![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynTranscribed from my notes of yesterday:
11/3/03, 9 PM to midnight
Well, I promised I would produce some kind of Sergeant Preston-related material every two days during NaNoWriMo. Aside from locating two photographs to use as reference material for drawing him I did no such thing on 1 or 2 November, so I have to try to make up for it now, in the three hours left for today.
Tonight’s material is not about the man himself, really. No, tonight I write about his family; tonight I would like you to meet his paternal grandfather, one “Honest Saul” Preston. Born in 1811, he came to Canada in his early forties after the collapse of business ventures in Scotland. He spent several years dabbling in trapping the fur-bearing beasts of the western wilderness. He tired of this, turning eventually to a less strenuous and more steadily profitable line of work – the selling of provisions and supplies to his fellow frontier settlers. Shortly after he married an Alberta girl named Margaret and had a son, Robert, who grew up to become one of the very first Northwest Mounted Police. Known to his customers for his scrupulous fairness in business dealings and his plain-spoken language, Saul died at the age of 73, having seen his grandson William reach two years old.
The story is rather more complicated than that.
Saul. Preston was born Paul Preston in Scotland, just outside of Edinburgh, in 1811. His family was respectable – tradesmen, I think, or several social levels above that – but they were also fertile. Saul was the fourth surviving child of six, with two brothers and a sister above him, and one of each below. They were respectable, but not rich. Not at first, anyway. The two elder boys in particular. For, you see, this being the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, there were- ah- mishaps along the way. Fevers. Losses. Childbed fever – oh, yes. The first two Preston boys were born to a mother who quite literally gave her all to live up to her husband’s expectations. Several of her children never made it to the light of day; others did, but not for long. The first Mrs. Preston ultimately died of puerperal fever; Semmelweiss would not be born for many years yet. John Preston found himself saddled with two young sons and a sickly third child, all of whom were in desperate need of a mother. He found himself a woman, Vivianna, and remarried shortly after the death of his youngest. Vivianna was an heiress, no siblings at all; families like hers would one day cause scientists of questionable methodology to wonder if the rich were not breeding for infertility while the poor spawned like wild beasts. Vivianna was not, however, as ill-suited for breeding as her mother. She bore her first child, a healthy girl, very quickly indeed. Possibly a bit too quickly, but no-one remarked on it.
No one save, perhaps, her stepsons. They resented this dark-haired stranger for taking their mother’s place; they resented their father for taking her in. And oh, but how they resented their new sister… and worse, a year later, their more respectably-timed brother. The boys were twelve and ten by then. Children, especially those on the verge of adolescence, can be amazingly cruel. The new Mrs. Preston lived in unspoken fear of her stepsons. There were accidents and quiet whispers, and- other things – around the house. She knew she and her children would have no safety while the two elder boys were about. She hinted at this to her husband, but he wrote it off as nerves. Vivianna thought on it a while, and realised that someone had to be sent away – the boys, for preference, but that did not seem possible. She herself had no chance of escape at all. But her children were another story. She’d had enough wit and rare early feminist spirit (and a very good solicitor) to retain some of her own money when she married, and so she broached the idea of having Paul schooled somewhere else. John didn’t quite fancy the idea, but he thought it wise to keep his first boys as close to him as possible, so he indulged his wife and sent Paul off to school in England.
It didn’t work. Paul was a bright lad, quick to learn, but surviving his brothers had instilled a nasty, manipulative streak in him. It had enabled him to deflect the worst of their subtle torments but it hadn’t given him much ability to make friends. He was, in short, a nasty little swot and at least initially unlikeable. All he had going for him was his brains. Young Paul was bright; oh, yes, he was bright. He remembered things. He remembered everything.
The boys told stories at his school, you know. They always do. Some were just the smutty kind. Some were all-over violence. And some, well. . . some were worse. Ghost stories, at first, the way young boys tell them – told and listened to as proof of bravery without having to actually do anything braver than sit still. Accusatory ghost stories later, the kind that featured murders rather than accidental death, and then the kind that targeted unpopular teachers. Paul never really believed that any of the teachers had strangled students, if only because it didn’t seem practical to him when expulsion in shame was a much easier way of getting rid of people. None of them seemed the sort to take that kind of action, anyway. Still, he listened to the stories; there was something oddly compelling about them.
