
neck out into the swish of the open air.
The calm roll of wheels upon the downy turf gave a velvety impression to the progress;
maples and oaks skirted the bridle path that lost itself in clumps after clumps of timber, sonorous
with a tenuous and yet rich quiescence; they were now through a mass of tangled trees, now on
an even plain, now up and down – dreamily they sped, and the horses only brushed the air with
their silken tails as they concertedly sped the van of riddles into the horizon of dubious promise,
with the tabernacle of Gelmore’s brain harassed by pricking, though diluted, suspicion in trials of
some inexplicable, haunting uncertainty.

It being somewhat stuffy indoors, Gelmore took to slowly unbuttoning his coat; he felt an
abrasive corner of an object within. A card dangled from his breast-pocket. It said but one thing.

Martnire Place, 7.30 p.m.

Somehow, Gelmore received an uneasying inkling that, sans any occasional stops of
relief, they were to spend the day-round of the sun inside the noble cask on wheels.
He was driving the Lord alone knew where; stranger to his side; stanger on carriage-box;
the terrain unknown; futurity, unknowable.

As they approached the white palace, which came out of the misty ether in a constant
uncertainty of character, full of dourness as in a sad dear memory, it loomed at the two evening
mates of the giglamp-lit carriage, at first ghostlily nondescript but at an narrower gaze compact
of elect, if somewhat repressed, grandeur. The carriage so matched the building as to give
Gelmore a vague idea that they must have been sent for, and taken here in advance; but that
‘advance’ was totally obliterate from his head, - it could have told him better what had taken
place a month before than how they had got into the transport in the first place, with that younger
companion of his.

The butler in red and white and black said, erect in stature, eye-lids almost shut, so well
he had been schooled to orient himself in the place, from undoubtable experience:
‘Sirs, you are expected in the second-floor hall room, by this set of stairs, facing the
entrance; you are welcome to come in, and to await.’
Whom it was thay they were to ‘await’ was never mentioned; but the spirits were such as
to understand things mid-way and to go into the unknown, for all that it could hold; Selinton
seemed to be more comfortable in such a convoy of circumstances than Gelmore; but the latter,
though reluctanlty by the whole drift of his unnatural obliviousness, forced himself into like
subordination to the force that now pointed to them from the valet’s lips the only, however
precarious, a sequel to their adventure.
They ascended the stairwell of burnished marble and ivory, with some heavy jewels
gross-releaved against the creamy panelling of the like-builded walls, veined in a texture of stern
calmness. The door meshed whitely with the side of the well, a gilt handle – beyond pressing
down which anything could take place.
They entered a sapphiresque-lit oblong and greatly capacious chamber, hung with light-
fusing draperies, some quaint portraits and landscapes garnishing the off-white-to-thinly-pink
stucco walls beset with white-stone panels. Wall chandeliers were instinct with dusk
illumination; a set of French windows on either side of the chamber led out onto the balconies
with stairs that, fan-like, dropped into the cypress-and-what-nots of the surrounding beauties of
Martnire Place; gardens could be seen waving with late-spring plants in the gathering gloom, and
two mirror ponds created the semblance of world within a world playing out on both sides of the
fine, if not more mystical, hallroom.
 A door clicked, in the thick shadows of the unlit remote broadwise part of the chamber,
starlessly gloomy under the drapery, parted though it had been, that lined the same.
A figure in a light dress swam out of the hind hall-way’s darkness; a figure in light
clothes and an unearthly sheen of a halo that half-hintingly, half-openly it irradiated; with a bon
coiffure that hid more beauty than it revealed, before them stood a most extraodrinary mistress of
a secluded tenement yet to be seen.
‘Good-evening, dear Thinker and Searcher,’ unbethought-of rang her arresting voice
across the echoing vastness.
Selinton gave a response to some such joyous effect that Gelmore marked not very well;
himself, mumbling something indistinct and forced, because he believed himself more in the
position of Questioner now rather than Thinker, an epithet he implicitly attached to himself. Part
of his nature was indignant, that part of the modern hide that is hard for the rays of subtler
luminence to pierce; the epidemic of the scientific-materialistic reason that plagued his age.
As if reading his thoughts, the lady in white spoke:
‘I know that you might be fresh with many questions and even remonstances, if you
pardon my attenutation, against the manner in which you had come here, seeing that you see but
little; but this is a one-time visit, and because it stands so, it is as well that you use and let me use
the opportunity to some such advantage that it offers, instead of going into the chase after things
that have their own time and place for explaining themselves – of course, only to those that so far
wend,’ she said.
Riddle-like it sounded to Gelmore, and more often than not infuriating; but the
overpowerment of the gracefulness that shone from that unearthly visage and beamed through
her lofty cadence like that of a purling mountain stream – the whole force of the effect that the
strange lady had on him was such as to give in, if once, and only air a version of response that
would appear more like a plea than a fierce invective.
‘Dear...’
‘Sarah Lenn,’ she smiled at him.
‘...you have your reasons for not revealing your marital state, and I have mine not to press
the more for it; yet if I dare beg of a help in my predicament, - I still quite forget...’
‘...yes, dear Mr Gelmore, that I have remarked upon, and think it best not to avert to this
subject – at least, that is not the purpose of the stay; and I have said that those who will shall get
to know, in despite of the incurred difficulties.’
‘...ahem, well, so be it,’ Gelmore gave in. ‘Then, I would just wonder what the purpose of
the sojourn be, though I don’t want to sound as an objector...’ he worded his escape, for indeed
the strange pregnancy of the place and air in which he was finding himself had already stamped
him with a desire to pause, if that were to yield any clarification, and even bring some cryptic
fulfilment.
‘That is not so easy to answer to as it should appear,’ Lady Lenn replied, grazing her
cheek with her eye-lashes in the breathless wonderment of the hall glow. ‘Sometimes, more
comes of not having a purpose but lighting upon it than having it only aftwerwards to lose it.’

