[1] Mahatma, “great-souled.” “One of a class of persons with
preter-natural powers, imagined to exist in India and Thibet.”—_New
English Dictionary_.
Everyone has seen a hare, either crouched or running in the fields, or
hanging dead in a poulterer’s shop, or lastly pathetic, even
dreadful-looking and in this form almost indistinguishable from a
skinned cat, on the domestic table. But not many people have met a
Mahatma, at least to their knowledge. Not many people know even who or
what a Mahatma is. The majority of those who chance to have heard the
title are apt to confuse it with another, that of Mad Hatter.
This is even done of malice prepense (especially, for obvious reasons,
if a hare is in any way concerned) in scorn, not in ignorance, by
persons who are well acquainted with the real meaning of the word and
even with its Sanscrit origin. The truth is that an incredulous Western
world puts no faith in Mahatmas. To it a Mahatma is a kind of spiritual
Mrs. Harris, giving an address in Thibet at which no letters are
delivered. Either, it says, there is no such person, or he is a
fraudulent scamp with no greater occult powers—well, than a hare.
I confess that this view of Mahatmas is one that does not surprise me
in the least. I never met, and I scarcely expect to meet, an individual
entitled to set “Mahatma” after his name. Certainly _I_ have no right
to do so, who only took that title on the spur of the moment when the
Hare asked me how I was called, and now make use of it as a
_nom-de-plume_. It is true there is Jorsen, by whose order, for it
amounts to that, I publish this history. For aught I know Jorsen may be
a Mahatma, but he does not in the least look the part.
Imagine a bluff person with a strong, hard face, piercing grey eyes,
and very prominent, bushy eyebrows, of about fifty or sixty years of
age. Add a Scotch accent and a meerschaum pipe, which he smokes even
when he is wearing a frock coat and a tall hat, and you have Jorsen. I
believe that he lives somewhere in the country, is well off, and
practises gardening. If so he has never asked me to his place, and I
only meet him when he comes to Town, as I understand, to visit
flower-shows.
Then I always meet him because he orders me to do so, not by letter or
by word of mouth but in quite a different way. Suddenly I receive an
impression in my mind that I am to go to a certain place at a certain
hour, and that there I shall find Jorsen. I do go, sometimes to an
hotel, sometimes to a lodging, sometimes to a railway station or to the
corner of a particular street and there I do find Jorsen smoking his
big meerschaum pipe. We shake hands and he explains why he has sent for
me, after which we talk of various things. Never mind what they are,
for that would be telling Jorsen’s secrets as well as my own, which I
must not do.
It may be asked how I came to know Jorsen. Well, in a strange way.
Nearly thirty years ago a dreadful thing happened to me. I was married
and, although still young, a person of some mark in literature. Indeed
even now one or two of the books which I wrote are read and remembered,
although it is supposed that their author has long left the world.
The thing which happened was that my wife and our daughter were coming
over from the Channel Islands, where they had been on a visit (she was
a Jersey woman), and, and—well, the ship was lost, that’s all. The
shock broke my heart, in such a way that it has never been mended
again, but unfortunately did not kill me.
Afterwards I took to drink and sank, as drunkards do. Then the river
began to draw me. I had a lodging in a poor street at Chelsea, and I
could hear the river calling me at night, and—I wished to die as the
others had died. At last I yielded, for the drink had rotted out all my
moral sense. About one o’clock of a wild, winter morning I went to a
bridge I knew where in those days policemen rarely came, and listened
to that call of the water.
“Come!” it seemed to say. “This world is the real hell, ending in the
eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are
but a demon’s mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its
universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is
no truth in all your father taught you” (he was a clergyman and rather
eminent in his profession), “there is no hope for man, there is nothing
he can win except the deep happiness of sleep. Come and sleep.”
