Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [14]
Mage summoned up the image of Dr Trelawney, a mage if ever there was one. I thought of the days when, as a child, I used to watch the Doctor and his young disciples, some of them no more than children themselves, trotting past the Stonehurst gate on their way to rhythmical callisthenics – whatever the exercises were – on the adjacent expanse of heather. In those days (brink of the first war) Dr Trelawney was still building up a career. He had not yet fully transformed himself into the man of mystery, the thaumaturge, he was in due course to become. The true surname was always in doubt (Grubb or Tibbs, put forward by Moreland), anyway something with less body to it than Trelawney. In his avatar of the Stonehurst period he had been less concerned with the predominantly occult engagement of later years; then seeking The Way (to use his own phrase) through appropriate meditations, exercises, diet, apparel.
Once a week Dr Trelawney and his neophytes would jog down the pine-bordered lane from which our Indian-type bungalow was set a short distance back. The situation was remote, a wide deserted common next door. Dr Trelawney himself would be leading, dark locks flowing to the shoulder, biblical beard, grecian tunic, thonged sandals. The Doctor’s robe (like the undefiled of Sardis) was white, somewhat longer and less diaphanous than the single garment – identical for both sexes and all weathers – worn by the disciples, tunics tinted in the pastel shades fashionable at that epoch. People who encountered Dr Trelawney by chance in the village post-office received an invariable greeting:
‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’
The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.
‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’
One of the firmest tenets – so Moreland always said – in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than ‘magic in action’. There had just been an example of that. Orlando Furioso had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney’s were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that – with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life – a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney’s view – also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh – that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as ‘dead’, there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the ‘liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies’. Perhaps Vaughan’s words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls’ T-shirts.
In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if – like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh – somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the