TO MEMORY
“_Yet, when I would command thee hence,
Thou mockest at the vain pretence,
Murmuring in mine ear a song
Once loved, alas! forgotten long;
And on my brow I feel a kiss
That I would rather die than miss._”--Mary Coleridge.
“Well?” Julius asked me, as we strolled across the pastures that
skirted the main forest, “and does it seem anywhere familiar to
you--the three of us together again? You recall--how much?” A rather
wistful smile passed over his face, but the eyes were grave. He was in
earnest if ever man was. “She doesn’t seem wholly a stranger to you?”
My mind searched carefully for words. To refer to any of my recent
impressions was difficult, even painful, and frank discussion of my
friend’s wife impossible--though, probably, there was nothing Julius
would not have understood and even welcomed.
“I--cannot deny,” I began, “that somewhere--in my imagination, perhaps,
there seems----”
He interrupted me at once. “Don’t suppress the imaginative
pictures--they’re memory. To deny them is only to forget again. Let
them come freely in you.”
“Julius----!” I exclaimed, conscious that I flushed a little, “but she
is wonderful; superior, too, in some magnificent way to--any----”
“Lady,” he came abruptly to my assistance, no vestige of annoyance
visible.
“To anyone of our own class,” I completed the sentence more to my
liking. “I admit I feel drawn to her--in a kind of understanding
sympathy--though how can I pretend that I--that this sense of
familiarity is really memory?” It was impossible to treat him lightly;
his belief was his life, commanding a respect due to all great
convictions of the soul. “You have found someone you can love,” I went
on, aware that it gave me no pleasure to say it, “and someone who loves
you. I--am delighted.”
He turned to me, standing hatless, the sunlight in his face, his eyes
fixed steadily upon my own.
“We had to meet--all three,” he said slowly; “sooner or later. It’s
an old, old debt we’ve got to settle up together, and the opportunity
has come at last. I only ask your sympathy--and hers.” He shrugged his
shoulders slightly. “To you it may seem a small thing, and, if you have
no memory, a wild, impossible thing as well, even with delusion in it.
But nothing is really small.” He paused. “I only ask that you shall not
resist.” And then he added gravely: “The risk is mine.”
I felt uneasiness; the old schooldays’ basis of complete sincerity was
not in me quite. I had lived too long in the world of ordinary men and
women. His marriage seemed prompted by an impersonal sense of justice
to the universe rather than by any desire for the companionship and
sweetness that a woman’s love could give him. For a moment I knew
not what to say. Could such a view be hers as well? Had she yielded
herself to him upon a similar understanding? And if not--the thought
afflicted me--might not this debt he spoke of have been discharged
without claiming the whole life of another in a union that involved
also physical ties?
Yet, while I could not find it in me to utter all I thought, there was
a burning desire to hear details of the singular courtship. Almost I
felt the right to know, yet shrank from asking it.
“Then nothing more definite stirs in you?” he asked quietly, his eyes
still holding mine, “no memory you can recognise? No wave of feeling;
no picture, even of that time when we--we three----”
“Julius, old friend,” I exclaimed with sudden impulsiveness, and hardly
knowing why I said it, “it only seems to me that these pine woods
behind you are out of the picture rather. They should be palms, with
spaces of sand shimmering in a hot sun. And the châlet”--pointing
over his shoulder--“seems still less to belong to you when I recall
the temples we talked about before the plain where the worship of the
rising sun took place----”
I broke off abruptly with a little shamefaced laughter: my invention,
or imagination, seemed so thin. But Julius turned eagerly, his face
alight.
“Laugh as you please,” he said, “but what makes you feel me out of the
picture, as you call it, is memory--memory of where we three were last
together. That sense of incongruity is memory. Don’t resist. Let the
pictures rise and grow as they will. And don’t deny any instinctive
feelings that come to you--they’re memory too.”
A moment of revolt swept over me, yet with it an emotion both sweet and
painful. Dread and delight both troubled me. Unless I resisted, his
great conviction would carry me away again as of old. And what if she
should come to aid him? What if she should bring the persuasion of her
personality to the attack, and with those eyes of mischief and disaster
ask me questions out of a similar conviction and belief? If she should
hold me face to face: “Do you remember me--_as I remember you?_”
“Julius,” I cried, “let me speak plainly at once and so prevent
your disappointment later.” I forced the words out against my
will, it seemed. “For the truth, my dear fellow, is simply--that I
remember--nothing! Definitely--I remember nothing.”
Yet there was pain and sadness in me suddenly. I had prevaricated.