Such were the arguments of that Voice of the river, the old, familiar
arguments of desolation and despair. I leant over the parapet; in
another moment I should have been gone, when I became aware that some
one was standing near to me. I did not see the person because it was
too dark. I did not hear him because of the raving of the wind. But I
knew that he was there. So I waited until the moon shone out for a
while between the edges of two ragged clouds, the shapes of which I can
see to this hour. It showed me Jorsen, looking just as he does to-day,
for he never seems to change—Jorsen, on whom, to my knowledge, I had
not set eyes before.
“Even a year ago,” he said, in his strong, rough voice, “you would not
have allowed your mind to be convinced by such arguments as those which
you have just heard in the Voice of the river. That is one of the worst
sides of drink; it decays the reason as it does the body. You must have
noticed it yourself.”
I replied that I had, for I was surprised into acquiescence. Then I
grew defiant and asked him what he knew of the arguments which were or
were not influencing me. To my surprise—no, that is not the word—to my
bewilderment, he repeated them to me one by one just as they had arisen
a few minutes before in my heart. Moreover, he told me what I had been
about to do, and why I was about to do it.
“You know me and my story,” I muttered at last.
“No,” he answered, “at least not more than I know that of many men with
whom I chance to be in touch. That is, I have not met you for nearly
eleven hundred years. A thousand and eighty-six, to be correct. I was a
blind priest then and you were the captain of Irene’s guard.”
At this news I burst out laughing and the laugh did me good.
“I did not know I was so old,” I said.
“Do you call that old?” answered Jorsen. “Why, the first time that we
had anything to do with each other, so far as I can learn, that is, was
over eight thousand years ago, in Egypt before the beginning of
recorded history.”
“I thought that I was mad, but you are madder,” I said.
“Doubtless. Well, I am so mad that I managed to be here in time to save
you from suicide, as once in the past you saved me, for thus things
come round. But your rooms are near, are they not? Let us go there and
talk. This place is cold and the river is always calling.”
That was how I came to know Jorsen, whom I believe to be one of the
greatest men alive. On this particular night that I have described he
told me many things, and since then he has taught me much, me and a few
others. But whether he is what is called a Mahatma I am sure I do not
know. He has never claimed such a rank in my hearing, or indeed to be
anything more than a man who has succeeded in winning a knowledge of
his own powers out of the depths of the dark that lies behind us. Of
course I mean out of his past in other incarnations long before he was
Jorsen. Moreover, by degrees, as I grew fit to bear the light, he
showed me something of my own, and of how the two were intertwined.
But all these things are secrets of which I have perhaps no right to
speak at present. It is enough to say that Jorsen changed the current
of my life on that night when he saved me from death.
For instance, from that day onwards to the present time I have never
touched the drink which so nearly ruined me. Also the darkness has
rolled away, and with it every doubt and fear; I know the truth, and
for that truth I live. Considered from certain aspects such knowledge,
I admit, is not altogether desirable. Thus it has deprived me of my
interest in earthly things. Ambition has left me altogether; for years
I have had no wish to succeed in the profession which I adopted in my
youth, or in any other. Indeed I doubt whether the elements of worldly
success still remain in me; whether they are not entirely burnt away by
that fire of wisdom in which I have bathed. How can we strive to win a
crown we have no longer any desire to wear? Now I desire other crowns
and at times I wear them, if only for a little while. My spirit grows
and grows. It is dragging at its strings.
What am I to look at? A small, white-haired man with a thin and rather
plaintive face in which are set two large, dark eyes that continually
seem to soften and develop. That is my picture. And what am I in the
world? I will tell you. On certain days of the week I employ myself in
editing a trade journal that has to do with haberdashery. On another
day I act as auctioneer to a firm which imports and sells cheap Italian
statuary; modern, very modern copies of the antique, florid marble
vases, and so forth. Some of you who read may have passed such marts in
different parts of the city, or even have dropped in and purchased a
bust or a tazza for a surprisingly small sum. Perhaps I knocked it down
to you, only too pleased to find a _bonâ fide_ bidder amongst my
company.
As for the rest of my time—well, I employ it in doing what good I can
among the poor and those who need comfort or who are bereaved,
especially among those who are bereaved, for to such I am sometimes
able to bring the breath of hope that blows from another shore.
