Book III

JULIUS LEVALLON

Julius LeVallon

An Episode

By

Algernon Blackwood

_Author of “The Centaur,” “John Silence,”

“The Human Chord,” etc._

Cassell and Company, Ltd

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

First published 1916

TO

M. S-K.

(1906)

Contents

PAGE

_BOOK I_

SCHOOLDAYS 3

_BOOK II_

EDINBURGH 77

_BOOK III_

THE CHÂLET IN THE JURA MOUNTAINS 149

_BOOK IV_

THE ATTEMPTED RESTITUTION 267

Book I

SCHOOLDAYS

“_Dream faces bloom around your face

Like flowers upon one stem;

The heart of many a vanished race

Sighs as I look on them._”

A. E.

Julius LeVallon

CHAPTER I

“_Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance when we

regard it no longer as a single and unexplained break in an

unending life, but as part of the continually recurring rhythm

of progress--as inevitable, as natural, and as benevolent as

sleep._”--“Some Dogmas of Religion” (Prof. J. M’Taggart).

It was one autumn in the late ’nineties that I found myself at Bâle,

awaiting letters. I was returning leisurely from the Dolomites, where

a climbing holiday had combined pleasantly with an examination of the

geologically interesting Monzoni Valley. When the claims of the latter

were exhausted, however, and I turned my eyes towards the peaks, it

happened that bad weather held permanent possession of the great grey

cliffs and towering pinnacles, and climbing was out of the question

altogether. A world of savage desolation gloomed down upon me through

impenetrable mists; the scouts of winter’s advance had established

themselves upon all possible points of attack; and the whole tossed

wilderness of precipice and scree lay safe, from my assaults at least,

behind a frontier of furious autumn storms.

Having ample time before my winter’s work in London, I turned my back

upon the unconquered Marmolata and Cimon della Pala, and made my way

slowly, via Bozen and Innsbruck, to Bâle; and it was in the latter

place, where my English correspondence was kind enough to overtake me,

that I found one letter in particular that interested me more than all

the others put together. It bore a Swiss stamp; and the handwriting

caused me a thrill of anticipatory excitement even before I had

consciously recalled the name of the writer. It was addressed before

and behind till there was scarcely room left for a postmark, and it had

journeyed from my chambers to my club, from my club to the university,

and thence, by way of various poste-restantes, from one hotel to

another till, with good luck little short of marvellous, it discovered

me in my room of the Trois Rois Hotel overlooking the Rhine.

The signature, to which I turned at once before reading the body of the

message, was Julius LeVallon; and as my eye noted the firm and very

individual writing, once of familiar and potent significance in my

life, I was conscious that emotions of twenty years ago woke vigorously

into being, releasing sensations and memories I had thought buried

beyond all effective resurrection. I knew myself swept back to those

hopes and fears that, all these years before, had been--me. The letter

was brief; it ran as follows:

FRIEND OF A MILLION YEARS,--Should you remember your promise,

given to me at Edinburgh twenty years ago, I write to tell you

that I am ready. Yours, especially in separation,

JULIUS LEVALLON.

And then followed two lines of instructions how to reach him in the

isolated little valley of the Jura Mountains, on the frontier between

France and Switzerland, whence he wrote.

The wording startled me; but this surprise, not unmingled with

amusement, gave place immediately to emotions of a deeper and much

more complex order, as I drew an armchair to the window and resigned

myself, half pleasurably, half uneasily, to the flood of memories

that rose from the depths and besieged me with their atmosphere of

half-forgotten boyhood and of early youth. Pleasurably, because my

curiosity was aroused abruptly to a point my dull tutorial existence

now rarely, if ever, knew; uneasily, because these early associations

grouped themselves about the somewhat unearthly figure of a man with

whom once I had been closely intimate, but who had since disappeared

behind a veil of mystery to follow pursuits where danger to body, mind

and soul--it seemed to me--must be his constant attendant.

For Julius LeVallon, or Julius, as he was known to me in our school

and university days, had been once a name to conjure with; a

personality who evoked for me a world more vast and splendid, horizons

wider, vistas of possibilities more dazzling, than any I have since

known--which have contracted, in fact, with my study of an exact

science to a dwindled universe of pettier scale and measurement;--and

wherein, formerly, with all the terror and delight of vividly imagined

adventure, we moved side by side among strange experiences and

fascinating speculations.

The name brings back the face and figure of as singular an individual

as I have ever known who, but for my saving streak of common sense and

inability to imagine beyond a certain point, might well have swept me

permanently into his own region of research and curious experiment.

As it was, up to the time when I felt obliged to steer my course away

from him, he found my nature of great assistance in helping him to

reconstruct his detailed mental pictures of the past; we were both “in

the same boat together,” as he constantly assured me--this boat that

travelled down the river of innumerable consecutive lives; and there

can be no doubt that my cautious questionings--lack of perspective, he

termed it--besides checking certain aspects of his conception, saved

us at the same time from results that must have proved damaging to our

reputations, if not injurious actually to our persons, physically and

mentally. Yet that he captured me so completely at the time was due

to an innate sympathy I felt towards his theories, a sympathy that at

times amounted to complete acceptance. I freely admit this sympathy. He

used another word for it, however: he called it Memory.

As a boy, Julius LeVallon was beyond question one of the strangest

beings that ever wore a mortar-board, or lent his soul and body to the

conventionalities of an English private school.

I recall, as of yesterday, my first sight of him, and the vivid

impression, startling as of shock, he then produced: the sensitive,

fine face, pallid as marble, the thatch of tumbling dark hair, and the

eyes of changing greeny blue that shone unlike any English eyes I have

ever looked upon before or since. “Giglamps” the other boys called

them, of course; but when you caught them through the black hair that

straggled over the high white forehead, they somehow conveyed the

impression of twin lanterns, now veiled, now clear, seen through the

tangled shadows of a twilight wood. Unlike the eyes of most dreamers,

they looked keenly within, rather than vaguely beyond; and I recall to

this day the sharp, half disquieting effect produced upon my mind as a

new boy the first instant I saw them--that here was an individual who

somehow stood aloof from the mob of noisy, mischief-loving youngsters

all about him, and had little in common with the world in which this

school was a bustling, practical centre of educational energy.

Nor is it that I recall that first sight with the added judgment of

later years. I insist that this moment of his entrance into my life

was accompanied by an authentic thrill of wonder that announced his

presence to my nerves, or even deeper, to my very soul. My sympathetic

nervous system was instinctively aware of him. He came upon me with a

kind of rush for which the proper word is startling; there was nothing

gradual about it; its nature was electrifying; and in some sense he

certainly captivated me, for, immediately upon knowing him, this

opening wonder merged in a deep affection of a kind so intimate, so

fearless, so familiar, that it seemed to me that I must, somewhere,

somehow, have known him always. For years to come it bound me to his

side. To the end, moreover, I never quite lost something of that

curious first impression, that he moved, namely, in an outer world

that did not claim him; that those luminous, inward-peering eyes saw

but dimly the objects we call real; that he saw them as counters in

some trivial game he deemed it not worth while to play; that while,

perforce, he used them like the rest of us, their face-value was as

naught compared to what they symbolised; that, in a word, he stood

apart from the vulgar bustle of ordinary ambitious life, and above

it, in a region by himself where he was forever questing issues of

infinitely greater value.

For a boy of fifteen, as I then was, this seems much to have discerned.

At the time I certainly phrased it all less pompously in my own

small mind. But that first sense of shock remains: I yearned to know

him, to stand where he stood, to be exactly like him. And our speedy

acquaintance did not overwhelm me as it ought to have done--for a

singular reason; I felt oddly that somehow or other I had the _right_

to know him instantly.

Imagination, no doubt, was stronger in me at that time than it is

to-day; my mind more speculative, my soul, perhaps, more sensitively

receptive. At any rate the insignificant and very ordinary personality

I own at present has since largely recovered itself. If Julius LeVallon

was one in a million, I know that I can never expect to be more than

one _of_ a million. And it is something in middle age to discover that

one can appreciate the exceptional in others without repining at its

absence in oneself.

Julius was two forms above me, and for a day or two after my arrival

at mid-term, it appears he was in the sick-room with one of those

strange nervous illnesses that came upon him through life at intervals,

puzzling the doctors and alarming those responsible for his well-being;

accompanied, too, by symptoms that to-day would be recognised, I

imagine, as evidence of a secondary personality. But on the third

or fourth day, just as afternoon “Preparation” was beginning and we

were all shuffling down upon our wooden desks with a clatter of books

and pens, the door beside the great blackboard opened, and a figure

stole into the room, tall, slender, and unsubstantial as a shadow, yet

intensely real.

“Hullo! Giglamps back again!” whispered the boy on my left, and

another behind me sniggered audibly “Jujubes”--thus Julius was

sometimes paraphrased--“tired of shamming at last!” Then Hurrish, the

master in charge, whose head had been hidden a moment behind his desk,

closed the lid and turned. He greeted the boy with a few kind words

of welcome which, of course, I have forgotten; yet, so strange are

the freaks of memory, and so instantaneous and prophetic the first

intuitions of sympathy or aversion, that I distinctly recall that I

liked Hurrish for his words, and was grateful to him for his kindly

attitude towards a boy whose very existence had hitherto been unknown

to me. Already, before I knew his name, Julius LeVallon meant, at any

rate, this to me.

But from that instant the shadow became most potently real substance.

The boy moved forward to his desk, looked about him as though to miss

no face, and almost immediately across that big room full of heads and

shoulders saw--myself.

That something of psychical import passed swiftly between us is

indubitable, for while Julius visibly started, pausing a moment in his

walk and staring as though he would swallow me with his eyes, there

flashed upon my own mind a thought so vivid, so precise, that it took

actual sentence form, and before I could possibly have imagined or

invented an idea so uncorrelated with a previous experience of any kind

at all, I heard myself murmuring: “He’s found me...!”

It seemed audible, at least. I hid my face a second, thinking I had

spoken it aloud. No one looked at me, however; Hurrish made no comment.

My name did not sound terribly across the class-room. The sentence,

after all, had remained a thought. But that it leaped into my mind at

all seems to me now, as it did at the time, significant.

His eyes rested for the fraction of a second on my face as he crossed

the floor, and I felt--but how describe it intelligibly?--as though

a wind had risen and caught me up into another place where there was

great light and an impression of vast distances. Hypnotic we should

call it to-day; hypnotic let it be. I can only affirm how, with that

single glance from a boy but slightly older than myself, seen then for

the first time, and with no word yet spoken, there came back to me a

larger sense of life, and of the meaning of life. I became aware of an

extended world, of wonder, movement, adventure on a scale immensely

grander than anything I found about me among known external things. But

I became aware--“again.” In earlier childhood I had known this bigger

world. It suddenly flashed over me that time stretched _behind_ me as

well as before--and that I stretched back with it. Something scared

me, I remember, with a faint stirring as of old pains and pleasures

suffered long ago. The face and eyes that called into being these

fancies, so oddly touched with alarm, were like those seen sometimes in

dreams that never venture into daily life--things of composite memory,

no doubt, that bring with them an atmosphere, and a range of query,

nothing in normal waking life can even suggest.

He passed to his place in front of Hurrish’s desk among the upper

forms, and a sea of tousled heads intervened to hide him from my sight;

but as he went the afternoon sunshine fell through the unfrosted half

of the window, and in later years--now, in fact, as I hold his letter

in my hand and re-collect these vanished memories--I still see him

coming into my life with the golden sunlight about his head and his

face wrapped in its halo. I see it reflected in the lamping eyes,

glistening on the mop of dark hair, shining on the pallid face with

its high expression of other-worldliness and yearning remote from the

chaos of modern life.... It was a long time before I managed to bring

myself down again to parse the verbs in that passage of _Hecuba_, for,

if anything, I have understated rather than exaggerated the effect

that this first sight of Julius LeVallon produced upon my feelings and

imagination. Some one, lost through ages but ever seeking me, rose

suddenly and spoke: “So here you are, at last! I’ve found you. We’ve

found each other again!”

To say more could only be to elaborate the memory with knowledge

that came later, and thus to distort the first simple and profound

impression. I merely wish to present, as it occurred, the picture of

this wizard face appearing suddenly above the horizon of my small

schoolboy world, staring with that deep suggestion of having travelled

down upon me from immense distances _behind_, bringing fugitive and

ghostly sensations of things known long ago, and hinting very faintly,

as I have tried to describe, of vanished pains and alarms--yet of

sufferings so ancient that to touch them even with the tenderest of

words is to make them crumble into dust and disappear.

CHAPTER II

“_‘Body,’ observes Plotinus, ‘is the true river of Lethe.’

The memory of definite events in former lives can hardly come

easily to a consciousness allied with brain.... Bearing in mind

also that even our ordinary definite memories slowly become

indefinite, and that most drop altogether out of notice, we

shall attach no importance to the naïve question, ‘Why does not

Smith remember who he was before?’ It would be an exceedingly

strange fact if he did, a new Smith being now in evidence along

with a new brain and nerves. Still, it is conceivable that such

remembrances occasionally arise. Cerebral process, conscious or

subconscious, is psychical._”--“Individual and Reality” (E. D.

Fawcett).

Looking back upon this entrance, not from the present long interval

of twenty years, but from a point much nearer to it, and consequently

more sympathetically in touch with my own youth, I must confess that

his presence--his arrival, as it seemed--threw a momentary clear light

of electric sharpness upon certain “inner scenery” that even at this

period of my boyhood was already beginning to fade away into dimness

and “mere imagining.” Which brings me to a reluctant confession I feel

bound to make. I say “reluctant,” because at the present time I feel

intellectually indisposed to regard that scenery as real. Its origin I

know not; its reality at the time I alone can vouch for. Many children

have similar experiences, I believe; with myself it was exceptionally

vivid.

Ever since I could remember, my childhood days were charged with

it--haunting and stimulating recollections that were certainly derived

from nothing in this life, nor owed their bright reality to anything

seen or read or heard. They influenced all my early games, my secret

make-believe, my magical free hours after lessons. I dreamed them,

played them, lived them, and nothing delighted me so much as to be

alone on half-holidays in summer out of doors, or on winter evenings

in the empty schoolroom, so that I might reconstruct for myself the

gorgeous detail of their remote, elusive splendour. For the presence

of others, even of my favourite playmates, ruined their reality with

criticising questions, and a doubt as to their genuineness was an

intrusion upon their sacredness my youthful heart desired to prevent

by--killing it at once. Their nature it would be wearisome to detail,

but I may mention that their grandeur was of somewhat mixed authority,

and that if sometimes I was a general like Gideon, against whom

Amalekites and such like were the merest insects, at others I was a

High Priest in some huge, dim-sculptured Temple whose magnificence

threw Moses and the Bible tabernacles into insignificance.

Yet it was upon these glories, and upon this sacred inner scenery, that

the arrival of Julius LeVallon threw a new daylight of stark intensity.

He made them live again. His coming made them awfully real. They had

been fading. Going to school was, it seemed, a finishing touch of

desolating destruction. I felt obliged to give them up and be a man.

Thus ignored, disowned, forgotten of set deliberation, they sank out of

sight and were prepared to disappear, when suddenly his arrival drew

the entire panorama delightfully into the great light of day again. His

presence re-touched, re-coloured the entire series. He made them true.

It would take too long, besides inviting the risk of unconscious

invention, were I to attempt in detail the description of our growing

intimacy. Moreover, I believe it is true that the intimacy did not grow

at all, but suddenly, incomprehensibly _was_. At any rate, I remember

with distinctness our first conversation. The hour’s “prep.” was over,

and I was in the yard, lonely and disconsolate as a new boy, watching

the others playing tip-and-run against the high enclosing wall, when

Julius LeVallon came up suddenly behind me, and I turned expectantly at

the sound of his almost stealthy step. He came softly. He was smiling.

In the falling dusk he looked more shadow-like than ever. He wore the

school cap at the back of his head, where it clung to his tumbling

hair like some absurd disguise circumstances forced him to adopt for

the moment.

And my heart gave a bound of excitement at the sound of his voice. In

some strange way the whole thing seemed familiar. I had expected this.

It had happened before. And, very swiftly, a fragment of that inner

scenery, laid like a theatre-inset against the playground of to-day,

flashed through the depths of me, then vanished.

“What is your name?” he asked me, very gently.

“Mason,” I told him, conscious that I flushed and almost stammered.

“John Mason. I’m a new boy.” Then, although my brother, formerly Head

of the school, had already gone on to Winchester, I added “Mason

secundus.” My outer self felt shy, but another, deeper self realised

a sense of satisfaction that was pleasure. I was aware of a desire to

seize his hand and utter something of this bigger, happier sensation.

The strength of school convention, however, prevented anything of the

sort. I was at first embarrassed by the attention of a bigger boy, and

showed it.

He looked closely into my face a moment, as though searching for

something, but so penetratingly that I felt his eyes actually

inside me. The information I had given did not seem to interest him

particularly. At the same time I was conscious that his near presence

affected me in a curious way, for I lost the feeling that this

attention to a new boy was flattering and unusual, and became aware

that there was something of great importance he wished to say to me. It

was all right and natural. There was something he desired to find out

and know: it was not my name. A vague yet profound emotion troubled me.

He spoke then, slowly, earnestly; the voice gentle and restrained, but

the expression in the eyes and face so grave, almost so solemn, that it

seemed an old and experienced man who addressed me, instead of a boy

barely sixteen years of age.

“Have you then ... quite ... forgotten ... everything?” he asked,

making dramatic pauses thus between the words.

And, singular in its abruptness though the question was, there flashed

upon me even while he uttered it, a sensation, a mood, a memory--I

hardly know what to call it--that made the words intelligible. It

dawned upon me that I _had_ “forgotten ... everything ... quite”:

crowded, glorious, ancient things, that somehow or other I ought

to have remembered. A faint sense of guiltiness accompanied the

experience. I felt disconcerted, half ashamed.

“I’m afraid ... I have,” came my faltering reply. Though bewildered, I

raised my eyes to his. I looked straight at him. “I’m--Mason secundus

... now....”

His eyes, I saw, came up, as it were, from their deep searching. They

rested quietly upon my own, with a reassuring smile that made them

kindly and understanding as those of my own father. He put his hand on

my shoulder in a protective fashion that gave me an intense desire to

remember all the things he wished me to remember, and thus to prove

myself worthy of his interest and attention. The desire in me was

ardent, serious. Its fervency, moreover, seemed to produce an effect,

for immediately there again rose before my inner vision that flashing

scenery I had “imagined” as a child.

Possibly something in my face betrayed the change. His expression, at

any rate, altered instantly as though he recognised what was happening.

“You’re Mason secundus now,” he said more quickly. “I know that.

But--can you remember nothing of the Other Places? Have you quite

forgotten when--we were together?”

He stopped abruptly, repeating the last three words almost beneath

his breath. His eyes rested on mine with such pleasure and expectancy

in them that for the moment the world I stood in melted out, the

playground faded, the shouts of cricket ceased, and I seemed to forget

entirely who or where I was. It was as though other times, other

feelings, other scenery battled against the actual present, claiming

me, sweeping me away, extending the sense of personal identity towards

a previous series. Seductive the sensation was beyond belief, yet

at the same time disturbing. I wholly ignored the flattery of this

kindness from an older boy. A series of vivid pictures, more familiar

than the nursery, more distant than a dream of years ago, swam up

from some inner region of my being like memories of places, people,

adventures I had actually lived and seen. The near presence of Julius

LeVallon drew them upwards in a stream above the horizon of some

temporarily veiled oblivion.

“... in the Other Places,” his voice continued with a droning sound

that was like the sea a long way off, or like wind among the branches

of a tree.

And something in me leaped automatically to acknowledge the truth I

suddenly realised.

“Yes, yes!” I cried, no shyness in me any more, and plunged into myself

to seize the flying pictures and arrest their sliding, disappearing

motion. “I remember, oh, I remember ... a whole lot of ... dreams ...

or things like made-up adventures I once had ages and ages ago ...

with ...” I hesitated a second. A rising and inexplicable excitement

stopped my words. I was shaking all over. “... with you!” I added

boldly, or rather the words seemed to add themselves inevitably. “It

was with you, sir?”

He nodded his head slightly and smiled. I think the “sir,” sounding so

incongruous, caused the smile.

“Yes,” he said in his soft, low voice, “it was with me. Only they were

not dreams. They were real. There’s no good denying what’s real; it

only prevents your remembering properly.”

The way he said it held conviction as of sunrise, but anyhow denial in

myself seemed equally to have disappeared. Deep within me a sense of

reality answered willingly to his own.

“And myself?” he went on gently yet eagerly at the same time, his eyes

searching my own. “Don’t you remember--me? Have I, too, gone quite

beyond recall?”

But with truth my answer came at once:

“Something ... perhaps ... comes back to me ... a little,” I stammered.

For while aware of a keen sensation that I talked with someone I knew

as well as I knew my own father, nothing at the moment seemed wholly

real to me except his sensitive, pale face with the large and beautiful

eyes so keenly peering, and the tangled hair escaping under that

ridiculous school cap. The pine trees in the cricket-field rose into

the fading sky behind him, and I remember being puzzled to determine

where his hair stopped and the feathery branches began.

“... carrying the spears up the long stone steps in the sunshine,”

his voice murmured on with a sound like running water, “and the old

man in the robe of yellow standing at the top ... and orchards below,

all white and pink with blossoms dropping in the wind ... and miles

of plain in blue distances far away, the river winding ... and birds

fishing in the shallow places ...”

The picture flashed into my mind. I saw it. I remembered it in detail

as easily as any childhood scene of a few years ago, but yet through

a blur of summery haze and at the end of a stupendous distance that

reduced the scale to lilliputian proportions. I looked down the wrong

end of a telescope at it all. The appalling distance--and something

else as well I was at a loss to define--frightened me a little.

“I ... my people, I mean ... live in Sussex,” I remember saying

irrelevantly in my bewilderment, “and my father’s a clergyman.” It was

the upper part of me that said it, no doubt anticipating the usual

question “What’s your father?” My voice had a lifeless, automatic sound.

“That’s now,” LeVallon interrupted almost impatiently. “It’s thinking

of these things that hides the others.”

Then he smiled, leaning against the wall beside me while the sunset

flamed upon the clouds above us and the tide of noisy boys broke,

tumbling about our feet. I see those hurrying clouds, crimson and gold,

that scrimmage of boys in the school playground, and Julius LeVallon

gazing into my eyes, his expression rapt and eager--I see it now across

the years as plainly as I saw that flash of inner scenery far, far

away. I even hear his low voice speaking. The whole, strange mood that

rendered the conversation not too incredibly fantastic at the time

comes over me again as I think of it.

He went on in that murmuring tone, putting true words to the pictures

that rolled clearly through me:

“... and the burning sunlight on the white walls of the building ...

the cool deep shadows where we talked and slept ... the shouting of

the armies in the distance ... with the glistening of the spears and

shining shields ...”

Mixed curiously together, kaleidoscopic, running one into the other

without sharp outlines of beginning or end, the scenes fled past me

like the pages of a coloured picture-book. I saw figures plainly, more

plainly than the scenery beyond. The man in the yellow robe looked

close into my eyes, so close, indeed, I could almost hear him speak.

He vanished, and a woman took his place. Her back was to me. She stood

motionless, her hands upraised, and a gesture of passionate entreaty

about her plunged me suddenly into a sea of whirling, poignant drama

that had terror in it. The blood rushed to my head. My heart beat

violently. I knew a moment of icy horror--that she would turn--and I

should recognise her face--worse, that she would recognise my own.

I experienced actual fear, a shrinking dread of something that was

nameless. Escape was impossible, I could neither move nor speak, nor

alter any single detail in this picture which--most terrifying of

all--I knew contained somewhere too--myself. But she did not turn; I

did not see her face. She vanished like the rest ... and I next saw

quick, running figures with skins of reddish brown, circlets of iron

about their foreheads and red tassels hanging from their loin cloths.

The scene had shifted.

“... when we lit the signal fires upon the hills,” the voice of

LeVallon broke in softly, looking over his shoulder lest we be

disturbed, “and lay as sentinels all night beside the ashes ... till

the plain showed clearly in the sunrise with the encampments marked

over it like stones ...”

I saw the blue plain fading into distance, and across it a

swiftly-moving cloud of dust that was ominous in character, presaging

attack. Again the scene shifted noiselessly as a picture on a screen,

and a deserted village slid before me, with small houses built of

undressed stone, and roomy paddocks, abandoned to the wild deer from

the hills. I smelt the keen, fresh air and the scent of wild flowers.

A figure, carrying a small blue stick, passed with tearing rapidity up

the empty street.

“... when you were a Runner to the tribe,” the voice stepped curiously

in from a world outside it all, “carrying warnings to the House of

Messengers ... and I held the long night-watches upon the passes,

signalling with the flaming torches to those below ...”

“But so far away, so dim, so awfully small, that I can hardly----”

The world of to-day broke in upon my voice, and I stopped, not quite

aware of what I had been about to say. Martin, the Fourth Form and

Mathematical Master, had come up unobserved by either of us, and was

eyeing LeVallon and myself somewhat curiously. It was afterwards, of

course, that I discovered who the interrupter was. I only knew at the

moment that I disliked the look of him, and also that I felt somehow

guilty.

“New boy in tow, LeVallon?” he remarked casually, the tone and manner

betraying ill-concealed disapproval. The change of key, both in its

character and its abruptness, seemed ugly, almost dreadful. It was so

trivial.

“Yes, sir. It’s young Mason.” LeVallon answered at once, touching his

cap respectfully, but by no means cordially.

“Ah,” said the master dryly. “He’s fortunate to find a friend so soon.

Tell him we look to him to follow his brother’s example and become Head

of the school one day perhaps.” I got the impression, how I cannot say,

that Martin stood in awe of LeVallon, was even a little afraid of him

as well. He would gladly have “scored off” him if it were possible.

There was a touch of spite in his voice, perhaps.

“We knew one another before, sir,” I heard Julius say quietly, as

though his attention to a new boy required explanation--to Martin.

I could hardly believe my ears. This extraordinary boy was indeed in

earnest. He had not the smallest intention of saying what was untrue.

He said what he actually believed. I saw him touch his cap again in

the customary manner, and Martin, the under-master, shrugging his

shoulders, passed on without another word. It is difficult to describe

the dignity LeVallon put into that trivial gesture of conventional

respect, or in what way Martin gained a touch of honour from it that

really was no part of his commonplace personality. Yet I can remember

perfectly well that this was so, and that I deemed LeVallon more

wonderful than ever from that moment for being able to exact deference

even from an older man who was a Form Master and a Mathematical Master

into the bargain. For LeVallon, it seemed to me, had somehow positively

dismissed him.

Yet, to such extent did the pictures in my mind dominate the playground

where our bodies stood, that I almost expected to see the master go

down the “long stone steps towards the sunny orchard below”--instead

of walk up and cuff young Green who was destroying the wall by picking

out the mortar from between the bricks. That wall, and the white wall

in the dazzling sunshine seemed, as it were, to interpenetrate each

other. The break of key caused by the interruption, however, was barely

noticeable. The ugliness vanished instantly. Julius was speaking again

as though nothing had happened. He had been speaking for some little

time before I took in what the words were:

“... with the moonlight gleaming on the bosses of the shields ... the

sleet of flying arrows ... and the hissing of the javelins ...”

The battle-scene accompanying the sentence caught me so vividly, so

fiercely even, that I turned eagerly to him, all shyness gone, and let

my words pour out impetuously as they would, and as they willy-nilly

had to. For this scene, more than all the others, touched some intimate

desire, some sharp and keen ambition that burned in me to-day. My

whole heart was wrapped up in soldiering. I had chosen a soldier’s

career instinctively, even before I knew quite the meaning of it.

