I stood alone with Julius, Nature alive and stirring strangely, as with
aggressive power, just beyond the narrow window-sill on which he leaned.
“You understand,” he murmured, “and you remember too--at last.”
I made no reply. There are moments when extraordinary emotions,
beyond expression either of tears or laughter, move the heart as
with the glory of another world. And one of these was certainly
upon me now. I knew things that I did not understand. A pageant of
incomparable knowledge went past me, yet, as it were, just out of
reach. The memories that offered themselves were too enormous--and too
different--to be grasped intelligently by the mind.
And yet one thing I realised clearly: that the elemental powers of
Nature already existing in every man and woman in small degree, could
know an increase, an intensification, which, directed rightly, might
exalt humanity. The consciousness of those olden days knew direct
access to Nature. And the method, for which no terms exist To-day
in any spoken language, was that _feeling-with_ which is adoration,
and that desiring sympathy which is worship. The script of Nature
wrote it clear. To read it was to act it out. The audacity of their
fire-stealing ambition in the past I understood, and so forgave. My
memory, further than this, refused to clear....
I remember that we talked together for a space; and it was longer than
I realised at the time, for before we separated the moon was down
behind the ridges and the valley lay in a single blue-black shadow.
There was confusion on my heart and mind. The self in me that asked
and answered seemed half of To-day and half of Yesterday.
“She remembered,” Julius said below his breath yet with deep delight;
“she recognised us both. In the morning she will have again forgotten,
for she knows not how to bring the experiences of deep sleep over into
her upper consciousness.”
“She said ‘they waited.’ There are--others--in this valley?” It was
more a statement to myself than a question, but he answered it:
“Everywhere and always there are others. But just now in this valley
they are near to us and active. I have sent out the call.”
“You have sent out the call,” I repeated without surprise and yet
with darkened meaning. “Yes, I knew--I was aware of it.” My older
consciousness was sinking down again.
“By worship,” he interrupted, “the worship of many weeks. We have
worshipped and felt-with, intensifying the link already established
by those who lived before us here. Your attitude is also worship.
Together we shall command an effective summons that cannot fail.
Already they are aware of us, and at the Equinox their powers will come
close--closer than love or hunger.”
“In ourselves,” I muttered. “Aware of their activities in ourselves!”
And my mouth went suddenly dry as I heard his quiet answer:
“We shall feel their immense activities in ourselves as they return to
their appointed places whence we first evoked them. Through one of our
three bodies they must pass--the bodiless ones.” A silence fell between
us. The blood beat audibly in my ears like drums.
“They need a body--again?” I whispered.
He bowed his head. “The channel, as before,” he whispered with deep
intensity, “of a human organism--a brain, a mind, a body.” And, seeing
perhaps that I stared with a bewilderment half fear and half refusal,
he added quietly, “In the raw, they are too vast for human use, their
naked, glassy essence impossible to hold. They must mingle first
with our own smaller powers that are akin to them, and thus take on
that restraint which enables the human will to harness their colossal
strength. Alone I could not accomplish this, but with the three of us,
merged by our love into a single unit----”
“But the risk--you both spoke of----?” I asked it impatiently, yet it
was only a thick whisper that I heard.
There was a little pause before he answered me.
“There are two risks,” he said with utmost gravity in his voice and
face. “The descent of such powers _may_ cause a shattering of the
one on whom they first arrive--he is the sacrifice. My death--any
consequent delay--might thus be the expiation I offer in the act of
their release. That is the first, the lesser risk.”
He paused, then added: “But I shall not fail.”
“And--should you----!” My voice had dwindled horribly.
“The Powers, once summoned, would--automatically--seek another channel:
the channel for their return--in case I failed. That is the second and
the greater risk.”
“Your wife?” The words came out with such difficulty that they were
scarcely audible. But Julius heard them.
He shook his head. “For herself there is no danger,” he answered. “My
love of to-day, and yours of yesterday protect her. Nor has it anything
to do with you,” he added, seeing the touch of fear that flashed
from my eyes beyond my power to conceal it. “The Powers, deprived
of my control in the case of my collapse beneath the strain, would
follow the law of their own beings automatically. They would seek the
easiest channel they could find. They would follow the line of least
resistance.”
