What Mr. Spalding saw was the sudden stoppage of the cart, which now
appeared as standing simultaneously at each station, Herr Schmidt’s
house, the inn, the grocery, the clock, the church and the side street
up which it had not yet turned.
In this vision solid objects became transparent, so that he saw the side
street through the intervening houses. In the same way, distributed in
space as on a Mercator’s projection, he saw all the subsequent stations
of the cart, up to its arrival in a farmyard between a stable and a
haystack. In the same duration of time, which was his present, he saw
the townspeople moving in their houses, eating, smoking and going to
bed, and the peasants in their farms and cottages, and the household of
the Graf in his castle. These figures retained all their positions while
the amazing experience lasted.
The scene widened. It became all Königsberg, and Königsberg became all
Prussia, and Prussia all Europe. Mr. Spalding seemed to have eyes at the
sides and back of his head. He saw time rising up round him as an
immense cubic space. He was aware of the French Revolution, the
Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian war, the establishment of the
French Republic, the Boer war, the death of Queen Victoria, the
accession and death of King Edward VII., the accession of King George
V., the Great War, the Russian and German Revolutions, the rise of the
Irish Republic, the Indian Republic, the British Revolution, the British
Republic, the conquest of Japan by America, and the federation of the
United States of Europe and America, all going on at once.
The scene stretched and stretched, and still Mr. Spalding kept before
him every item as it had first appeared. He was now aware of the vast
periods of geologic time. On the past side he saw the mammoth and the
caveman; on the future he saw the Atlantic flooding the North Sea and
submerging the flats of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk,
Essex, and Kent. He saw the giant tree-ferns; he saw the great saurians
trampling the marshlands and sea-beaches of the past. A flight of
fearful pterodactyls darkened the air. And he saw the ice creep down and
down from the poles to the vast temperate zone of Europe, America and
Australasia; he saw men and animals driven before it to the belt of the
equator.
And now he sank down deeper; he was swept into the stream that flowed,
thudding and throbbing, through all live things; he felt it beat in and
around him, jet after jet from the beating heart of God; he felt the
rising of the sap in trees, the delight of animals at mating-time. He
knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and
bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings. The stars whirled past
him with a noise like violin strings, and through it he heard the voice
of Paul Jeffreson, singing a song. He was aware of an immense,
all-pervading rapture pierced with stabs of pain. At the same time he
was drawn back on the ebb of life into a curious peace.
His stretch widened. He was present at the beginning and the end. He saw
the earth flung off, an incandescent ball, from the wheeling sun. He saw
it hang like a dead white moon in a sky strewn with the corpses of spent
worlds. But to his surprise he saw no darkness. He learned that light is
older than the suns; that they are born of it, not it of them. The whole
universe stood up on end round him, doubling all its future back upon
all its past.
He saw the vast planes of time intersecting each other, like the planes
of a sphere, wheeling, turning in and out of each other. He saw other
space and time systems rising up, toppling, enclosing and enclosed. And
as a tiny inset in the immense scene, his own life from birth to the
present moment, together with the events of his heavenly life to come.
In this vision Elizabeth’s adultery, which had once appeared so
monstrous, so overpowering an event, was revealed as slender and
insignificant.
And now the universe dissolved into the ultimate constituents of matter,
electrons of electrons of electrons, an unseen web, intensely vibrating,
stretched through all space and all time. He saw it sucked back into the
space of space, the time of time, into the thought of God.
Mr. Spalding was drawn in with it. He passed from God’s immanent to his
transcendent life, into the Absolute. For one moment he thought that
this was death; the next his whole being swelled and went on swelling in
an unspeakable, an unthinkable bliss.
Joined with him, vibrating with him in one tremendous rapture, were the
spirits of Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson. He had now no memory of their
adultery or of his own.
When he came out of his ecstasy he was aware that God was spinning his
thought again, stretching the web of matter through space and time.
He was going to make another jig-saw puzzle of a universe.
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