“Yes, rather!” I cried with enthusiasm, staring so close into his face

that I could have counted the tiny hairs on the smooth pale skin, “and

that narrow ledge high up inside the dome where the prisoners stood

until they dropped on to the spear-heads in the ground beneath, and how

some jumped at once, and others stood all day, and--and how there was

only just room to balance by pressing the feet sideways against the

curving wall...?”

It all rushed at me as though I had witnessed the awful scene a week

ago. Something inside me shook again with horror at the sight of the

writhing figures impaled upon the spears below. I almost felt a sharp

and actual pain pierce through my flesh. I overbalanced. It was my turn

to fall ...

A sudden smile broke swiftly over LeVallon’s face, as he held my arm a

moment with a strength that almost hurt.

“Ah, you remember _that!_ And little wonder----” he began, then stopped

abruptly and released his grip. The cricket ball came bouncing to

our feet across the yard, with insistent cries of “Thank you, ball!

Thank you, LeVallon!” impossible to ignore. He did not finish the

sentence, and I know not what shrinking impulse of suffering and

pain in me it was that felt relieved he had not done so. Instead, he

stooped good-naturedly, picked up the ball, and flung it back to the

importunate cricketers; and as he did so I noticed that his action was

unlike that of any English boy I had ever seen. He did not throw it as

men usually throw a ball, but used a violent yet graceful motion that I

vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere before. It perplexed me for

a moment--then, suddenly, out of that deeper part of me so strangely

now astir, the hint of explanation came. It was the action of a man who

flings a spear or javelin.

A bell rang over our heads with discordant clangour, and we were swept

across the yard with the rush of boys. The transition was abrupt and

even painful--as when one comes into the noisy street from a theatre

of music, lights and colour. A strong effort was necessary to recover

balance and pull myself together. Until we reached the red-brick porch,

however, LeVallon kept beside me, and his hurried last phrases, as we

parted, were the most significant of all. It seemed as if he kept them

for the end, although no such intention was probably in his thought.

They left me quivering through and through as I heard them fall from

his lips so quietly.

His face was shining. The words came from his inmost heart:

“Well, anyhow,” he said beneath his breath lest he might be overheard,

“I’ve found you, and we’ve found each other--at last. That’s the great

thing, isn’t it? No one here understands all that. Now, we can go on

together where we left off before; and, having found you, I expect I

shall soon find her as well. For we’re all three together, and--sooner

or later--there’s no escaping anything.”

I remember that I staggered. The hand I put out to steady myself

scraped along the uneven bricks and broke the skin. A boy with red

hair struck me viciously in the back because I had stumbled into him;

he shouted at me angrily too, though I heard no word he said. And

LeVallon, for his part, just had time to bend his head down with “work

hard and get up into my form--we shall have more chances then,” and was

gone into the passage and out of sight--leaving me trembling inwardly

as though stricken by some sudden strange attack of nerves.

For his words about the woman turned me inexplicably--into ice. My

legs gave way beneath me. A cold perspiration broke out upon my skin.

No words of any kind came to me; there was no definite thought; clear

recollection, absolutely none. The strange emotion itself I could

not put a name to, nor could I say what part was played in it by any

particular ingredient such as horror, terror, or mere ordinary alarm.

All these were in it somewhere, linked darkly to a sense of guilt at

length discovered and brought home. I can only say truthfully that I

saw again the picture of that woman with her back towards me; but that,

when he spoke, she turned and looked at me. She showed her face. I

knew a sense of dreadful chill like some murderer who, after years of

careful hiding, meets unexpectedly The Law and sees the gallows darkly

rise. A hand of justice--of retribution--seemed stretched upon my

shoulder from the empty sky.

I now set down my faithful recollection of what happened; and,

incredible as it doubtless sounds to-day, yet it was most distressingly

real. Out of what dim, forgotten past his words, this woman’s face,

arose to haunt “me” of To-day, I had no slightest inkling. What

crime of mine, what buried sin, came as with a blare of trumpets,

seeking requital, no slightest hint came whispering. Yet this was the

impression I instantly received. I was a boy. It terrified and amazed

me, but it held no element of make-believe. Julius LeVallon, myself,

and an unknown woman stood waiting on the threshold of the breathless

centuries to set some stone in its appointed place--a stone, moreover,

he, I, and she, together breaking mighty laws, had left upon the

ground. It seemed no common wrong to her, to him, to me, and yet we

three, working together, alone could find it and replace it.

This, somehow, was the memory his words, that face, struggled to

reconstruct.

I saw LeVallon smiling as he left my side. He disappeared in the

way already described. The stream of turbulent boys separated us

physically, just as, in his belief, the centuries had carried us apart

spiritually--he--myself--and this other. I saw a veil drop down upon

his face. The lamps in his splendid eyes were shrouded. At supper we

sat far apart, and the bedroom I shared with two other youngsters of my

own age and form, of course, did not include LeVallon.

CHAPTER III

“_Souls without a past behind them, springing suddenly into

existence, out of nothing, with marked mental and moral

peculiarities, are a conception as monstrous as would be the

corresponding conception of babies suddenly appearing from

nowhere, unrelated to anybody, but showing marked racial and

family types._”--“The Ancient Wisdom” (A. Besant).

As the terms passed and I ceased to be a new boy, it cannot be said

that I got to know Julius LeVallon any better, because our intimacy had

been established, or “resumed” as he called it, from the beginning;

but the chances of being together increased, we became members of the

same form, our desks were side by side, and we shared at length the

same bedroom with another Fifth Form boy named Goldingham. And since

Goldingham, studious, fat, good-natured, slept soundly from the moment

his head touched the pillow till the seven o’clock bell rang--and

sometimes after it in order to escape his cold bath--we practically had

the room to ourselves.

Moreover, from the beginning, it all seemed curiously true. It was

not Julius who invented, but I who in my stupidity had forgotten.

Long, detailed dreams, too, came to me about this time, which I

recognised as a continuation of these of “Other Places” his presence

near me in the daytime would revive. They existed, apparently, in

some layer deeper than my daily consciousness, recoverable in sleep.

In the daytime something sceptical in me that denied, rendered them

inaccessible, but once reason slept and the will was in abeyance, they

poured through me in a continuous, uninterrupted flow. A word from

Julius, a touch, a glance from his eyes perhaps, would evoke them

instantly, and I would _see_. Yet he made no potent suggestions that

could have caused them; there was no effort; I did not imagine at his

bidding; and often, indeed, his descriptions differed materially from

my own, which makes me hesitate to ascribe the results to telepathy

alone. It was his presence, his atmosphere that revived them. To-day,

of course, immediately after our schooldays in fact, they ceased to

exist for me--to my regret, I think, on the whole, for they were very

entertaining, and sometimes very exquisite. I still retain, however,

the vivid recollection of blazing summer landscapes; of people,

sometimes barbaric and always picturesque, moving in brilliant colours;

of plains, and slopes of wooded mountains that dipped, all blue and

thirsty, into quiet seas--scenes and people, too, utterly unlike any

I had known during my fifteen years of existence under heavy English

skies.

LeVallon knew this inner world far better and more intimately than

I did. He lived in it. Motfield Close, the private school among

the Kentish hills, was merely for him a place where his present

brain and body--instruments of his soul--were acquiring the current

knowledge of To-day. It was but temporary. He himself, the eternal

self that persisted through all the series of lives, was in quest

of other things, “real knowledge,” as he called it. For this reason

the recollection of his past, these “Other Places,” was of paramount

importance, since it enabled him to see where he had missed the central

trail and turned aside to lesser pursuits that had caused delay. He was

forever seeking to recover vanished clues, to pick them up again, and

to continue the main journey with myself and, eventually, with--one

other.

“I’ve always been after those things,” he used to say, “and I’m

searching, searching always--inside myself, for the old forgotten

way. We were together, you and I, so your coming back like this will

help----”

I interrupted, caught by an inexplicable dread that he would mention

another person too. I said the first thing that came into my head.

Instinctively the words came, yet right words:

“But my outside is different now. How could you know? My face and body,

I mean----?”

“Of course,” he smiled; “but I knew you instantly. I shall never forget

that day. I felt it at once--all over me. I had often dreamed about

you,” he added after a moment’s pause, “but that was no good, because

you didn’t dream with me.” He looked hard into my eyes. “We’ve a lot

to do together, you know,” he said gravely, “a lot of things to put

right--one thing, one big thing in particular--when the time comes.

Whatever happens, we mustn’t drift apart again. We shan’t.”

Another minute and I knew he would speak of “her.” It was strange, this

sense of shrinking that particular picture brought. Never, except in

sleep occasionally, had it returned to me, and I think it was my dread

that kept it out of sight. Yet Julius just then did not touch the topic

that caused my heart to sink.

“I must be off,” he exclaimed a moment later. “There’s ‘stinks’ to mug

up, and I haven’t looked at it. I shan’t know a blessed word!” For the

chemistry, known to the boys by this shorter yet appropriate name, was

a constant worry to him. He was learning it for the first time, he

found it difficult. But he was a boy, a schoolboy, and he talked like

one.

He never doubted for one instant that I was not wholly with him. He

assumed that I knew and remembered, though less successfully, and that

we merely resumed an interrupted journey. Pre-existence was as natural

to him as that a certain man and woman had provided his returning

soul with the means of physical expression, termed body. His soul

remembered; he, therefore, could not doubt. It was innate conviction,

not acquired theory.

“I can’t get down properly to the things I want,” he said another time,

“but they’re coming. It’s a rotten nuisance--learning dates and all

these modern languages keeps them out. The two don’t mix. But, now

you’re here, we can dig up a jolly sight more than I could alone. And

you’re getting it up by degrees all right enough.”

For the principle of any particular knowledge, once acquired, was never

lost. It was learning a thing for the first time that was the grind.

Instinctive aptitude was subconscious memory of something learned

before.

“The pity is we’re made to learn a lot of stuff that belongs to one

particular section, and doesn’t run through them all. It clogs the

memory. The great dodge is to recognise the real knowledge and go for

it bang. Then you get a bit further every section.”

Until my arrival, it seems, he kept these ideas strictly to himself,

knowing he would otherwise be punished for lying, or penalised in

some other educational manner for being too imaginative. Yet, while

he stood aloof somewhat from the common school life, he was popular

and of good repute. The boys admired, but stood in awe of him. He

pleased the masters almost as much as he puzzled them; for, unlike most

dreamy, fanciful youths, he possessed concentration and an imperious

will; he worked hard and always knew his lessons. Modern knowledge he

found difficult, and only mastered with great labour the details of

recent history, elementary science, chemistry, and so forth, whereas

in algebra, Euclid, mathematics, and the dead languages, especially

Greek, he invariably stood at the head of the form. He was merely

re-collecting them.

During the whole two years of our schooldays at the Close, I never

heard him use such phrases as “former life” or “reincarnation.” Life,

for him, was eternal simply, and at Motfield he was in eternal life,

just as he always had been and always would be. Only he never said

this. He was a boy and talked like a boy. He just lived it. Death to

him was an insignificant detail. His whole mind ran to the idea that

life was continuous, each section casting aside the worn-out instrument

which had been exactly suited to the experience its wearer needed

for its development at that time and under those conditions. And,

certainly, he never understood that astounding tenet of most religions,

that life can be “eternal” by prolonging itself endlessly in the

future, without having equally extended endlessly also in the past!

“But _I’m_ going to be a general,” I said, “when I grow up,” afraid

that the “real knowledge” might interfere with my main ambition. “I

could never think of giving up _that_.”

Julius looked up from tracing figures in the sand with the point of his

gymnasium shoe. There was a smile on his lips, a light in his eye that

I understood. I had said something that belonged to To-day, and not to

all To-days.

“You were before,” he answered patiently, “a magnificent general, too.”

“But I don’t remember it,” I objected, being in one of my denying moods.

“You want to be it again,” he smiled. “It’s born in you. That _is_

memory. But, anyhow,” he added, “you can do both--be a general with

your mind and the other thing with your soul. To shirk your job only

means to come back to it again later, don’t you see?”

Quite naturally, and with profound conviction, he spoke of life’s

obligations. Physical infirmities resulted from gross errors in the

past; mental infirmities, from lost intellectual opportunities;

spiritual disabilities, from past moral shirkings and delinquencies:

all were methods, moreover, by which the soul divines her mistakes

and grows, through discipline, stronger, wiser. He would point to a

weakness in someone, and suggest what kind of error caused it in a

previous section, with the same certainty that a man might show a scar

and say “that came from fooling with a mowing machine when I was ten

years old.”

The antipathies and sympathies of To-day, the sudden affinities like

falling in love at sight, and the sudden hostilities that apparently

had no cause--all were due to relationships in some buried Yesterday,

while those of To-morrow could be anticipated, and so regulated, by

the actions of To-day. Even to the smallest things. If, for instance,

Martin vented his spite and jealousy, working injustice upon another,

he but prepared the way for an exactly adequate reprisal later that

must balance the account to date. For into the most trivial affairs

of daily life dipped the spirit of this remarkable boy’s belief,

revealing as with a torch’s flare the workings of an implacable

justice that never could be mocked. No question of punishment meted

out by another entered into it, but only an impersonal law, which men

call--elsewhere--Cause and Effect.

At the time, of course, I was somewhat carried away by the thoroughness

with which he believed and practised these ideas, though without

grasping the logic and consistency of his intellectual position. I

was aware, most certainly, in his presence of large and vitalising

sensations not easily accounted for, of being caught up into some

unfamiliar region over vast horizons, where big winds blew from dim and

ancient lands, where a sunlight burned that warmed the inmost heart

in me, and where I seemed to lose myself amid the immensities of an

endless, vistaed vision.

This, of course, is the language of maturity. At the time I could not

express a tithe of what my feelings were, except that they were vast

and wonderful. To think myself back imaginatively, even now, into that

period of my youth with Julius LeVallon by my side, is to feel myself

eternally young, alive forever beyond all possibility of annihilation

or decay; it is, further, to realise an ample measure of lives at my

disposal in which to work towards perfection, the mere ageing and

casting off of any particular body after using it for sixty years or

so--nothing, and less than nothing.

“Don’t funk!” I remember his saying once to a boy named Creswick who

had “avoided” the charging Hurrish at football. “You can’t lose your

life. You can only lose your body. And you’ll lose that anyhow.”

“Crazy lout!” Creswick exclaimed, nursing his ankle, as he confided

to another boy of like opinions. “I’m not going to have my bones all

smashed to pulp for anybody. Body I’m using at the moment indeed! It’ll

be life I’m using at the moment next!”

Which, I take it, was precisely what LeVallon meant.

CHAPTER IV

“_In the case of personal relations, I do not see that heredity

would help us at all. Heredity, however, can produce a more

satisfactory explanation of innate aptitudes. On the other hand,

the doctrine of pre-existence does not compel us to deny all

influence on a man’s character of the character of his ancestors.

The character which a man has at any time is modified by any

circumstances which happen to him at that time, and may well be

modified by the fact that his re-birth is in a body descended

from ancestors of a particular character._”--Prof. J. M’Taggart.

There were numerous peculiarities about this individual with a foreign

name that I realise better on looking back than I did at the time.

Of his parentage and childhood I knew nothing, for he mentioned

neither, and his holidays were spent at school; but he was always well

dressed and provided with plenty of pocket-money, which he generously

shared. Later I discovered that he was an orphan, but a certain cruel

knowledge of the world whispered that he was something else as well.

This mystery of his origin, however, rather added to the wonder of him

than otherwise. Compared to the stretch of time behind, it seemed a

trifling detail of recent history that had no damaging significance.

“Julius LeVallon is my label for this section,” he observed, “and John

Mason is yours.” And family ties for him seemed to have no necessary

existence, since neither parents nor relations were of a man’s own

choosing. It was the ties deliberately formed, and especially the ties

renewed, that held real significance.

I thought of him as “foreign,” though, in a deeper sense than that he

was not quite English. He carried me away from England, but also away

from modern times; and something about him belonged to lands where

life was sunnier, more passionate, more romantic even, and where the

shadows of great Gods haunted blue, wooded mountains, vast plains and

deep, sequestered valleys. He claimed kinship somehow with an earlier

world, magical, unstained. Even his athletic gifts, admired of all, had

this subtle distinction too: the way he ran and jumped and “fielded”

was not English. At fives, squash-racquets, or with the cricket-bat he

fumbled badly, whereas in any game that demanded speed, adroitness,

swift intuitive decision, and physical dexterity of a certain

un-English kind--as against mere strength and pluck--he was supreme. He

was deer rather than bull-dog. The school-games of modern days he was

learning, apparently, for the first time.

In a corner of the field, where a copse of larches fringed the horizon

against the sloping woods and hop-poles in the distance, we used to

lie and talk for hours during playtime. The high-road skirted this

field, and a hedge was provided with a gate which, under penalties, was

the orthodox means of entrance. Few boys attempted any other, though

Peabody was once caught by the Head as he floundered through a thorny

opening with the jumping pole. But Julius never used the gate--nor was

ever caught. He would dart from my side with a few quick steps, leap

into the air, and fly soaring over the hedge, his feet tucked neatly

under him like a bird’s.

“Now,” he would say, as we flung ourselves down beneath the shade of

the larches, “we’ve got an hour or more. Let’s talk, and remember, and

get well down into it all.”

How it was accomplished I cannot hope to describe. The world about

me faded, another took its place. It rose in sheets and layers,

shimmering, alive, and amazingly familiar. Space and time seemed to

overlap, objects and scenery interpenetrated. There was fragrance,

light and colour; adventure and alarm; delight and ceaseless

expectation. It was a kind of fairyland where flowers never died, where

motion was swift as thought, and life seemed meted out on a more lavish

scale than by the meagre measurements of ticking clocks. And, while

the memories were often hard to disentangle, the marked idiosyncrasies

of our separate natures were never in the least confusion: _my_ passion

for adventure, _his_ to find the reality that lay behind all manifested

life. For this was the lode-star that guided him over the hills and

deserts of all his many “sections”--the unquenchable fever to learn

essential truth, to pierce behind the veil of appearances and discover

the secret nature of the soul, its origin, its destiny, the methods of

its full realisation.

It was a pastoral people that interested me most, primitive folk with

migratory habits not yet abandoned. Their herds roamed an enormous

territory. There was a Red Tribe and a Blue Tribe. The fighting men

used bows, spears and javelins, and carried shields with round, smooth

metal bosses to deflect the rain of arrows. And there was cavalry--two

thousand men on horseback called a “coorlie.” Julius and I both knew

it all as if we had lived with them, not merely read an invented tale;

and it was pictures of this land and people that had first flared up in

me that afternoon in the playground when he asked if I “remembered.”

Memories of my childhood a few years before had not half the vividness

and actuality of these. Nothing could have been more stupid than such

undistinguished legends, but for this convincing reality that was their

outstanding characteristic.... It all came back to me: the days and

nights of hunting, nomad existence, the wild freedom of open plains and

trackless forests, of migrations in the spring, wood fires, lawless

raids, and also of some kind of mighty worship that stirred me deeply

with an old, grand sense of Nature Deities adequately approached.

This latter fact, indeed, rose most possessingly upon me. There came

a vague uneasiness and discomfort with it. I was aware of brooding

Presences....

“And they are still about us if we care to look for them,” interrupted

a low voice in my ear, “ready to give us of their strength and

happiness, waiting to answer if we call....”

I looked up, disagreeably startled. A breath of wind stirred in the

branches overhead. The tufts of ragwort bent their yellow heads. In

the sky there was a curious glow and warmth. A sense of hush pervaded

all the air, as though someone had crept close to where we lay and

overheard our thoughts with sympathy.

And in that very moment, just as I looked up at Julius, the picture of

the woman, her face averted and her hands upraised, stole like a ghost

before my inner vision. She vanished into mist again; the layer that

had so suddenly disclosed itself, sank down; the other shifted up into

its former place; and my companion, I saw, with sharp amazement was

stretched upon his back, his head turned from me, resting on his folded

hands--as though he had not spoken any word at all. For his eyes, as

I then leaned over to discover, were gazing into space, and his mind

seemed intent upon pictures that he visualised for himself.

“Julius,” I said quickly, “you spoke to me just now?”

He turned slowly, as with an effort to tear himself away from what he

saw within him; he answered quietly:

“I may have spoken. I can’t be sure. Why do you ask? I’ve been so far

away.” His face was rapt as with some inner light. It had a radiant

look. There was no desire in me to insist.

“Oh, nothing,” I answered quickly, and lay down again to follow what

memories might come. The slight shiver that undeniably had touched me

went its way. There was relief, intense relief--that he had not taken

the clue I recklessly had offered. And, almost at once, the world about

me faded out once more, the larches dipped away, the field sank out of

sight. I plunged down into the sea of older memories....

I saw the sunlight flashing on shield and spear; I saw the hordes

all gathered in the plains below, a mass of waving plumes, with red

on the head-dress of the chieftains; I saw the river blackened by

the thousands crossing it, covering the opposite bank like swarms of

climbing ants.... I saw the chieftains lay aside their arms as they

entered the sacred precincts of the grove; I smelt the odour of the

sacrificial fires, heard the long-drawn droning of petitions, the cries

of the victims.... And then the sentry-fires behind the sleeping camps

... the stirring of the soldiers at dawn ... the perfume of leagues of

open plain ... muffled tramping far away ... wind ... fading stars ...

wild-flowers dripping with the dew....

There was fighting, too, galore; tremendous marches; signalling by

night from the mountain-tops with torches alternately hidden and

revealed; and of sacred rites, primitive and fraught with danger to

human life, no end....

In the middle of which up stole again that other layer, breathing

terror and shrinking dread, and with a vividness of actuality that put

all the rest into the shade. It could not, _would_ not be dismissed.

Its irruption was of but an instant’s duration, but in that instant

there flashed upon me a clear intuition of certainty. I knew that

Julius refrained purposely from speaking of this figure, because

he understood my dread might drive me from his side before what we

three must accomplish together was ripe for action, and because he

waited--till she should appear in person. And, before it vanished

again, I knew another thing: that what we three must accomplish

together had to do directly with the worship of these mighty, old-world

Nature Deities.

The stirring of these deep, curious emotions in me banished effectually

all further scenery. I sat up and began to talk. I laughed a little and

raised my voice. The sky, meanwhile, had clouded over, there was no

heat in the occasional gleams of sunshine.

“I’ve been hunting and fighting and the Lord knows what else besides,”

I exclaimed, touching Julius on the shoulder where he lay. “But somehow

I didn’t feel that you were with me--always.”

“It’s too awfully far back, for one thing,” he replied dreamily, as

if still half withdrawn, “and, for another, we both left that section

young. The three of us were not together then. That was a bit later.

All the same,” he added, “it was there you sowed the first seeds of

the soldiering instinct which is so strong in you to-day. I was killed

in battle. We were on opposite sides. You fell----”

“On the steps----” I cried, seizing a flashing memory.

“Of the House of Messengers,” he caught me up. “You carried the Blue

Stick of warning. You got down the street in safety when the flying

javelin caught you as you reached the very steps----”

There was a sound behind us in the field quite close.

“What in the world do you two boys find to talk about so much?” asked

the voice of Hurrish suddenly. “I’m afraid it’s not all elegiacs.” And

he laughed good-humouredly.

We turned with a start. Julius looked up, then rose and touched his

cap. I followed his example the same moment.

“No, sir,” he said, before I could think of anything to answer. “It’s

the Memory Game.”

Hurrish looked at him with a quiet smile upon his face. His expression

betrayed interest. But he said nothing, merely questioning with his

eyes.

“The most wonderful game you ever played, sir,” continued Julius.

“Indeed! The most wonderful game you ever played?” Hurrish repeated,

yet by no means unkindly.

“Getting down among the memories of--of before, sir. Recovering what we

did, and what we were--and so understanding what we are to-day.”

The master stared without a sign of emotion upon his face. Apparently,

in some delightful way, he understood. He was very sympathetic, I

remember, to both of us. We thought the world of him, respecting

him almost to the point of personal affection; and this in spite of

punishments his firm sense of justice often obliged him to impose. I

think, at that moment, he divined what Julius meant and even felt more

sympathy than he cared to show.

“The Memory Game,” he repeated, looking quizzically down at us over the

top of his glasses. “Well, well.” He hummed and hesitated a moment,

choosing his words, it seemed, with care. “There’s a good deal of that

in the air just now, I know--as you’ll discover for yourselves when

you leave here and get into the world outside. But, remember,” he went

on with a note of earnestness and warning in his voice, “most of it is

little better than a feeble, yet rather dangerous, form of hysteria,

with vanity as a basis.”

I hardly understood what he meant myself, but I saw the quick flush

that coloured the pale cheeks of my companion.

“There are numbers of people about to-day,” continued Hurrish, as we

walked home slowly across the field, “who pretend to remember all kinds

of wonderful things about themselves and about their past, not one of

which can be justified. But it only means, as a rule, that they wish

to appear peculiar by taking up the fad of the moment. They like to

glorify themselves, though few of them understand even the A B C of the

serious belief that _may_ lie behind it all.”

Julius squeezed my arm; the flush had left his skin; he was listening

eagerly.

“You may later come across a good many thinking people, too,” said

the master, “who play your Memory Game, or think they do, and some

among them who claim to have carried it to an extraordinary degree of

perfection. There are ways and means, it is said. I do not deny that

their systems may be worthy of investigation; I merely say it is a good

plan to approach the whole thing with caution and common sense.”

He glanced down first at one, then the other of us, with a grave and

kindly expression in the eyes his glasses magnified so oddly.

“And most who play it,” he added dryly, “remember so much of their

wonderful past that they forget to do their ordinary duties in their

very commonplace present.” He chuckled a little, while Julius again

gripped my flesh so hard that I only just prevented crying out.

“I’ll remember him in a minute--if only I can get down far enough,” he

managed to whisper in my ear. “We were together----”

We had reached the gate, and were walking down the road towards the

house. It was very evident that Hurrish understood more than he cared

to admit about our wonderful game, and was trying to guide us rather

than to deride instinctive beliefs.

That night in our bedroom, when Goldingham was asleep and snoring,

I felt a touch upon my pillow, and looking up from the edge of

unconsciousness, saw the white outline of Julius beside the bed.

“Come over here,” he whispered, pointing to a shaded candle on the

chest of drawers, “I’ve got something to show you. Something Hurrish

gave me--something out of a book.”

We peered together over a page of writing spread before us. Julius

was excited and very eager. I do not think he understood it much

better than I myself did, but it was the first time he had come across

anything approaching his beliefs in writing. The discovery thrilled

him. The authority of print was startling.

“He said it was somebody or other of importance, an Authority,”

Julius whispered as I leaned over to read the fine handwriting. “It’s

Hurrish’s,” I announced. “Rather,” Julius answered. “But he copied it

from a book. _He_ knows right enough.”

Oddly enough, the paper came eventually into my hands, though how I

know not; I found it many years later in an old desk I used in those

days. I have it now somewhere. The name of the author, however, I quite

forget.

“The moral and educational importance of the belief in metempsychosis,”

it ran, as our fingers traced the words together in the uncertain

candle-light, “lies in the fact that it is a manifestation of the

instinct that we are not ‘complete,’ and that one life is not enough to

enable us to reach that perfection whither we are urged by the inmost

depths of our being, and also an evidence of the belief that all human

action will be inevitably rewarded or punished----”

“Rewards or punishes _itself_,” interrupted Julius; “it’s not

punishment at all really.”