And something oddly compelling about certain library books, too. Histories, for the most part. Nothing forbiddable. Stories of the Templars, of accusations leveled against Jews throughout history, of other things that had happened in this or that part of the British Empire. Feverish accusations like that stick in the mind of a boy who isn’t well-liked, especially one who’s been primed the way Paul had. He made notes – mental ones, mostly – and resolved to study these things more when he had the time.
Paul had less time for stupid petty narking after that. There were too many things to learn and too many opportunities to lose. He still wasn’t well liked, but he was no longer quite as actively prickly. Even centuries off, he knew the scrutiny that awaited those who would be dubbed Quiet, Troubled Loners- and suspected the dangers waiting for the Boy With All The Wrong Friends. He had to be careful. More importantly, he had to be rich. You couldn’t make a splash in the world – sinister or legitimate – without cash. He persuaded his father (who by now had amassed a small fortune of his own, using his wife’s money as a seed) to start him in business when he left school, and he set about investing with a will. There was a lot of money to be made in India, whether he ever set foot there or not.
Paul married young, and shrewdly. Martha was not beautiful, but she was practical, and she harboured Ambitions. That suited Paul nicely. He didn’t always have the kind of persistence he would have liked. Chasing down money was harder than it looked, even from half a world away, and smelly old books of lore were not easily found even with money to grease the gears. When old resentments failed to burn hot enough to sustain, Martha’s dreams of superiority for its own sake carried the day. In fact, sometimes they were enough all by themselves. He began to entertain the idea that revenge on the World In General and his Brothers In Specific was more trouble than it was worth – that wealth and temporal power could be had solely for enjoyment, rather than for the specific joy of grinding someone else’s nose in them.
Unfortunately he was just the sort of person who liked academic exercises a great deal. By the time his second child was born, Paul was respectably well off – and distanced enough from his school and sibling conflicts that he was able to turn his attitude around almost completely. The Templars and all the others, he decided, had made the mistake of getting too absorbed in their subject. You couldn’t comprehend your path to power clearly if you were blinded by rage or I’ll-show-them-all-it is. The weird and sinister subjects he’d read about were dangerous enough without getting tunnel vision around them, and were worth studying for their own sake.
His India trading brought him in contact with British sahibs who did not always know what it was they had accumulated. When their souvenirs had to be sold off, they came to him; even then Paul was known for giving a fair price, since he was well aware that people were more likely to continue coming to him if they did not see him as out to skin them alive. He had acquired just enough knowledge of Sanskrit in school to recognise Interesting when he saw it, and it occurred to him that the Indians had ways of doing things that did not place one’s immortal soul at the feet of Satan. Well, they did have that whole heathen gods thing – but Paul didn’t believe in any of their gods. Demons, yes, he’d been raised in the Kirk even if he hardly ever went; alien gods, no. It didn’t seem likely to him that false gods who did not exist could do him any kind of harm. India was. . . promising.
Further delving, unfortunately, now had to wait. He’d learned Greek and Latin at school, but not Sanskrit. It was annoying, but now he had to learn the language anyway, and the modern written language of India as well. It was a long slow process, and in the course of it he sired two more (carefully spaced) children. Martha didn’t mind, since the spacing was essentially her idea. Paul was pleased by her forethought and independence, qualities that spoke well in anyone, particularly a woman. Martha, for her part, thought her husband was making plans for a career overseas, or at least laying the foundations for one. Such ambitions seemed good to her. Since he practiced his translation skills on, shall we say, mundanely interesting Indian texts, she encouraged him wholeheartedly. It made for very entertaining evenings.
Paul eventually learned enough to translate the really Interesting texts, amassing a collection of esoterica from among the muck that his clients brought him. The practice of cultivating inner energies through yoga and tightly focussed meditation seemed much more sensible than mucking about with prayers and gods and sacrifices, and more reliable. Unfortunately it was also devilishly hard and often required more patience than Paul had- his attention span, while it had in fact grown, had not kept pace with his academic interests. He began looking for shortcuts, ways of bootstrapping himself into superior practice and capability. It occurred to him that combinations of Western ritual and procedure with Indian inner cultivation seemed. . . promising. Frightening, but promising. Some of the oldest Greek practices in particular showed echoes of potential. (His researches were a little too narrow to bring him into contact with more than the outer fringes of Qabalistic mysticism, but what little he saw was not really of interest to him. For all the claims people made about it from the outside, it still looked to him more like religion than magic, and anyway it relied too much on external entities for his liking. Besides, he didn’t much fancy a magical system that flat out promised insanity for anyone under the age of thirty-nine who studied it. Or that would require him to learn YET ANOTHER LANGUAGE.)