Occasionally also I amuse myself in my own fashion. Thus sure knowledge
has come to me about certain epochs in the past in which I lived in
other shapes, and I study those epochs, hoping that one day I may find
time to write of them and of the parts I played in them. Some of these
parts are extremely interesting, especially as I am of course able to
contrast them with our modern modes of thought and action.
They do not all come back to me with equal clearness, the earlier lives
being, as one might expect, the more difficult to recover and the
comparatively recent ones the easiest. Also they seem to range over a
vast stretch of time, back indeed to the days of primeval, prehistoric
man. In short, I think the subconscious in some ways resembles the
conscious and natural memory; that which is very far off to it grows
dim and blurred, that which is comparatively close remains clear and
sharp, although of course this rule is not invariable. Moreover there
is foresight as well as memory. At least from time to time I seem to
come in touch with future events and states of society in which I shall
have my share.
I believe some thinkers hold a theory that such conditions as those of
past, present, and future do not in fact exist; that everything already
is, standing like a completed column between earth and heaven; that the
sum is added up, the equation worked out. At times I am tempted to
believe in the truth of this proposition. But if it be true, of course
it remains difficult to obtain a clear view of other parts of the
column than that in which we happen to find ourselves objectively
conscious at any given period, and needless to say impossible to see it
from base to capital.
However this may be, no individual entity pervades all the column.
There are great sections of it with which that entity has nothing to
do, although it always seems to appear again above. I suppose that
those sections which are empty of an individual and his atmosphere
represent the intervals between his lives which he spends in sleep, or
in states of existence with which this world is not concerned, but of
such gulfs of oblivion and states of being I know nothing.
To take a single instance of what I do know: once this spirit of mine,
that now by the workings of destiny for a little while occupies the
body of a fourth-rate auctioneer, and of the editor of a trade journal,
dwelt in that of a Pharaoh of Egypt—never mind which Pharaoh. Yes,
although you may laugh and think me mad to say it, for me the legions
fought and thundered; to me the peoples bowed and the secret
sanctuaries were opened that I and I alone might commune with the gods;
I who in the flesh and after it myself was worshipped as a god.
Well, of this forgotten Royalty of whom little is known save what a few
inscriptions have to tell, there remains a portrait statue in the
British Museum. Sometimes I go to look at that statue and try to recall
exactly under what circumstances I caused it to be shaped, puzzling out
the story bit by bit.
Not long ago I stood thus absorbed and did not notice that the hour of
the closing of the great gallery had come. Still I stood and gazed and
dreamt till the policeman on duty, seeing and suspecting me, came up
and roughly ordered me to begone.
The man’s tone angered me. I laid my hand on the foot of the statue,
for it had just come back to me that it was a “Ka” image, a sacred
thing, any Egyptologist will know what I mean, which for ages had sat
in a chamber of my tomb. Then the Ka that clings to it eternally awoke
at my touch and knew me, or so I suppose. At least I felt myself
change. A new strength came into me; my shape, battered in this world’s
storms, put on something of its ancient dignity; my eyes grew royal. I
looked at that man as Pharaoh may have looked at one who had done him
insult. He saw the change and trembled—yes, trembled. I believe he
thought I was some imperial ghost that the shadows of evening had
caused him to mistake for man; at any rate he gasped out—
“I beg your pardon, I was obeying orders. I hope your Majesty won’t
hurt me. Now I think of it I have been told that things come out of
these old statues in the night.”
Then turning he ran, literally ran, where to I am sure I do not know,
probably to seek the fellowship of some other policeman. In due course
I followed, and, lifting the bar at the end of the hall, departed
without further question asked. Afterwards I was very glad to think
that I had done the man no injury. At the moment I knew that I could
hurt him if I would, and what is more I had the desire to do so. It
came to me, I suppose, with that breath of the past when I was so great
and absolute. Perhaps I, or that part of me then incarnate, was a
tyrant in those days, and this is why now I must be so humble. Fate is
turning my pride to its hammer and beating it out of me.
For thus in the long history of the soul it serves all our vices.