And, realising that it was the other human occupant of the house he
meant, I experienced a curious sensation of pity and relief; and with
a hint of grandeur in my thought, I knew with what fine pathetic
willingness, with what whole-hearted simplicity of devotion, this
faithful “younger soul” would offer himself to help in so big a
purpose--if he understood.
It was with an appalling shock that I realised my mistake. Julius,
watching me closely, divined my instant thought. He made a gesture of
dissent. To my complete amazement, I saw him shake his head.
“An empty and deserted organism, as yours was at the time we used
it for our evocation,” he said slowly; “an organism unable to offer
resistance owing to its being unoccupied--that is the channel, if it
were available, which they would take. When the soul is out--or _not
yet--in_.”
We gazed fixedly at one another for a time I could not measure. I knew
his awful meaning. For to me, in that first moment of comprehension, it
seemed too terrible, too incredible for belief. I staggered over to the
open window. Julius came after me and laid his hand upon my shoulder.
“The body is but the instrument,” I heard him murmur; “the vehicle of
the soul that uses it. Only at the moment of birth does a soul move in
to take possession. The parents provide it, helpless and ignorant as to
who eventually shall take command. And if this thing happened--though
the risk is small----”
I turned and faced him as he stopped.
“A monster!”
“An elemental being, a child of the elements----”
“Non-human?” I gasped.
“Nature and human-nature linked,” he replied with curious reverence. “A
cosmic being born in a human body. Only---- I shall not fail.”
And before I could find another word to utter, or even acknowledge
the quick pressure of his hand upon my own, I heard his step upon the
passage boards, and found myself alone again. I stood by the open
window, gazing into the deep, star-lit sky above this mountain valley
on our little, friendly Earth, prey to emotions that derived from
another, but forgotten planet--emotions, therefore, that no “earthly”
words can attempt to fathom or describe....
Book IV
THE ATTEMPTED RESTITUTION
CHAPTER XXV
“_Let us consider_ wisdom _first_.
“_Can we be wiser by reason of something which we have forgotten?
Unquestionably we can.... A man who dies after acquiring
knowledge--and all men acquire some--might enter his new life,
deprived indeed of his knowledge, but not deprived of the
increased strength and delicacy of mind which he had gained in
acquiring the knowledge. And if so, he will be wiser in the
second life because of what has happened in the first._
“_Of course he loses something in losing the actual knowledge....
But ... is not even this loss really a gain? For the mere
accumulation of knowledge, if memory never ceased, would soon
become overwhelming, and worse than useless. What better fate
would we wish for than to leave such accumulations behind us,
preserving their greatest value in the_ mental faculties _which
have been strengthened by their acquisition_.”--J. M’Taggart.
As I sit here in the little library of my Streatham house, trying to
record faithfully events of so many years ago, I find myself at a point
now where the difficulty well-nigh overwhelms me. For what happened in
that valley rises before me now as though it had been some strange and
prolonged enchantment; it comes back to me almost in the terms of dream
or vision.
If it be possible for a man to enjoy two states of consciousness
simultaneously, then that possibility was mine. I know not. I can
merely state that at the time my normal consciousness seemed replaced
by another mode, another order, that usurped it, and that this usurping
consciousness was incalculably older than anything known to men to-day;
further, also, that the three of us had revived it from some immemorial
pre-existence. It was memory.
Thus it seemed to me at the time; thus, therefore, I must record it.
And so completely was the change effected in me that belief came with
it. In no one of us, indeed, lay the slightest hint of doubt. What
happened must otherwise have been the tawdriest superstition, whereas
actually there was solemnity in it, even grandeur. The performance
our sacramental attitude of mind made holy, was true with the reality
of an older time when Nature-Worship was effective in some spiritual
sense far beyond what we term animism in our retrospective summary of
the past. We did, each one of us, and in more or less degree, share
the life of Nature by the inner process of feeling-with that life.
Her natural forces augmented us indubitably--there was intelligent
co-operation.
To-day, of course, the forces in humanity drive in quite another
direction; Nature is inanimate and Pan is dead; another attitude
obtains--thinking, not feeling, is our ideal; men’s souls are scattered
beyond the hope of unity and the sword of formal creeds sharply
separates them everywhere. We regard ourselves proudly as separate
from Nature. Yet, even now, as I struggle to complete this record in
the suburban refuge my old age has provided for me, I seem aware of
changes stealing over the face of the world once more. Like another
vast dream beginning, I feel, perhaps, that man’s consciousness is
slowly spreading outwards once again; it is re-entering Nature, too,
in various movements; the wireless note is marvellously sounding; on
all sides singular phenomena that _seem_ new suggest that there is no
limit--to extension of consciousness--to interior human activity. Some
voice from the long ago is divinely trumpeting across our little globe.