He’d reached forty or so when he finally felt he’d studied and practised enough to begin attempting the Real Thing. The first of his magical workings were very minor, but had tangible, real effects, mostly to do with his business (and one to do with his hair, which was starting to grey in a few places). Greatly encouraged by this, he set about planning a major Working. Exactly what I do not know, but it was not the old revenge-urge, unless indirectly. Like as not he was out to rewrite his own fortune, his whole future – who knows. Certainly it was something very big indeed, touching on his entire life and ambitions. He had full confidence in his ability to make things work exactly right.
He did not reckon on what lived inside his own head. Not the id, one day to be described by Freud, nor yet the Shadow as described by Jung – though it was very close. No, something else. Occult writers speak of the Guardian on the Threshold:
A truly terrible spectral being confronts (the magical student), and he will need all the presence of mind and faith in the security of his path which he has had ample opportunity to acquire in the course of his previous training. . .
“I am that very being who shaped my body out of thy good and evil achievements. My spectral form is woven out of thine own life's record.”
However horrible the form assumed by the Guardian, it is only the effect of the student's own past life, his own character risen out of him into independent existence. This awakening is brought about by the separation of will, thought, and feeling. To feel for the first time that one has oneself called a spiritual being into existence is in itself an experience of deepest significance. The student's preparation must aim at enabling him to endure the terrible sight without a trace of timidity and, at the moment of the meeting, to feel his strength so increased that he can undertake fully conscious the responsibility for transforming and beautifying the Guardian.
Paul was. . . not well prepared for this. He had been betting on the stories being allegory. He found himself face to face with a completely conscienceless, cheerfully detached, utterly self-centered and amoral Guardian, shaped out of his own past. It was an immensely frightening experience, not the least of which was because of his own severe misinterpretation. He assumed that he was facing an external entity passing itself off as a warning, and attacked it. The Guardian, of course, fought back – dirtier than Paul ever dreamed. It was humiliating and horrible and all Paul’s frustration and rage only made it worse. Paul beat a hasty retreat, smarting horribly.
NOW the urge for revenge came back, but not against his brothers or schoolmates. No, Paul wanted the Watcher smashed. It stood in his way as nothing else had. Somehow the emotional involvement didn’t seem as much of a mistake when it was turned inward. He spent six months preparing to overthrow the thing, thinking that doing so would make him master of his fate, captain of his soul, etc. The preparations scared Martha badly. Mostly because Paul had never told her exactly what his REAL interest in India and moldy old books was, and as a result he came off rather like a man plotting a murder. In a way, he was, perhaps.
Frankly, mundane murder would have been easier – and less traumatic. Paul’s attempt to overthrow the Guardian was doomed from the start, since he failed to comprehend what it really was. It was nastily ironic that his attempts to pursue the occult had come so far without involving deities or anti-deities, only to have him assume one was involved now – the more so because he was out to destroy it. In his attempt to do so, he essentially exploded the structures and channels that had restrained the nastier parts of his own psyche and karma, and let EVERYTHING in his head run loose. Including all his own fears-turned-contempt of alien gods and idols, the things he had scorned for being worshipped in the dark, by the ignorant.
He had broken through, though. He had Capability now. What he no longer had was protection – rationalization – psychic defense mechanisms. He could not hold off the awareness of his past deeds and thoughts, and of their consequences; he saw himself vulnerable now, constantly in danger. So he was, and so were those around him. The more so because he had avoided the teachings of others, beyond what could be gleaned from books. A teacher could have guided him through the minefield, but he had no teacher and did not know where to look in his books for a guide to what he now faced. His only ally was his purely mundane wife, and she and the children now feared him. He did, after all, show the signs of recognizable madness. Paul had power, but no barriers on it beyond the ones he set, and no control other than that which he consciously maintained. It was a sort of magical Ondine’s Curse, the medical condition in which certain body functions like breathing only continue so long as the person consciously maintains them. And, well, attention span. . . Thanks to his poor choices, unless he heavily warded himself, things happened while he slept. Specifically, while he dreamed, and I do not mean the dreams that have plot and story either. There are dreams that occur out of REM sleep, in the deeper phases. Dreams that are strange even by the standards of the dreaming mind, that cannot be properly understood or relayed even if you wake the sleeper while they are happening. During those dreams, when he lay too still to be thought anything but just this side of death, he inadvertently affected the real world. Things happened, things that came from Paul alone and so could not be stopped except by him. . .