Almost I had told a lie. Some vague fear of involving myself in
undesirable consequences had forced me against my innate knowledge.
Almost I had denied--her.
From the forest stole forth a breath too soft and perfumed for an
autumn wind. It stirred the hair upon his forehead, left its touch of
dream upon my cheeks, then passed on to lift a wreath of mist in the
fields below. And, as though a spirit older than the wind moved among
my thoughts, this modern world seemed less real when it had gone. I
heard the voice of Julius answering me. His words came very slowly,
fastening upon my own. The resentment, the disappointment I had looked
for were not there, nor the comparison of myself--in her favour--I had
half anticipated.
The answer utterly nonplussed me:
“Neither does she remember--anything.”
I started. A curious pang shot through me--something of regret, even of
melancholy in it. That she had forgotten “everything” was pain. She had
forgotten me.
“But we--you, I mean--can make her?”
The words were out impulsively before I could prevent them. He did not
look at me. I did not look at him.
“I should have put it differently, perhaps,” he answered. “She is not
_aware_ that she remembers.”
He drew me further along the dewy meadow towards the upper valley, and
drew me deeper, as it seemed, into his own strange region whence came
these perplexing statements.
“But, Julius,” I stammered, seeing that he kept silence, “if she
remembers nothing--how could you know--how could you feel sure, when
you met her----?”
My sentences stopped dead. Even in these unusual circumstances it was
not possible to question a friend about the woman he had married.
Had she proved some marvel of physical beauty or of intellectual
attainment, curiosity might have been taken as a compliment. But as it
was----!
Yet all the time I _knew_ that her insignificant worldly value was a
clean stroke of proof that he had not suffered himself to be deceived
in this recovery and recognition of the spiritual maturity he meant by
the term “old soul.” His voice reached me, calm and normal as though
he talked about the weather. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “for it’s
interesting, and, besides, you have the right to know.”
And the words fell among my tangled thoughts like deft fingers that
put confusion straight. The incredible story he told me as a child
might relate a fairy-tale it knows is true, yet thinks may not be quite
believed. Without the slightest emphasis, and certainly without the
least embarrassment or sense that it was unusual. Even of comedy I was
not properly once aware. All through the strange recital rang in my
mind, “She is not aware that she remembers.”
“‘The Dardanelles,’” he began, smiling a little as though at the
recollection, “was where I met her, thus recovered. Not on the way from
Smyrna to Constantinople; oh, no! It was not romantic in that little
sense. ‘The Dardanelles’ was a small and ugly red-brick villa in Upper
Norwood, with a drive ten yards long, ragged laurel bushes, and a green
five-barred gate, gold-lettered. Maennlich lives there--the Semitic
language man and Egyptologist; you know. She was his parlour-maid at
the time, and before that had been lady’s-maid to the daughter of some
undistinguished duchess. In this way,” he laughed softly, “may old
souls wait upon the young ones sometimes! Her father,” he continued,
“was a market-gardener and fruiterer in a largish way at East Croydon,
and she herself had been brought up upon the farm whence his supplies
came. ‘Chance,’ as they call it, led her into these positions I have
mentioned, and so, inevitably--to me.”
He looked up at me a moment. “And so to you as well.”
His manner was composed and serious. He spoke with the simple
conviction of some Christian who traces the Hand of God in the smallest
details of his daily life, and seeks His guidance in his very train
journeys. There was something rather superb about it all.
“A fruiterer in East Croydon! A maid in service! And--you knew--you
recognised her?”
“At once. The very first day she let me in at the front door and asked
if I wished to see her master, what name she might announce, and so
forth.”
“It was all--er--unexpected and sudden like that?” came the question
from a hundred others that crowded together in me. “To find a lost
friend of years only--in such a way--the shock, I mean, to you----!” I
simply could not find my words. He told it all so calmly, naturally.
“You were wholly unprepared, weren’t you? Nothing had led you to
expect?” I ended with a dash.
“Not wholly unprepared,” was his rejoinder; “nor was the meeting
altogether unexpected--on my side, that is. Intimations, as I told
you at Motfield Close twenty years ago--when she was born--had come
to me. No soul draws breath for the first time, without a quiver of
response running through all that lives. Souls intimately connected
with each other may feel the summons. There are ways----! I knew that
she was once more in the world, that, like ourselves, her soul had
reincarnated; and ever since I have been searching----”
“Searching----!”
“There are clues that offer themselves--that come, perhaps in sleep,
perhaps by direct experiment, and, regardless of space, give hints----”
“Psychometry?” I asked, remembering a word just coined.