This, possibly, is an old man’s dream. Yet it helps me vaguely to
understand how, in that enchanted valley, the three of us may actually
have realised another, older point of view which amounted even to a
different type of consciousness. The slight analogy presents itself;
I venture to record it. Only on some such supposition could I, a
normal, commonplace product of the day, have consented to remain
in the valley without repugnance and distress, much less to have
participated willingly as I did in all that happened. For I was almost
whole-heartedly in and of it. My moments of criticism emerged, but
passed. I saw existence from some cosmic point of view that presented
a human life as an insignificant moment in an eternal journey that was
related both to the armies of the stars and to the blades of grass
along the small, cool rivulet. At the same time this vast perspective
lifted each tiny detail into a whole that inspired these details with
sacramental value whose meaning affected everything. To live _with_
the universe made life the performance of a majestic ceremony; to live
against it was to creep aside into a _cul de sac_. And so this small
item of balance we three, as a group, desired to restore was both an
insignificant and a mighty act of worship.
Yet, whereas to myself the happenings were so intense as to seem
terrific even, to one who had not _felt_ them--as I did--they must seem
hardly events or happenings at all. I say “felt,” because my perception
of what occurred was “feeling” more than anything else. I enjoyed this
other mode of existence known to the human spirit in an earlier day,
and brought, apparently, to earth from our experience upon another
planet.
The happenings, to me, seemed momentous--yet they consisted largely of
interior changes. They were inner facts. And such inner facts “To-day”
regards as less real than outer events, dismissing them as subjective.
The collapse of a roof is real, the perception of an eternal verity is
a mood! And if my attempt to describe halts between what is alternately
bald and overstrained, it is because modern words can only stammer in
dealing with experiences that have so entirely left the racial memory.
For myself the test of their actuality lies in the death that
resulted--an indubitable fact at any rate!--and in the birth that
followed it a little later--another unquestionable “fact.”
I may advantageously summarise the essential gist of the entire matter.
I would do so for this reason: that physical memory grows dim on
looking back so many years and that the events in the châlet grow more
and more elusive, so that I find a sharp general outline helpful to
guide me in this subsequent record. Further, the portion I am now about
to describe depends wholly upon a yet older memory, the memory--as it
seemed to me--of thousands of years ago. This more ancient memory came
partially to me only. I saw much I could not understand or realise,
and so can merely report baldly. There was fluctuation. Perhaps, after
all, my earlier consciousness was never restored with sufficient
completeness to reconstitute the entire comprehension that had belonged
to it when it was my _natural_ means of perceiving, knowing, being.
Words, therefore, obviously fail.
Let me say then, as Julius himself might have said, that in some far
off earlier existence the three of us had offended a cosmic law, and
that for the inevitable readjustment of this error, its expiation, the
three of us must first of all find ourselves reincarnated once again
together. This, after numerous intervening centuries, had come to pass.
The nature of the offence seemed crudely this: that, in the days
when elemental Nature-Powers were accessible to men, we used two of
these--those operating behind wind and fire--for selfish instead of
for racial purposes. Apparently they had been evoked by means of a
human body which furnished their channel of approach. It was available
because untenanted, as already described. I state merely the belief and
practice of an earlier day. Special guardians protected the vacated
bodies from undesirable invasion, and while Julius and the woman
performed this duty, they had been tempted to unlawful use for purposes
of their own. The particular body was my own: I was the channel of
evocation. That I had, however, been persuaded to permit such usage was
as certain as that it was the love between the woman and myself that
was the reason of such permission. How and why I cannot state, because,
simply, I could not--remember. But that the failure of their experiment
resulted in my sudden recall into the body, and the loss, therefore,
of teaching and knowledge I should have otherwise enjoyed--this had
delayed my soul’s advance and explained also why, To-day, memory
failed in me and my soul had lagged behind in its advance. Somewhat in
this way LeVallon stated it.
