“_We cannot limit the types, superhuman or subhuman, that may
obtain. We can ‘set no bounds to the existence or powers of
sentient beings’--a consideration of the highest importance_,
as well, perhaps, practical as theoretical.... _The discovery
of Superhumans of an exalted kind may be only a question of
time, and the attainment of knowledge on this head one of the
most important achievements in the history of races that are to
come._”--“The Individual and Reality” (Fawcett).
Something certainly tightened in my throat as we went across that
soaking grass towards the building that was half châlet, half
farm-house, with steep, heavy roof and wide veranda. The lights
beckoned to us through the little windows. I saw a shadow slip across
the casement window on the upper floor. And my question was out of its
own accord before I could prevent it. My mind held in that moment no
other thought at all; my pulses quickened.
“So, Julius, you have--found her?”
And he answered as though no interval of years had been; as
though still we stood in the dawn upon the steps of the Edinburgh
lodging-house. The tone was matter of fact and without emotion:
“She is with me here--my wife--eager to see you at last.”
The words dropped down between us like lightning into the earth, and
a sense of chill, so faint I hardly recognised it, passed over me.
Emotion followed instantly, yet emotion, again, so vague, so odd, so
distant in some curious way, that I found no name for it. A shadow as,
perhaps, of disappointment fell on my thoughts. Yet, assuredly, I had
expected no different statement. He had said the right and natural
thing. He had found the woman of his dream and married her. What
lurked, I wondered nervously, behind my lame congratulations? Why was
I baffled and ashamed? What made my speech come forth with a slight
confusion between the thought and its utterance? For--almost--I had
been about to say another thing, and had stopped myself just in time.
“And she--remembers?” I asked quickly--point-blank, and bluntly
enough--and felt mortified the same instant by my premature curiosity.
Before I could modify my words, or alter them into something less
aggressively inquisitive, he turned and faced me, holding my arm to
make me look at him. His skin wore the familiar marble pallor as of
old; I saw it shine against the dark building where the light from the
window caught it.
“Me?” he asked quietly, “or--you?”
“Anything,” I stammered, “anything at all of--of the past, I meant.
Forgive me for asking so abruptly; I----”
The words froze on my lips at the expression that came into his face.
He merely looked at me and smiled. No more than that, so far as
accurate description goes, and yet enough to make my heart stop dead as
a stone, then start thumping against my ribs as though a paddle-wheel
were loose in me. For it was not Julius in that instant who looked at
me. His white skin masked another; behind and through his eyes this
other stared straight into my own; and this other was familiar to me,
yet unknown. The look disappeared again as instantaneously as it came.
“You shall judge for yourself,” I heard, as he drew me on towards the
house.
His tone made further pointed questioning impossible, rousing my
curiosity higher than ever before. Again I saw the woman in my
imagination; I pictured her as a figure half remembered. As the shadow
had slid past the casement of the upper floor, so her outline slipped
now across a rising screen of memory not entirely obliterated.
The presentment was even vivid: she would be superb. I saw her of the
Greek goddess type, with calm, inscrutable eyes, majestic mien, the
suggestion of strange knowledge in her quiet language and uncommon
gestures. She would be genuinely distinguished, remarkable in mind
as well as in appearance. Already, as we crossed the veranda, the
thrill of anticipation caught me. She would be standing in the hall
to greet us, or, seated before an open fire of logs, would rise out
of the shadows to meet the friend of whom she had doubtless “heard so
much,” and with whom such strange things were now to be accomplished.
The words Julius next actually uttered, accordingly, reached me with
a sense of disappointment that was sharp, and the entire picture
collapsed like a house of cards. The reaction touched my sense of
comedy almost.
“I think she is still preparing your room,” he said. “I had just taken
the water up when I heard your cart. We have little help, or need for
help. A girl from the farm in the lower valley brings butter sometimes.
We do practically everything ourselves.” I murmured something, courtesy
keeping a smile in check; and then he added, “We chose this solitude on
purpose, of course--she chose it, rather--and you are the first visitor
since we came here months ago. We were only just ready for you; it was
good that you were close--that it was so easy for you to get here.”
“I am looking forward immensely to seeing Mrs. LeVallon,” I replied,
but such a queer confusion of times and places had fallen on my mind
that my tongue almost said “to seeing her again.”