When one of Paul’s most puissant wards failed and a stray exploding dreamlet nearly killed the children, Paul knew he had to take action. A more sensible man would have gone looking for outside help, but a more sensible man wouldn’t have been in his position in the first place. Given the storm raging in his head, Paul did the only thing he thought sensible: he ran. He ran as far as he could from his family, for their safety, and as far as he could from India, for his own. The prairies of Canada, and the mountains beyond them, seemed far enough to start over again, and it was there that he renounced everything he’d done so far. Paul always was one for the dramatic, but he was really acting on a sentiment that would one day inform the sensibilities of a man calling himself Bill W.: “one drink would be too many”. He had just enough control to put it all aside, suppress it, keep it under lock and key – but only if he threw away the key. Anything else would make him a danger to himself and the world around him. (Again, a teacher would have helped in this.) He took to the mountains of what would one day be Alberta, changing his name to Saul in a wry nod to his own backsliding. Not trusting his renunciation to be enough at first, he isolated himself from human contact as much as possible, taking up the largely solitary occupation of trapping. Doing that meant he only had to visit other traders once in a while. When he felt he’d gained a measure of distance and security, he sent word back to Scotland, explaining what he’d done and as much of his reasoning as possible. He also indicated that he fully accepted any wishes Martha might harbour for a divorce on any grounds she liked.
She took the letter to court and got her divorce, and very few in Scotland blamed her. A little surprised that it had actually happened, Saul bit his lip and went on. The first extended human contact he felt he could risk was with people he saw as naturally protected – the local churchmen, who happened to be Methodists. Given time and gentle prodding by the preacher, who saw only a badly scarred and emotionally isolated man, Saul admitted that he hated tramping the woods day in and day out in search of dead animals. He took the money he’d accumulated (for where did he have the chance to spend it?) and went into the business of trade again, this time selling supplies and provisions, all very mundane. It was small potatoes compared to what he’d once known, but it was safe, and he had enough business savvy to know how to carry it off well. His fiscal honesty paid off; one of the trappers who bought from him introduced him to a furrier, who had a daughter named Margaret. Saul somewhat reluctantly found himself falling for the girl. Fearing that she might somehow find out what he had once been and done, he chose to come forward and tell her all that thought she could handle: namely, that he had once had a wife and family in Scotland, that his most ambitious venture there had failed badly, and that the resultant bad dreams had caused him to attempt to harm them in his sleep. Shocked, Margaret wrote to Martha; she received confirmation of this from her, in a letter tinged with regret (for despite everything, Martha had still loved Paul). Martha also wrote of her husband’s studious nature, and of how she hoped that his fit of madness had been lifted from his shoulders by the Canadian wilderness, and that he had made for himself a better life without the dangers of overweening ambition.
The whole thing gave Margaret pause, but Saul readily confessed to all of it. The traders and fur-folk and- yes!- even the Indians attested to Saul’s reformed, controlled nature. He’d earned the nickname they’d given him, Honest Saul. Eventually, Margaret decided that Martha’s wish for the man’s reformation had come true, and she agreed to marry him – although she insisted on sleeping in separate beds, just in case the dreams came back. Not that there was any danger; Saul would never lose control that way again, waking or sleeping. In January of 1857 Margaret bore him a son, and they named the boy Robert. Saul taught his son self-control, the need to know one’s limits, and the dangers of believing oneself above temptation. He also stressed that a man had responsibility to his community and his family, though he did not explain precisely what sort of responsibility. Probably this was just as well. Robert grew up applying the lessons to society in general, and joined the newly-created Northwest Mounted Police in 1873. This pleased Saul mightily, as did the birth of his Canadian grandson, little Frank William.
Robert never learned anything of his father’s life in Scotland beyond what Saul chose to share. His son knows nothing beyond what his father told him: a collapsed business venture, a few years of trapping, a life of trading in supplies, and a handful of relations named Preston somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It will be. . . interesting . . . if he ever finds out.