“And this is an importance that must not be underestimated,” the

interrupted sentence concluded. “In so far,” we read on together,

somewhat awed, I think, to tell the truth, “as the theory is based upon

the supposition that a personal divine power exists and dispenses this

retributive justice----”

“Wrong again,” broke in Julius, “because it’s just the law of natural

results--there’s nothing personal about it.”

“--and that the soul must climb a long steep path to approach this

power, does metempsychosis preserve its religious character.”

“He means going back into animals as well--which _never_ happens,”

commented the excited boy beside me once again. We read to the end then

without further interruption.

“This, however, is not all. The Theory is also the expression of

another idea which gives it a philosophical character. It is the

earliest intellectual attempt of man, when considering the world

and his position in it, to conceive that world, not as alien to

him, but as akin to him, and to incorporate himself and his life

as an indispensable and eternal element in the past and future of

the world with which it forms one comprehensive totality. I say

an eternal element, because, regarded philosophically, the belief

in metempsychosis seems a kind of unconscious anticipation of the

principle now known as ‘Conservation of Energy.’ Nothing that has ever

existed can be lost, either in life or by death. All is but change; and

hence souls do not perish, but return again and again in ever-changing

forms. Moreover, later developments of metempsychosis, especially as

conceived by Lessing, can without difficulty be harmonised with the

modern idea of evolution from lower to higher forms.”

“That’s all,” Julius whispered, looking round at me.

“By George!” I replied, returning his significant stare.

“I promised Hurrish, you know,” he added, blowing out the candle.

“Promised I’d read it to you.”

“All right,” I answered in the dark.

And, without further comment or remark, we went back to our respective

beds, and quickly so to sleep.

Before taking the final plunge, however, into oblivion, I heard the

whisper of Julius, sharply audible in the silence, coming at me across

the darkened room:

“It’s all rot,” he said. “The chap who wrote that was simply thinking

with his brain. But it’s not the brain that remembers; it’s the other

part of you.” There was a pause. And then he added, as though after

further reflection: “Don’t bother about it. There’s lots of stuff like

that about--all tommy-rot and talk, that’s all. Good night! We’ll dream

together now and p’raps remember.”

CHAPTER V

“_We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious

Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose

mental processes go on at such different time-rates to ours that

we cannot easily adjust ourselves to an appreciation of their

inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of

their presence.... Nature is a vast realm of finite consciousness

of which your own is at once a part and an example._”--Royce.

There was a great deal more in LeVallon, however, than the Memory Game:

he brought a strange cargo with him from these distant shores, where,

apparently, I--to say nothing of another--had helped to load it. Bit by

bit, as my own machinery of recovery ran more easily, I tapped other

layers also in myself. Our freight was slowly discharged. We examined

and discussed each bale, as it were, but I soon became aware that

there was a great deal he kept back from me. This secrecy first piqued

and then distressed me. It brought mystery between us; there stood a

shadowy question-mark in our relationship.

I divined the cause, and dreaded it--that is, I dreaded the revelation

he would sooner or later make. For I guessed--I _knew_--what it

involved and whom. I asked no questions. But I noticed that at a

certain point our conversations suddenly stopped, he changed the

subject, or withdrew abruptly into silence. And something sinister

gripped my heart. Behind it, closely connected in some undiscovered

manner, lay two things I have already mentioned: the woman, and the

worship.

This reconstruction of our past together, meanwhile, was--for a pair

of schoolboys--a thrilling pursuit that never failed to absorb. Stone

by stone we built it up. After often missing one another, sometimes by

a century, sometimes by a mere decade or so, our return at last had

chimed, and we found ourselves on earth again. We had inevitably come

together. There was no such thing as missing eventually, it seemed.

Debts must be discharged between those who had incurred them. And,

chief among these mutual obligations, I gathered, were certain dealings

we had together in connection with some form of Nature worship, during

a section he referred to as our “Temple Days.”

The character of these dealings was one of those secret things that he

would not disclose; he knew, but would not speak of it; and alone I

could not “dig it up.” Moreover, the effect upon me here was decidedly

a mixed one, for while there was great beauty in these Temple Days,

there lurked behind this portion of them--terror. We had not been alone

in this. Involved somehow or other with us was “the woman.”

Julius would talk freely of certain aspects of this period, of various

practices, physical, mental, spiritual, and of gorgeous ceremonies

that were stimulating as well as true, pertaining undoubtedly to

some effective worship of the sun, that resulted in the obtaining of

enormous energy by the worshippers; but after a certain point he would

say no more, and would deliberately try to shift back to some other

“layer” altogether. And it was sheer cowardice in me that prevented my

forcing a declaration. I burned to know, yet was afraid.

“I do wish I could remember better,” I said once.

“It comes gradually of itself,” he answered, “and best of all when

you’re not thinking at all. The top part gets thin, and suddenly you

see down into clear deep water. The top part, of course, is recent; it

smothers the older things.”

“Like thick sand, mine is,” I said, “heaps and heaps of it.”

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“The pictures of To-day hide those of Yesterday,” he explained. “You

can’t remember two things at once. If your head is stuffed with what’s

happening at the moment, you can’t expect to remember what happened a

month ago. Dig back. It’s trying that starts it moving.”

Ancient as the stars themselves appeared the origins of our friendship

and affection of to-day.

“Then I didn’t get as far as you--in those Temple Days?” I asked.

He glanced sharply at me beneath his long dark eyelids. He hesitated a

moment.

“You began,” he answered presently in a low voice, “but got

caught later by--something in the world--fighting, or money, or a

woman--something sticky like that. And you left me for a time.”

Any temptation that enticed the soul from “real knowledge” he described

as “sticky.”

“For several sections you fooled with things that counted for the

moment, but were not carried over through the lot. You came back to

the real ones--but too late.” His voice sank down into a whisper; his

face was grave and troubled. Shrinking stole over me. There was the

excitement that he was going to tell me something, yet the dread, too,

that I should hear it. “But now,” he went on, half to himself and half

to me, “we can put that right. Our chance--at last--is coming.” These

last words he uttered beneath his breath.

And then he abruptly shifted the subject, leaving me with a strangely

disquieting emotion that I should be drawn against my will into

something that I dreaded yet could not possibly avoid. The expression

of his face chilled my heart. He pulled me down upon the grass beside

him. “You’ve got to burrow down inside yourself,” he went on earnestly,

raising his voice again to its normal pitch, “that’s where it all lies

buried. Once you get it up by yourself, you’ll understand. Then you can

help me.”

His own excitement ran across the air to me. I felt grandeur in his

wonderful conception--this immense river of our lives, the justice of

inevitable cause and effect, the ultimate importance of every action,

word and thought, and, what appealed to me most of all, the idea

that results depended upon one’s own character and will without the

hiring of exalted substitutes to make it easy. Even as a boy this all

appealed strongly to me, probably to the soldier fighting-instinct that

was my chief characteristic....

Of these Temple Days with their faint, flying pictures I retain

fascinating recollections. In them was nothing to suggest any country

I could name, certainly neither Egypt, Greece nor India. Julius spoke

of some great civilisation in which primitive worship of some true kind

combined with accomplishments we might regard to-day as the result of

trained and accurate science. It involved union somehow with great

“natural” forces. There was awe in it, but an atmosphere, too, of

wonder, power and aspiration of a genuinely lofty type.

It left upon me the dim impression that it was not on the earth at

all. But, for me it was too thickly veiled for detailed recovery,

though an invincible instinct whispered that it was here “the woman”

first intruded upon our joint relationship. I saw, with considerable

sharpness, however, delightful pictures of what was evidently

sun-worship, though of an intelligent rather than a superstitious

kind. We seemed nearer to the sun than we are to-day, differently

constituted, aware of greater powers; there was vast heat, there were

gigantic, mighty winds. In this heat, through these colossal winds,

came deity. The elemental powers were its manifestation. The sun, the

planets, the entire universe, in fact, seemed then alive; we knew it

was alive; we were kin with every point in it; and worship of a sun,

a planet, or a tree, as the case might be, somehow drew their beings

into definite relationship with our own, even to the point of leaving

the characteristics of their particular Powers in our systems. A human

being was but _one_ living detail of a universe in which all other

details were equally living and equally--possibly more--important.

Nature was a power to be experienced, shared, and natural objects had

a meaning in their own right. We read the phenomena of Nature as signs

and symbols, clear as the black signs of writing on a printed page.

Out of many talks together, Julius and I recovered all this. Alone

I could not understand it. Julius, moreover, believed it still

to-day. Though nominally, and in his life as well, a Christian, he

always struck me as being intensely religious, yet without a definite

religion. It was afterwards, of course, I realised this, when my

experience of modern life was larger. He was unfettered by any little

dogmas of man-made creeds, but obeyed literally the teaching of the

Sermon on the Mount, which he knew by heart. It was essential spiritual

truth he sought. His tolerance and respect for all the religions of

to-day were based upon the belief that each contained a portion of

truth at least. His was the attitude of a perfect charity--of an

“old soul,” as he phrased it later, who “had passed through all the

traditions.” His belief included certainly God and the gods, Nature and

Christ, temples of stone and hills and woods and that temple of the

heart which is the Universe itself. True worship, however, was _with_

Nature.

A vivid picture belongs to this particular “layer.” I saw the light

of a distant planet being used, apparently in some curative sense, by

human beings. It took place in a large building. Long slits in the roof

were so arranged that the planet shone through them exactly upon the

meridian. Dropping through the dusky atmosphere, the rays were caught

by an immense concave mirror of polished metal that hung suspended

above an altar where the smoke of incense rose; and, since a concave

mirror forms at its focus in the air before it an image of whatever is

reflected in its depths, a radiant image of the planet stood shining

there in the heart of the building. It was a picture of arresting

beauty and significance. Gleaming overhead, hung a mirror of still

mightier proportions that caught the reflected rays and poured them

down in a stream of intensified light upon the backs of men and women

who lay naked on the ground, waiting to receive them.

“The quality of that particular planet is what they need,” whispered

Julius, as we watched together; “the light-cures of that age have

hardly changed,” he laughed; “the principle, at least, remains the

same.”

There was another scene as well in which I saw motionless, stretched

figures. I could never see it clearly, though. Darkness invariably

rolled down and hid it; and I had the idea that LeVallon tried to

prevent its complete recovery--just then. Nor was I sorry at this, for

beyond it lay something that seemed the source of the shrinking dread

that haunted me. If I saw all, I should see also--_her_. I should know

the secret thing Julius kept back from me, the thing we three had

somehow to “set right again.” And once, when this particular scene was

in my mind and Julius, I felt sure, was seeing it too, as he lay beside

me on the grass, there passed into me a sudden sensation of a kind I

find it difficult to describe. There was yearning in it, but there was

anguish too, and a pain as of deep, unfathomable regret wholly beyond

me to account for. It swept into me, I think, from him.

I turned suddenly. He lay, I saw, with his face hidden in his hands;

his shoulders shook as though he sobbed; and it seemed that some

memory of great poignancy convulsed him. For several minutes he lay

speechless in this way, yet an air of privacy about him, that forbade

intrusion. Once or twice I surprised him under these curious attacks;

they were invariably connected with this particular “inner scenery”;

and sometimes were followed by bouts of that nameless and mysterious

illness that kept him in the sick-room for several days. But I asked no

questions, and he vouchsafed no explanation.

On this particular point, at least, I asked no questions; but on the

general subject of my uneasiness I sometimes probed him.

“This sense of funk when I remember these old forgotten things,” I

asked, “what is it? Why does it frighten me?”

Gazing at me out of those strange eyes that saw into so huge a

universe, he answered softly:

“It’s a faint memory too--of the first pains and trials you suffered

when you began to learn. You feel the old wrench and strain.”

“It hurt so----?”

He nodded, with that smile of yearning that sometimes shone so

beautifully on his face.

“At first,” he replied. “It seemed like losing your life--until you got

far enough to know the great happiness of the bigger way of living.

Coming back to me like this revives it. We began to learn together, you

see.”

I mentioned the extraordinary feelings of the playground when first I

spoke with him, and of the class-room when first we saw each other.

“Ah,” he sighed, “there’s no mistaking it--the coming together of old

friends or enemies. The instant the eyes meet, the flash of memory

follows. Only, the tie must have been real, of course, to make it

binding.”

“How can it ever end?” I asked. “Each time starts it all going again.”

“By starting the opposite. Love dissolves the link. Understand why you

hate--and at once it lessens. Sympathy follows, feeling-with--that’s

love; and love sets you both free. It’s not thinking, but feeling that

makes the strongest chains.”

And it was speaking of “feeling” that led to his saying things I

have never forgotten. For thinking, in those older days, seemed of

small account. It was an age of feeling, chiefly. Feeling was the

way to knowledge: here was the main difference between To-day and

those far-off Yesterdays. The way to know an object was to feel

it--feel-with it. The simplicity of the method was as significant as

its--impossibility! Yet a fundamental truth was in it.

To know a thing was not to enumerate merely its qualities. To state the

weight, colour, texture of a stone, for instance, was merely to mention

its external characteristics; whereas to think of it till it became

part of the mind, seen from its own point of view, was to know it as

it actually is. The mind felt-with it. It became a part of yourself.

Knowledge, as Julius understood the word, was identifying himself with

the object: it became part of the substance of the mind: it was known

from within.

Communion with inanimate objects, with Nature itself, was in this way

actually possible.

“Dwell upon anything you like,” he said, “to the point where you feel

it, and you get it all exactly as it _is_, not merely as _you_ see it.

Its quality, its power, becomes a part of yourself. Take trees, rivers,

mountains, take wind and fire in this way--and you feel their power in

you. You can use them. That was the way of worship--then.”

“The sun itself, the planets, anything?” I asked eagerly, recognising

something that seemed once familiar to me.

“Anything,” he replied quietly. “Copy their own movements too, and

you’ll get nearer still. Imitate the attitude and gestures of a

stranger and you begin to understand what he’s up to, his point of

view--what he’s feeling. You begin to know him. All ceremonies began

that way. On that big plain where the worship of the sun was held, the

smaller temples represented the planets, the distances all calculated

in proper ratio from the heavens. We copied their movements exactly,

as we moved, thousands and thousands of us, in circular form about the

centre. We felt-with them, got all joined up to the whole system; by

imitating their gestures, we understood them and absorbed a portion of

their qualities and powers. Our energy became as theirs. Acting the

ceremony brought the knowledge, don’t you see? Oh, it’s scientific,

right enough,” he added. “It’s not going backwards--instinctive

knowledge. It’s a pity it’s forgotten now.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“I’ve done it so often. You’ve done it with me. Alone, of course, it’s

difficult to get results; but when a lot together do it--a crowd--a

nation--the whole world--you could shift Olympus into the Ægean, or

bring Mars near enough to throw a bridge across!”

We burst out laughing together, though his face instantly again grew

grave and earnest.

“It will come,” he said, “it will come again in time. When the idea of

brotherhood has spread, and the separate creeds have merged, and the

whole world feels the same thing together--it will come. It’s another

order of consciousness, that’s all.”

His passionate conviction certainly stirred joy and wonder in me

somewhere. It was stupendous, yet so simple. The universe was knowable;

its powers assimilable by human beings. Here was true Nature Magic, the

elements co-operating, the stars alive, the sun a deity to be known and

felt.

“And that’s why concentration gives such power,” he added. “By feeling

anything till you _feel-with_ it and become it, you know every blessed

thing about it from inside. You have instinctive knowledge of it.

Mistakes become impossible. You live and act with the whole universe.”

And, as I listened, it seemed a kind of childish presumption that had

shut us off from the sun, the stars, the numerous other systems of

space, and that reduced knowledge to the meagre statement of a people

dwelling upon one unimportant globe of comparatively recent matter in

one of the smaller solar systems.

Our earth, indeed, was not the centre of the universe; it was but

a temporary point in the long, long journey of the River of Lives.

The soul would eventually traverse a million other points. It was so

integral a part of everything, so intimately akin to every corner and

aspect of the cosmos, that a “human” being’s relative position to

the very stars, the angle at which he met their light and responded

to the tension of their forces, must necessarily affect his inmost

personality. If the moon could raise the tides, she could assuredly

cause an ebb and flow in the fluids of the human body, and how could

men and women expect to resist the stress and suction of those

tremendous streams of power that played upon the earth from the network

of great distant suns? Times and seasons, now known as feast-days

and the like, were likewise of significance. There were moments, for

instance, in the “ceremony” of the heavens when it was possible to see

more easily in one direction than in another, when certain powers,

therefore, were open and accessible. The bridges then were clear, the

channels open. A revelation of intenser life--from the universe, from a

star, from mountains, rivers, winds or forests--could then steal down

and leave their traces in the heart and passion of a human being. For,

just as there is a physical attitude of prayer by which the human body

invites communion, so times and seasons were attitudes and gestures

of that greater body of Nature when results could be most favourably

expected.

It was all very bewildering, very big, very curious; but if I protested

that it merely meant a return to the unreasoning superstitious days of

Nature Magic, there was something in me at the same time that realised

vital, forgotten truth behind it all. Cleansed and scientific, Julius

urged, it must return into the world again. What men formerly knew by

feeling, an age now coming would justify and demonstrate by brain and

reason. Touch with the universe would be restored. We should go back to

Nature for peace and power and progress. Scientific worship would be

known.

Yet by worship he meant not merely kneeling before an Ideal and praying

eagerly to resemble it; but approaching a Power and acquiring it. What

heat in itself may be we do not know; only that without it we collapse

into inert particles. What lies behind, beyond the physicist’s account

of air as a gas, remains unknown; deprived of it, however, we cease to

breathe and be conscious in matter. Each moment we feel the sun, take

in the air, we live; and the more we accomplish this union, the more we

are alive. In addition to these physical achievements, however, their

essential activities could be known and acquired spiritually. And the

means was that worship which is union--feeling-with.

To Julius this achievement was a literal one. The elements were an

expression of spiritual powers. To be in touch with them was to be

in touch with a Whole in which the Earth or Sirius are, after all,

but atoms. Moreover, it was a conscious Whole. In atoms themselves he

found life too. Chemical affinity involved intelligence. Certain atoms

refuse to combine with certain other atoms, they are hostile to each

other; while others rush headlong into each other’s arms. How do the

atoms know?

Here lay hints of powers he sought to reclaim for human use and human

help and human development.

“For they were known once,” he would cry. “We knew them, you and I.

Their nature is not realised to-day; consciousness has lost touch

with them. We recall a broken fragment, but label it superstition,

ignorance, and the like. And, being incomplete, these remnants of

necessity seem childish. Their meaning cannot come through the brain,

and that other mode of consciousness which understood has left us now.

The world, pursuing a lesser ideal, denies its forgotten greatness with

a sneer!”

A great deal of this he said to me one day while we were walking home

from church, whose “service” had stirred him into vehement and eager

utterance. His language was very boyish, and yet it seemed to me that I

listened to someone quite as old as Dr. Randall, the Headmaster who had

preached. I can see the hedges, wet and shining after rain; the dull

November sky; ploughed fields and muddy lanes. I can hear again the

plover calling above the hill. Nothing could possibly have been more

uninspiring than the dreary hop-poles, the moist, depressing air, the

leafless elms, and the “Sunday feeling” amid which the entire scene was

laid.

The boys straggled along the road in twos and threes, hands in pockets,

points of Eton jackets sticking out behind. Hurrish, the nice master,

was just in front of us, walking with Goldingham. I saw the latter turn

his face up sideways as he asked some question, and I suddenly wondered

whether he knew how odd he looked, or, indeed, what he looked like at

all. I wondered what sort of “sections” and adventures Goldingham,

Hurrish, and all these Eton-jacketed boys had been through before they

arrived at _this;_ and next it flashed across me what a grotesque

result it was for LeVallon to have reached after so many picturesque

and stimulating lives--an Eton jacket, a mortar-board, and tight

Wesleyan striped trousers.

And now, as I recall these curious recollections of years ago, it

occurs to me as remarkable that, although a sense of humour was not

lacking in either of us, yet neither then nor now could the spirit of

the comic, and certainly never of the ludicrous, rob by one little

jot the reality, the deep, convincing actuality of these strange

convictions that LeVallon and I shared together when at Motfield Close

we studied Greek and Latin, while remembering a world before Greeks or

Latins ever existed at all.

CHAPTER VI

“_There seems nothing in pre-existence incompatible with any

of the dogmas which are generally accepted as fundamental to

Christianity._”--Prof. M’Taggart.

By my last half-year at Motfield Close, when I was Head of the school,

LeVallon had already left, but the summer term preceding his departure

is the one most full of delightful recollections for me. He was Head

then--which proves that he was sufficiently normal and practical to

hold that typically English position, and to win respect in it--and I

was “Follow-on Head,” as we called it.

I suppose he was verging on eighteen at the time, for neither

of us was destined for a Public School later, and we stayed on

longer than the general run of boys. We still shared the room with

Goldingham--“Goldie,” who went on to Wellington and Sandhurst, and

afterwards lost his life in the Zulu War--and we enjoyed an unusual

amount of liberty. The “triumvirate” the masters called us, and I

remember that we were proud of topping Hurrish by half an inch, each

being over six feet in his socks.

With peculiar pleasure, too, I recall the little class we formed by

ourselves in Greek, and the hours spent under Hurrish’s sympathetic and

enthusiastic guidance, reading Plato for the first time. Hurrish was

an admirable scholar, and myself and Goldie, though unable to match

LeVallon’s singular and intuitive mastery of the language, made up

for our deficiency by working like slaves. The group was a group of

enthusiasts, not of mere plodding schoolboys. But Julius it undoubtedly

was who fed the little class with a special subtle fire of his own,

and with a spirit of searching interpretative insight that made the

delighted Hurrish forget that he was master and Julius pupil. And in

the “Sympathetic Studies” the former published later upon Plotinus and

some of the earlier Gnostic writings, I certainly traced more than

one illuminating passage to its original inspiration in some remark

let fall by LeVallon in those intimate talks round Hurrish’s desk at

Motfield Close.

But what comes back to me now with a kind of veritable haunting wonder

that almost makes me sorry such speculations are no longer possible,

were the talks and memories we enjoyed together in our bedroom. For

there was a stimulating excitement about these whispered conversations

we held by the open window on summer nights--an atmosphere of stars

and scented airs and hushed silent spaces beyond the garden--that

comes back to me now with an added touch of mystery and beauty both

compelling and suggestive. When I think of those bedroom hours I step

suddenly out of the London murk and dinginess, out of the tedium

of my lecturing and teaching, into a vast picture gallery of vivid

loveliness. The scenery of mighty dreams usurps the commonplace

realities of the present.

Ten o’clock was the hour for lights out, and by ten-fifteen Goldie,

with commendable regularity, was asleep and snoring. We thanked him

much for that, as somebody says in “Alice,” and Julius, as soon as the

signal of Goldie’s departure became audible, would creep over to my

bed, touch me on the shoulder, and give the signal to drag the bolsters

from a couple of unused beds and plant ourselves tailor-wise in our

dressing-gowns before the window.

“It’s like the old, old days,” he would say, pointing to the sky.

“The stars don’t change much, do they?” He indicated the dim terraces

of lawn with the tassel of his dressing-gown. “Can’t you imagine it

all? _I_ can. There were the long stone steps--don’t you see?--below,

running off into the plain. Behind us, all the halls and vestibules,

cool and silent, veil after veil hiding the cells for meditation, and

over there in the corner the little secret passages down to the crypts

below ground where the tests took place. Better put a blanket round

you if you’re cold,” he added, noticing that I shivered, though it was

excitement and not cold that sent the slight trembling over my body.

“And there”--as the church clock sounded the hour across the Kentish

woods and fields--“are the very gongs themselves, I swear, the great

gongs that swung in the centre of the dome.”

Goldie’s peaceful snoring, and an occasional closing of a door as one

master after another retired to his room in the house below, were the

only sounds that reminded me of the present. Julius, sitting beside me

in the starlight, his eyes ashine, his pale skin gleaming under the mop

of tangled dark hair, whispered words that conjured up not only scenes

and memories, but the actual feelings, atmosphere and emotions of

days more ancient than any dreams. I smelt the odour of dim, pillared

aisles, tasted the freshness of desert air, heard the high rustle

of other winds in palm and tamarisk. The Past that never dies swept

down upon us from sky and Kentish countryside with the murmur of the

night-breeze in the shrubberies below. It enveloped us completely.

“Not the stars we knew together _first_--not the old outlines we once

travelled by,” he whispered, describing in the air with his finger the

constellations presumably of other skies. “That was earlier still.

Yet the general look is the same. You can feel the old tinglings

coming down from some of them.” And he would name the planet that was

in ascension at the moment, with invariable correctness I found out

afterwards, and describe the particular effect it produced upon his

thoughts and imagination, the moods and forces it evoked, the mental

qualities it served--in a word its psychic influence upon the inner

personality.

“Look,” he whispered, but so suddenly that it made me start. He pointed

to the darkened room behind us. “Can’t you almost see the narrow slit

in the roof where the rays came through and fell upon the metal discs

swinging in mid-air? Can’t you see the rows of dark-skinned bodies on

the ground? Can’t you feel the minute and crowding vibrations of the

light on your flesh, as the disc swung round and the stream fell down

in a jolly blaze all over you?”

And, though I saw nothing in the room but faintly luminous patches

where the beds stood, and the two tin baths upon the floor, a vivid

scene rose before my mind’s eye that stirred poignant emotions I was

wholly at a loss to explain. The consciousness of some potent magical

life stirred in my veins, a vaster horizon, and a larger purpose than

anything I had known hitherto in my strict and conventional English

life and my quaint worship in a pale-blue tin tabernacle where all was

ugly, cramped, and literally idolatrous.

“And the gongs so faintly ringing,” I cried.

Julius turned quickly and thrust his face closer into mine. Then he

stood up beside the open window and drew in a deep breath of the June

night air.

“Ah, you remember that?” he said, with eyes aglow. “The gongs--the big

singing gongs! There you had a bit of clean, deep memory right out of

the centre. No wonder you feel excited...!”

And he explained to me, though I scarcely recognised the voice or

language, so strongly did the savour of shadowy past days inform them,

how it was in those old temples when the world was not cut off from

the rest of the universe, but claimed some psychical kinship with all

the planetary and stellar forces, that each planet was represented by

a metal gong so attuned in quality and pitch as to vibrate in sympathy

with the message of its particular rays, sound and colour helping and

answering one another till the very air trembled and pulsed with the

forces the light brought down. No doubt, Julius’s words, vibrating

with earnestness, completed my confusion while they intensified my

enjoyment, for I remember how carried away I was by this picture of the

temples acting as sounding-boards to the sky, and by his description

of the healing powers of the light and sound thus captured and

concentrated.

The spirit of comedy peeped in here and there between the entr’actes,

as it were, for even the peaceful and studious Goldie was also

included in these adventures of forgotten days, sometimes consciously,

sometimes unconsciously.

“By the gods!” Julius exclaimed, springing up, “I’ve an idea! We’ll try

it on Goldie, and see what happens!”

“Try what?” I whispered, catching his own excitement.

“Gongs, discs and planet,” was the reply.

I stared at him through the gloom. Then I glanced towards the

unconscious victim.

“There’s no harm. We’ll imagine this is one of the old temples, and

we’ll do an experiment!” He touched me on the back. Excitement ran

through me. Something caught me from the past. I watched him with an

emotion that was half amazement, half alarm.