He shrugged his shoulders. “All objects radiate,” he said, “no
matter how old they are. Their radiation never ceases till they
are disintegrated; and if you are sensitive you can receive their
messages. If you have certain powers, due to relation and affinity,
you may interpret them. There is an instantaneous linking-up--in
picture-form--impossible to mistake.”
“You knew, then, she was somewhere on the earth--waiting for you?” I
repeated, wondering what was coming next. That night in the Edinburgh
lodgings, when he had been “searching,” came back to me.
“For _us_,” he corrected me. “It was something from a Private
Collection that gave me the clue by which I finally traced
her--something from the older sands.”
“The sands! Egyptian?”
Julius nodded. “Egypt, for all of us, was a comparatively recent
section--nearer to To-day, I mean. Many a time has each of us been
back there--Thebes, Memphis, even as lately ago as Alexandria at its
zenith, learning, developing, reaping what ages before we sowed--for
in Egypt the knowledge that was _our_ knowledge survived longer than
anywhere else. Yet never, unfortunately, returning together, and thus
never finding the opportunity to achieve the great purpose of our
meeting.”
“But the clue?” I asked breathlessly.
He smiled again at the eagerness that again betrayed me.
“This old world,” he resumed quietly, “is strewn, of course, with the
remnants of what once has been our bodies--‘suits of clothes’ we have
inhabited, used, and cast aside. Here and there, from one chance or
another, some of these may have been actually preserved. The Egyptians,
for instance, went to considerable trouble to ensure that they should
survive as long as possible, thus assisting memory later.”
“Embalming, you mean?”
“As you wander through the corridors of a modern museum,” he continued
imperturbably, “you may even look through a glass covering at the very
tenement your soul has occupied at an earlier stage! Probably, of
course, without the faintest whisper of recognition, yet, possibly,
with just that acute and fascinated interest which _is_ the result
of stirring memory. For the ‘old clothes’ still radiate vibrations
that belong to _you;_ the dried blood and nerves once thrilled with
emotions, spiritual or otherwise, that were you--the link may be
recoverable. You think it is wild nonsense! I tell you it is in the
best sense scientific. And, similarly,” he added, “you may chance upon
some such remnant of another--the body of ancient friend or enemy.”
He paused abruptly in his extraordinary recital. “I had that good
fortune,” he added, “if you like to call it so.”
“You found _hers?_” I asked in a low voice. “Her, I mean?”
“Maennlich,” he replied with a smile, “has the best preserved mummies
in the world. He never allowed them even to be unwrapped. The object I
speak of--a body she had occupied in a recent Egyptian section--though
not when _we_ were there, unfortunately--lay in one of his glass cases,
while the soul who once had used it answered his bell and walked across
his carpets--two of her bodies in the house at once. Curious, wasn’t
it? A discarded instrument and the one in present use! The rest was
comparatively easy. I traced her whereabouts at once, for the clue
furnished the plainest possible directions. I went straight to her.”
“And you knew instantly--when you saw her? You had no doubt?”
“Instantly--when the door swung open and our eyes met on the threshold.”
“Love at first sight, Julius, you mean? It was love you felt?” I asked
it beneath my breath, for my heart was beating strangely.
He raised his eyebrows. “Love?” he repeated, questioningly. “Deep joy,
intuitive sympathy, content and satisfaction, rather. I knew her. I
knew _who_ she was. In a few minutes we were more intimate in mind and
feeling than souls who meet for the first time can become after years
of living together. You understand?”
I lowered my eyes, not knowing what to say. The standards of modern
conduct, so strong about me, prevented the comments or questions that I
longed to utter.
There flashed upon me in that instant’s pause a singular
conviction--that these two had mated for a reason of their own.
They had not known the clutch of elemental power by which Nature
ensures the continuance of the race. They had not shuddered, wept,
and known the awful ecstasy, but had slipped between her fingers and
escaped. They had not loved. While he knew this consciously, she was
aware of it unconsciously. They mated for another reason, yet one
as holy, as noble, as pure--if not more so, indeed--as those that
consecrate marriage in the accepted sense. And the thought, strange
as it was, brought a sweet pleasure to me, though shot with a pain
that was equally undeniable and equally perplexing. While my thoughts
floundered between curiosity, dismay and something elusive that yet
was more clamorous than either, Julius continued without a vestige of
embarrassment, though obviously omitting much detail that I burned to
hear.
“And that very week--the next day, I think, it was--I asked Maennlich
to allow me an hour’s talk with her alone----”
“She--er----?”
“She liked me--from the very first, yes. She felt me.”
“And showed it?” I asked bluntly.