11/3/03, 9 PM to midnight
Well, I promised I would produce some kind of Sergeant Preston-related material every two days during NaNoWriMo. Aside from locating two photographs to use as reference material for drawing him I did no such thing on 1 or 2 November, so I have to try to make up for it now, in the three hours left for today.
Tonight’s material is not about the man himself, really. No, tonight I write about his family; tonight I would like you to meet his paternal grandfather, one “Honest Saul” Preston. Born in 1811, he came to Canada in his early forties after the collapse of business ventures in Scotland. He spent several years dabbling in trapping the fur-bearing beasts of the western wilderness. He tired of this, turning eventually to a less strenuous and more steadily profitable line of work – the selling of provisions and supplies to his fellow frontier settlers. Shortly after he married an Alberta girl named Margaret and had a son, Robert, who grew up to become one of the very first Northwest Mounted Police. Known to his customers for his scrupulous fairness in business dealings and his plain-spoken language, Saul died at the age of 73, having seen his grandson William reach two years old.
The story is rather more complicated than that.
Saul. Preston was born Paul Preston in Scotland, just outside of Edinburgh, in 1811. His family was respectable – tradesmen, I think, or several social levels above that – but they were also fertile. Saul was the fourth surviving child of six, with two brothers and a sister above him, and one of each below. They were respectable, but not rich. Not at first, anyway. The two elder boys in particular. For, you see, this being the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, there were- ah- mishaps along the way. Fevers. Losses. Childbed fever – oh, yes. The first two Preston boys were born to a mother who quite literally gave her all to live up to her husband’s expectations. Several of her children never made it to the light of day; others did, but not for long. The first Mrs. Preston ultimately died of puerperal fever; Semmelweiss would not be born for many years yet. John Preston found himself saddled with two young sons and a sickly third child, all of whom were in desperate need of a mother. He found himself a woman, Vivianna, and remarried shortly after the death of his youngest. Vivianna was an heiress, no siblings at all; families like hers would one day cause scientists of questionable methodology to wonder if the rich were not breeding for infertility while the poor spawned like wild beasts. Vivianna was not, however, as ill-suited for breeding as her mother. She bore her first child, a healthy girl, very quickly indeed. Possibly a bit too quickly, but no-one remarked on it.
No one save, perhaps, her stepsons. They resented this dark-haired stranger for taking their mother’s place; they resented their father for taking her in. And oh, but how they resented their new sister… and worse, a year later, their more respectably-timed brother. The boys were twelve and ten by then. Children, especially those on the verge of adolescence, can be amazingly cruel. The new Mrs. Preston lived in unspoken fear of her stepsons. There were accidents and quiet whispers, and- other things – around the house. She knew she and her children would have no safety while the two elder boys were about. She hinted at this to her husband, but he wrote it off as nerves. Vivianna thought on it a while, and realised that someone had to be sent away – the boys, for preference, but that did not seem possible. She herself had no chance of escape at all. But her children were another story. She’d had enough wit and rare early feminist spirit (and a very good solicitor) to retain some of her own money when she married, and so she broached the idea of having Paul schooled somewhere else. John didn’t quite fancy the idea, but he thought it wise to keep his first boys as close to him as possible, so he indulged his wife and sent Paul off to school in England.
It didn’t work. Paul was a bright lad, quick to learn, but surviving his brothers had instilled a nasty, manipulative streak in him. It had enabled him to deflect the worst of their subtle torments but it hadn’t given him much ability to make friends. He was, in short, a nasty little swot and at least initially unlikeable. All he had going for him was his brains. Young Paul was bright; oh, yes, he was bright. He remembered things. He remembered everything.
The boys told stories at his school, you know. They always do. Some were just the smutty kind. Some were all-over violence. And some, well. . . some were worse. Ghost stories, at first, the way young boys tell them – told and listened to as proof of bravery without having to actually do anything braver than sit still. Accusatory ghost stories later, the kind that featured murders rather than accidental death, and then the kind that targeted unpopular teachers. Paul never really believed that any of the teachers had strangled students, if only because it didn’t seem practical to him when expulsion in shame was a much easier way of getting rid of people. None of them seemed the sort to take that kind of action, anyway. Still, he listened to the stories; there was something oddly compelling about them.