He smiled. “She will be with us in the morning,” he added quietly, “if
not to-night.”
This simple exchange of commonplaces let down the tension of my
emotions pleasantly. He turned towards me as he spoke, and for the
first time, beneath the hanging oil lamp, I noted the signature of the
intervening years. There was a look of power in eyes and mouth that had
not been there previously. I was aware of a new distance between us,
and a new respect came with it. Julius had “travelled.” He seemed to
look down upon me from a height. But, at the same time, the picture his
brief words conveyed had the effect of restoring me to my normal world
again. For nothing more banal could have been imagined, and side by
side with the chagrin to my sense of the theatrical ran also a distinct
relief. It came as a corrective to the loneliness and grandeur of the
setting, and checked the suggestion lying behind the hint that they
were “only just ready” for my coming.
My emotions sank comfortably to a less inflated level. I murmured
something politely as we passed into the so-called “sitting-room”
together, and for a moment the atmosphere of my own practical world
came in strongly with me. The sense of the incongruous inevitably was
touched. The immense fabric of my friend’s beliefs seemed in that
instant to tremble a little. That the woman he--_we_--had been waiting
for through centuries, this “old soul” taught of the ancient wisdom and
aware of august, forgotten worship, should be “making a bed upstairs”
woke in me a sense of healthy amusement. Julius took up the water! She
was engaged in menial acts! A girl brought butter from a distant farm!
And I could have laughed--but for one other thing that lay behind and
within the comedy. For that other thing was--pathos. There was a kind
of yearning pain at the heart of it: a pain whose origins were too
remote to be discoverable by the normal part of me.
It touched the poetry in me, too. For after the first disturbing
effect--that it was not adequate--I felt slowly another thing: that
this commonplace meeting was far more likely to be _true_ than the
dramatic sort I had anticipated. It was natural, it was simple; all big
adventures of the soul begin in a quiet way. Obviously, as yet, the two
selves in me were not yet comfortably readjusted.
I became aware, too, that Julius was what I can only call somewhere
less human than before--more impersonal. He talked, he acted, he even
looked as a figure might outside our world. I had no longer insight
into his being as before. His life lay elsewhere, expresses it best
perhaps. I can hardly present him as a man of flesh and blood. Emotion
broke through so rarely.
And our talk that evening together--for Mrs. LeVallon put in no
appearance--was ordinary, too. Julius, of course, as ever, used phrases
that belonged to the world peculiarly his own, but he said nothing
startling in the sense I had expected. No dramatic announcement came.
He took things for granted in the way he always did, assuming my
beliefs and theories were his own, and that my scepticism was merely
due to the “mind” in me to-day. We had some supper together, a bowl of
bread and milk the man brought in, and we talked of the intervening
years as naturally as might be--but for this phraseology he favoured.
When the man said “good night,” Julius smiled kindly at him, and the
fellow made a gesture of delight as though the attention meant far more
to him than money. He reminded me again irresistibly, yet in no sense
comically, of a faithful and devoted animal. Julius had patted him! It
was delightful. An inarticulateness, as of the animal world, belonged
to him. His rare words came out with effort, almost with difficulty.
He looked his master straight in the eye, listened to orders with a
personal interest mere servants never have, and, without a trace of
servility in face or manner, hurried off gladly to fulfil them. The
distress in the eyes alone still puzzled me.
“You have a treasure there,” I said. “He seems devoted to you.”
“A young soul,” he said, “in a human body for the first time, still
with the innocence and simplicity of the recent animal stage about his
awakening self-consciousness. It is unmistakable....”
“What sleeps in the vegetable, dreams in the animal, wakes in the man,”
I said, remembering Leibnitz. “I’m glad we’ve left the earlier stages
behind us.” His explanation interested me. “But that expression in his
eyes,” I asked, “that look of searching, almost of anxiety?”
Julius replied thoughtfully. “My atmosphere acts upon him as a kind
of forcing-house, perhaps. He is dimly aware of knowledge that lies,
at present, too far beyond him--and yet he reaches out for it.
Instinctive, but not yet intuitional. The privilege brings terror.
Opportunities of growth so swift and concentrated involve bewilderment,
even pain.”
“Pain?” I queried, interested as of old.