In a moment he had the looking-glass balanced upon the window-ledge at

a perilous angle, reflecting the faint starlight upon the head of the

sleeping Goldingham. Any minute I feared it would fall with a crash

upon the lawn below, or break into smithereens upon the floor. Julius

fixed it somehow with a hair-brush and a towel against the sash.

“Get the disc,” he whispered, and after a moment’s reflection I

understood what he meant; I emptied one bath as quietly as possible

into the other, then dragged it across the carpet to the bedside of the

snoring Goldie who was to be “healed.” The ridiculous experiment swept

me with such a sense of reality, owing to the intense belief LeVallon

injected into it, that I never once felt inclined to laugh. I was only

vaguely afraid that Goldingham might somehow suffer.

“It’s Venus,” exclaimed Julius under his breath. “She’s in the

ascendant too. That’s the luck of the gods, isn’t it?”

I whispered something in reply, wondering dimly what Goldie might think.

“You bang the bath softly for the sound,” said he, “while I hold it

up for you. We _may_ hit the right note--the vibrations that fit in

with the rate of the light, I mean--though it’s a bit of a chance, I

suppose!”

I obeyed, thinking of masters sleeping down below in the silent

building.

“Louder!” exclaimed Julius peremptorily.

I obeyed again, with a dismal result resembling tin cans in orgy. And

the same minute the good-natured and studious Goldingham awoke with a

start and stretched out a hand for his glasses.

“Feel anything unusual, Goldie?” asked LeVallon at once, tremendously

in earnest, as he lowered the tin bath.

“Oh, it’s only _you!_” exclaimed the victim, awakened out of his first

sleep and blinking in the gloom, “and _you!_” he added, catching sight

of me, my fist still upraised to beat; “rotten brutes, both of you!

You _might_ let a fellow sleep a bit. You know I’m swotting up for an

exam.!”

“But do you _feel_ anything, Goldie?” insisted LeVallon, as though it

were a matter of life and death. “It was Venus, you know....”

“Was it?” spluttered the other, catching sight of the big bath between

him and the open window. “Well, Venus is beastly cold. Who opened the

window?” The sight of the bath apparently unnerved him. He hardly

expected it before seven in the morning.

Further explanations were cut short by the sudden collapse of the

mirror with a crash of splintering glass upon the floor. The noise of

the bath, that pinged and boomed as I balanced it against the bed,

completed the uproar. Then the door opened, and there stood--Martin.

It was an awkward moment. Yet it was not half as real, half as vivid,

half as alive with the emotion of actual life, as that other memory so

recently vanished. Martin, at first, seemed the dream; that other, the

reality.

He entered with a lighted candle. The noise of the opening window and

the footsteps had, no doubt, disturbed him for some time. Yet, quickly

as he came, Goldie and I were “asleep” even before he had time to cross

the threshold. Julius stood alone to face him in the middle of the

floor. It was characteristic of the boy. He never shirked.

“What’s the meaning of all this noise?” asked Martin, obviously pleased

to find himself in a position of unexpected advantage. “LeVallon, why

are you not in bed? And why is the window open?”

Secretly ashamed of myself, I lay under the sheets, wondering what

Julius would answer.

“We always sleep with the window open, sir,” he said quietly.

“What was that crash I heard?” asked the master, coming farther into

the room, and holding the candle aloft so that it showed every particle

of the broken glass. “Who did this?” He glanced suspiciously about him,

knowing of course that Julius was not the only culprit.

LeVallon stood there, looking straight at him. Martin--as I think of

the incident to-day--had the appearance of a weasel placed by chance in

a position of advantage, yet afraid of its adversary. He winced, yet

exulted.

“Do you realise that it’s long after eleven,” he observed frigidly,

“and that I shall be obliged to report you to Dr. Randall in the

morning....”

“Yes, sir,” said Julius.

“It’s very serious,” continued Martin, more excitedly, and

apparently uncertain how to drive home his advantage, “it’s very

distressing--er--to find you, LeVallon, Head of the School, guilty of

mischief like a Fourth-Form boy--at this hour of the night too!”

The reference to the lower form was, of course, intended to be

crushing. But Julius in his inimitable way turned the tables

astonishingly.

“Very good, sir,” he said calmly, “but I was only trying to get the

light of Venus, and her sound, into Goldingham’s head--into his

system, that is--by reflecting it in the looking-glass; and it fell

off the ledge. It’s an experiment of antiquity, as you know, sir. I’m

exceedingly sorry....”

Martin stared. He was a little afraid of LeVallon; the boy’s knowledge

of mathematics had compelled his admiration as often as his questions,

sometimes before the whole class, had floored him.

“It’s an old experiment,” the boy added, his pale face very grave,

“healing, you know, sir, by the rays of the planets--forgotten

star-worship--like the light-cures of to-day----”

Martin’s somewhat bewildered eye wandered to the flat tin bath still

propped against Goldingham’s bedside.

“... and using gongs to increase the vibrations,” explained Julius

further, noticing the glance. “We were trying to make it do for a

gong--the scientists will discover it again before long, sir.”

The master hardly knew whether to laugh or scold. He stood there in his

shirt-sleeves looking hard at LeVallon who faced him with tumbled hair

and shining eyes in his woolly red dressing-gown. Erect, dignified,

for all the absurdity of the situation, the flush of his strange

enthusiasm emphasising the delicate beauty of his features, I remember

feeling that even the stupid Martin must surely understand that there

was something rather wonderful about him, and pass himself beneath the

spell.

“I was the priest,” he said.

“But I did the gong--I mean, the bath-part, please sir,” I put in,

unable any longer to let Julius bear all the blame.

There was a considerable pause, during which grease dripped audibly

upon the floor from the master’s candle, while Goldingham lay blinking

in bed in such a way that I dared not look at him for fear of laughter.

I have often wondered since what passed through the mind of Tuke

Martin, the senior Master of Mathematics, during that pregnant interval.

“Get up, all of you,” he said at length, “and pick up this mess.

Otherwise you’ll cut your feet to pieces in the morning. Here,

Goldingham, you help too. You’re no more asleep than the others.” He

tried to make his tone severe.

“Goldingham only woke when the glass fell off the ledge, sir,”

explained LeVallon. “It was all my doing, really----”

“And mine,” I put in belatedly.

Martin watched us gather up the fragments, Goldie, still dazed and

troubled, barking his shins against chairs and bedposts, unable to find

his blue glasses in the excitement.

“Put the pieces in the bath,” continued Martin shortly, “and ring for

William in the morning to clear it away. And pay the matron for a new

looking-glass,” he added, with something of a sneer; “Mason half, and

you, LeVallon, the other half.”

“Of course, sir,” said Julius.

“And don’t let me hear any further sounds to-night,” said the master

finally, closing the window, and going out after another general look

of suspicion round the room.

Which was all that we ever heard of the matter! For the Master of

Mathematics did not particularly care about reporting the Head of the

School to Dr. Randall, and incurring the dislike of the three top boys

into the bargain. I got the impression, too, that Tuke Martin was as

glad to get out of that room without loss of dignity as we were to see

him go. LeVallon, by his very presence even, had a way of making one

feel at a disadvantage.

“Anything particular come to you?” he asked Goldie, as soon as we were

alone again, and the victim’s temper was restored by finding himself

the centre of so much general interest. “I suppose there was hardly

time, though----”

“Queer dream’s all I can remember,” he replied gruffly.

“What sort?”

“Nothing much. I seemed to be hunting through a huge lexicon for verbs,

but every time I opened the beastly thing it was like opening the lid

of a box instead of the cover of a book; and, in place of pages, I saw

rows of people lying face downwards, and streaks of light dodging about

all over their skins. Rotten nightmare, that’s all!”

Julius and I exchanged glances.

“And then,” continued Goldie, “that bally tin bath banged like thunder

and I woke up to see you two rotters by my bed.”

“If there had been more time----” Julius observed to me in an aside.

“I’m jolly glad it’s your last term,” Goldingham growled, looking at

LeVallon, or LeValion, as he usually called him; “you’re as mad as a

March hare, anyhow!”--which was the sentence I took into dreamland with

me.

CHAPTER VII

“_The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within

my mind,

It left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.

To-day was past and dead for me, for from to-day my feet had run

Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient

Babylon._”--A. E.

It was another time, very early in the morning, that LeVallon called

me from the depths of dreamless sleep with a whisper that seemed to

follow me out of some vast place where I had been lying under open

skies with the winds of heaven about my face and the stars as close as

flowers. It was no dream; I brought back no single detail of incident

or person--only this keen, sweet awareness of having been somewhere

far away upon an open plain or desert of enormous stretch, waiting for

something, watching, preparing--and that I had been awakened. Great

hands drew back into the stars; eyes that were mighty closed; heads of

majestic aspect turned away; and Presences of some infinite demeanour

grandly concealed themselves as when mountains become veiled by the

hood of hurrying clouds. I had the feeling that the universe had

touched me, then withdrawn.

The room was dark, but shades of tender grey, stealing across the walls

and ceiling, told that the dawn was near. Our windows faced the east; a

flush of delicate light was in the sky; and, between me and this sky,

something moved very softly and came close. It touched me.

Julius, I saw, was bending down above my pillow.

“Are you ready?” he whispered, as I felt his hand upon my hair. “The

sun is on the way!”

The words, however, at first, seemed not in English, but in some

other half-familiar language that I instantly translated into my own

tongue. They drifted away from me like feathers into space. I grew

wide awake and rubbed my eyes. It startled me a little to find myself

in this modern room and to see his pale visage peering so closely into

mine. I surely had dropped from a height, or risen from some hollow of

prodigious depth; for it flashed across me that, had I waked a moment

sooner, I must have caught a glimpse of other faces, heard other voices

in that old familiar language, remembered other well-known things, all

of which had fled too suddenly away, plunging with swiftness into the

limbo of forgotten times and places.... It was very sweet. There was

yearning desire in me to know more.

I sat up in bed.

“What is it?” I asked, my tongue taking the words with a certain

curious effort. “What were you saying...? A moment ago ... just now?” I

tried to arrest the rout of flying sensations. Dim, shadowy remoteness

gathered them away like dreams.

“I’m calling you to see the sunrise,” he whispered softly, taking my

hand to raise me; “the sunrise on the Longest Day upon the plain. Wake

up and come!”

Confusion vanished at his touch and voice. Yet a fragment of words just

vanished dropped back into my mind. Something sublime and lovely ran

between us.

“But you were saying--about the Blue Circle and the robes--that it was

time to----” I went on, then, with the effort to remember, lost the

clue completely. He _had_ said these other things, but already they had

dipped beyond recovery. I scrambled out of bed, almost expecting to

find some robe or other in place of my old grey dressing-gown beside

the chair. Strong feelings were in me, awe, wonder, high expectancy,

as of some grand and reverent worship. No mere bedroom of a modern

private school contained me. I was elsewhere, among imperial and august

conditions. I was aware of the Universe, and the Universe aware of me.

I spoke his name as I followed him softly over the carpet. But to my

amazement, my tongue refused the familiar “Julius” of to-day, and

framed instead another sound. Four syllables lay in the name. It was

“Concerighé” that slipped from my lips. Then instantly, in the very

second of utterance, it was gone beyond recovery. I tried to repeat the

name, and could not find it.

Julius laughed softly just below his breath, making no reply. I saw his

white teeth shine in the semi-darkness. He moved away on tiptoe towards

the window, while I followed....

The lower sash was open wide as usual. I heard Goldingham breathing

quietly in his sleep. Still with the mistiness of slumber round me,

I felt bewildered, half caught away, as it seemed, into some web of

ancient, far-off things that swung earthwards from the stars. In this

net of other times and other places, I hung suspended above the world I

ordinarily knew. I was not Mason, a Sixth-Form boy at a private school

in Kent, yet I was indubitably myself. A flood of memories rose; my

soul moved among more spacious conditions; all hauntingly alive and

real, yet never recoverable completely....

We stood together by the open window and looked out. The country lay

still beneath the fading stars. A faint breath of air stirred in the

laurel shrubberies below. The notes of awakening birds, marvellously

sweet, came penetratingly from the distant woods. I smelt the night,

I smelt the coolness of very early morning, but there was another

subtler, wilder perfume, that came to my nostrils with a deep thrill of

happiness I could not name. It was the perfume of another day, another

time, another land, all three as familiar to me as this Kentish hill

where now I lived, yet gone otherwise beyond recall. Deep emotion

stirred in me the sense of recognition, as though smell alone had the

power to reconstruct the very atmosphere of those dim days by raising

the ghosts of feelings that once accompanied them....

To the right I saw the dim cricket-field with hedge of privet and

hawthorn that ran away in a dark and undulating line towards the

hop-poles standing stiffly in the dusk; and, farther off, to the

left, loomed the oast-houses, peaked and hooded, their faces turned

the other way like a flock of creatures that belonged to darkness. The

past seemed already indistinguishable from the present. I stood upon

shifting sands that rustled beneath my feet.... The centuries drove

backwards....

And the eastern sky, serene and cloudless, ran suddenly into gold and

crimson near to the horizon’s rim. It became a river of fire that

flashed along the edge of the world with high, familiar speed. It

broke the same instant into coloured foam far overhead, with shafts

of reddish light that swept the stars and put them out. And then this

strange thing happened:

For, as my sight passed from the shadowy woods beyond, the scene before

me rose like a lifted map into the air; changed; trembled as though

it were a sheet shaken from the four corners, and--disclosed another

scene below it, most exquisitely prepared. The world I knew melted and

disappeared. I looked a second time. It was gone.

And with it vanished the entire little bundle of thoughts and feelings

I was accustomed to regard as John Mason.... I smelt the long and windy

odours of the open world. The stars bent down and whispered. Rivers

rolled through me. Forests and grass grew thickly in my thoughts. And

there was dew upon my face.... It was all so natural and simple. It was

divine. The Universe was conscious. I was not separate from it at any

point.... More, I was conscious with it.

Far off, as an auditorium seen with a bird’s-eye view from some

gigantic height, yet with the distinctness of a map both scaled and

raised, I saw a treeless plain of vast dimensions, grey in the shadows

just before the dawn. In the middle distance stood a domed white

building upon the summit of a mound, with broad steps of stone in

circles all about it, leading to a pillared door that faced the east.

On all sides round it, covering the plain like grass, there was a

concourse, many thousands strong, of people, upright and motionless,

arranged in wide concentric rings, each one a hundred to two hundred

deep. Each ring was dressed in coloured robes, from blue to red,

from green to a soft pale yellow, purple, brown and orange, and the

outermost of all a delicate and tender green that merged into the tint

of the plain itself at a distance of a mile beyond the central building.

These concentric rings of colour, this vast living wheel of exquisitely

merging tints, standing motionless and silent about the hub of that

majestic temple, formed a picture whose splendour has never left my

mind; and a sense of intoxicating joy and awe swept through me as

something whispered that long ago, I, too, had once taken my appointed

place in those great circles, and had felt the power of the Deity of

Living Fire pass into me in the act of worship just about to begin. The

courage and sweetness of the sun stole on me; light, heat and glory

burned in my heart; I knew myself akin to earth, sea and sky, as also

to every human unit in the breathing wheel; and, knowing this, I knew

the power of the universe was in me because the universe was my Self.

Imperceptibly at first, but a moment later with measurable speed, a

movement ran quivering round the circles. They began to turn. The

immense, coloured wheel revolved silently upon the plain. The rings

moved alternately, the first to the right, the second to the left,

those at the outer rim more swiftly, and those within more slowly, each

according to its distance from the centre, so that the entire mass

presented the appearance of a single body rotating with a uniform and

perfect smoothness. There rose a deep, muffled sound of myriad feet

that trampled down the sand. The mighty shuffling of it paced the air.

No other sound was audible. The sky grew swiftly brighter. The shafts

of light shot out like arms towards the paling zenith. There came a

whir of cool, delicious wind that instantly died down again and left

the atmosphere more still and empty than before.

And then the sun came up. With the sudden rush of an eastern clime,

it rose above the world. One second it was not there, the next it

had appeared. The wheel blazed into flame. The circles turned to

coloured fire. And a roaring chant burst forth instantaneously--a

prodigious sound of countless voices whose volume was as the volume

of an ocean. This wind of singing swept like a tempest overhead, each

circle emitting the note related to its colour, the total resulting in

a chord whose magnificence shook the heart with an ecstasy of joyful

worship.... I was aware of the elemental power of fire in myself....

How long this lasted, or how long I listened is impossible to tell

... the dazzling glory slowly faded; there came a moment when the

brilliance dimmed; a blur of coloured light rose like a sheet from the

surface of the wheeling thousands, floating off into the sky as though

it were a separate shining emanation the multitude gave off. I seemed

to lose my feet. I no longer stood on solid earth. There came upon me

a curious sense of lightness, as of wings, that yet left my body far

below.... I was charged with a deific power, energy.... Long shafts of

darkness flashed across the sea of light; the pattern of interwoven

colour was disturbed and broken; and, suddenly, with a shock as though

I fell again from some great height, I remembered dimly that I was no

longer--that my name was----

I cannot say. I only know confusion and darkness sponged the entire

picture from the world; and my sight, I suddenly realised, went groping

with difficulty about a little field, a rough, uneven hedge, a strip of

ribboned whiteness that was a road, and some ugly, odd-shaped things

that I recognised as--yes, as oast-houses just beyond. And a pale,

sad-looking sun then crawled above the horizon where the hop-poles

stood erect.

“You saw...?” whispered someone beside me.

It was Julius. His voice startled me. I had forgotten his very presence.

I nodded in reply; no words came to me; there was still a trembling in

me, a sense of intolerable yearning, of beauty lost, of power gone

beyond recall, of pain and littleness in the place of it.

Julius kept his eyes upon my face, as though waiting for an answer.

“The sun ...” I said in a low and shaking voice.

He bent his head a moment, leaning down upon the window-sill with his

face in his hands.

“As we knew it then,” he said with a deep-drawn sigh, raising himself

again. “To-day----!”

He pointed. Across the fields I saw the tin roof of the conventicle

where we went to church on Sunday, lifting its modern ugliness beyond

the playground walls. The contrast was somehow dreadful. A revulsion of

feeling rose within me like a storm. I stared at the meagre building

beneath whose roof of corrugated iron, once a week, we knelt and

groaned that we were “miserable sinners”--begging another to save us

from “punishment” because we were too weak to save ourselves. I saw

once more in memory the upright-standing throng, claiming with joy

the powers of that other Deity of whom they knew they formed a living

portion. And again this intolerable yearning swept me. My soul rose up

in a passionate protest that vainly sought to express itself in words.

Language deserted me; tears dimmed my eyes and blurred my sight; I

stretched my hands out straight towards that misty sunrise of To-day....

And, when at length I turned again to speak to Julius, I saw that he

had already left my side and gone back to bed.

CHAPTER VIII

“_Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways:

One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of

endless days._”--A. E.

And so, in due course, the period of our schooldays came to its

appointed end without one single further reference to the particular

thing I dreaded. Julius had offered no further word of explanation, and

my instinctive avoidance of the subject had effectively prevented my

asking pointed questions. It remained, however; it merely waited the

proper moment to reveal itself. It was real. No effort on my part, no

evasion, no mere pretence that it was fantasy or imagination altered

_that_. The time would come when I should know and understand; evasion

would be impossible. It was inevitable as death.

During our last term together it lay in almost complete abeyance, only

making an appearance from time to time in those vivid dreams which

still presented themselves in sleep. It hid; and I pretended bravely to

ignore it altogether.

Meanwhile our days were gloriously happy, packed with interest, and

enlivened often with experiences as true and beautiful as the memory

of our ancient sun-worship I have attempted to describe. No doubt

assailed me; we _had_ existed in the past together; those pictures of

“inner scenery” were memories. The emotions that particular experience,

and many others, stirred in me were as genuine as the emotions I

experienced the last term but one, when my mother died; and, whatever

my opinion of the entire series may be to-day, on looking back, honesty

compels me to admit this positive character of their actuality. There

was no make-believe, no mere imagination.

Our intimacy became certainly very dear to me, and I felt myself linked

to Julius LeVallon more closely than to a brother. The knowledge that

much existed he could not, or would not, share with me was pain, the

pain of jealousy and envy, or possibly the deeper pain that a barrier

was raised. Sometimes, indeed, he went into his Other Places almost

for days together where I could not follow him, and on these occasions

the masters found him absent-minded and the boys avoided him; he went

about alone; if games or study compelled his attention, he would give

it automatically--almost as though his body obeyed orders mechanically

while the main portion of his consciousness seemed otherwise engaged.

And, while it lasted, he would watch me curiously, as from a distance,

expecting apparently that I would suddenly “remember” and come up to

join him. His soul beckoned me, I felt, but half in vain. I longed to

be with him, to go where he was, to see what he saw, but there was

something that effectually prevented.

And these periods of absence I rather dreaded for some reason. It was

uncanny, almost creepy. For I would suddenly meet his glowing eyes

fixed queerly, searchingly on my own, gazing from behind a veil at me,

asking pregnant questions that I could not catch. I would see him lying

there beneath the larches of the cricket-field alone, rapt, far away,

deep in his ancient recollections, and apart from me; or I would come

upon him suddenly in the road, in a sunny corner of the playground,

even in the deserted gymnasium on certain afternoons, when he would

start to see me, and turn away without a word, but with an expression

of unhappy yearning in his eyes as though he shared my pain that he

dwelt among these Other Places which, for the moment, I might not know.

Many, many, indeed, are the details of these days that I might

mention, but their narration would prove too long. One, however, may

be told. He had, for instance, a kind of sign-language that was quite

remarkable. On the sandy floor of a disused gravel-pit, where we lay

on windy days for shelter while we talked, he would trace with a twig

a whole series of these curious signs. They were for him the alphabet

of a long-forgotten language--some system of ideograph or pictorial

representation that expressed the knowledge of the times when it was

used. He never made mistakes; the same sign invariably had the same

meaning; and it all existed so perfectly in his inner vision that he

used it even in his work, and kept a book in which the Greek play of

the moment was written out entirely in this old hieroglyphic side by

side with the original. He read from it in class, even under the eagle

eye of the Head, with the same certainty as he read from the Greek

itself.

There were characteristic personal habits, too, that struck me later

as extraordinary for a boy of eighteen--in England; for he led an

inner life of exceeding strictness, not to say severity, and was for

ever practising mental concentration with a view to obtaining complete

control of his feelings, thoughts and, therefore, actions. Upright as

a rod of steel himself, he was tolerant to the failings of others,

lenient to their weaknesses, and forgiving to those who wronged him. He

bore no malice, cherished no ill-feeling. “It’s as far as they’ve got,”

he used to say, “and no one can be farther than he is.” Indeed, his

treatment of others implied a degree of indifference to self that had

something really big about it. And, even on the lowest grounds, to bear

a grudge meant only casting a net that must later catch the feet.

His wants in the question of food were firmly regulated too; for at

an age when most boys consider it almost an aim in life to devour

all they can possibly get and to spend half of their pocket-money on

tempting eatables, Julius exercised a really Spartan control over these

particular appetites. Not only was his fare most frugal in quantity,

but he avoided the eating of meat almost entirely, alcohol completely,

and sometimes would fast for a period that made me wonder for his

health. He never spoke of this. I noticed it. Nor ever once did he use

his influence to persuade me to like habits. No boy was ever less a

prig than LeVallon. Another practice of his was equally singular. In

order to increase control of the body and develop tenacity of will, I

have known him, among other similar performances, stand for hours at a

time on winter nights, clad only in a nightshirt, fighting sleep, cold,

hunger, movement--stand like a statue in the centre of the room, as

though the safety of the world depended upon success.

Most curious of all, however, seemed to me his habit of--what I can

only call--communing with inanimate things. “You only remember the

sections where we were together,” he explained, when once I asked the

meaning of what he did; “and as you were little with me when this was

the way of getting knowledge, it is difficult for you to understand.”

This fact likewise threw light upon the enormous intervals between

remembered sections. We recalled no recent ones at all. We had not come

back together in them.

This communing with inanimate things had chiefly to do, of course, with

Nature, and I may confess at once that it considerably alarmed me. To

read about it comfortably in an armchair over the fire is one thing;

to see it done is another. It alarmed me, moreover, for the reason

that somewhere, somehow, it linked on to the thing I dreaded above all

others--the days when he and I and _she_ had made some wrong, some

selfish use of it. This, of course, remained an intuition of my own.

I never asked; I never spoke of it. Only in my very bones I felt sure

that the thing we three must come together to put right again somehow

involved, and involved unpleasantly, this singular method of acquiring

knowledge and acquiring power. We had abused it together; we had yet to

put it right.

To see Julius practising this mysterious process with a stone, a

flower, a tree, and to hear him then talk about these three different

objects, was like listening to a fairy tale told with the skill of a

great imaginative artist. He personified them, gave their life history,

rendered their individual experiences, moods, sensations, qualities,

adventures--anything and everything that could ever happen to a stone,

a flower, a tree. I realised their existence from their own point of

view; felt-with them; shared their joys and sufferings, and understood

that they were living things, though with a degree of life so far below

our own. Communion with Nature was, for him, communion with the very

ground of things. All this, though exquisitely wonderful, was within

the grasp of sympathetic comprehension. It was natural.

But when he dealt with things less concrete--and his favourites were

elemental forces such as air and heat, or as he preferred to call them,

wind and fire--the experience, though no whit less convincing owing to

the manner of his description, was curiously disturbing, because of the

results produced upon himself. I can describe it in two words, though I

can give no real idea of it in two thousand. He rushed, he flamed. It

was almost as if, in one case, his actual radiation became enormous,

and in the other, some power swept, as in the form of torrential

enthusiasm, from his very person. _I_ remember my first impression in

the class-room--that a great wind blew, and that flaming colours moved

upon the air.

When he was “feeling-with” this pair of elemental forces he seemed to

draw their powers into his own being so that I, being in close sympathy

with him, caught some hint of what was going forward in his heart.

Sometimes on drowsy summer afternoons when no air stirred through

the open windows of the room, there would come a sudden change in my

surroundings, an alteration. I would hear a faint and distant sound of

roaring; something invisible drove past me. Julius, at the desk beside

me, had finished work, and closed his books. His head in his hands, he

sat motionless, an intent expression on both face and body, wrapped

deep in concentrated effort of some kind. He was practising.... And

once, too, I remember being waked out of sleep in the early morning

with an impression of a stimulating heat about me which amounted to an

intensification of life almost. There he stood beside the window, arms

folded, head bent down upon his breast, and an effect about him that

can only be described as glowing. The air immediately round him seemed

to shine with a faint, delicate radiance as of tropical starlight, or

as though he stood over a dying fire of red-hot coals. It was a half

fascinating, half terrifying sight; the light pulsed and trembled with

distinct vibrations, the air quivered so as to increase his bodily

appearance. He looked taller, vaster. And not once I saw this thing,

but many times. No single dream could possibly explain it. In both

cases, with the wind as with the fire, his life seemed magnified as

though he borrowed from these elemental forces of Nature their own

special qualities and powers.

“All the elements,” I remember his saying to me once, “are in our

bodies. Do you expect Nature to be less intelligent than the life that

she produces?” For him, certainly, there was the manifestation of

something deeper than physics in the operations of so-called natural

laws.

For here, let me say now in conclusion of this broken record of

our days at school together, was the rock on which our intercourse

eventually suffered interruption, and here was that first sign of the

parting of our ways. It frightened me.... Later, in our university

days, the cleavage became definite, causing a break in our friendship

that seemed at the moment final. For a long time the feeling in me had

been growing that his way and mine could not lie much farther together.