And something oddly compelling about certain library books, too. Histories, for the most part. Nothing forbiddable. Stories of the Templars, of accusations leveled against Jews throughout history, of other things that had happened in this or that part of the British Empire. Feverish accusations like that stick in the mind of a boy who isn’t well-liked, especially one who’s been primed the way Paul had. He made notes – mental ones, mostly – and resolved to study these things more when he had the time.
Paul had less time for stupid petty narking after that. There were too many things to learn and too many opportunities to lose. He still wasn’t well liked, but he was no longer quite as actively prickly. Even centuries off, he knew the scrutiny that awaited those who would be dubbed Quiet, Troubled Loners- and suspected the dangers waiting for the Boy With All The Wrong Friends. He had to be careful. More importantly, he had to be rich. You couldn’t make a splash in the world – sinister or legitimate – without cash. He persuaded his father (who by now had amassed a small fortune of his own, using his wife’s money as a seed) to start him in business when he left school, and he set about investing with a will. There was a lot of money to be made in India, whether he ever set foot there or not.
Paul married young, and shrewdly. Martha was not beautiful, but she was practical, and she harboured Ambitions. That suited Paul nicely. He didn’t always have the kind of persistence he would have liked. Chasing down money was harder than it looked, even from half a world away, and smelly old books of lore were not easily found even with money to grease the gears. When old resentments failed to burn hot enough to sustain, Martha’s dreams of superiority for its own sake carried the day. In fact, sometimes they were enough all by themselves. He began to entertain the idea that revenge on the World In General and his Brothers In Specific was more trouble than it was worth – that wealth and temporal power could be had solely for enjoyment, rather than for the specific joy of grinding someone else’s nose in them.
Unfortunately he was just the sort of person who liked academic exercises a great deal. By the time his second child was born, Paul was respectably well off – and distanced enough from his school and sibling conflicts that he was able to turn his attitude around almost completely. The Templars and all the others, he decided, had made the mistake of getting too absorbed in their subject. You couldn’t comprehend your path to power clearly if you were blinded by rage or I’ll-show-them-all-it is. The weird and sinister subjects he’d read about were dangerous enough without getting tunnel vision around them, and were worth studying for their own sake.
His India trading brought him in contact with British sahibs who did not always know what it was they had accumulated. When their souvenirs had to be sold off, they came to him; even then Paul was known for giving a fair price, since he was well aware that people were more likely to continue coming to him if they did not see him as out to skin them alive. He had acquired just enough knowledge of Sanskrit in school to recognise Interesting when he saw it, and it occurred to him that the Indians had ways of doing things that did not place one’s immortal soul at the feet of Satan. Well, they did have that whole heathen gods thing – but Paul didn’t believe in any of their gods. Demons, yes, he’d been raised in the Kirk even if he hardly ever went; alien gods, no. It didn’t seem likely to him that false gods who did not exist could do him any kind of harm. India was. . . promising.
Further delving, unfortunately, now had to wait. He’d learned Greek and Latin at school, but not Sanskrit. It was annoying, but now he had to learn the language anyway, and the modern written language of India as well. It was a long slow process, and in the course of it he sired two more (carefully spaced) children. Martha didn’t mind, since the spacing was essentially her idea. Paul was pleased by her forethought and independence, qualities that spoke well in anyone, particularly a woman. Martha, for her part, thought her husband was making plans for a career overseas, or at least laying the foundations for one. Such ambitions seemed good to her. Since he practiced his translation skills on, shall we say, mundanely interesting Indian texts, she encouraged him wholeheartedly. It made for very entertaining evenings.
Paul eventually learned enough to translate the really Interesting texts, amassing a collection of esoterica from among the muck that his clients brought him. The practice of cultivating inner energies through yoga and tightly focussed meditation seemed much more sensible than mucking about with prayers and gods and sacrifices, and more reliable. Unfortunately it was also devilishly hard and often required more patience than Paul had- his attention span, while it had in fact grown, had not kept pace with his academic interests. He began looking for shortcuts, ways of bootstrapping himself into superior practice and capability. It occurred to him that combinations of Western ritual and procedure with Indian inner cultivation seemed. . . promising. Frightening, but promising. Some of the oldest Greek practices in particular showed echoes of potential. (His researches were a little too narrow to bring him into contact with more than the outer fringes of Qabalistic mysticism, but what little he saw was not really of interest to him. For all the claims people made about it from the outside, it still looked to him more like religion than magic, and anyway it relied too much on external entities for his liking. Besides, he didn’t much fancy a magical system that flat out promised insanity for anyone under the age of thirty-nine who studied it. Or that would require him to learn YET ANOTHER LANGUAGE.)