“Development is nothing but a series of little deaths. The soul passes
so quickly to new stages.” He looked up searchingly into my face. “We
knew that privilege once,” he added significantly; “we, too, knew
special teaching.”
And, though at the moment I purposely ignored this reference to our
“Temple Days,” I understood that this man’s neighbourhood might,
indeed, have an unusual and stimulating effect upon a simple, ignorant
type of mind. Even in my own case his presence gave me furiously to
think. The “Dog-Man,” the more I observed him, was little more than a
faithful creature standing on his hind legs with considerable surprise
and enjoyment that he was able to do so--that “little more” being quite
possibly _self_-consciousness. He showed his teeth when I met him
at the station, whereas, now that I was accepted by his master, his
approval was unlimited. He gave willing service in the form of love.
While Julius continued speaking, as though nothing else existed at
the moment, I observed him carefully. My eyes assessed the changes in
the outward “expression” of himself. He was thinner, slighter than
before; there was an increased balance and assurance in his manner; a
poise not present in our earlier days; but to say that he looked older
seemed almost a misuse of language. Though the eyes were stronger,
steadier, the lines in the skin more deeply cut, the outline of the
features chiselled with more decision, these, even in combination,
added no signature of age to the general expression of high beauty that
was his. The years had not coarsened, but etherealised the face. Two
other things, moreover, impressed me: the texture of skin and flesh had
refined away, so that the inner light of his enthusiasm shone through;
and--there was a marked increase in what I must term the “feel” of his
immediate atmosphere or presence. Always electric and alive, it now
seemed doubly charged. Against that dark inner screen where the mind
visualises pictorially, he rose in terms of radiant strength. Immense
potency lay suppressed in him; Powers--spiritual or Nature Powers--were
in attendance. He had acquired a momentum that was in some sense both
natural and super-human. It was not unlike the sense of power that
great natural scenes evoke in those who are receptive--mountains,
landscapes, forests. It was elemental. I felt him immense, at the head
of an invisible procession, as it were, a procession from the sky, the
heights, the woods, the stars.
And a touch of eeriness stole over me. I was aware of strange vitality
in this lonely valley; and I was aware of it--through him. I stood, as
yet, upon the outer fringe. Its remoteness from the modern world was
not a remoteness of space alone, but of--condition.
There was, however, another thing impossible to ignore--that somewhere
in this building there moved a figure already for me mysterious
and half legendary. Upstairs, not many feet away from us, her step
occasionally audible by the creaking of the boards, she moved,
breathing, thinking, listening, hearing our voices, almost within
touching distance of our hands. There was a hint of the fabulous in it
somewhere.
And, realising her near presence, I felt a curious emotion rising
through me as from a secret spring. Its character, veiled by interest
and natural anticipation, remained without a name. I could not describe
it to myself even. Each time the thought of meeting her, that she was
close, each time the sound of her soft footfall overhead was audible,
this emotion rose in me pleasurably, yet with dread behind it somewhere
lurking. I caught it stirring; the stream of it went out to this
woman I had never seen with the certain aim of intuitive direction; I
surprised it in the act. But always something blocked it, hiding its
name away. It escaped analysis. And, never more than instantaneous,
passing the very moment it was born, it seemed to me that the opposing
force that blocked it thus had to do with the man who was my host
and my companion. It emanated from him--this objecting force. Julius
checked it; though not with deliberate consciousness--he prevented my
discovery of its nature. There was uncommon and mysterious sweetness in
it, a sweetness as of long mislaid romance that lifted the heart. Yet
it returned each time upon me, blank and unrewarded.
It was noticeable, moreover, that our talk avoided the main object
of my presence here. LeVallon talked freely of other things, of the
“Dog-Man,” of myself--I gave him a quick sketch of my life in the long
interval--of anything and everything but the purpose of my coming.
There was, doubtless, awkwardness on my side, since my instinct was
not to take my visit heavily, but to regard the fulfilment of my
old-time pledge as an adventure, even a fantasy, rather than the
serious acceptance of a grave “experiment.” His reluctance, yet, was
noticeable. He told me little or nothing of himself by way of exchange.
