“_Why is she set so far, so far above me,
And yet not altogether raised above?
I would give all the world that she should love me,
My soul that she should never learn to love._”--Mary Coleridge.
“The channels here are open.”
As the days went by the words remained with me. I recognised their
truth. Nature was pouring through me in a way I had never known before.
I had gone for a walk that afternoon after the sudden storm, and tried
to think things out. It was all useless. I could only feel. The stream
of this strange new point of view had swept me from known moorings;
I was in deep water now; there was exhilaration in the rush of an
unaccustomed tide. One part of me, hourly fading, weighed, criticised
and judged; another part accepted and was glad. It was like the
behaviour of a divided personality.
“Your brain of To-day asks questions, while your soul of long ago
remembers and is sure.”
I was constantly in the presence of Mrs. LeVallon. My “brain” was
active with a thousand questions. The answers pointed all one way. This
woman, so humbly placed in life to-day, rose clearer and clearer before
me as the soul that Julius claimed to be of ancient lineage. Respect
increased in me with every word, with every act, with every gesture.
Her mental training, obviously, was small, and of facts that men call
knowledge she had but few; but in place of these recent and artificial
acquirements she possessed a natural and spontaneous intelligence
that was swiftly understanding. She seized ideas though ignorant of
the words that phrased them; she grasped conceptions that have to
be hammered into minds the world regards as well equipped--seized
them naïvely, yet with exquisite comprehension. Something in her
discriminated easily between what was transitory and what was real, and
the glory of this world made evidently small appeal to her. No ordinary
ambition of vulgar aims was hers. Fame and position were no bait at
all; she cared nothing about being “somebody.” There was a touch of
unrest and impatience about her when she spoke of material things
that most folk value more than honour, some even more than character.
Something higher, yet apparently forgotten, drew her after it. The
pursuit of pleasure and sensation scarcely whispered to her at all, and
though her self-esteem was strong, personal vanity in the little sense
was quite a negligible quantity.
This young wife had greatness in her. Domestic servant though she
certainly had been, she was distinguished in her very bones. A clear
ray of mental guidance and intuition ran like a gleam behind all
her little blunders of speech and action. To her, it was right and
natural, for instance, that her husband’s money should mostly be sent
away to help those who were without it. “We’re much better this way,”
she remarked lightly, remembering, perhaps, the life of detailed and
elaborate selfishness she once had served, “and anyhow I can’t wear
two dresses at the same time, can I? Or live in two houses--what’s the
good of all that? But for those who like it,” she added, “I expect
it’s right enough. They need it--to learn, or something. I’ve been in
families of the best that didn’t want for anything--but really they had
nothing at all.” It was in the little things I caught the attitude.
Although conditions here made it impossible to test it, I had more and
more the impression, too, that she possessed insight into the causes of
human frailty, and understood temptations she could not possibly have
experienced personally in this present life.
An infallible sign of younger souls was their pursuit hot-foot of
pleasure and sensation, of power, fame, ambition. The old souls
leave all that aside; they have known its emptiness too often.
Their hall-mark lies in spiritual discernment, the power to choose
between the permanent and the transitory. Brains and intellect were
no criterion of development at all. And I reflected with a smile
how the “educated” and “social” world would close its doors to such
a woman--the common world of younger, cruder souls, insipid and
undistinguished, many of them but just beyond the animal stage--the
“upper classes”! The Kingdom of Heaven lies within, I remembered, and
the meek and lowly shall inherit the “earth.”
And the “Dog-Man” also rose before me in another light--this
slow-minded, instinctive being whom elsewhere I should doubtless have
dismissed as “stupid.” His approximation to the instinctive animal life
became so clear. In his character and essential personality lay the
curious suggestion. Out of his frank gaze peered the mute and searching
appeal of the soul awakening into self-consciousness--a look of direct
and simple sincerity, often questioning, often poignant. The interval
between Mrs. LeVallon and himself was an interval of countless lives.