Julius attributed it to my bringing up, which I was not independent

enough to shake off. I can only say that I became conscious uneasily

that this curious intercourse with Nature--“communing” as he termed

it--led somehow away from the Christianity of my childhood to the gods

and deification of the personal self. I did not see at the time, as he

insisted, that _both_ were true, being different aspects of the central

fact that God is the Universe, and that man, being literally part of

it, must eventually know Him face to face by actually becoming Him. All

this lay far beyond me at the time.

It seemed to me then, and more as I grew older, an illegitimate,

dangerous traffic; for paganism, my father taught me sternly, was the

Devil, and that the Universe could actually be alive was a doctrine of

heathenish days that led straight to hell and everlasting burning. I

could not see, as Julius saw, that here was teaching which might unify

the creeds, put life into the formal churches, inspire the world with

joy and hope, and bring on the spirit of brotherhood by helping the

soul to rediscover its kinship with a living cosmos.

One certainty, however, my schooldays with this singular boy bequeathed

to me, a certainty I have never lost, and a very gorgeous and inspiring

one--that life is continuous.

LeVallon lived in eternal life. He knew that it stretched infinitely

behind his present “section,” and infinitely ahead into countless other

“sections.” The results of what lay behind he must inevitably exhaust.

Be that harvest painful or pleasant, he must reap what he had sown. But

the future lay entirely in his own hands, and in his power of decision;

chance or caprice had no word to say at all. And this consciousness

of being in eternal life now, at the present moment, master of fate,

potentially at least deific--this has remained a part of me, whether

I will or no. To Julius LeVallon I owe certainly this unalterable

conviction.

Another memory of that early intercourse that has remained with me,

though too vaguely for very definite description, is the idea that

personal life, even in its smallest details, is part of a cosmic

ceremony, that to perform it faithfully deepens the relationship man

bears to the Universe as a living whole, and is therefore of ultimate

spiritual significance. An inspiring thought, I hold, even in the

vagueness of my comprehension of it.

Yet above and beyond such notions, remained the chief memory of all:

that in some such ancient cosmic ceremony, Julius, myself and one other

had somehow abused our privileges in regard to Nature Powers, and that

the act of restoration still awaiting fulfilment at our hands, an

act involving justice to the sun and stars as well as to our lesser

selves, could not be accomplished until that “other” was found on earth

together with himself and me. And that other was a woman.

Book II

EDINBURGH

“_We do not know where sentient powers, in the widest sense of

the term, begin or end. And there may be disturbances and moods

of Nature wherein the very elemental forces approach sentient

being, so that, perhaps, mythopœic man has not been altogether a

dreamer of dreams. I need not dwell on the striking reflections

to which this possibility gives rise; enough that an idealistic

dynamism forces the possibility on our view. If the life of

Nature is from time to time, and under special conditions,

raised to the intense requisite level, we are in the presence of

elemental forces whose character primitive man has not entirely

misunderstood._”--“Individual and Reality” (E. D. Fawcett).

CHAPTER IX

There was an interval of a year and a half before we met again. No

letters passed between us, and I had no knowledge of where LeVallon

was or what he did. Yet while in one sense we had gone apart, in

another sense I knew that our relationship suffered no actual break.

It seemed inevitable that we should come together again. Our tie was

of such a kind that neither could shake the other off. In the meantime

my soldier’s career had been abandoned; loss of money in the family

decreed a more remunerative destiny; and the interval had been spent

learning French and German abroad with a view to a less adventurous

profession. At the age of nineteen, or thereabouts, I found myself at

Edinburgh University to study for a Bachelor of Science degree, and the

first face I saw in Professor Geikie’s lecture room for geology was

that of my old school-friend of the “Other Places,” Julius LeVallon.

I stood still and stared, aware of two opposing sensations. For

this unexpected meeting came with a kind of warning upon me. I felt

pleasure, I felt dread: I cannot determine which came first, only that,

mingled with the genuine gratification, there was also the touch of

uneasiness, the sinking of the heart I knew so well.

And I remember saying to myself--so odd are the tricks of memory--“Why,

he’s as pale as ever! Always that marble skin!” As though during

the interval he ought somehow to have acquired more colour. He was

tall, over six feet, thin, graceful as an Oriental; an expression of

determination in his face had replaced the former dreaminess. The eyes

were clear and very strong. There was an expression of great intensity

about him.

His greeting was characteristic: he showed eager pleasure, but

expressed no surprise.

“Old souls like ours are bound to meet again,” he said with a smile as

he shook my hand. “We have so much to do together.”

I recalled the last time I had seen him, waiting on the school platform

as the train went out, and I realised that there were changes in him

that left me standing still, as it were. Perhaps he caught my thought,

for his face took on a touch of sadness; he gazed into my eyes, making

room for me beside him on the bench. “But you’ve been dawdling on the

way a bit,” he added. “You’ve been after other things, I see.”

It was true enough. I had fallen in love, for one thing, besides

devoting myself with the ardour of youth to literature, music, sport,

and other normal interests of my age. From his point of view, of

course, I had not advanced, whereas he obviously had held steadily

to the path he had chosen for himself, following always one main

thing--this star in the east of his higher knowledge. His attitude

to me, I felt moreover, had undergone a change. The old sympathy and

affection had not altered, but a strain of pity had crept in, a regret

that I suffered the attractions of the world to interfere with my

development.

A delay, as he called it, in our relationship there had certainly been,

though the instant we met I realised that something bound us together

fundamentally with a power that superficial changes or external

separation could never wholly dissolve.

Yet, on the whole, I saw little enough of him during these Edinburgh

days, far less certainly than at Motfield Close. I was older, for one

thing, more of the world for another. As a boy, of course, the idea

that we renewed an eternal friendship, faithful to one another through

so many centuries, made a romantic appeal that was considerable. But

the glamour had evaporated; I was a man now, I considered, busy with

the things of men. At the same time I was aware that these other

tendencies were by no means dead in me, and that very little would be

required to revive them. Buried by other interests, they were yet ready

to assert themselves again.

And LeVallon, for his part, though he saw less of me, and I think cared

to see less of me than before, kept deliberately in touch, and of set

purpose would not suffer us to go too far apart. We did not live in

the same building, but he came often to my rooms, we took great walks

together over the Pentland Hills, and once or twice wandered down the

coast from Musselburgh to the cliffs of St. Abbs Head above the sea.

Why he came to Edinburgh at all, indeed, puzzled me a little; but I am

probably not far wrong in saying that two things decided the choice:

He wished to keep me in sight, having heard somehow of my destination;

and, secondly, certain aspects of Nature that he needed were here

easily accessible--the sea, hills, woods, and lonely places that his

way of life demanded. Among the lectures he took a curious selection:

geology, botany, chemistry, certain from the Medical Course, such

as anatomy and materia medica, and, above all, the advanced mental

classes. He attended operations, post-mortems, and anything in the

nature of an experiment, while the grim Dissecting Room knew him as

well as if his living depended upon passing the examination in anatomy.

Of his inner life at this period it was not so easy to form an

estimate. He worked incessantly, but at something I never could quite

determine. At school he was for ever thinking of this “something”; now

he was working at it. It seemed remote from the life of the rest of us,

students and others, because its aim was different. Pleasure, as such,

and the usual forms of indulgence, he left on one side; and women,

though his mysterious personality, his physical beauty, and his cold

indifference attracted them, he hardly admitted into his personal life

at all; to his intimacy, never. His habits were touched with a singular

quality of selflessness, very rare, very exquisite, sincere as it was

modest, that set him apart in a kind of divine loneliness, giving to

all, yet asking of none. My former feeling that his aims were tinged by

something dark and anti-spiritual no longer held good; it was due to a

partial and limited judgment, to ignorance, even to misunderstanding.

His aims were undeniably lofty, his life both good and pure. Respect

grew with my closer study of him, for his presence brought an uplifting

atmosphere of intenser life whose centre of activity lay so high above

the aims of common men as to constitute an “other-worldliness” of a

very unusual kind indeed.

I observed him now as a spectator, more critically. No dreams or

imaginative visions--with one or two remarkable exceptions--came

to bewilder judgment. I saw him from outside. If not sufficiently

unaffected by his ideas to be quite a normal critic, I was certainly

more prosaic, and often sceptical. None the less the other deeper

tendency in me was still strong; it easily wakened into life. This deep

contradiction existed.

The only outward change I noticed, apart from the greater maturity

and decision in the features, was a look of sadness he habitually

wore, that altered when he spoke of the things he cared about, into an

expression of radiant joy. The thought of his great purpose then lit

flames in his eyes, and brought into the whole countenance a certain

touch of grandeur. It was not often, evidently, that he found anyone

to talk with; and arguing, as such, he never cared about. He knew. He

was one of those fortunate beings who never had felt doubt. Perfect

assurance he had.

Julius, at that time, occupied a suite of rooms at the end of Princes

Street, where Queensferry Road turns towards the Forth. They were, I

think, his only extravagance, for the majority of students were content

with a couple of rooms, or a modest flat on the Morningside. This suite

he furnished himself, and there was one room in it that no one but

himself might enter. It had, I believe, no stick of furniture in it,

and required, therefore, no dusting apparently; in any case, neither

landlady, friend nor servant ever passed its door.

My curiosity concerning it was naturally considerable, though never

satisfied. He needed a place, it seems, where absolute solitude was

possible, an atmosphere uncoloured by others. He made frequent use of

it, but whether for that process of “feeling-with” already mentioned,

or for some kind of secret worship, ceremonial, or what not, is

more than I can say. Often enough I have sat waiting for him in the

outer room when he was busy within this mysterious sanctum; no sound

audible; no movement; a bright light visible beneath the crack of the

door; a sense of hush, both deep and solemn, about the entire place.

Though it may sound ridiculous to say so, there was a certain air of

sanctity that hung like a veil about that inner chamber, the silence

and stillness evoked a hint of reverence. I waited with something

between awe and apprehension for the handle to turn, aware that behind

the apparent stillness something intensely active was going forward,

of which faint messages reached my mind outside. Certainly, while

sitting with book or newspaper, waiting for his footstep, my thoughts

would glow and burn within me, rushing with energy along unaccustomed

channels, and I remember the curious feeling that behind those panels

of painted deal there lay a space far larger than the mere proportions

of a room.

As in the fairy-tale, that door opened into outer space; and I suspect

that Julius used the solitude for “communing” with those Nature Powers

he seemed always busy with. Once, indeed, when he at length appeared,

after keeping me waiting for a longer period than usual, I was aware

of two odd things about him: he brought with him a breath of open air,

cool, fresh and scented as by the fragrance of the forest; about him,

too, a faintly luminous atmosphere that lent to his face a kind of

delicate radiance almost shining. My sight for a moment wavered; the

air between us vibrated as he came across the room towards me. There

was a strangeness round about him. There was power. And when he spoke,

his voice, though low as always, had a peculiar resonance that woke

echoes, it seemed, beyond the actual walls.

The impressions vanished as curiously as they came; but their

reality was beyond question. And at times like these, I confess,

the old haunting splendour of his dream would come afresh upon me

as at Motfield Close. My little world of ambition and desire seemed

transitory and vain. The magic of his personality stole sweetly,

powerfully upon me; I was swept by gusts of passionate yearning to

follow where he led. For his purpose was not selfish. The knowledge and

powers he sought were for the ultimate service of the world. It was the

permanent Self he trained rather than the particular brain and body of

one brief and transient “section,” called To-day.

These moods with me passed off quickly, and the practical world in

which I now lived brought inevitable reaction; I mention them to

show that in me two persons existed still: an upper, that took life

normally like other people, and a lower, that hid with Julius LeVallon

in strange “Other Places.” For in this duality lies the explanation of

certain experiences I later shared with him, to be related presently.

Our relations, meanwhile, held intimate and close as of old--up to a

certain point. There was this barrier of my indifference and the pity

that it bred in him. Though never urging it, he was always hoping that

I would abandon all and follow him; but, failing this, he held to me

because something in the future made me necessary. Otherwise the gulf

between us had certainly not widened.

I see him as he stood before me in those Edinburgh lodgings: young,

in the full tide of modern life, with good faculties, health, means,

looks, high character, and sane as a policeman! All that men hold dear

and the world respects was his. Yet, without a hint of insincerity or

charlatanism, he seemed conscious only of what he deemed the long,

sweet prizes of the soul, difficult of attainment, and to the majority

mere dreams. His was that rare detachment which sees clear to the end,

not through avoiding the stress of perilous adventure by the way,

but through refusing the conclusion that the adventures were ends in

themselves, or could have any other significance than as items in

development, justifying all suffering.

Eternal life for him was _now_. He sought the things that once acquired

can never be forgotten, since their fruits are garnered by the Self

that persists through all the series of consecutive lives. Through

all the bewildering rush and clamour of the amazing world he looked

ever to the star burning in the depths of his soul. And for a tithe of

his certainty, as of the faith and beauty of living that accompanied

it, I sometimes felt tempted to give all that I possessed and follow

him. The scale at any rate was grand. The fall of empires, the crash

of revolutions, the destiny of nations, all to him were as nothing

compared with the advance or retreat of a single individual soul in the

pursuit of what he deemed “real knowledge.”

Yet, while acknowledging the seduction of his dream, and even half

yielding to it sometimes, ran ever this hidden thread of lurking

dread and darkness that, for the life of me, I could never entirely

get rid of. It was lodged too deeply in me for memory to discover, or

for argument to eject. Ridicule could not reach it, denial made no

difference. To ignore it was equally ineffective. Even during the long

interval of our separation it was never quite forgotten. Like something

on the conscience it smouldered out of sight, but when the time was

ripe it would burst into a blaze.

At school I merely “funked” it; I would not hear about it. Now,

however, my attitude had changed a little. The sense of responsibility

that comes with growing older was involved--rather to my annoyance

and dismay. Here was something I must put right, or miss an important

object of my being. It was inevitable; the sooner it was faced and done

with, the better.

Yet the time, apparently, was not quite yet.

CHAPTER X

“_Instead of conceiving the elements as controlled merely by

blindly operative forces, they may be imagined as animated

spiritual beings, who strive after certain states, and offer

resistance to certain other states._”--Lotze.

In connection with LeVallon’s settled conviction that the Universe was

everywhere alive and one, and that only the thinnest barriers divided

animate from so-called inanimate Nature, I recall one experience

in particular. The world men ordinarily know is limited to a few

vibrations the organs of sense respond to. Though science, with her

delicate new instruments, was beginning to justify the instinctive

knowledge of an older time, and wireless marvels and radio-activity

were still unknown (at the time of which I write), Julius spoke of

them as the groundwork of still greater marvels by which thought would

be transmissible. The thought-current was merely a little higher than

the accepted wave lengths; moreover, powers and qualities were equally

transmissible. Unscientifically, he was aware of all these things,

and into this beyond-world he penetrated, apparently, though with the

effort of a long-forgotten practice. He linked the human with the

non-human. He knew Saturn or the Sun in the same way that he knew a

pebble or a wild flower--by feeling-with them.

“It’s coming back into the world,” he said. “Before we leave this

section it will all be known again. The ‘best minds,’” he laughed,

“will publish it in little primers, and will label it ‘extension of

consciousness,’ or some such laboured thing. And they will think

themselves very wonderful to have discovered what they really only

re-collect.”

He looked up at me and smiled significantly, as we sat side by side

in the Dissecting Room, busily tracing the nerves and muscles in a

physical “instrument” some soul had recently cast aside. I use his

own curious phraseology, of course. He laid his pointed weapon down a

moment upon the tangle of the solar plexus that resembled the central

switch-board of a great London telegraph office.

“There’s the main office,” he pointed, “not _that_,” indicating the

sawn-off skull where the brain was visible. “Feeling is the clue, not

thinking.”

And, then and there, he described how this greatest nerve-centre of the

human system could receive and transmit messages and powers between its

owner and the entire universe. His quiet yet impassioned language I

cannot pretend at this interval to give; I only remember the conviction

that his words conveyed. It was more wonderful than any fairy-tale, for

it made the fairy-tale come true. For this “beyond-world” of Julius

LeVallon contained whole hierarchies of living beings, whose actuality

is veiled to-day in legend, folk-lore, and superstition generally--some

small and gentle as the fairies, some swift and radiant as the biblical

angels, others, again, dark, powerful and immense as the deities of

savage and “primitive” races. But all knowable, all obedient to the

laws of their own being, and, furthermore, all accessible to the

trained will of the human who understood them. Their great powers

could be borrowed, used, adapted. Herein lay for him a means to deeper

wisdom, richer life, the recovery of true worship, powers that must

eventually help Man to that knowledge of the universe which is, more

simply put, the knowledge of one God. At present Man was separate, cut

off from all this bigger life, matter “inanimate” and Nature “dead.”

And I remember that in this remarkable outburst he touched very nearly

upon the origin of my inner dread. Again I felt sure that it was in

connection with practices of this nature that he and I and _she_

had involved ourselves in something that, as it were, disturbed the

equilibrium of those forces whose balance constitutes the normal

world, but something that could only be put right again by the three of

us acting in concert and facing an ordeal that was somehow terrible.

One afternoon in October I always associate particularly with this talk

about elemental Nature Powers being accessible to human beings, for it

was the first occasion that I actually witnessed anything in the nature

of definite results. And I recall it in detail; the memory of such an

experience could never fade.

We had been walking for a couple of hours, much of the time in silence.

My own mind was busy with no train of thought in particular; rather I

was in a negative, receptive state, idly reviewing mental pictures,

and my companion’s presence obtruded so little that I sometimes almost

forgot he was beside me. On the Pentlands we followed the sheep tracks

carelessly where they led, and presently lay down among the heather

of the higher slopes to rest. Julius flung himself down first, and,

pleasantly tired, I imitated him at once. In the distance lay the

mosaic of Edinburgh town, her spires rising out of haze and mist.

Across the uninspiring strip of modern houses called the Morningside,

the Castle Rock stood on its blunt pedestal, carved out by the drive of

ancient glaciers. At the end of the small green valley where immense

ice-chisels once had ploughed their way, we saw the Calton Hill; beyond

it, again, the line of Princes Street with its stream of busy humanity;

and further still, the lovely dip over the crest of the hill where the

Northern ocean lay towards the Bass Rock and the sea-birds.

The autumn air drew cool and scented along the heathery ridges, and

while Julius lay gazing at the cirrus clouds, I propped myself upon one

elbow and enjoyed the scene below. It was my pleasure always to know a

thing by name and recognise it--the different churches, the prison, the

University buildings, the particular house where my own lodgings were;

and I was searching for Frederick Street, trying to pick out the actual

corner where George Street cut through it, when I became aware that,

across the great dip of intervening valley, something equally saw me.

This was my first impression--that something watched me.

I placed it, naturally enough, where my thought was fixed, across

the dip; but the same instant I realised my mistake. It was much

nearer--close beside me. Something was watching us intently. We were

no longer quite alone. And, with the discovery, there grew gradually

about me a sense of indescribable loveliness, a soft and tender beauty

impossible to define precisely. It came like one of those enveloping

moods of childhood, when everything is alive and anything may happen.

My heart, it seemed, expanded. It turned wild.

I looked round at Julius. He still lay on his back as before, with the

difference that his hands now were folded across his eyes and that his

body was motionless and rigid as a log. He hardly breathed. He seemed

part and parcel of the earth, merged in the hill-side as naturally as

the heather.

Yet something had happened, or was in the act of happening, to him. The

forgotten schoolday atmosphere of Other Places stole over me as I gazed.

I made no sound; I did not speak; my eyes passed quickly from the

panorama of town and sea to a flock of mountain sheep that nibbled

the patches of coarse grass not far away. The feeling that something

invisible yet conscious approached us from the empty spaces of the

afternoon became a certainty. My spirit lifted. There was a new and

vital relationship between my inner nature, so to speak, and my

material environment. My nerves were quivering, the sense of beauty

remained, but my questioning wonder changed to awe. Somewhere about me

on that bare hill-side Nature had become aggressively alive.

Yet no one of my senses in particular conveyed the great impression;

it seemed wrought of them all in combination--a large, synthetic,

universal report sent forth by the natural things about me. Some

flooding energy, like a tide of unknown power, rose through my body.

But my brain was clear. One by one I ticked off the different senses;

it was neither sight, smell, touch, nor hearing that was individually

affected. There was vague uneasiness, it seems, as well, for I sought

instinctively what was of commonplace import in the landscape. I stared

at the group of nibbling sheep. My sight wandered to the larches on

my right, some thirty yards away. Next, seeking things more humanly

comforting still, I fixed my gaze upon my nailed and muddy boots.

At the same moment Julius became suddenly alert. He sat erect.

The change in his attitude startled me; he seemed intent upon something

in the nearer landscape that escaped me. He, like myself, was aware

that other life approached; he shared my strange emotion of delight

and power; but in him was no uneasiness, for whereas I questioned

nervously, he _knew_ with joy. Yet he was doing nothing definite, so

far as I could see. The change of attitude resulted in no act. His

face, however, was so intense, so animated, that I understood it was

the touch of his mind that had reached my own so stimulatingly, and

that what was coming--came through him. His eyes were fixed, I saw,

upon the little grove of larches.

I made no movement, but watched the larches and his face alternately.

And what I can only call the childhood mood of make-believe enormously

increased. It extended, however, far beyond the child’s domain; it

seemed all-potent, irresistibly imperative. By the mere effort of my

will I could--create. Some power in me hidden, lost, unused, seemed

trying to assert itself. I merely had to say “Let there be a ball

before me in the air,” and by the simple fiat of this power it must

appear. I had only to will the heather at my feet to move, and it must

move--as though, in the act of willing, some intense, intermolecular

energy were set free. There was almost the sense that I had this power

in me now--that I had certainly once known how to use it.

I can hardly describe intelligently what followed. It is so easy to

persuade myself that I was dreaming or deceived, yet so difficult

to prove that I was neither one nor other, but keenly observant and

wholly master of my mind. For by this time it was clear to me that the

sensation of being watched, of knowing another living presence close,

as also of sharing this tender beauty, issued primarily from the grove

of larches. My being and their own enjoyed some inter-relationship,

exquisite yet natural. There was exchange between us. And the wind,

blowing stiffly up the heather slopes, then lifted the lower branches

of the trees, so that I saw deep within the little grove, yet at

the same time behind and beyond them. Something that their veil of

greenness draped went softly stirring. The same minute it came out

towards me with a motion best described as rushing. The heart of the

grove became instinct with life, life that I could appreciate and

understand, each individual tree contributing its thread to form the

composite whole, Julius and myself contributing as well. This Presence

swam out through the afternoon atmosphere towards us, whirring, almost

dancing, as it came. There was an impression of volume--of gigantic

energy. The air in our immediate neighbourhood became visible.

Yet to say that I saw something seems as untrue as to say that I

saw nothing. Form was indistinguishable from movement. The air, the

larches and ourselves were marvellously entangled with the sunshine

and the landscape. I was aware of an intelligence different from my

own, immensely powerful, but somehow not a human intelligence. Superb,

unearthly beauty touched the very air.

“Hush!” I heard LeVallon whisper. “Feel-with it, but do not think.”

The advice was unnecessary. I felt; but I had no time to think, no

inclination either. A long-forgotten “I” was active. My familiar, daily

self shrank out of sight. Vibrant, sensitive, amazingly extended, my

being responded in an _immediate_ fashion to things about me. Any

“thoughts” I had came afterwards.

For the greenness whirled and flashed like sunlight upon water or on

fluttering silk. With an intricate and complex movement it appeared

to spin and revolve within itself; and I cannot dare to say from what

detail came the absolute persuasion that it was alive in the same

sense that I myself and Julius were alive, while of another order of

intelligence.

Julius rose suddenly to his feet, and a fear came over me that he was

going to touch it; for he moved forwards with an inviting gesture that

caused me an exhilarating distress as when a friend steps too near the

edge of a precipice. But the next moment I saw that he was directing it

rather, with the immediate result that it swerved sharply to one side,

passed with swiftness up the steep hill-side, and--disappeared. It

raced by me with a soft and roaring noise, leaving a marked disturbance

of the air that was like a wind within a wind. I seemed pushed aside

by the fringe of a small but violent whirlwind. The booming already

sounded some distance up the slope.

“I’ve lost it!” I remember shouting with a pang of disappointment. For

it seemed that the power and delight in me both ebbed and that energy

went with them.

“Because you thought a moment instead of felt!” cried Julius. He

turned, holding up one hand by way of warning. His voice was more than

ordinarily resonant, his whole body charged with force. “Now--watch the

sheep,” he added in a lower tone. And, although the words surprised me

in one way, in another I anticipated them. There passed across his face

a momentary expression of intense effort, but even before the sentence

was finished I heard the rushing of the frightened animals, and

understood something of what was happening. There was panic in them.

The entire flock ran headlong down the steep slope of heather. The

thunder of their feet is in my ears to-day. I see their heaving backs

of dirty wool climbing in tumbling fashion one upon another as they

pressed tightly in a wedge-shaped outline. They plunged frantically

together down the steep place to some level turf below. But, even then,

I think they would not have stopped, had not a sound, half cry, half

word of command, from my companion brought them to a sudden halt again.

They paused in their wild descent. Like a single animal the entire

company of them--twenty or thirty, perhaps, all told--were arrested.

They looked stupidly about them, turned their heads in the opposite

direction, and with one accord began once more peacefully--eating grass.

The incident had occupied, perhaps, three minutes.

“The larches!” I heard, and the same instant that softly-roaring thing,

not wind, yet carried inside the wind, again raced past me, going this

time in the direction of the grove. There was just time to turn, when

I heard a clap--not unlike the sound of an open hand that strikes a

pillow, though on a far vaster scale--and it seemed to me that the

bodies of the trees trembled for a moment where they melted into one

another amid the general greenness of stems and branches.

For the fraction of a second they shone and pulsed and quivered.

Something opened; something closed again. The enthralling sense of

beauty left my heart, the power sank away, the huge energy retired.

And, in a flash, all was normal once again; it was a cool October

afternoon upon the Pentland Hills, and a wind was blowing freshly from

the distant sea.

I was lying on the grass again exactly as before; Julius, watching me

keenly beneath the lids of his narrowed eyes, had just flung himself

down to keep me company....

“The barriers, you see, are thin,” he said quietly. “There really are

no barriers at all.”

This was the first sentence I heard, though his voice, it seemed, had

been speaking for some considerable time. I had closed my eyes--to

shut out a rising tide of wonderful and familiar pictures whose beauty

somehow I sought vigorously to deny. Yet there was this flare of vivid

memory: a penetrating odour of acrid herbs that burned in the clearing

of a sombre forest; a low stone altar, the droning of men’s voices

chanting monotonously as they drew near in robes of white and yellow

... and I seemed aware of some forgotten but exquisite ceremonial by

means of which natural forces were drawn upon to benefit the beings of

the worshippers....

“All is transmissible,” rose LeVallon’s voice out of the picture, “all

can be shared. That was the aim and meaning of our worship....”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. The expansion of my consciousness

had been a genuine thing; the power and joy both real; the worship

authentic. Now they had left me and the shrinkage caused me pain; there

was a poignant sense of loss. I felt afraid again.

“But it’s all gone,” I answered in a hushed tone, “and everything has

left me.” Reason began to argue and deny. I could scarcely retain the

memory of those big sensations which had offered a channel into an

extended world.

Julius searched my face with his patient, inward-gazing eyes.

“Your attitude prevented,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation; “it

became unsafe.”

“You brought it?” I faltered.

He nodded. “A human will,” he replied, “and a physical body--as

channel. Your resistance broke the rhythm and brought danger in.” And

after a pause he added significantly: “For the return--the animals

served well.” He smiled. “Ran down a steep place into the sea--almost.”