He’d reached forty or so when he finally felt he’d studied and practised enough to begin attempting the Real Thing. The first of his magical workings were very minor, but had tangible, real effects, mostly to do with his business (and one to do with his hair, which was starting to grey in a few places). Greatly encouraged by this, he set about planning a major Working. Exactly what I do not know, but it was not the old revenge-urge, unless indirectly. Like as not he was out to rewrite his own fortune, his whole future – who knows. Certainly it was something very big indeed, touching on his entire life and ambitions. He had full confidence in his ability to make things work exactly right.
He did not reckon on what lived inside his own head. Not the id, one day to be described by Freud, nor yet the Shadow as described by Jung – though it was very close. No, something else. Occult writers speak of the Guardian on the Threshold:
A truly terrible spectral being confronts (the magical student), and he will need all the presence of mind and faith in the security of his path which he has had ample opportunity to acquire in the course of his previous training. . .
“I am that very being who shaped my body out of thy good and evil achievements. My spectral form is woven out of thine own life's record.”
However horrible the form assumed by the Guardian, it is only the effect of the student's own past life, his own character risen out of him into independent existence. This awakening is brought about by the separation of will, thought, and feeling. To feel for the first time that one has oneself called a spiritual being into existence is in itself an experience of deepest significance. The student's preparation must aim at enabling him to endure the terrible sight without a trace of timidity and, at the moment of the meeting, to feel his strength so increased that he can undertake fully conscious the responsibility for transforming and beautifying the Guardian.
Paul was. . . not well prepared for this. He had been betting on the stories being allegory. He found himself face to face with a completely conscienceless, cheerfully detached, utterly self-centered and amoral Guardian, shaped out of his own past. It was an immensely frightening experience, not the least of which was because of his own severe misinterpretation. He assumed that he was facing an external entity passing itself off as a warning, and attacked it. The Guardian, of course, fought back – dirtier than Paul ever dreamed. It was humiliating and horrible and all Paul’s frustration and rage only made it worse. Paul beat a hasty retreat, smarting horribly.
NOW the urge for revenge came back, but not against his brothers or schoolmates. No, Paul wanted the Watcher smashed. It stood in his way as nothing else had. Somehow the emotional involvement didn’t seem as much of a mistake when it was turned inward. He spent six months preparing to overthrow the thing, thinking that doing so would make him master of his fate, captain of his soul, etc. The preparations scared Martha badly. Mostly because Paul had never told her exactly what his REAL interest in India and moldy old books was, and as a result he came off rather like a man plotting a murder. In a way, he was, perhaps.
Frankly, mundane murder would have been easier – and less traumatic. Paul’s attempt to overthrow the Guardian was doomed from the start, since he failed to comprehend what it really was. It was nastily ironic that his attempts to pursue the occult had come so far without involving deities or anti-deities, only to have him assume one was involved now – the more so because he was out to destroy it. In his attempt to do so, he essentially exploded the structures and channels that had restrained the nastier parts of his own psyche and karma, and let EVERYTHING in his head run loose. Including all his own fears-turned-contempt of alien gods and idols, the things he had scorned for being worshipped in the dark, by the ignorant.
He had broken through, though. He had Capability now. What he no longer had was protection – rationalization – psychic defense mechanisms. He could not hold off the awareness of his past deeds and thoughts, and of their consequences; he saw himself vulnerable now, constantly in danger. So he was, and so were those around him. The more so because he had avoided the teachings of others, beyond what could be gleaned from books. A teacher could have guided him through the minefield, but he had no teacher and did not know where to look in his books for a guide to what he now faced. His only ally was his purely mundane wife, and she and the children now feared him. He did, after all, show the signs of recognizable madness. Paul had power, but no barriers on it beyond the ones he set, and no control other than that which he consciously maintained. It was a sort of magical Ondine’s Curse, the medical condition in which certain body functions like breathing only continue so long as the person consciously maintains them. And, well, attention span. . . Thanks to his poor choices, unless he heavily warded himself, things happened while he slept. Specifically, while he dreamed, and I do not mean the dreams that have plot and story either. There are dreams that occur out of REM sleep, in the deeper phases. Dreams that are strange even by the standards of the dreaming mind, that cannot be properly understood or relayed even if you wake the sleeper while they are happening. During those dreams, when he lay too still to be thought anything but just this side of death, he inadvertently affected the real world. Things happened, things that came from Paul alone and so could not be stopped except by him. . .