“To-morrow, when you are thoroughly rested from your journey,” he met
my least approach to the matter that occupied our deepest thoughts;
or--“later, when you’ve had a little time to get acclimatised. You must
let this place soak into you. Rest and sleep and take things easy;
there is no hurry--here.” Until I realised that he wished to establish
a natural sympathy between my being and the enchanted valley, to avoid
anything in the nature of surprise or shock which might disturb a
desired harmony, and that, in fact, the absence of his wife and his
silence about himself were both probably intentional. Conditions were
to flow in upon me of their own accord and naturally, thus reducing
possible hostility to a minimum. Before we rose to go to bed an hour
later this had become a conviction in me. It was all thought out
beforehand.
We stood a moment on the veranda to taste the keen, sweet air and see
the dark mountains blocked against the stars. The sound of running
water was all we heard. No lights, of course, showed anywhere. The
meadows, beneath thin, frosty mist, lay very still. But the valley
somehow rushed at me; it seemed so charged to the brim with stimulating
activity and life. Something felt on the move in it. I stood in the
presence of a crowd, waiting to combine with energies latent in it. I
was aware of the idea of co-operation almost.
“One of the rare places,” he said significantly when I remarked upon it
cautiously, “where all is clean and open still. Humanity has been here,
but humanity of the helpful kind. We went to infinite trouble to find
it.”
It was the first time he had come so near to the actual subject. I was
aware he watched me, although his eyes were turned towards the darkness
of the encircling forest.
“And--your wife likes it too?” For though I remembered that she had
“chosen it,” its loneliness must surely have dismayed an ordinary woman.
Still with his eyes turned out across the valley, he replied, “She
chose it. Yes”--he hesitated slightly--“she likes it, though not
always----” He broke off abruptly, still without looking at me, then
added, as he came a little nearer, “But we both agree--we _know_ it is
the right place for us.” That “us,” I felt certain, included myself as
well.
I did not press for explanation at the moment. I touched upon another
thing.
“Humanity, you say, has been here! I should have thought some virgin
corner of the earth would have suited your--purpose--better?” Then, as
he did not answer for a moment, I added: “This is surely an ordinary
peasant’s house that you’ve made comfortable?”
He looked at me. A breath of wind went past us. I had the ghostly
feeling someone had been listening; and a faint shiver ran across my
nerves.
“A peasant’s, yes, but not”--and he smiled--“an ordinary peasant. We
found here an old man with his sons; they, or their forbears, had lived
in isolation for generations in this valley; they were ‘superstitious’
in the sense of knowing Nature and understanding her. They _believed_,
though in an imperfect and degraded form, what was once a living truth.
They sold out to me quite willingly and are now established in the
plains below. In this loneliness, away from modern ‘knowledge,’ they
loved what surrounded them, and in that sense their love was worship.
They felt-with the forests, with streams and mountains, with clouds and
sky, with dawn and sunset, with the darkness too.” He looked about him
as he said it, and my eyes followed the direction of his own across the
night. Again the valley stirred and moved throughout its whole expanse.
“They also,” Julius continued in a lower tone, his face closer than
before, “felt-with the lightning and the wind.”
I could have sworn some subtle change went through the surrounding
darkness as he said the words. Fire and wind sprang at me, so vivid was
their entrance into my thought. Again that slight shudder ran tingling
up my spine.
“The place,” he continued, “is therefore already prepared to some
extent, for the channels that we need are partly open. The veil is here
unthickened. We can work with less resistance.”
“There is certainly peace,” I agreed, “and an uplifting sense of
beauty.”
“You feel it?” he asked quickly.
“I feel extraordinarily and delightfully alive,” I admitted truthfully.
Whereupon he turned to me with a still more significant rejoinder:
“Because that which worship and consecration-ceremonies ought to
accomplish for churches--are meant to accomplish, rather--has never
been here _undone_. All places were holy ground until men closed the
channels with their unbelief and thus defiled them by cutting them off
from the life about them.”
I heard a window softly closing above us; we turned and went indoors.
Julius put the lamps out one by one, taking a candle to show me up the
stairs. We went along the wooden passage. We passed several doors,
beneath one of which I saw a line of light. My own room was at the
further end, simply, almost barely, furnished, with just the actual
necessaries. He paused at the threshold, shook my hand, said a short
“good night,” and left me, closing the door behind him carefully. I
heard his step go softly down the passage. A door in the distance also
opened and closed. Then complete silence hushed the entire house about
me, yet a silence that was listening and alive. No ancient, turreted
castle, with ivied walls and dungeons, with forsaken banqueting-hall
or ghostly corridors, could possibly have felt more haunted than this
peasant’s châlet in the Jura fastnesses.