And, abruptly then, the modern world came back, as though what I

had just experienced had been but some pictured memory, thrust up,

withdrawn. I was aware that my fellow student at Edinburgh University,

LeVallon by name, lay beside me in the heather, his face charged with

peace and happiness ... that the dusk was falling, and that the air was

turning chilly.

Without further speech we rose and made our way down from the windy

ridge, and the chief change I noticed in myself seemed to be a marked

increase of vitality that was singularly exhilarating, yet included

the touch of awe already mentioned. The feeling was in me that life of

some non-human kind had approached us both. I looked about me, first at

Julius, then at the landscape, growing dim. The wind blew strongly from

the sea. Far in the distance rose the outline of the Forth Bridge,

then a-building, its skeleton, red in the sunset, rearing across the

water like a huge sea-serpent with ribs of gleaming steel. I could

almost hear the hammering of the iron.... And, at our feet, the first

lights of the Old Town presently twinkled through the veil of dusk and

smoke that wove itself comfortingly about the habitations of men and

women.

My thoughts were busy, but for a long time no speech passed.

Occasionally I stole glances at my companion as we plodded downwards

through the growing dusk, and there seemed a curious glow about his

face that made him more clearly visible than the other objects about

us. The way he looked back from time to time across his shoulder

increased my impression--by no means a pleasant one just then--that

something followed us from those heathery hill-tops, kept close behind

us through the muddy lanes, and watched our movements across the fields

and hedges.

I have never forgotten that walk home in the autumn twilight, nor

the sense of haunting possibilities that hung about it like an

atmosphere--the feeling that other life loomed close upon our steps.

Before Roslin Chapel was passed, and the welcome lights of the town

were near, this consciousness of a ghostly following suite became

a certainty, and I felt that every copse and field sent out some

messenger to swell the throng. We had established touch with another

region of life, of power, and the link was not yet fully broken.

And the sentences Julius let fall from time to time, half to himself

and half to me, increased my nervousness instead of soothing it.

“The gods, you see, are not dead,” he said, waving his hand towards

the hills, “but only distant. They are still accessible to all who can

feel-with their powers. In your self-consciousness a door stands open;

they can be approached--through Nature. Ages ago, when the sun was

younger, and you and I were nearer to the primitive beauty ...”

A cat, darting silently across the road like a shadow from a cottage

door, gave me such a start that I lost the remainder of the sentence.

His arm was linked in mine as he added softly:

“... Only, what is borrowed in this way must always be returned, for

otherwise the equilibrium is destroyed, and the borrower suffers

until he puts it right again. So utterly exact is the balance of the

universe....”

I deliberately turned my head away, aware that something in me _would_

not listen. The conviction grew that he had a motive in the entire

business. That inner secret dread revived. Yet, in spite of it, there

was a curiosity that refused to let me escape altogether. It was bound

to satisfy itself. The question seemed to force itself out of my lips:

“They are unconscious, though, these Powers?” And, having asked it,

I would willingly have blotted out the words. I heard his low voice

answer so far away it seemed an echo from the hills behind us.

“Of a different order,” he replied, “until they are part of you; and

then they share _your_ consciousness....”

“Hostile or friendly?” I believed I thought this question only, but

apparently I spoke it out aloud. Julius paused a moment. Then he said

briefly:

“Neither one nor other, of themselves. Merely that they resent an order

being placed upon them. It involves mastery or destruction.”

The words sank into me with something like a shudder. It seemed that

everything I asked and everything he answered were as familiar as

though we spoke of some lecture of the day before. What I had witnessed

shared this familiarity, too, though more faintly. All belonged to this

incalculable past he for ever searched to bring to light. Yet of what

dim act of mine, of his, or of another working with us, this mysterious

shudder was born, I still remained in ignorance, though an ignorance

that seemed now slowly about to lift.

Then, suddenly, the final question was out before I could prevent it.

It came irresistibly:

“And if, instead of animals, it had been men...?”

The effect was instantaneous, and very curious. I could have sworn he

had been waiting for that question. For he turned upon me with passion

that shone a moment in his pale and eager face, then died away as

swiftly as it came. His hand tightened upon my arm; he drew me closer.

He bent down. I saw his eyes gleam in the darkness as he whispered:

“Such men would know themselves cut off from their own kind, a gulf

between humanity--and themselves. For the elemental powers may be

borrowed, but not kept. There would burn in them fires no human hands

could quench, because no human hands had lit them. Yet their vast

energies might lift our little self-seeking race into that grander

universal life where----”

He stopped dead in the darkened road and fixed me with his eyes. He

said the next words with a vehement conviction that struck cold into my

very entrails:

“He who retains within himself the elemental powers which are the

deities in Nature, is both above and below his kind.”

A moment he hid his face in his hands; then, opening his arms wide

and throwing his head back to the sky, he raised his voice; he almost

cried aloud: “A man who has worshipped the Powers of Wind and the

Powers of Fire, and has retained them in himself, keeping them out of

their appointed places, is born of them. He is become their child. He

is a son of Wind and Fire. And though he break and flame with energies

that could regenerate the world, he must remain alien and outcast

from humanity, untouched by love or sorrow, stranger to joy, aloof,

impersonal, until by full and complete restitution, he restore the

balance in the surrender of his stolen powers.”

It seemed to me he towered; that his stature grew; that the darkness

round his very head turned bright; and that a wind from nowhere went

driving down the sky behind him with a wailing violence. The amazing

outburst took me off my feet by its suddenness. An emotion from the

depths rose up and shook me. What happened next I hardly realised, only

that he caught my arm and hurried along the road at a reckless, half

stumbling speed, and that the lonely hills behind us followed in the

darkness....

A few moments afterwards we found ourselves among the busy lights and

traffic of the streets. His calm had returned as suddenly as it had

deserted him. Such moments with him were so rare, he seemed almost

unnatural, superhuman. And presently we separated at the corner of the

North Bridge, going home to our respective rooms. He made no single

reference to the storm that had come upon him in this extraordinary

manner; I likewise spoke no word. We said good night. He turned one

way, I another. But, as I went, his burning sentences still haunted

me; I saw his face like moonlight through the tangle of a wood; and I

_knew_ that all we had seen and heard and spoken that afternoon had

reference to a past that we had shared, yet also to a future, which he

and I awaited together for the coming of a--third.

CHAPTER XI

“_Strange as it may appear to the modern mind, whose one

ambition is to harden and formalise itself ... the ancient mind

conceived of knowledge in a totally different fashion. It did not

crystallise itself into a hardened point, but, remaining fluid,

knew that the mode of knowledge suitable to its nature was by

intercourse and blending. Its experience was ... that it could

blend with intelligence greater than itself, that it could have

intercourse with the gods._”--“Some Mystical Adventures” (G. R.

S. Mead).

An inevitable result of this experience was that, for me, a reaction

followed. I had no stomach for such adventures. Though carried away at

the moment by the enthralling character of the feelings roused that

afternoon, my normal self, my upper self as I had come to call it,

protested--with the result that I avoided Julius. I changed my seat in

the class-rooms, giving as excuse that I could not hear the lecturer;

I gave up attending post-mortems and operations where I knew that he

would be; and if I saw him in the street I would turn aside or dive

into some shop until the danger of our meeting passed. Ashamed of my

feebleness, I yet could not bring myself to face him and thrash the

matter out.

Other influences also were at work, for my father, it so happened, and

the girl I was engaged to marry, her family too, were all of them in

Edinburgh just about that time, and some instinct warned me that they

and LeVallon must not meet. In the latter case particularly I obeyed

this warning instinct, for in the influence of Julius there hid some

strain of opposition towards these natural affections. I was aware of

it unconsciously, perhaps. It seemed he made me question the reality of

my love; made me doubt and hesitate; sometimes almost made me challenge

the value of these ties that meant so much to me. From his point of

view, I knew, these emotions belonged to transient relationships

of one brief section, and to become centred in them involved the

obliteration of the larger view. His attitude was more impersonal: Love

everyone, but do not lose perspective by focusing your entire self in

one or two. It was _au fond_ a selfish pleasure merely; it delayed the

development of the permanent personality; it destroyed--more important

still--the sense of kinship with the universe which was the basic

principle with him. It need not: but it generally did.

For some weeks, therefore, our talks and walks were interrupted; I

devoted myself to work, to intercourse with those I loved, and led

generally the normal existence of a university student who was reading

for examinations that were of importance to his future career in life.

Yet, though we rarely met, and certainly held no converse for some

time, interruption actually there was none at all. To pretend it were a

farce. The inner relationship continued as before. Physical separation

meant absolutely nothing in those ties that so strangely and so

intimately knit our deeper lives together. There was no more question

of break between us than there is question of a break in time when

light is extinguished and the clock becomes invisible. His presence

always stood beside me; the beauty of his pale, un-English face kept

ever in my thoughts; I heard his whisper in my dreams at night, and the

ideas his curious language watered continued growing with a strength I

could not question.

There were two selves in me then as in our schooldays: one that

resisted, and one that yearned. When together, it was the former that

asserted its rights, but when apart, oddly enough, it was the latter.

There is little question, however, that the latter was the stronger of

the two. Thus, the moment I found myself alone again, my father and my

fiancée both gone, we rushed together like two ends of an elastic that

had been stretched too long apart.

And almost immediately, as though the opportunity must not be lost, he

spoke to me of an experiment he had in view.

By what network of persuasiveness he induced me to witness, if not

actually to co-operate in, this experiment, I cannot pretend at this

distance to remember. I think it is true that he used no persuasion

at all, but that at the first mention of it my deeper being met the

proposal with curious sympathy. At the horror and audacity my upper

self shrank back aghast; the thing seemed wholly impermissible and

dreadful; something unholy, as of blasphemy, lay in it too. But, as

usual, when this mysterious question of “Other Places” was involved,

in the end I followed blindly where he led. My older being held the

casting vote. And the reason--I admit it frankly--was that somewhere

behind the amazing glamour of it all lay--truth. While reason scoffed,

my heart remembered and believed.

Moreover, in this particular instance, a biting curiosity had its

influence too. I was wholly sceptical of results. The thing was mad,

incredible, even wicked. It could never happen. Yet, while I said these

words, and more besides, there ran a haunting terror in me underground

that, after all ... that possibly ... I cannot even set down in words

the nature of my doubt. I can merely affirm that something in me was

not absolutely sure.

“The essential thing,” he told me, “is to find an empty ‘instrument’

that is in perfect order--young, vigorous, the tissues unwasted by

decay or illness. There must have been no serious deterioration of the

organs, muscles, and so forth.”

I knew then that this new experiment was akin to that other I had

already witnessed. The experience on the Pentlands had also been

deliberately brought about. The only difference was that this second

one he announced beforehand. Further, it was of a higher grade. The

channel of evocation, instead of being in the vegetable kingdom, was in

the human.

I understood his meaning, and suggested that someone in deep trance

might meet the conditions, for in trance he held that the occupant, or

soul, was gone elsewhere, the tenement of flesh deserted.

But he shook his head. That was not, he said, legitimate. The owner

would return. He watched me with a curious smile as he said this. I

knew then that he referred to the final emptiness of a vacated body.

“Sudden death,” I said, while his eyes flashed back the answer. “And

the Elemental Powers?” I asked quickly.

“Wind and fire,” he replied. And in order to carry his plan into

execution he proposed to avail himself of his free access to the

students’ Dissecting Room.

During the longish interval between the conception and carrying out

of this preposterous experiment I shifted like a weathercock between

acceptance and refusal. My doubts were torturing. There were times

when I treated it as the proposal of a lunatic that at worst could

work no injury to anyone concerned. But there were also times when a

certain familiar reality clothed it with a portentous actuality. I was

reminded faintly of something similar I had been connected with before.

Dim figures of this lost familiarity stalked occasionally across the

field of inner sight. Julius and I had done this thing together long,

long ago, “when the sun was younger,” and when we were “nearer to the

primitive beauty,” as he phrased it. In reverie, in dreams, in moments

when thinking was in abeyance, this odd conviction asserted itself.

It had to do with a Memory of some worship that once was mighty and

effective; when august Presences walked the earth in stupendous images

of power; and traffic with them had been useful, possible. The barrier

between the human and the non-human, between Man and Nature, was not

built. Wind and fire! It was always wind and fire that he spoke of. And

I remember one vivid and terrific dream in particular in which I heard

again a voice pronounce that curious name of “Concerighé,” and, though

the details were blurred on waking, I clearly grasped that certain

elemental powers had been evoked by us for purposes of our own and had

not been suffered to return to their appointed places; further, that

concerned with us in the awful and solemn traffic was--another. We had

been three.

This dream, of course, I easily explained as due directly to my

talks with Julius, but my dread was not so easily dismissed, and

that I overcame it finally and consented to attend was due partly to

the extraordinary curiosity I felt, and partly to this inexplicable

attraction in my deeper self which urged me to see the matter through.

Something inevitable about it forced me. Yet, but for the settled

conviction that behind the abhorrent proposal lay some earnest purpose

of LeVallon’s, not ignoble in itself, I should certainly have refused.

For, though saying little, and not taking me fully into his confidence,

he did manage to convey the assurance that this thing was not to

be carried out as an end, but as a means to an end, in itself both

legitimate and necessary. It was, I gathered, a kind of preliminary

trial--an attempt that _might_ possibly succeed, even without the

presence of the third.

“Sooner or later,” he said, aware that I hesitated, “it must be faced.

Here is an opportunity for us, at least. If we succeed, there is no

need to wait for--another. It is a question. We can but try.”

And try accordingly we did.

The occasion I shall never forget--a still, cold winter’s night towards

the middle of December, most of the students already gone down for

Christmas, and small chance of the room being occupied. For even in

the busiest time before examinations there were few men who cared to

avail themselves of the gruesome privilege of night-work, for which

special permission, too, was necessary. Julius, in any case, made his

preparations well, and the janitor of the grey-stone building on the

hill, whose top floor was consecrated to this grisly study of life in

death, had surrendered the keys even before we separated earlier in the

evening for supper at the door of the post-mortem theatre.

“Upstairs at eleven o’clock,” he whispered, “and if I’m late--the

preparations may detain me--go inside and wait. Your presence is

necessary to success.” He laid his hand on my shoulder; he looked at

me searchingly a moment, almost beseechingly, as though he detected

the strain of opposition in me. “And be as sympathetic as you can,” he

begged. “At least, do not actively oppose.” Then, as he turned away,

“I’ll try to be punctual,” he added, smiling, “but--well, you know as

well as I do----!” He shrugged his shoulders and was gone.

_You know!_ Somehow or other it was true: I did know. The interval of

several hours he would spend in his inner chamber concentrated upon

the process of feeling-with--evoking. He would have no food, no rest,

no moment’s pause. At the appointed hour he would arrive, charged with

the essential qualities of these two elemental powers which in dim past

ages, summoned by another audacious “experiment” from their rightful

homes, he now sought to “restore.” He would seek to return what had

been “borrowed.” He would attempt to banish them again. For they could

only be thus banished, as they had been summoned--through the channel

of a human organism. They were of a loftier order, then, than the

Powers for whose return the animal organisms of the sheep had served.

I went my way down Frederick Street with a heart, I swear, already

palpitating.

Of the many thrilling experiences that grew out of my acquaintance

with this extraordinary being, I think that night remains

supreme--certainly, until our paths met again in the Jura Mountains.

But, strangest of all, is the fact that throughout the ghastly horror

of what occurred was--beauty! To convey this beauty is beyond any

power that I possess, yet it was there, a superb and awful beauty that

informed the meanest detail of what I witnessed. The experiment failed

of course; in the accomplishment of LeVallon’s ultimate purpose, that

is, it failed; but the failure was due, apparently, to one cause alone:

that the woman was not present.

It is most difficult to describe, and my pen, indeed, shrinks from

setting down so revolting a performance. Yet this curious high beauty

redeems it in my memory as I now recall the adventure through the

haze of years, and I believe the beauty was due to a deeper fact

impossible to convey in words. Behind the little “modern” experiment,

and parallel to it, ran another, older Memory that was fraught with

some significance of eternity. This parent memory penetrated and

overshadowed the smaller copy of it; it exalted what was ugly, uplifted

what seemed abominable, sublimated the distressing failure into an

image of what might have been magnificent. I mean, in a word, that

this experiment was a poor attempt to reconstruct an older ritual of

spiritual significance whereby those natural forces, once worshipped as

the gods, might combine with qualities similar to their own in human

beings. The memory of a more august and effective ceremony moved all

the time behind the little reconstruction. The beauty was derived from

my dim recollection of some transcendent but now forgotten worship.

* * * * *

At the appointed hour I made my way across the Bridge and towards the

Old Town where the University buildings stood. It was, as I said, a

bitter night. The Castle Rock and Cathedral swam in a flood of silvery

moonlight; frost sparkled on the roofs; the spires of Edinburgh shone

in the crystal wintry atmosphere. The air, so keen, was windless.

Few people were about at this late hour, and I had the feeling that

the occasional pedestrians, hurrying homewards in tightly-buttoned

overcoats, eyed me askance. No one of them was going in the same

direction as myself. They questioned my purpose, looked sharply over

their shoulders, then quickened their pace away from me towards the

houses where the fires burned in cosy human sitting-rooms.

At the door of the great square building itself I hesitated a moment,

hiding in the shadow of the overhanging roof. It was easy to pretend

that moral disapproval warned me to turn back, but the simpler truth is

that I was afraid. At the best of times the Dissecting Room, with its

silent cargo of dreadful forms and faces, was a chamber of horrors I

could never become hardened to as the majority of students did; but on

this occasion, when a theory concerning life alien to humanity was to

be put to so strange a test, I confess that the prospect set my nerves

a-quivering and made the muscles of my legs turn weak. A cold sensation

ran down my spine, and it was not the wintry night alone that caused it.

Opening the heavy door with an effort, I went in and waited a moment

till the clanging echo had subsided through the deserted building. My

imagination figured the footsteps of a crowd hurrying away behind the

sound down the long stone corridors. In the silence that followed I

slowly began climbing the steps of granite, hoping devoutly that Julius

would be waiting for me at the top. I was a little late; he might

possibly have arrived before me. Up the four flights of stairs I went

stealthily, trying to muffle my footsteps, putting my weight heavily

upon the balustrade, and doing all I could to make no sound at all. For

it seemed to me that my movements were both watched and heard, and that

those motionless, silent forms above were listening for my approach,

and knew that I was coming.

On the landings at each turn lay a broad sweet patch of moonlight that

fell through the lofty windows, and but for these the darkness would

have been complete. No light, it seemed to me, had ever looked more

clean and pure and welcome. I thought of the lone Pentland ridges,

and of the sea, lying calm and still outside beneath the same sheet

of silver, the air of night all keen and fragrant. The heather slopes

came back to me, the larches and the flock of nibbling sheep. I thought

of these in detail, of my fire-lit rooms in Frederick Street, of the

vicarage garden at home in Kent where my boyhood had been spent; I

thought of a good many things, truth to tell, all of them as remote as

possible from my present surroundings; but when I eventually reached

the topmost landing and found LeVallon was not there, I thought of one

thing only--that I was alone. Just beyond me, through that door of

frosted glass, lay in its most loathsome form the remnant of humanity

left behind by death.

In the daytime, when noisy students, callous and unimaginative,

thronged the room, the horror of it retreated, modified by the vigorous

vitality of these doctors of the future; but now at night, amid the

ominous silence, with darkness over the town and the cold of outer

space dropping down upon the world, as though linking forces with that

other final cold within the solemn chamber, it seemed quite otherwise.

I stood shivering and afraid upon the landing, angry that I could have

lent myself to so preposterous and abominable a scheme, yet determined,

so long as my will held firm, to go through with it to the end.

He had asked me to wait for him--inside.

Knowing that every minute of hesitation must weaken my powers of

resolve, I moved at once towards the door, then paused again. The

comforting roar of the traffic floated to my ears; I heard the distant

tinkle of a tramcar bell, the boom of Edinburgh, a confused noise

of feet and wheels and voices, far away, it is true, but distinctly

reassuring.

Outside, the life of humanity rolled upon its accustomed way, recking

little of the trembling figure that stood on the top floor of this

silent building, one hand on the door upon whose further side so many

must one day come to final rest. For one hand already touched the

freezing knob, and I was in the act of turning it when another sound,

that was certainly not the murmur of the town, struck sharply through

the stillness and brought all movement in me to a sudden halt.

It came from within, I thought at first; and it was like a wave of

sighs that rose and fell, sweeping against the glass door a moment,

then passing away as abruptly as it came. Yet it was more like wind

than sighs through human lips, and immediately, then, I understood that

it _was_ wind. I caught my breath again with keen relief. Wind was

rising from the hills, and this was its first messenger running down

among the roofs and chimney-pots. I heard its wailing echoes long after

it had died away.

But a moment later it returned, louder and stronger than before,

and this time, hearing it so close, I know not what secret embassies

of wonder touched me from the night outside, deposited their

undecipherable messages, and were gone again. I can only say that the

key of my emotions changed, changed, moreover, with a swelling rush

as when the heavier stops are pulled out upon an organ-board. For, on

entering the building, the sky had been serenely calm, and keen frost

locked the currents of the air; whereas now that wind went wailing

round the walls as though it sought an entrance, almost as though its

crying voice veiled purpose. There seemed a note of menace, eager and

peremptory, in its sudden rush and drop. It knocked upon the stones

and upon the roof above my head with curious and repeated buffets of

sound that resembled the “clap” I had heard that October afternoon

among the larches, only a hundred times repeated and a hundred-fold

increased. The change in myself, moreover, was similar to the change

then experienced--the flow and drive of bigger consciousness that

helped to banish fear. I seemed to know about that wind, to feel its

life and being, indeed, to share it. No longer was I merely John Mason,

a student in Edinburgh, separate and distinct from all about me, but

was--I realised it amazingly--a bit of life in the universe, not

isolated even from the wind.

The beauty of the sensation did not last; it passed through me,

linked to that insistent roar; but the fact that I had felt it gave

me courage. The stops were instantly pushed in again ... and the same

minute the swing-door closed behind me with a sullen thud.

I stood within the chamber; Julius, I saw in a moment, was not there.

I moved through the long, narrow room, keeping close beside the wall,

taking up my position finally about halfway down, where I could command

the six tall windows and the door. The moon was already too high to

send her rays directly through the panes, but from the extensive

sky-lights she shed a diffused, pale glow upon the scene, and my eyes,

soon accustomed to the semi-darkness, saw everything quite as clearly

as I cared about.

In front of me stretched the silent, crowded room, patchy in the

moonshine, but with shadows deeply gathered in the corners; and, row

after row upon the white marble slabs, lay the tenantless forms in

the grotesque, unnatural positions as the students had left them a

few hours before. The picture does not invite detailed description,

but I at once experienced the peculiar illusion that attacks new

students even in the daytime. It seemed that the sightless eyes turned

slowly round to stare at me, that the shrunken lips half opened as

in soundless speech, and that the heads with one accord shifted to

an angle whence they could observe and watch me better. There went a

rustling through that valley of dry bones as though life returned for a

moment to drive the broken machinery afresh.

This sensible illusion was, of course, one I could easily dismiss.

More difficult, however, was the subtler attack that came upon me from

behind the sensory impressions. For, while I stood with my back against

the wall, listening intently for LeVallon’s step upon the stairs, I

could not keep from my mind the terror of those huddled sheep upon the

Pentland ridges; the whole weird force of his theories about “life” in

Nature came beating against my mind, aided, moreover, by some sympathy

in myself that could never wholly ridicule their possible truth.

I gazed round me at the motionless, discarded forms, used for one

brief “section,” then cast aside, and as I did so my mind naturally

focused itself upon a point of dreadful and absorbing interest--which

one was to be the subject of the experiment? So short a time ago had

each been a nest of keenest activity and emotion, enabling its occupant

to reap its harvest of past actions while sowing that which it must

reap later again in its new body, already perhaps now a-forming. And

of these discarded vehicles, one was to be the channel through which

two elemental Powers, evoked in vanished ages, might return to their

appointed place. I heard that clamouring wind against the outer walls;

I felt within me the warmth of a strange enthusiasm rise and glow;

and it seemed to me just then that the whole proposal was as true and

simple and in the natural order of things as birth or death, or any

normal phenomenon to the terror and glory of which mankind has grown

accustomed through prolonged familiarity. To this point, apparently,

had the change in my feelings brought me. The dreadful novelty had

largely gone. Something would happen, nor would it be entirely

unfamiliar.

Then, on a marble slab beside the door, the body of a boy, fresh,

white and sweet, and obviously brought in that very day, since it was

as yet untouched by knife or scalpel, “drew” my attention of its own

accord--and I knew at once that I had found it.

Oddly enough, the discovery brought no increase of fearful thrill; it

was as natural as though I had helped to place it there myself. And,

again, for some reason, that delightful sense of power swept me; my

diminutive modern self slipped off to hide; I remembered that a million

suns surrounded me; that the earth was but an insignificant member of

one of the lesser systems; that man’s vaunted Reason was as naught

compared to the oceans of what might be known and possible; and that

this body I wore and used, like that white, empty one upon the slab,

was but a transient vehicle through which _I_, as a living part of the

stupendous cosmos, acted out my little piece of development in the

course of an eternal journey. This wind, this fire, that Julius spoke

of, were equally the vehicles of other energies, alive as myself, only

less tamed and cabined, yet similarly obedient, again, to the laws

of their own beings. The extraordinary mood poured through me like a

flood--and once more passed away. And the wind fled singing round the

building with a shout.

I looked steadily at the beautiful but vacated framework that the soul

had used--used well or ill I knew not--lying there so quietly, so

calmly, the smooth skin as yet untouched by knife, unmarred by needle,

surrounded on all sides by the ugly and misshapen crew of older death;

and as I looked, I thought of some fair shell the tide had left among

the seaweed wrack, a flower of beauty shining ’mid decay. In the

moonlight I could plainly see the thin and wasted ribs, the fixed blue

eyes still staring as in life, the lank and tangled hair, the listless

fingers that a few hours before must have been active in the flush of

health, and passionately loved by more than one assuredly. For, though

I knew not the manner of the soul’s out-passing, this boy must have

suddenly met death that very day. And I found it odd that he should now

be lying here, since usually the students’ work is concerned to study

the processes of illness and decay. It confirmed my certainty that here

was the channel LeVallon meant to use.

Time for longer reflection, however, there was none, for just then

another gust of this newly-risen wind fell against the building with a

breaking roar, and at the same moment the swing door opened and Julius

LeVallon stood within the room.

Whether windows had burst, or the great skylights overhead been left

unfastened, I had no time, nor inclination either, to discover, but

I remember that the wind tore past him down the entire length of the

high-ceilinged chamber, tossing the hair uncannily upon a dozen heads

in front of me and even stirring the dust about my feet. It was almost

as though we stood upon an open plain and met the unobstructed tempest

in our teeth.

Yet the rush and vehemence with which he entered startled me, for I

found myself glad of the support which a high student’s stool afforded.

I leaned against it heavily, while Julius, after standing by the door a

moment, turned immediately then to the left. He knew exactly where to

look. Simultaneously, he saw me too.

Our eyes, in that atmosphere of shadow and soft moonlight, met also

across centuries. He spoke my name; but it was no name I answered to

To-day.