“And showed it,” he repeated, “although she said it puzzled her and she
couldn’t understand.”
“On her side, then, it was love--love at first sight?”
“Strong attraction,” he put it, “but an attraction she thought it her
duty to resist at first. Her present conditions made any relationship
between us seem incongruous, and when I offered marriage--as I did at
once--it overwhelmed her. She made sensible objections, but it was
her brain of To-day that made them. You can imagine how it went. She
urged that to marry a man in another class of life, a ‘gentleman,’ a
‘wealthy’ gentleman and an educated, ‘scholar gentleman,’ as she called
me, could only end in unhappiness--because I should tire of her. Yet,
all the time--she told me this afterwards--she had the feeling that we
were meant for one another, and that it must surely be. She was shy
about it as a child.”
“And you convinced her in the end!” I said to myself rather than aloud
to him. There were feelings in me I could not disentangle.
“Convinced her that we needed one another and could never go apart,” he
said. “We had something to fulfil together. The forces that drove us
together, though unintelligible to her, were yet acknowledged by her
too, you see.”
“I see,” my voice murmured faintly, as he seemed to expect some word in
reply. “I see.” Then, after a longer pause than usual, I asked: “And
you told her of your--your theories and beliefs--the purpose you had to
do together?”
“No single word. She could not possibly have understood. It would have
frightened her.” I heard it with relief, yet with resentment too.
“Was that quite fair, do you think?”
His answer I could not gainsay. “Cause and effect,” he said, “work out,
whether memory is there or not. To attempt to block fulfilment by fear
or shrinking is but to delay the very thing you need. I told her we
were necessary to each other, but that she must come willingly, or not
at all. I used no undue persuasion, and I used no force. I realised
plainly that her upper, modern, uncultured and uneducated self was
merely what she had acquired in the few years of her present life. It
was this upper self that hesitated and felt shy. The older self below
was not awake, yet urged her to acceptance blindly--as by irresistible
instinctive choice. She knew subconsciously; but, once I could succeed
in arousing her knowledge consciously, I knew her doubts would vanish.
I suggested living away from city life, away from any conditions
that might cause her annoyance or discomfort due to what she called
our respective ‘stations’ in life; I suggested the mountains, some
beautiful valley perhaps, where in solitude for a time we could get to
know each other better, untroubled by the outer world--until she became
accustomed----”
“And she approved?” I interrupted with impatience.
“Her words were ‘That’s the very thing; I’ve always had a dream like
that.’ She agreed with enthusiasm, and the opposition melted away. She
knew the kind of place we needed,” he added significantly.
We had reached the head of the valley by this time, and I sat down upon
a boulder with the sweep of Jura forests below us like a purple carpet.
The sun and shadow splashed it everywhere with softest colouring. The
morning wind was fresh; birds were singing; this green vale among the
mountains seemed some undiscovered paradise.
“And you have never since felt a moment’s doubt--uncertainty--that she
really is this ‘soul’ you knew before?”
He lay back, his head upon his folded hands, and his eyes fixed upon
the blue dome of sky.
“A hundred proofs come to me all the time,” he said, stretching himself
at full length upon the grass. “And in her atmosphere, in her presence,
the memories still revive in detail from day to day--just as at school
they revived in you--those pictures you sought to stifle and deny. From
the first she never doubted me. She was aware of a great tie and bond
between us. ‘You’re the only man,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘that
could have done it like that. I belonged to you--oh! I can’t make it
out--but just as if there wasn’t any getting out of it possible. I felt
stunned when I saw you. I had always felt something like this coming,
but thought it was a dream.’ Only she often said there was something
else to come as well, and that we were not quite complete. She knew,
you see; she knew.” He broke off suddenly and turned to look at me. He
added in a lower tone, as he watched my face: “And you see how pleased
and happy she is to have _you_ here!”
I made no reply. I reached out for a stone and flung it headlong down
the steep slope towards the stream five hundred feet below.
“And so it was settled then and there?” I asked, after a pause that
Julius seemed inclined to prolong.
“Then and there,” he said, watching the rolling stone with dreamy
eyes. “In the hall-way of that Norwood villa, under the very eyes of
Maennlich who paid her wages and probably often scolded her, she came
up into my arms at the end of our final talk, and kissed me like a
happy child. She cried a good deal at the time, but I have never once
seen her cry since!”
“And it’s all gone well--these months?” I murmured.
“There was a temporary reaction at first--at the very first, that is,”
he said, “and I had to call in Maennlich to convince her that I was
in earnest. At her bidding I did that. Some instinct told her that
Maennlich ought to see it--perhaps, because it would save her awkward
and difficult explanations afterwards. There’s the woman in her, you
see, the normal, wholesome woman, sweet and timid.”