When one of Paul’s most puissant wards failed and a stray exploding dreamlet nearly killed the children, Paul knew he had to take action. A more sensible man would have gone looking for outside help, but a more sensible man wouldn’t have been in his position in the first place. Given the storm raging in his head, Paul did the only thing he thought sensible: he ran. He ran as far as he could from his family, for their safety, and as far as he could from India, for his own. The prairies of Canada, and the mountains beyond them, seemed far enough to start over again, and it was there that he renounced everything he’d done so far. Paul always was one for the dramatic, but he was really acting on a sentiment that would one day inform the sensibilities of a man calling himself Bill W.: “one drink would be too many”. He had just enough control to put it all aside, suppress it, keep it under lock and key – but only if he threw away the key. Anything else would make him a danger to himself and the world around him. (Again, a teacher would have helped in this.) He took to the mountains of what would one day be Alberta, changing his name to Saul in a wry nod to his own backsliding. Not trusting his renunciation to be enough at first, he isolated himself from human contact as much as possible, taking up the largely solitary occupation of trapping. Doing that meant he only had to visit other traders once in a while. When he felt he’d gained a measure of distance and security, he sent word back to Scotland, explaining what he’d done and as much of his reasoning as possible. He also indicated that he fully accepted any wishes Martha might harbour for a divorce on any grounds she liked.
She took the letter to court and got her divorce, and very few in Scotland blamed her. A little surprised that it had actually happened, Saul bit his lip and went on. The first extended human contact he felt he could risk was with people he saw as naturally protected – the local churchmen, who happened to be Methodists. Given time and gentle prodding by the preacher, who saw only a badly scarred and emotionally isolated man, Saul admitted that he hated tramping the woods day in and day out in search of dead animals. He took the money he’d accumulated (for where did he have the chance to spend it?) and went into the business of trade again, this time selling supplies and provisions, all very mundane. It was small potatoes compared to what he’d once known, but it was safe, and he had enough business savvy to know how to carry it off well. His fiscal honesty paid off; one of the trappers who bought from him introduced him to a furrier, who had a daughter named Margaret. Saul somewhat reluctantly found himself falling for the girl. Fearing that she might somehow find out what he had once been and done, he chose to come forward and tell her all that thought she could handle: namely, that he had once had a wife and family in Scotland, that his most ambitious venture there had failed badly, and that the resultant bad dreams had caused him to attempt to harm them in his sleep. Shocked, Margaret wrote to Martha; she received confirmation of this from her, in a letter tinged with regret (for despite everything, Martha had still loved Paul). Martha also wrote of her husband’s studious nature, and of how she hoped that his fit of madness had been lifted from his shoulders by the Canadian wilderness, and that he had made for himself a better life without the dangers of overweening ambition.
The whole thing gave Margaret pause, but Saul readily confessed to all of it. The traders and fur-folk and- yes!- even the Indians attested to Saul’s reformed, controlled nature. He’d earned the nickname they’d given him, Honest Saul. Eventually, Margaret decided that Martha’s wish for the man’s reformation had come true, and she agreed to marry him – although she insisted on sleeping in separate beds, just in case the dreams came back. Not that there was any danger; Saul would never lose control that way again, waking or sleeping. In January of 1857 Margaret bore him a son, and they named the boy Robert. Saul taught his son self-control, the need to know one’s limits, and the dangers of believing oneself above temptation. He also stressed that a man had responsibility to his community and his family, though he did not explain precisely what sort of responsibility. Probably this was just as well. Robert grew up applying the lessons to society in general, and joined the newly-created Northwest Mounted Police in 1873. This pleased Saul mightily, as did the birth of his Canadian grandson, little Frank William.
Robert never learned anything of his father’s life in Scotland beyond what Saul chose to share. His son knows nothing beyond what his father told him: a collapsed business venture, a few years of trapping, a life of trading in supplies, and a handful of relations named Preston somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh. It will be. . . interesting . . . if he ever finds out.