For a considerable time I sat at my open window, thinking; and yet not
thinking so much, perhaps, as--relaxing. I was aware that my mind had
been at high tension the entire day, almost on guard--as though seeking
unconsciously to protect itself. Ever since the morning I had been on
the alert against quasi-attack, and only now did I throw down my arms
and abandon myself without reserve. Something I had been afraid of had
shown itself friendly after all. A feeling of security stole over me;
I was safe; gigantic powers were round me, oddly close, yet friendly,
provided I, too, was friendly. It was a singular feeling of being
helpless, yet cared for. The valley took hold of me and all my little
human forces. To set myself against it would be somehow dangerous,
but to go with it, adopting its overmastering stride, was safety.
This became suddenly clear to me--that I must be sympathetic and that
hostility on my part might involve disaster.
Here, apparently, was the first symptom of that power which Julius
declared was derived from “feeling-with.” I began to understand another
thing as well; I recalled his choice of words--that the veil hereabouts
was “unthickened” and the channels “open.” He did not say the veil was
thin, the channels cleared. It was in its native, primitive condition.
I sat by the window, letting the valley pour through and over me. It
flooded my being with its calm and beauty. The stars were very bright
above the ridges; small clouds passed westwards; the water sang and
tinkled; the cup-like hollow had its secrets, but it told them. I had
never known night so wonderfully articulate. Power brooded here. I felt
my blood quicken with the sense of kinship.
And the little room with its unvarnished pine-boards that held a
certain forest perfume, was comforting too; the odour of peat fires
still clung to the darkened rafters overhead; the candle, in its
saucer-like receptacle of wood, gave just the simple, old-fashioned
light that was appropriate. Bodily fatigue made bed exceedingly
welcome, though it was long before I fell asleep. Figures, at first,
stole softly in across the night and peered at me--Julius, pale and
rapt, remote from the modern world; the silent “Dog-Man,” with those
eyes of questioning wonder and half-disguised distress. And another
ghostly figure stole in too, though without a face I could decipher;
a woman whom the long, faultless balance of the ages delivered, with
the rest of us, into the keeping of this lonely spot for some deep
purpose of our climbing souls. Their outlines hovered, mingled with the
shadows, and withdrew.
And a certain change in myself, though perhaps not definitely noted at
the time, was apparent too--I found in my heart a singular readiness
to believe. While sleep crept nearer, and reason dropped a lid,
there assuredly was in me, as part of something accepted naturally,
the likelihood that LeVallon’s attitude was an aspect of forgotten
truth. Veiled in Nature’s operations, perchance directing them, and
particularly in spots of loneliness such as this, dwelt those mighty
elemental Potencies he held were accessible to humanity. A phrase
from some earlier reading floated back to me, as though deliberately
supplied--not that Nature “works towards what are called ‘ends,’ but
that it was possible or rather probable, that ‘ends’ which implied
conscious superhuman activities, are being realised.” The sentence, for
some reason, had remained in my memory. When life was simpler, closer
to Nature, some such doctrine may have been objectively verifiable, and
worship, in the sense that Julius used the word, might well promise to
restore the grandeur of forgotten beliefs which should make men as the
gods....
With the delightful feeling that in this untainted valley, the woods,
the mountains, the very winds and stormy lightnings, were yet but
the physical vehicle of powers that expressed intelligence and true
_being_, I passed from dozing into sleep, the cool outside air touching
my eyelids with the beauty of the starry Jura night. An older, earlier
type of consciousness--though I did not phrase it to myself thus--was
asserting itself and taking charge of me. The spell was on my heart.
Yet the human touch came last of all, following me into the complicated
paths of slumber, and haunting me as with half-recovered memories
of far-off, enchanted days. Uncommon visions met my descending or
ascending consciousness, so that while brain and body slept, some
deeper part of me went travelling swiftly backwards. I knew the old
familiar feeling that the whole of me did not sleep ... and, though
remembering nothing definite, my first thought on awakening was the
same as my final thought on falling into slumber: What manner of
marvellous woman would _she_ prove to be?