“A fascinating personality,” I murmured quickly, lest I might say other
things--before their time.
“No looks, no worldly beauty,” he nodded, “but the unconscious charm of
the old soul. It’s unmistakable.”
Worlds and worlds I would have given to have been present at that
interview; Julius LeVallon, so unusual and distinguished; the shy
and puzzled serving-maid, happy and incredulous; the grey-bearded
archæologist and scholar; the strange embarrassment of this amazing
proposal of marriage!
“And Maennlich?” I asked, anxious for more detail.
Julius burst out laughing. “Maennlich lives in his own world with his
specimens and theories and memories of travel--more recent memories of
travel than our own! It hardly interested him for more than a passing
moment. He regarded it, I think, as an unnecessary interruption--and a
bothering one--some joke he couldn’t quite appreciate or understand.
He pulled his dirty beard, patted me on the back as though I were
a boy running after some theatre girl, and remarked with a bored
facetiousness that he could give her a year’s character with a clear
conscience and great pleasure. Something like that it was; I forget
exactly. Then he went back to his library, shouting through the door
some appointment about a Geographical Society meeting for the following
week. For how could he know”--his voice grew softer as he said it and
his laughter ceased--“how could he divine, that old literal-minded
savant, that he stood before a sign-post along the route to the eternal
things _we_ seek, or that my marrying his servant was a step towards
something we three owe together to the universe itself?”
It was some time before either of us spoke, and when at length I broke
the silence it was to express surprise that a woman, so long ripened
by the pursuit of spiritual, or at least exalted aims, should have
returned to earth among the lowly. By rights, it seemed, she should
have reincarnated among the great ones of the world. I knew I could
say this now without offence.
“The humble,” Julius answered simply, “_are_ the great ones.”
His fingers played with the fronds of a piece of staghorn moss as
he said it, and to this day I cannot see this kind of moss without
remembering his strange words.
“It’s among what men call the lower ranks that the old souls return,”
he went on; “among peasants and simple folk, unambitious and heedless
of material power, you always find the highest ones. They are there to
learn the final lessons of service or denial, neglected in their busier
and earlier--kindergarten sections. The last stages are invariably
in humble service--they are by far the most difficult; no young,
‘ambitious’ soul could manage it. But the old souls, having already
mastered all the more obvious lessons, are content.”
“Then the oldest souls are not the great minds and great characters of
history?” I exclaimed.
“Not necessarily,” he answered; “probably never. The most advanced are
unadvertised, in the least assuming positions. The Kingdom of Heaven
belongs to them, hard of attainment by those the world applauds. The
successful, so called, are the younger, cruder souls, passionately
acquiring still the external prizes men hold so dear. Maturer souls
have long since discarded these as worthless. The qualities the world
crowns are great, perhaps, at that particular stage, but they never
are the highest. Intellect, remember, is not of the soul, and all that
reason teaches must be unlearned again. Theories change, knowledge
shifts, facts are forgotten or proved false; only what the soul itself
acquires remains eternally the same. The old are the intuitional; and
the oldest of all--ah! how wonderful!--He who came back from loftier
heights than most of us can yet even conceive of, was the--son of a
carpenter.”
I left my seat upon the boulder and lay beside him, listening for a
long time while he talked, and if there was much that seemed visionary,
there was also much that thrilled me with emotions beyond ordinary.
Nothing, certainly, was foolish--because of the man who said it.
And, while he took it for granted that all Nature was alive and a
manifestation of spiritual powers, the elements themselves but forces
to be mastered and acquired, it grew upon me that I had indeed entered
an enchanted valley where, with my strange companions, I might witness
new, incredible things. Finding little to reply, I was content to
listen, wondering what was coming next. And in due course the talk came
round again to ourselves, and so to the woman who was now his wife.
“Then she has no idea,” I said at length, “that we three--you and I and
she--have been together before, or that there is any particular purpose
in my being here at this moment?”
“In her normal condition--none,” he answered. “For she has no memory.”
“There is a state, however, when she does remember?” I asked. “You have
helped her to remember? Is that it, Julius?”
“Yes,” he replied; “I have reached down and touched her soul, so that
she remembers for herself.”
“The deep trance state?”
“Where all the memories of the past lie accumulated,” he answered,
“the subconscious state. Her Self of To-day--with new body and recent
brain--she has forgotten; in trance--the subconscious Self where the
soul dwells with all its past--she remembers.”