“Come, Silvatela,” he said, “lend me your will and sympathy. Feel now

with Wind and Fire. For both are here, and the time is favourable. At

last, I shall perhaps return what has been borrowed.” He beckoned me

with a gesture of strange dignity. “It is not that time of balanced

forces we most desire--the Equinox--but it is the winter solstice,” he

went on, “when the sun is nearest. That, too, is favourable. We _may_

transcend the appointed boundaries. Across the desert comes the leaping

wind. Both heat and air are with us. Come!”

And, having vaguely looked for some kind of elaborate preparation

or parade, this sudden summons took me by surprise a little, though

the language somehow did not startle me. I sprang up; the stool fell

sideways, then clattered noisily upon the concrete floor. I made my

way quickly between the peering faces. It seemed no longer strange,

this abrupt disturbance of two familiar elements, nor did I remark

with unusual curiosity that the wind went rushing and crying about the

room, while the heat grew steadily within me so that my actual skin was

drenched with perspiration. All came about, indeed, quickly, naturally,

and without any pomp of dreadful ceremonial as I had expected. Julius

had come with power in his hands; and preparation, if any, had already

taken place elsewhere. He spoke no further word as I approached, but

bent low over the thin, white form, his face pale, stern and beautiful

as I had never seen it before. I thought of a star that entered the

roof of those Temple Memories, falling beneficently upon the great

concave mirrors where the incense rose in a column of blue smoke.

His entire personality, when at length I stood beside him, radiated

an atmosphere of force as though charged with some kind of elemental

activity that was intense and inexhaustible. The wonder and beauty

of it swept me from head to foot. The air grew marvellously heated.

It rose in beating waves that accompanied the rushing wind, like a

furnace driven by some powerful, artificial draught; in his immediate

neighbourhood it whirled and roared. It drew me closer. I, too, found

myself bending down above the motionless, stretched form, oblivious of

the other crowded slabs about us.

So familiar it all seemed suddenly. Some such scene I had witnessed

surely many a time elsewhere. I knew it all before. Upon success hung

issues of paramount importance to his soul, to mine, to the soul of

another who, for some reason unexplained, was not present with us, and,

somehow, also, to the entire universe of which we formed, with these

two elements, a living, integral portion. A weight of solemn drama lay

behind our little show. It seemed to me the universe looked on and

waited. The issue was of cosmic meaning.

Then, as I entered the sphere of LeVallon’s personality, a touch of

dizziness caught me for an instant, as though this running wind, this

accumulating heat, emanated directly from his very being; and, before

I quite recovered myself, the moonlight was extinguished like a lamp

blown out. Across the sky, apparently, rushed clouds that changed the

spreading skylights into thick curtains, while into the room of death

came a blast of storm that I thought must tear the windows from their

very sockets in the stone. And with the wind came also a yet further

increase of heat that was like a touch of naked fire on some inner

membrane.

I dare not assert that I was wholly master of myself throughout the

swift, dramatic scene that followed in darkness and in tumult, nor can

I claim that what I witnessed in the gloom, shot with occasional gleams

of moonlight here and there, was more than the intense visualisation

of an over-wrought imagination. It well may be that what I expected to

happen dramatised itself as though it actually did occur. I can merely

state that, at the moment, it seemed real and natural, and that what I

saw was the opening scene in a ceremony as familiar to me as the Litany

in my father’s church.

For, with the pouring through the room of these twin energies of

wind and fire, I saw, sketched in the dim obscurity, one definite

movement--as the body of the boy rose up into a sitting posture close

before our faces. It instantly then sank back again, recumbent as

before upon the marble slab. The upright movement was repeated the same

second, and once more there came the sinking back. There were several

successive efforts before the upright position was maintained; and

each time it rose slowly, gradually, all of one piece and rigidly,

until finally these tentative movements achieved their object--and the

boy sat up as though about to stand. Erect before us, the head slightly

hanging on one side, the shoulders squared, the chest expanded as with

lung-drawn air, he rose steadily above his motionless companions all

around.

And Julius drew back a pace. He made certain gestures with his arms

and hands that in some incalculable manner laid control upon the

movements. I saw his face an instant as the moon fell on it, pale,

glorious and stately, wearing a glow that was _not_ moonlight, the lips

compressed with effort, the eyes ablaze. He looked to me unearthly and

magnificent. His stature seemed increased. There was an air of power,

of majesty about him that made his presence beautiful beyond words; and

yet, most strange of all, it was familiar to me, even this. I had seen

it all before. I knew well what was about to happen.

His gesture changed. No word was spoken. It was a Ceremony in which

gesture was more significant than speech. There was evidence of

intense internal struggle that yet did not include the ugliness of

strain. He put forth all his power merely--and the body rose by jerks.

Spasmodically, this time, as though pulled by wires, yet with a kind

of terrible violence, it floated from that marble slab into the air.

With a series of quick, curious movements, half plunge, half jerk,

it touched the floor. It stood stiffly upright on its feet. It rose

again, it turned, it twisted, moving arms and legs and head, passing me

unsupported through the atmosphere some four feet from the ground. The

wind rushed round it with a roar; the fire, though invisible, scorched

my eyes. This way and that, now up, now down, the body of this boy

danced to and fro before me, silent always, the blue eyes fixed, the

lips half parted, more with the semblance of some awful marionette than

with human movement, yet charged with a colossal potency that drove

it hither and thither. Like some fair Ariel, laughing at death, it

flitted above the yellow Calibans of horror that lay strewn below.

Yet, from the very nature of these incompleted movements, I was

aware that the experiment was unsuccessful, and that the power was

insufficient. Instead of spasmodic, the movements should have been

rhythmical and easy; there should have been purpose and intention in

the performance of that driven body; there should have been commanding

gestures, significant direction; there should have been spontaneous

breathing and--a voice--the voice of Life.

And instead--I witnessed an unmeaning pantomime, and heard the wailing

of the dying wind....

A voice, indeed, there was, but it was the voice of Julius LeVallon

that eventually came to me across the length of the room. I saw him

slowly approaching through the patches of unequal moonlight, carrying

over his shoulder the frail, white burden that had collapsed against

the further wall. And his words were very few, spoken more to himself

apparently than to me. I heard them; they struck chill and ominous upon

my heart:

“The conditions were imperfect, the power insufficient. Alone we cannot

do it. We must wait for _her_.... And the channel must be another’s--as

before.”

The strain of high excitement passed. I knew once again that small

and pitiful sensation of returning to my normal consciousness. The

exhilaration all was gone. There came a dwindling of the heart. I

was “myself” again, John Mason, student at Edinburgh University. It

produced a kind of shock, the abruptness of the alteration took my

strength away. I experienced a climax of sensation, disappointment,

distress, fear and revolt as well, that proved too much for me. I ran.

I reeled. I heard the sound of my own falling.

No recollection of what immediately followed remains with me ...

for when I opened my eyes much later, I found myself prone upon the

landing several floors below, with Julius bending solicitously over

me, helping me to rise. The moonlight fell in a flood through a

window on the stairs. My recovery was speedy, though not complete. I

accompanied him down the remaining flight, leaning upon his arm; and in

the street my senses, though still dazed, took in that the night was

calm and cloudless, that the moonlight veiled the stars by its serene

brightness, and that the clock above the University buildings pointed

to the hour of two in the morning.

The cold was bitter. There was no wind!

Julius came with me to my door in Frederick Street, but the entire

distance of a mile neither of us spoke a word.

At the door of my lodging-house, however, he turned. I drew back

instinctively, hesitating, for my desire was to get upstairs into my

own room with the door locked safely behind me. But he caught my hand.

“We failed to-night,” he whispered, “but when the real time comes we

shall succeed. _You_ will not--fail me then?”

In the stillness of very early morning, the moon sinking towards the

long dip of the Queensferry Road, and the shadows lying deep upon the

deserted streets, I heard his voice once more come travelling down the

centuries to where I stood. The atmosphere of those other days and

other places came back with incredible appeal upon me.

He drew me within the chilly hall-way, the sound of our feet echoing

up the spiral staircase of stone. Night lay silently over everything,

sunrise still many hours away.

I turned and looked into his eager, passionate face, into his eyes

that still shone with the radiance of the two great powers, at the

mouth and lips which now betrayed the exhaustion that had followed

the huge effort. And something appealing and personal in his entire

expression made it impossible to refuse. I shook my head, I shrank

away, but a voice I scarcely recognised as my own gave the required

answer. My upper and my under selves conflicted; yet the latter gave

the inevitable pledge: “Julius ... I promise you.”

He gazed into my eyes. An inexpressible tenderness stole into his

manner. He took my hand and held it. The die was cast.

“She is now upon the earth with us,” he said. “I soon shall find her.

We three shall inevitably be drawn together, for we are linked by

indestructible ties. There is this debt we must repay--we three who

first together incurred it.”

There was a pause. Far away I heard a cart rumbling over the cobbles

of George Street. In another world it seemed, for the gods were still

about us where we stood. Julius moved from me. Once more I saw his eyes

fixed pleadingly, almost yearningly upon my own. Then the street door

closed upon him and he was gone.

CHAPTER XII

“_Love and pity are pleading with me this hour.

What is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield,

Offering beauty, love, and immortal power,

Aeons away in some far-off heavenly field?_”--A. E.

The actual beginnings of a separation are often so slight that they

are scarcely noticed. Between two friends, whose acquaintance is of

several years’ standing, sure that their tie will stand the ordinary

tests of life, some unexpected and trivial incident first points to the

parting of the ways; each discovers suddenly that, after all, the other

is not necessary to him. An emotion unshared is sufficient to reveal

some fundamental lack of sympathy hitherto concealed, and they go their

different ways, neither claim debited with the least regret. Like the

scarce perceptible mist of evening that divides dusk from night, the

invisible chill has risen between them; each sees the other through a

cloud that first veils, then distorts, and finally obliterates.

For some weeks after the “experiment” I saw LeVallon through some

such risen mist, now thin, now thick, but always there and invariably

repelling. I remember distinctly, however, that our going apart was to

me not without a sense of regret both keen and poignant. I owed him

something impossible to describe; a yearning sense of beauty touched

common things about me at the sight of him, even at the mention of his

name in the University class-rooms; he had given me an awareness of

other possibilities, an exhilarating view of life that held immense

perspectives; a feeling that justice determined even the harshest

details; above all, a sense of kinship with Nature that combined to

form a tie of a most uncommon order.

Yet I went willingly from his side; for his prospectus of existence led

me towards heights where I could not comfortably breathe. His entire

scheme I never properly grasped, perhaps; the little parts we shared

I saw, possibly, in wrong proportion, uncorrelated to the huge map

his mind contained so easily. My own personality was insignificant,

my powers mediocre; above all I had not always his strange conviction

of positive memory to support me. I lagged behind. I left him. The

seductive world that touched him not made decided claims upon my

heart--love, passion, ambition and adventure called me strongly. I

would not give up all and follow where he led. Yet I left him with

the haunting consciousness that I surrendered a system of belief that

was logical, complete and adequate, its scale of possible achievement

wonderful, and its unselfish ideal, if immensely difficult, at least

noble and inspiring. For all his mysticism, Julius, it seems to me, was

practical and scientific.

Yet, the plausibility of his audacious theories would sometimes return

questioningly upon me. Man was an integral part of Nature, not alien to

it. What was there, after all, so impossible in what he claimed? And

what amongst it might not the science of to-morrow, with its X rays, N

rays, its wireless messages, its radium, its inter-molecular energy,

and its slowly-formulating laws of telepathy and the dynamic character

of Thought, not come eventually to confirm under new-fangled names?

So far as I reflected concerning these things at all, I kept an open

mind; my point was simply that I preferred the ordinary pursuits of

ordinary men. He was evidently aware of the change in me, while yet he

made no effort to prevent my going. Nor did he make, so far as I can

recall, any direct reference to the matter. Once only, in a lecture

room, with a hand upon my shoulder while we jostled out together in the

stream of other students, he bent his face towards me and said with the

tender, comprehending smile that never failed to touch me deeply: “Our

lives are far too deeply knit for any final separation. Out of the Past

we come, and that Past is not exhausted yet.” The crowd had carried us

apart before I could reply, but through me like a flash of lightning

rose the certainty that this was literally true, and that while my

upper, modern Self went off, my older, hidden Self was with him to the

end. We merely took two curves that presently must join again.

But, though we saw little of one another all these weeks, I can never

forget the scene of our actual leave-taking, nor the extraordinary

incidents that led up to it. Now that I set it down on paper such

phrases as “imaginative glamour” and the like may tempt me, but at the

time it was as real and actual as the weekly battles with my landlady,

or the sheaves of laborious notes I made at lecture-time. In some

region of my consciousness, abnormal or otherwise, this scene most

certainly took place.

It was one late evening towards the close of the session--March or

April, therefore--that I had occasion to visit LeVallon’s house for

some reason in itself of no importance; one of those keen and blustery

nights that turn Edinburgh into a scene of unspeakable desolation,

Princes Street, a vista of sheeted rain where shop-windows glistened

upon black pavements; the Castle smothered in mist; Scott’s Monument

semi-invisible with a monstrous air about it in the gloom; and the

entire deserted town swept by a wind that howled across the Forth with

gusts of quite thunderous energy. Even the cable-cars blundered along

like weary creatures blindly seeking shelter.

I hurried through the confusion of the tempest, fighting my way at

every step, and on turning the corner past the North British Railway

Station, the storm carried me with a rush into the porch of the

house, whipping the soaked macintosh with a blow across my face. The

rain struck the dripping walls down their entire height, then poured

splashing along the pavement in a stream. Night seemed to toss me into

the building like some piece of wreckage from the crest of a great wave.

Panting and momentarily flustered, I paused in the little hall to

recover breath, while the hurricane, having flung me into shelter,

went roaring and howling down the sloping street. I wiped the rain

from my face and put straight my disordered clothes. My mind just then

was occupied with nothing but these very practical considerations. The

impression that followed the next instant came entirely unbidden:

For I became aware of a sudden and enveloping sense of peace, beyond

all telling calm and beautiful--an interior peace--a calm upon the

spirit itself. It was a spiritual emotion. There drifted over me

and round me, like the stillness of some perfect dawn, the hush of

something serene and quiet as the stars. All stress and turmoil of

the outer world passed into an exquisite tranquillity that in some

nameless way was solemn as the spaces of the sky. I felt almost as if

some temple atmosphere, some inner Sanctuary of olden time, where the

tumult of external life dared not intrude, had descended on me. And the

change arrested every active impulse in my being; my hurrying thoughts

lay down and slept; all that was scattered in me gathered itself softly

into an inner fold; unsatisfied desires closed their eyes. It seemed

as if all the questing energies of my busy personality found suddenly

repose. Life’s restlessness was gone. I even forgot momentarily the

purpose for which I came.

So abrupt a change of key was difficult to realise; I can only say that

the note of spiritual peace seemed far more true and actual than the

physical relief due to the escape from wind and rain. Moreover, as I

climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor where Julius lived, it

deepened perceptibly--as though it emanated from his dwelling quarters,

pervading the entire building. It brought back the atmosphere of what

at school we called our “Temple Days.”

I went on tiptoe, fearful of disturbing what seemed solemn even to

the point of being sacred, for the mood was so strong that I felt no

desire to resist or criticise. Whatever its cause, this subjective

state of mind was soothing to the point of actual happiness. A hint of

bliss was in it. And it did not lessen either, when I discovered the

landlady, Mrs. Garnier, white of face in the little hall-way, showing

signs of nervousness that she made no attempt whatever to conceal.

She was all eagerness to speak. Before I could ask if Julius was at

home, she relieved her burdened mind:

“Oh, it’ll be you, Mr. Mason! And I’m that glad ye’ve come!”

Her round, puffy visage plainly expressed relief, as she came towards

me with a shambling gait, looking over her shoulder across the dim-lit

hall. “Mr. LeVallion,” she whispered, “has been in there without a

sound since mornin’, and I’m thinkin’, maybe, something would ha’

happened to him.” And she stared into my face as though I could

instantly explain what troubled her. Where I felt spiritual peace, she

felt, obviously, spiritual alarm.

“He is engaged?” I inquired. Then--though hardly aware why I put the

question--I added: “There is someone with him?”

She peered about her.

“He’ll be no engaged to you, sir,” she replied. Plainly, it was not her

lodger’s instructions that prompted the words; by the way she hung back

I discerned that she dreaded to announce me; she hoped I would go in

and explore alone.

“I’ll wait in the sitting-room till he comes out,” I said, after a

moment’s hesitation. And I moved towards the door.

Mrs. Garnier, however, at once made an involuntary gesture to

prevent me. I can still hear her slippered tread shuffling across

the oil-cloth. The gesture became a sort of leap when she saw that I

persisted. It reminded me of a frightened animal.

“There’ll be twa gentlemen already waiting,” she mumbled thickly, her

face turning a shade paler.

And, hearing this, I paused. The old woman, I saw, was trembling. I was

annoyed at the interruption, for it destroyed the sense of delightful

peace I had enjoyed.

“Anyone I know?”

I was close to the door as I asked it, the terrified old woman close

beside me. She thrust her grey face up to mine; her eyes shone in the

gleam of the low-turned gas jet above our heads; and her excitement

communicated itself suddenly to my own blood. A distinct shiver ran

down my back.

“I dinna ken them,” she whispered behind a hand she held to her mouth,

“for, ye see, I dinna let them in.”

I stared at her, wondering what was coming next. The slight trepidation

I had felt for a moment vanished, but I kept my voice at a whisper for

fear of disturbing Julius in his inner chamber on the other side of the

wall.

“What do you mean? Tell me plainly what’s the matter.” I said it with

some sharpness.

She replied at once, only too glad to share her anxiety with another.

“They came in by themselves,” she whispered with a touch of

superstitious awe; “wonderfu’ big men, the twa of them, and

dark-skinned as the de’il,” and she drew back a pace to watch the

effect of her words upon me.

“How long ago?” I asked impatiently. I remembered suddenly that Julius

had friends among the Hindu students. It was more than possible that he

had given them his key.

Mrs. Garnier shook her head suggestively. “I went in an hour ago,” she

told me in a low tone, “thinkin’ maybe he would be eatin’ something,

and, O Lord mercy, I ran straight against the pair of them, settin’

there in the darkness wi’oot a word.”

“Well?” I said, seeing that she was likely to invent, “and what of it?”

“Neither of them moved a finger at me,” she continued breathlessly,

“but they looked all over me, and they had eyes like a flame o’ fire,

and I all but let the lamp fall and came out in a faintin’ condeetion,

and have been prayin’ ever since that someone would come in.”

She shuffled into the middle of the hall-way, drawing me after her by

my sleeve. She pointed towards a corner of the ceiling. A small square

window was let into the wall of the little interior room where Julius

sought his solitude, and where at this moment he was busy with his

mysterious occupations.

“And what’ll be that awfu’ licht, then?” she inquired, plucking me by

the arm.

A gleam of bright white light, indeed, was visible through the

small dusty pane above us, and again a curious memory ran like

sheet-lightning across my mind that I had seen this kind of light

before and that it was familiar to me. It vanished instantly before I

could seize the fleeting picture. The light certainly was of peculiar

brightness, coming from neither gas nor candle, nor from any ordinary

light that I could have named off-hand.

“It’ll be precisely that kind of licht that’s in their eyes,” I heard

her whisper, as she jerked her whole body rather than her head alone

towards the sitting-room I was about to enter. She wiped her clammy

hands upon the striped apron that hung crooked from her angular hips.

“Mrs. Garnier,” I said with authority, “there’s nothing to be afraid

of. Mr. LeVallon makes experiments sometimes, that’s all. He wouldn’t

hurt a hair of your head----”

“Nae doot,” she interrupted me, backing away from the door, “for his

bonny face is a face to get well on, but the twa others in there, the

darkies--aye, and that’ll be another matter, and not one for me to be

meddlin’ with----”

I cut her short. “If you feel frightened,” I said, smiling, “go to your

room and pray. You needn’t announce me. I’ll go in and wait until he’s

ready to come out and see me.”

Her face went white as linen, showing up an old scar on the cheek in

an ugly reddish pattern, while I pushed past her and turned the handle

of the door. I heard the breath catch in her throat. The next minute,

lamp in hand, I was in the room, slamming the door literally in her

face lest she might follow and do some foolish thing. I set the lamp

down upon the table in the centre. I looked quickly about me. No living

person but myself was there--certainly no Hindu gentlemen with eyes

of flame. Mrs. Garnier’s Celtic imagination had run away with her

altogether. I sat down and waited. A line of that same bright, silvery

light shone also beneath the crack of the door from the inner chamber.

The wind and rain trumpeted angrily at the windows. But the room was

undeniably empty.

Yet it is utterly beyond me to describe the sense of exaltation that at

once rose over me like some influence of perfect music; “exaltation”

_is_ the right word, I think, and “music” conveys best the uplifting

and soothing effect that was produced. For here, at closer quarters,

the sensation of exquisite peace was doubly renewed. The nervous

alarm inspired by the woman fled. This peace flooded me; it stirred

the bliss of some happy spiritual life long since enjoyed and long

since forgotten. I passed instantly, as it were, under the sway of

some august authority that banished the fret and restlessness of the

extraneous world; and compared to which the strife and ambition of my

modern life seemed, indeed, well lost.

Behind it, however, and behind the solemnity that awed, was at the same

time the faint presage of something vaguely disquieting. The memory

of some afflicting incompleteness gripped me; the anguish of ideals

too lofty for attainment; the sweet pain and passion of some exquisite

long suffering; the secret yearning of a soul that had dared sublime

accomplishment, then plunged itself and others in the despair of

failure--all this lay in the apprehension that stood close behind the

bliss.

But, above all else, was the certainty that I remembered definite

details of those Temple Days, and that I was upon the verge of still

further and more detailed recollection.... That faintness stealing

over me was the faintness of immeasurable distance, the ache of dizzy

time, the weariness that has no end and no beginning. I felt what

Julius LeVallon felt--the deep sickness of eternity that knows no

final rest, either of blessed annihilation or of non-existence, until

the journey of the soul comes to its climax in the Deity. And, feeling

this--realising it--for the first time, I understood, also for the

first time, LeVallon’s words at Motfield Close two years ago--“If the

soul remembered all, it would lose the courage to attempt. Only the

vital things are worth recalling, because they guide.”

This flashed across me now, as I sat in that Edinburgh lodging-house,

waiting for him to come. I knew myself, beyond all doubt or question,

caught away in that web of wonderful, far-off things; there revived

in me the yearnings of memories exceedingly remote; poignant still

with life, because they were unexhausted still, and terrible with

that incompleteness which sooner or later _must_ find satisfaction.

And it was this sense of things left undone that brought the feeling

of presentiment. Julius, in that inner chamber, was communing as of

old. But also--he was searching. He was hard upon the trail of ancient

clues. He was seeking _her_. I knew it in my bones.

For I felt some subtle communication with that other mind beyond the

obstructing door--not, however, as it was to-day, but as it was in the

recoverable centuries when the three of us had committed the audacious

act which still awaited its final readjustment at our hands. Julius,

searching by some method of his own among the layers of our ancient

lives, reconstructed the particular scenes he needed. Involuntarily,

unwittingly, I shared them too. I had stepped into his ancient mood....

My mind grew crowded. The pictures rose and passed, and rose again....

But it was always one in particular that returned, staying longer than

the others. He concentrated upon one, then. In his efforts to find

_her_ soul in its body of to-day, he went back to the source of our

original relationship, the immensely remote experience when he and I

and she had sown the harvest we had now come back to reap together.

Thence, holding the clue, he could trace the thread of her existences

down to this very moment. He could find her where she stood upon the

earth--to-day.

This seemed very clear to me, though how I realised it is difficult to

say. I remember a curious thought--which proves how real the conviction

was in me. I asked myself: “Does _she_ feel anything now, as she goes

about her business on this earth, perhaps in England, perhaps not far

removed from us, as distance goes? And is she, too, wherever she stands

and waits, aware perhaps of some queer presentiment that haunts her

waking or her sleeping mind--the presentiment of something coming,

something about to happen--that someone waits for her?”

The one persistent picture rose and captured me again....

In blazing sunlight stood the building of whitened stone against

the turquoise sky; and, a little to the left, the yellow cliffs,

precipitous and crumbling. At their base were mounds of sand the wind

and sun had chiselled and piled up against their feet. The soft air

trembled with the heat; fierce light bathed everything--from the small

white figures moving up and down the rock-hewn steps, to the Temple

hollowed out between the stone paws of an immense outline half animal,

half human. To the right, and towards the east, stretched the abundant

desert, shimmering grey and blue and green beneath the torrid sun. I

smelt the empty leagues of sand, the delicate perfume that gathers

among the smooth, baked hollows of a million dunes; I felt the breeze,

sharp and exhilarating, that knew no interruption of broken surfaces to

break its journey of days and nights; and behind me I heard the faint,

sharp rustle of trees whose shadows flickered on the burning ground.

This heat and air grew stealthily upon me; fire and wind were here the

dominating influences, the natural methods which furnished vehicles for

the manifestation of particular Powers. Here was the home of our early

worship of the Sun and space, of Fire and Wind. Yet, somehow, it seemed

not of this present planet we call Earth, but of some point nearer to

the centre.

Beside those enormous paws, where the air danced and shimmered in

the brilliant glare, I saw the narrow flight of steps leading to

the crypts below--the retreats for solitude. And then, suddenly,

with a shock of poignant recognition, I saw a figure that I knew

instantly to be myself, the Sower of my harvest of To-day. It slowly

moved down the steps behind another figure that I recognised with

equal conviction--some inner flash of lightning certainty--as Julius

LeVallon, the soul I knew to-day in Edinburgh, the soul that, in

another body, now stood near me in a nineteenth century lodging-house.

The bodies, too, were lighter, less dense and material than those we

used to-day, the spirit occupier less hampered and restricted. That too

was clear to me.

I was aware of both times, both places simultaneously. That is, I was

not dreaming. The peace, moreover, that stole round me in this modern

building was but a faint reflection of the peace once familiar to me

in those far-off Temple Days. And somehow it was the older memory that

dominated consciousness.

About me the room held still as death, the battle of that earthly

storm against the walls and windows half unreal, or so remote as to

be not realised. Time paused a moment. I looked back. I lived as I

had been then--in another type of consciousness, it seemed. It was

marvellous, yet natural as in a dream. Only, as in a dream, subsequent

language fails to retain the searching, vivid reality. The living

_fact_ is not recaptured. I felt. I understood. Certain tendencies

and characteristics that were “me” to-day I saw explained--those that

derived from this particular period. What must be conquered, and why,

flashed sharply; also individuals whom to avoid would be vain shirking,

since having sown together we must reap together--or miss the object of

our being.

I heard strange names--Concerighé, Silvatela, Ziaz ... and a surge of

passionate memories caught at my heart. Yet it was not Egypt, it was

not India or the East, it was not Assyria or old Chaldea even; this

belonged to a civilisation older than them all, some dim ancient

kingdom that antedated all records open to possible research to-day....

I was in contact with the searching mind within that inner chamber.

His effort included me, making the deeps in me give up their dead.

I saw. He sought through many “sections.”... I followed.... There

was confusion--the pictures of recent days breaking in upon others

infinitely remote. I could not disentangle....

Very sharply, then, and with a sensation of uneasiness that was almost

pain, another figure rose. I saw a woman. With the same clear certainty

of recognition the face presented itself. Hair, lips, and eyes I saw

distinctly, yet somehow through a haze that veiled the expression.

About the graceful neck hung a soft cloth of gold; dark lashes screened

a gaze still starry and undimmed; there was a smile of shining teeth

... the eyes met mine....