‘For instance, if I open this door,’ and the lady with her pearly white and light pink hand turned
the knob into a tenebral chasm that irrupted upon the light of the hallroom with a mysterious and
unsettling breath, ‘and intended to show you another world, more perfect than this one – would
you have the eyes to behold it, rather than laughing it down? what would you turn to it to make it
flow into you – and to flow along its otherworldly current? will it happen?
‘You might be jesting to yourselves in your minds that this is nothing but bizarre rigmarole
concocted for the purpose of amusement. But be careful with what you endue something with,
like this gateway; it might indeed not bear out something special per se, yet be a different matter
altogether as part of a greater whole... What you give is what you receive. And is it not an
inspired, divine law?’
‘In other words, you want to say,’ partly with a grunt, moved the voice of Gelmore, who it was
not quite comprehensible if he was studying the whole presentation with a serious goal within
view of his staid learning or disbelieving most of what was being uttered ‘that there is a reality
which is superior to our mundane version of it which, while it is the reality, is also quite
unknown to us, to our common shame?..’
The young woman paused, as if tentatively collecting the strands of the two gentlemen’s notice
that could have grown loose.
‘In us sits a potent liar; not omnipotent; but potent enough to sidetrack us from our brighter ends,
baffle our best volitions, destroy our highest dreams; potent enough to control the surrounding
atmosphere, and by its means to convey its falsehoods; and the thing that we perceive to be truth,
is, being an illusion, proves often a lethal one.’
‘Then, maybe I am sounding childish, but – how to extricate oneself from a maze such as the one
desribed by yourself?’ asked Stelinton, mildly grinning, with a jovial abstracted look, floating in
some sort of else-reverie. He had even been to some of the paintings while Gelmore was stock
still more or less, pre-occupied with what was in hand.
‘The answer is that very beautiful end, and without reaching it it cannot be had, or is worthless;
what if I tell you, - Lady Lenn asked, enigmatically, - to abandon yourself to the Sacrament of
the Godly Presence?..’
She anticipated the unbelieving vein in Gelmore, and turning to him specially (what she had
done more frequently, as one caresses a more hopeless case), said:
‘What if your ‘no’ to that is that self-reliance that has never let you even ask the question that
Partick Selinton has framed?.. The whole new, and never-perishing, world, under the Lordship of
Jesus as God, not imagination, is closed off from you even by that interior liar who sells you –
your inner man – the illusion for truth – and thus you never live?..’

A number of days had passed since that strange occurrence; a hush was now before the
nightfall. The nightingale had spoken his dusk-time last.
The dreamquirer Selinton was perched on a herbal mound that overlooked the far tract of
heaven. It was already past that strange condition when thoughts reel haphazardly on the spur of
a recent event; deeper broodings had crept up; and the feeling combined a greater clarity with a
colder heaviness that is regarded in sobriety.
He had refused to return by carriage; a new friend departed, a new heart in the palace –
two souls he had grown together with under the unlikeliest of cicrumstances.
The sky’s occluded face was leaden, with a touch of livid; layers of mauvish cloud half-
luminous by the departing hidden orb. The wind stirred by sudden onsets the dishevelled heads
of pines and some darker maples; the veined etchings on the trunks that avoided picturing their
somnolent gravity brought to his soul the view of Martnire Place; he had been granted leave to
journey on into the blueberry-tinted unknown of distant climes to the north-west; whither he now
was looking, and trying to distinguish better what he saw. The desire was impeded by the humid
pall on the land, and the dim features of its landmarks; it was a far reach of the palace’s western
garden.
The mound jutted into a deep down where three paths kissed together into one, past a
privet trim, a silvery arrow that darted towards the ascent of startling silence and airiness, in
clumps of conifers.
Delineate by darkling forms of furze, yew and arbor vitae, the vista melted in the distant
mist surmounting a hill diminished by its farness.

A sigh of the wind was suppressed in the breaks of the srhubs and dendral sweeps that saw the
path off into where it moved up and up, to merge with the diffusion of wet air, hiding the lower
halves of pine, fir, and elm.
There, amid the dense needlework of the straddling clusters of sombre trees, in the
obfuscated humour of downcast light, a sight of a cross was streaked forth more distinctly than
the remnant twain.