How welcome to him would be the support of a thought-out religious
creed, to her how useless! The different stages individuals occupy, how
far apart, how near, how various! I felt it all as true, and the effect
of this calm valley upon me was not sympathy with Nature only, but a
certain new sympathy with all the world. It was very wonderful.
I watched the “man” with a new interest and insight--the proud and
self-conscious expression on his face as he moved constantly about us,
his menial services earnest and important. The safety of the entire
establishment lay upon his shoulders. He made the beds as he served the
coffee, cleaned the boots or lit the lamps at dusk, with a fine dignity
that betrayed his sense of our dependence on him--he would never fail.
He was ever on the watch. I could believe that he slept at night
with one eye open, muscles ready for a spring in case of danger. In
myself, at any rate, his signal devotion to our interest woke a kind of
affectionate wonder that touched respect. He was so eager and ready to
learn, moreover. The pathos in his face when found fault with was quite
appealing--the curious dumb attitude, the air of mortification that he
wore: “I’m rather puzzled, but I shall know another time. I shall do
better. Only--I haven’t got as far as you have!”
In myself, meanwhile, the change worked forward steadily. I was much
alone, for Julius, preoccupied and intense, was now more and more
engaged upon purposes that kept him out of sight. Much of the time
he kept to his room upstairs, but he spent hours, too, in the open,
among the woods and on the further ridges, especially at night. Not
always did he appear at meals even, and what intercourse I had was with
Mrs. LeVallon, so that our intimacy grew quickly, ripening with this
sense of sudden and delightful familiarity as though we had been long
acquainted. There was at once a happy absence of formality between us,
although a dignity and sweet reserve tempered our strange relationship
in a manner the ordinary world--I feel certain--could hardly credit.
Out of all common zones of danger our intercourse was marvellously
lifted, yet in a way it is difficult to describe without leaving the
impression that we were hardly human in the accepted vulgar meaning of
the words.
But the truth was simple enough, the explanation big with glory. It
was that Nature included us, mothering all we said or did or thought,
above all, _felt_. Our intercourse was not a separate thing, apart,
shut off, two little humans merely aware of the sympathetic draw of
temperament and flesh. It was part of Nature, natural in the biggest
sense, a small, true incident in the processes of the entire cosmos
whose life we shared. The physical thing called passion, of course, was
present, yet a passion that the sun and wind took care of, spreading
it everywhere about us through the hourly happenings of “common”
things--in the wind that embraced the trees and then passed on, in the
rushing stream that caught the flowers on its bank, then let them go
again, in the fiery sunshine that kissed the earth while leaving the
cooling shadows beside every object that it glorified.
All this seemed in some new fashion clear to me--that passion degrades
because it is set exclusive and apart, magnified, idolatrised into a
false importance due to Nature’s being neglected and left outside. For
not alone the wind and sun and water shared our intercourse, knowing
it was well, but in some further sacramental way the whole big Earth,
the movements of the Sun, the Seasons, aye, and the armies of the other
stars in all their millions, took part in it, justifying its necessity
and truth. Without a trace of false exaltation in me I saw far, far
beyond even the poet’s horizon of love’s philosophy:
“_Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle--
Why not I with thine?_”
and so came again with a crash of fuller comprehension upon the words
of Julius that here we lived and acted out a Ceremony that conveyed
great teaching from a cosmic point of view. My relations with Mrs.
LeVallon, as our relations all three together, seen from this grander
angle, were not only possible and true: they were necessary. We were a
unit formed of three, a group-soul affirming truths beyond the brain’s
acceptance, proving universal, cosmic teaching in the only feasible
way--by acting it out.
The scale of experience grew vast about me. This error of the past we
would set right was but an episode along the stupendous journey of our
climbing souls. The entire Present, the stage at which humanity found
itself to-day, was but a moment, and values worshipped now, and by
the majority rightly worshipped, would pass away, and be replaced by
something that would seem entirely new, yet would be in reality not
discovery but recovery.