With a diving rush the entire picture shifted, passing on to another

scene, and I saw two figures, her own and his, bending down over

something that lay stretched and motionless upon an altar of raised

stones. We were in shadow now; the air was cool; the perfume of the

open desert had altered to the fragrance that was incense.... The

picture faded, flashed quickly back, faded again, and once again was

there. I could not hold it for long. Larger, darker figures swam

between to confuse and blur its detail, figures of some swarthier

race, as though layers of other memories, perhaps more recent, mingled

bewilderingly with it. The two passed in and out of one another,

sometimes interpenetrating, as when two slides appear upon the

magic-lantern sheet together; yet, peering at me through the phantasmal

kaleidoscope, shone ever this woman-face, seductively lovely, haunting

as a vision of stars, mask of a soul even then already “old,” although

the picture was of ages before the wisdom of Buddha or the love of

Christ had stolen on the world....

Then came a moment of clearer sight suddenly, and I saw that the

objects lying stretched and motionless in the obscurity, and over

one of which they bent in concentrated effort, were the bodies of

men not dead, but temporarily vacated. And I knew that we stood in

the Hall of the Vacated Bodies, an atmosphere of awe and solemnity

about us. For these were the advanced disciples who in the final

initiation lay three days and nights entranced, while their souls

acquired “elsewhere and otherwise” the knowledge no brain could attain

to in the flesh. During the interval there were those who watched the

empty tenements--Guardians of the Vacated Bodies--and two of these I

now saw bending low--the woman and a man. The body itself I saw but

dimly, but an overmastering curiosity woke in me to see it clearly--to

recognise----!

The intensity of my effort caused a blur, it seemed. Across my inner

sight the haze thickened for a moment, and I lost the scene. But this

time I understood. The dread of something they were about to consummate

blackened the memory with the pain of treachery. Guardians of the

Vacated Bodies, they had been faithless to their trust: they had used

their position for some personal end. Awe and terror clutched my soul.

Who was the leader, who the led, I failed utterly to recover, nor what

the motive of the broken trust had been. A sublime audacity lay in it,

that I knew. There was the desire for knowledge not yet properly within

their reach; there was the ambition to evoke the elemental powers;

and there was an “experiment,” using the instrument at hand as the

channel for an achievement that might have made them--one of them, at

any rate--as the gods. But there was about it all an entanglement of

personalities and motives I was helpless to unravel. The whole deep

significance I could not recover. My own part, the part he played, and

the part the woman played, seemed woven in an involved and inextricable

knot. It belonged, I felt, to an order of consciousness which is not

the order of to-day. I, therefore, failed to understand completely.

Only that we three were together, closely linked, emerged absolutely

clear.

For one moment the scene returned again. I remember that something

drove forcibly against me in that ancient place, that it flung itself

roaring like a tempest in my face, that a great burning sensation

passed through me, while sheets of what I can only describe as black

fire tore through the air about us. There was fire and there was wind

... that much I realised.

I rocked--that is my present body rocked. I reeled upon my chair. The

entire memory plunged down into darkness with a speed of lightning. I

seemed to rise--to emerge from the depths of some sea within me where I

had lain sunk for ages. In one sense--I awoke. But, before the glamour

passed entirely, and while the reality of the scene hung about me

still, I remember that a cry for help escaped my lips, and that it was

the name of our leader that I called upon:

“Concerighé...!”

With that cry still sounding in the air, I turned, and saw him whom I

had called upon beside me. With a kind of splendid, dazzling light he

came. He rested one hand upon my shoulder; he gazed down into my eyes;

and I looked into a face that was magnificent with power, radiant,

glorious. The atmosphere momentarily seemed turned to flame. I felt a

wind of strength strike through me. The old temptation and the sin--the

failure--all were clear at last.

I remembered....

CHAPTER XIII

The brilliance of the figure dimmed and melted, as though the shadows

ate it from the edges inwards; there came a rattling at the handle of

that inner chamber door; it opened suddenly; and Julius LeVallon, this

time in his body of To-day, stood framed against the square of light

that swirled behind him like clouds of dazzlingly white steam. The door

swung to and closed. He moved forward quickly into the room.

By this time I was more in possession of my normal senses again. Here

was no question of memory, vision, or imagination’s glamour. Beyond

any doubt or ambiguity, there stood beside me in this sitting-room of

the Edinburgh lodging-house two figures of Julius LeVallon. I saw them

simultaneously. There was the normal Julius walking across the carpet

towards me, and there was his double that stood near me in a body of

light--now fading, yet unquestionably wearing the likeness of that

Concerighé whom I had seen bending with the woman above the vacated

body.

They moved together swiftly. Almost the same moment they met; they

intermingled, much as two outlines of an object slip one into the other

when the finger’s pressure on the eyeball is removed. They became one

person. Julius was there before me in the lamp-lit room, just come

from his inner chamber that blazed with brilliance. This light now

disappeared. No line showed beneath the crack of the door. I heard the

wind and rain shout drearily past the windows with the dying storm.

I caught my breath. I stood up to face him, taking a quick step

backwards. And I heard Julius laugh a little. He told me afterwards I

had assumed an attitude of defence.

He was speaking--in his ordinary voice, no sign of excitement in him,

nor about his presence anything unusual.

“You called me,” he said quietly; “you called for help. But I could not

come at once; I could not get back; it was such a long way off.” He

looked at me and smiled. “I was searching,” he added, as though he had

been merely turning the pages of a book.

“Our old Memory Game. I know. I felt it--even out here.”

He nodded gravely.

“You could hardly help it,” he replied, “being so close,” and indicated

that inner room with a gesture of his head. “Besides, you were in it

all the time. And she was in it too. Oh,” he said with a touch of swift

enthusiasm, “I have recovered nearly all. I know exactly now what

happened. I was the leader, I the instigator; you both merely helped

me; you with your faithful friendship, even while you warned; she with

her passionate love that asked no questions, but obeyed.”

“She loved you so?” I asked faintly, but with an uncontrollable

trembling of the voice. An amazing prescience seized me.

“You,” he said calmly. “It was you she loved.”

What thrill of romance, deathless and enthralling, stirred in me as

I heard these words! What starry glory stepped down upon the world!

A memory of bliss poured into me; the knowledge of an undying love

constant as the sun itself. Then, hard upon its heels, flashed back

the Present with a small and insignificant picture--of my approaching

union--with another. An extraordinary revulsion caught me. I remember

steadying myself against the chair in front of me.

“For it was your love,” Julius went on quietly, “that made you so

necessary. You two were a single force together. I had the knowledge,

but you together had the greatest power in the world. We were three--a

trinity--the strongest union possible. And the temptation was too much

for me----”

He turned away a moment so that I could not see his face. He broke off

suddenly. There was a new and curious quality in his voice, as though

it dwindled in volume and grew smaller, yet was not audibly lowered.

What caused the old sense of dread to quicken in me? What brought this

sudden sinking of the heart as he turned again from the cabinet where

he stood, and our eyes met steadily through the lamp-lit room?

“I borrowed love, but knew not how to use it,” he went on slowly,

solemnly. “I had evoked the Powers successfully; through the channel

of that vacated body I had drawn them into my own being. Then came the

failure----”

“I--we failed you!” I faltered.

“The failure,” he replied, still fixing me with his glowing eyes, “was

mine, and mine alone. The power lent me I did not understand. It was

not my own, and without great love these things cannot be accomplished.

I must first know love. What I had summoned I was too weak to banish.

The owner of the vacated body returned.” Then, after a pause, he added

half below his breath: “The Powers, exiled from their appointed place,

are about me to this very day. But it is the owner of that body whose

forgiveness I need most. And only with your help--with the presence,

the sympathetic presence of yourself and her--can this be effected.”

Past, present, and future seemed strangely intermingled as I heard, for

my thoughts went groping forward, and at the same time diving backwards

among desert sands and temples. The passion of an immense love-story

caught me; I was aware of intense yearning to resume my place in it

all with him, with her, with all the reconstructed conditions of

relationships so ancient and so true. It swept over me like a storm

unchained. That scene in the cool and sunless crypt flamed forth again,

reality in each smallest detail. The meaning of his words I did not

wholly grasp, however; there was something lacking in my mind of

To-day that withheld the final clue. My present consciousness was not

as then. From brain and reason all this seemed so utterly divorced, and

I had forgotten how to understand by _feeling_ in the way that Julius

did. Those last words, however, brought a sudden question to my lips.

Almost unconsciously I gave it utterance:

“Through the channel of a body?” I asked, and my voice was lower than

his own.

“Through the channel of a human system,” was his answer, “an organism

that uses consciously both heat and air, and that, therefore, knows the

nature of them both. For the Powers can be summoned only by those who

understand them; and understanding, being worship, depends ultimately

upon _sharing_ their natures, though it be in little.”

There came a welcome break, then, in the strain of this extraordinary

conversation, as Julius, using no bridge to transpose our emotions

from one key to the other, walked quietly over to the cupboard. It was

characteristically significant of his attitude to life in general,

that the solemn things we had been speaking of were yet no more sacred

than the prosaic detail of to-day that now concerned him--a student’s

supper. All was “one” to him in this rare but absolutely genuine way.

He was unconscious of any break in the emotional level of what had

been--for him there was, indeed, no break--and, watching him, it almost

seemed that I still saw that other figure of long ago striding across

the granite, sun-drenched slabs.

The voice rose unbidden within me, choked by the stress of some

inexplicable emotion:

“Concerighé...!” I cried aloud involuntarily; “Concerighé ... Ziaz....

We are all together still ... my help is yours ... my unfailing

help....”

Julius, loaf and marmalade jar in hand, turned from the cupboard as

though he had been struck. For a moment he stood and stared. The

customary expression melted from his face, and in its place a look of

tenderest compassion shone through the strength.

“You do remember, then!” he said very softly; “even the names!”

“And Silvatela,” I murmured, moisture rising unaccountably to my eyes.

I saw the room in mist.

Julius stood before me like a figure carved in stone. For a long

time he spoke no word. Gradually the curious disturbance in my own

breast sank and passed. The mist lifted and disappeared. I felt myself

slipping back into To-day on the ebb of some shattering experience,

already half forgotten.

“You remember,” he repeated presently, his voice impassioned but firmly

quiet, “the temptation--and--the failure...?”

I nodded, almost involuntarily again.

“And still hold to you--both,” I murmured.

He held me with his eyes for quite a minute. Though he used no word or

gesture, I felt his deep delight.

“Because we must,” he answered presently; “because we must.”

He had moved so close to me that I felt his breath upon my face. I

could have sworn for a second that I gazed into the shining eyes of

that other and audacious figure, for it was the voice of Concerighé,

yet the face of Julius. Past and present seemed to join hands, mingling

confusedly in my mind. Cause and effect whispered across the centuries,

linking us together. And the voice continued deeply, as if echoing down

hollow aisles of stone.

I heard the words in the shadowy spaces of that old-world crypt, rather

than among the plush furniture of these Edinburgh lodgings.

“We three are at last together again, and must bring the Balance to a

final close. As the stars are but dust upon the pathway of the gods, so

our mistakes are but dust upon the pathway of our lives. What we let

fall together, we must together remove.”

Then, with an abruptness that pertained sometimes to these curious

irruptions from the past, the values shifted. He became more and more

the Julius LeVallon whom I knew to-day. Speech changed to a modern

and more usual key. And the effect upon myself was of vague relief,

for while the impression of great drama did not wholly pass, the

uneasiness lightened in me, and I found my tongue again. I told my

own experience--all that I had seen and felt and thought. Brewing the

cocoa, and setting out the bread and marmalade upon the table, Julius

listened to every word without interruption. Our intimacy was complete

again as though no separation, either of lives or days, had been

between us.

“Inside me, of course,” I concluded the recital; “in some kind of

interior sight I saw it all----”

“The only true sight,” he declared, “though what you saw was but the

reflection at second-hand of memories I evoked in there.” He pointed to

the inner room. “In there,” he went on significantly, “where nothing

connected with the Present enters, no thought, no presence, nothing

that can disturb or interrupt,--in there you would see and remember

as vividly as I myself. The room is prepared.... The channels all are

open. As it was, my pictures flashed into you and set the great chain

moving. For no life is isolated; all is shared; and every detail,

animate or so-called inanimate, belongs inevitably to every other.”

“Yet what I saw was so much clearer than our schoolday memories,” I

said. “Those pictures, for instance, of the pastoral people where we

came together first.”

An expression of yearning passed into his eyes as he answered.

“Because in our Temple Days you led the life of the soul instead of the

body merely. The soul alone remembers. There lies the permanent record.

Only what has touched the soul, therefore, is recoverable--the great

joys, great sorrows, great adventures that have reached it. You _feel_

them. The rest are but fugitive pictures of scenery that accompanied

the spiritual disturbances. Each body you occupy has a different brain

that stores its own particular series. But true memory is in, and of,

the Soul. Few have any true soul-life at all; few, therefore, have

anything to remember!”

His low voice ran on and on, charged with deep earnestness; his very

atmosphere seemed to vibrate with the conviction of his words; about

his face occasionally were flashes of that radiance in which his body

of light--his inmost being--dwelt for ever. I remember moving the

marmalade pot from its precarious position on the table edge, lest his

gestures should send it flying! But I remember also that the haunting

reality of “other days and other places” lay about us while we talked,

so that the howling of the storm outside seemed far away and quite

unable to affect us. We knew perfect communion in that dingy room. We

_felt_ together.

“But it is difficult, often painful, to draw the memories up again,”

he went on, still speaking of recovery, “for they lie so deeply coiled

about the very roots of joy and grief. Things of the moment smother the

older pictures. The way of recovery is arduous, and not many would deem

the sacrifice involved worth while. It means plunging into yourself as

you must plunge below the earth if you would see the starlight while

the sun is in the sky. To-day’s sunlight hides the stars of yesterday.

Yet all is accessible--the entire series of the soul’s experiences, and

real forgetting is not possible.”

A movement as of wind seemed to pass between us over the faded carpet,

bearing me upwards while he spoke, sweeping me with his own conviction

of our eternal ancestry and of our unending future.

“We have made ourselves exactly what we are. We are making our future

at this very minute--_now!_” I exclaimed. The justice of the dream

inspired me. Great courage, a greater hope awoke.

He smiled, opening his arms with a gesture that took in the world.

“Your aspirations, hopes and fears, all that has ever burned

vitally at your centre, every spiritual passion that uplifted or

enticed, each deep endeavour that seeded your present tendencies

and talents--everything, in fact, strong enough to have touched

your Soul--sends up its whirling picture of beauty or dismay at the

appointed time. The disentangling may be difficult, but all are

there, for you yourself are their actual, living Record. Feeling,

not thinking, best unravels them--the primitive vision as of

children--the awareness of kinship with everything about you. The

sense of separateness and isolation vanishes, and the soul recovers

the consciousness of sharing all the universe. There is no loneliness;

there is no more fear.”

* * * * *

Ah, how we talked that night of tempest through! What thoughts and

dreams and possibilities Julius sent thundering against my mind as

with the power of the loosed wind and rain outside. The scale of life

became immense, each tiniest detail of act and thought important with

the sacredness of some cosmic ceremonial that it symbolised. Yet to his

words alone this power was not due, but rather to some force of driving

certitude in himself that brought into me too a similar conviction. The

memory of it hardened in the sands of my imagination, as it were, so

that the result has remained, although the language by which he made it

seem so reasonable has gone.

I smoked my pipe; and, as the smoke curled upwards, I watched his face

of pallid marble and the mop of ebony hair that set off so well the

brilliance of the eyes. He looked, I thought to myself, like no human

being I had ever seen before.

“And sometimes,” I remember hearing, “the memories from a later section

may suddenly swarm across an earlier one--confusing the sight, perhaps,

just when it is getting clear. A few hours ago, for instance, my

search was interrupted by an inrush of two more recent layers--Eastern

ones--which came to obliterate with their vividness the older, dimmer

ones I sought.”

I mentioned what the frightened woman imagined she had seen.

“She caught a reflected fragment too,” he said. “So strong a picture

was bound to spread.”

“Then was Mrs. Garnier with us too before?” I asked, as we burst out

laughing.

“Not in that sense, no. It was the glamour that touched her

only--second-sight, as she might call it. She is sensitive to

impressions, nothing more.”

He came over and sat closer to me. The web of his language folded

closer too. The momentum of his sincerity threw itself against all my

prejudices, so that I, too, saw the serpentine vista of these previous

lives stretching like a river across the ages. To this day I see his

tall, slim figure, his face with the clear pale skin, the burning eyes;

now he leaned across the table, now stood up to emphasise some phrase,

now paced the floor of that lamp-lit students’ lodging-house, while he

spoke of the long battling of our souls together, sowing thoughts and

actions whose consequences must one day be reaped without evasion. The

scale of his Dream was vast indeed, its prospect austere and merciless,

yet the fundamental idea of justice made it beautiful, as its inclusion

of all Nature made it grand.

To Julius LeVallon the soul was indeed unconquerable, and man master

of his fate. Death lost its ugliness and terror; the sense of broken,

separated life was replaced by the security of a continuous existence,

whole, unhurried, eternal, affording ample time for all development,

accepting joy and suffering as the justice of results, but never as of

reward or punishment. There was no caprice; there was no such thing as

chance.

Then, as the night wore slowly on, and the wind died down, and the

wonderful old town lay sleeping peacefully, we talked at last of that

one thing towards which all our conversation tended subconsciously: our

future together and the experiment that it held in store for us--with

her.

I cannot hope to set down here the words by which this singular

being led me, half accepting, to the edge of understanding that his

conception might be right. To that edge, however, I somehow felt my

mind was coaxed. I looked over that edge. I saw for a moment something

of his magnificent panorama. I realised a hint of possibility in

his shining scheme. But it is beyond me to report the persuasive

reasonableness of all I heard, for the truth is that Julius spoke

another language--a language incomprehensible to my mind to-day. His

words, indeed, were those of modern schools and books, but the spirit

that ensouled them belonged to a forgotten time. Only by means of some

strange inner sympathy did I comprehend him. Another, an older type of

consciousness, perhaps, woke in me. As with the pictures, this also

seemed curiously familiar as I listened. Something in me old as the

stars and wiser than the brain both heard and understood.

For the elemental forces he held to be Intelligences that share the

life of the cosmos in a degree enormously more significant than

anything human life can claim. Mother Earth, for him, was no mere

poetic phrase. There was spiritual life in Nature as there was

spiritual life in men and women. The insignificance of the latter was

due to their being cut off from the great sources of supply--to their

separation from Nature. Under certain conditions, and with certain

consequences, it was possible to obtain these powers which, properly

directed, might help the entire world. This experiment we had once

made--and failed.

The method I already understood in a certain measure; but the rest

escaped my comprehension. Memory failed to reconstruct it for me;

vision darkened; his words conveyed no meaning. It was beyond me.

Somewhere, somehow, personal love had entered to destroy the effective

balance that ensured complete success. Yet, equally, the power of love

which is quintessential sympathy, _was_ necessary.

What, however, I did easily understand was that the object of that

adventure was noble, nothing meanly personal in it anywhere; and,

further, that to restore the damaged equilibrium by returning these

particular powers to their rightful places, there must be an exact

reproduction of the conditions of evocation--that is, the three

original participants must be together again--a human system must serve

again as channel.

And the essential fact of all that passed between us on this occasion

was that I gave again my promise. When the necessary conditions were

present--I would not fail him. This is the memory I have carried with

me through the twenty years of our subsequent separation. I gave my

pledge.

* * * * *

The storm blew itself to rest behind the hills; the rain no longer set

the windows rattling; the hush of early morning stole down upon the

sleeping city. We had talked the night away. He seemed aware--I know

not how--that we stood upon the brink of going apart for years. There

was great tenderness in his manner, his voice, his gestures. Turning

to me a moment as the grey light crept past the curtains, he peered

into my face as though he would revive lost centuries with the passion

of his eyes. He took my hand and held it, while a look of peace and

trust passed over his features as though the matter of the future were

already then accomplished.

He led me silently across the room towards the door. I turned

instinctively; words rose up in me, but words that found no utterance.

A deep emotion held me dumb. Then, as I opened the door, I found the

old, familiar name again:

“Concerighé ... Friend of a million years...!”

But no sentence followed it. He touched my arm. A cold wind seemed to

pass between us. I firmly believe that somehow he foresaw the long

interval of separation that was coming. Something about him seemed to

fade; I saw him less distinctly; my sight, perhaps, was blurred with

the strain of these long hours--hours the like of which I was not to

know again for many years. That magical name has many a time echoed

since in my heart away from him, as it echoed then across the darkened

little hall-way of those Edinburgh lodgings: “Concerighé! Friend of a

million years!”

Side by side we went down the granite steps of the spiral staircase to

the street. Julius opened the big front door. I heard the rattling of

the iron chain. A breeze from the sea blew salt against our faces,

then ran gustily along the streets. Behind the Calton Hill showed a

crimson streak of dawn. A line of clouds, half rosy and half gold,

ran down the sky. No living being was astir. I heard only the noisy

whirling of the iron chimney-pots against the morning wind.

And then his voice:

“Good-bye---- Until we meet again....”

He pressed my hands. I looked into his eyes. He stepped back into the

shadow of the porch. The door closed softly.

CHAPTER XIV

“_Forgive? O yes! How lightly, lightly said!

Forget? No, never, while the ages roll,

Till God slay o’er again the undying dead,

And quite unmake my soul!_”--Mary Coleridge.

I stepped down, it seemed, into a lilliputian world where the grander

issues no longer drew the souls of men. The deep and simple things were

fled, the old Nature gods withdrawn. The scale of life had oddly shrunk.

I saw the names above the shuttered shops with artificial articles for

sale--“11¾d. a yard”--on printed paper labels. The cheapness of a

lesser day flashed everywhere.

I passed the closed doors of a building where people flocked to mumble

that no good was in them, while a man proclaimed in a loud voice things

he hardly could believe. A few streets behind me Julius LeVallon stood

in the shadows of another porch, solitary and apart, yet communing with

stars and hills and seas, survival from a vital, vanished age when life

was realised everywhere and the elemental Nature Powers walked hand in

hand with men.

Through the deserted streets I made my way across the town to my own

little student’s flat on the Morningside where I then lived. Gradually

the crimson dawn slipped into a stormy sunrise. I watched the Pentlands

take the gold, and the Castle rock turn ruddy; a gentle mist lay over

Leith below; a pool of deep blue shadow marked the slumbering Old Town.

But about my heart at this magic hour stirred the dawn-winds of a

thousand ancient sunrises, and I felt the haunting atmosphere of

other days and other places steal up through the mists of immemorial

existences. I thought of the whole great series, each life rising and

setting like a little day, each with its dawn and noon and sunset,

each with its harvest of failure and success, of joy and sorrow,

of friendships formed and enemies forgiven, of ideals realised or

abandoned--pouring out of the womb of time and slowly bringing the

soul through the discipline of all possible experience towards that

perfection which proclaims it one with the entire universe--the Deity.

And a profound weariness fell about my spirit as I went. I became

aware of my own meagre enthusiasm. I welcomed the conception of some

saviour who should do it all for me. I knew myself unequal to the

gigantic task. In that moment the heroic figure of Julius seemed remote

from reality, a towering outline in the sky, an austere embodiment

of legendary myth. The former passionate certainty that he was right

dwindled amid wavering doubts. The perplexities of life came back upon

me with tormenting power. I lost the coherent vision of consistent and

logical beauty that he inspired. It was all too vast for me.

This reaction was natural enough, though for a long time mood chased

mood across my troubled mind, each battling for supremacy. The

materialism of the day, proudly strutting with its boundless assurance

and its cock-sure knowledge, regained possession of my thoughts.

The emptiness of scholastic theology no longer seemed so hideously

apparent. It was pain to let the other go, but go it did--though never,

perhaps, so completely as I then believed.

By insignificant details the change revealed itself. I recalled that

I was due that very afternoon at a luncheon where “intellectual” folk

would explain away the soul with a single scientific formula, and

where learned heads would wag condescendingly as they murmured “But

there’s no evidence to prove _that_, you know ...” ... and Julius rose

before me in another light at once--Pagan, dreamer, monster of exploded

superstitions, those very hills where he evoked the sylvan deities, a

momentary hallucination....

Then again, quite suddenly, it was the chatterers at the luncheon party

who seemed unreal, and all their clever patter about the “movements”

of the day mere shallow verbiage. The hoardings of the town were blue

and yellow with gaudy election posters, but the sky was aflame with

the grand old message of the Sun God, written in eternal hieroglyphs

of gold and red upon the clouds that brushed the hills. The elemental

deities stormed thundering by. And, instead of scholars laying down the

letter of their little law, I heard the tones of Concerighé calling

across the centuries the names of great belief, of greater beauty.

And the older pageantry stole back across the world.

Almost it was in me to turn and seek ... with him ... that

soul-knowledge which ran through all the “sections.”... Yet the younger

fear oppressed me. The endless journey, the renunciation and suffering

involved, the incessant, tireless striving, with none to help but one’s

own unconquerable will--this, and a host of other feelings that lay

beyond expression, bore down upon me with their cold, glacier power.

I thought of Julius with something of reverence akin to terror.... I

despised myself. I also understood why the majority need priests and

creeds and formulæ to help them.... The will, divorced from Nature, was

so small a thing!

When I entered my rooms the sunlight lay upon the carpet, and never

before had it seemed so welcome or so comforting. I could then and

there have worshipped the great body that sent it forth. But, instead,

in a state of exhaustion and weariness, I flung myself upon the bed.

Yet, while I slept, it seemed I left that little modern room and

entered the region of great, golden days “when the sun was younger.”

In very different attire, I took my place in the blue-robed circle,

a portion of some ancient, gorgeous ceremonial that was nearer to

the primitive beauty, when the “circles swallowed the sun,” and the

elemental Powers were accessible to every heart.

It was not surprising that I slept till dusk, missing my lectures

and the luncheon party as well; but it was distinctly surprising to

find myself wakened by a knocking at the door for a telegram that

summoned me south forthwith. And only in the train, anxiously counting

the minutes in the hope that I might find my father still alive, did

the possible significance of LeVallon’s final words come back upon my

troubled mind: “Until we meet again.”

For little did I guess that my father’s death was to prevent my

returning to the University, that my career would be changed and

hastened owing to an unexpected lack of means, that my occasional

letters to Julius were to be returned “unknown,” or that my next word

of him would be received twenty years later in a room overlooking the

Rhine at Bâle, where I have attempted to set down these difficult notes

of reminiscence....

Book III

THE CHÂLET IN THE JURA MOUNTAINS

“_He (man) first clothes the gods in the image of his own

innermost nature; he personifies them as modes of his own greater

consciousness. All this was native to him when he still felt

himself kin with Nature; when he felt rather than thought, when

he followed instinct rather than ratiocination. But for long

centuries this feeling of kinship with Nature has been gradually

weakened by the powerful play of that form of mind peculiar to

man; until he has at last reached a stage when he finds himself

largely divorced from Nature, to such an extent indeed that he

treats her as something foreign and apart from himself...._

“_He seems at present, at any rate in the persons of most of

the accredited thinkers of the West, to be absolutely convinced

that no other mode of mind can exist except his own mode....

To say that Nature thinks, he regards as an entire misuse of

language.... That Nature has feelings even, he will not allow; to

speak of love and hate among the elements is for him a puerile

fancy the cultured mind has long outgrown._

“_The sole joy of such a mind would almost seem to be the delight

of expelling the life from all forms and dissecting their dead

bodies._”--“Some Mystical Adventures” (G. R. S. Mead).