Where this ancient experiment took place, in what country and age, I
cannot pretend to affirm. The knowledge made use of, however, seems to
have been, in its turn, a yet earlier memory still, and of an existence
upon a planet nearer to the sun, since Fire and Wind were there
recognised as a means by which deific Powers became accessible--through
worship. That the human spirit was then clothed in bodies of lighter
mould, and that Wind and Fire were viewed as manifestations of deity,
turns my imagination, if not my definite memory, to a planet like
Mercury, where gigantic Heat and therefore mighty Winds would be
imposing vehicles of conveying energy from their source--the Sun.
For the expiation of the error, a re-enactment of the actual scene of
its committal was necessary. It must be acted out to be effective--a
ceremony. The channel, again, of a human system was essential as
before. The struggles that eventually ensued, complicated by the stress
of personal emotion--the individual attempts each participator made
to become the channel and so the possible sacrifice--this caused,
apparently, the awful failure. Emotion destroyed the unity of the
group. For Julius was unable to direct the Powers evoked. They were
compelled to seek a channel elsewhere, and they automatically availed
themselves of that which offered the least resistance. The birth
that subsequently followed, accordingly, was a human body informed
literally by these two elemental Powers; and it is in the hope that of
those who chance to read these notes, someone may perhaps be aware of
the existence in the world of this unique being--it is in this hope
primarily, I say, that the record I have attempted is made, that it may
survive my death which cannot now be very long delayed.
One word more, however, I am compelled to add:
I am aware that my so easy surrender to the spell of LeVallon’s
personality and ideas must seem difficult to justify. Even those of my
intimates, who may read this record after I am gone, may feel that my
capitulation was due to what men now term hypnotic influence; whereas,
that some part of me accepted with joy and welcome is the actual
truth--it was some lesser part that objected and disapproved.
To myself, as to those few who may find these notes, I owe this
somewhat tardy confession of personal bias. That I have concealed it
in this Record hitherto seems because my “educated” self must ever
struggle to deny it.
For there have always been two men in me--more than in the usual sense
of good and evil. One, up to date and commonplace, enjoys the game of
nineteenth century life, interests itself in motors, telephones, and
mechanical progress generally, finds Socialism intriguing and even
politics absorbing; while the other, holding all that activity of which
such things are symbols, in curious contempt, belongs to the gods alone
know what. It remains essentially inscrutable, incalculable, its face
masked by an indecipherable smile. It worships the sun, believes in
Magic, accepts the influences of the stars, and acknowledges with sweet
reverence extended hierarchies of Beings, both lower and higher than
the stage at which humanity now finds itself.
In youth, of course, this other self was stronger than in later years;
yet, though submerged, it has never been destroyed. It seemed an
older aspect of my divided being that declined to die. For periods of
varying duration, the modern part would deny it as the superstition of
primitive animistic ignorance; but, biding its time, it would rise to
the surface and take the reins again. The modern supremacy passed, the
older attitude held authoritative sway. The Universe then belonged to
it, alive in every detail; there was communion with trees and winds
and streams; the thrill of night became articulate; it was concerned
with distant stars; the sun changed the earth once more into a vast
temple-floor. I was not apart from any item, large or small, on earth
or in the heavens, while myth and legend, poetry and folk-lore were
but the broken remnants of a once extended faith, a mighty worship that
was both of God and knew the gods.
At such times the drift of modern life seemed in another--a
minor--direction altogether. The two selves in me could not mingle,
could not even compromise. The recent one seemed trivial, but the older
one pure gold. It dwelt, this latter, in loneliness, sweetly-prized,
perhaps, but isolated from all minds of to-day worth knowing,
because its mode of being was not theirs. A loneliness, however, not
intolerable, since it was aware of lifting joy, of power no mere
contrivance could conceive, and of a majestic beauty nothing of
to-day could even simulate.... Societies, moreover, called secret,
fraternities labelled magical and hierophantic, were all too trumpery
to feed its ancient longings, too charlatan to offer it companionship,
too compromising to obtain results. Among modern conditions I found no
mode of life that answered to its imperious call in me. It seemed an
echo and a memory.
As I grew older, both science and religion told me it must be denied.
Respectful of the former, I sought some reasonable basis for these
strange burning beliefs that flamed up with this older self--in
vain. Unjustifiable, according to all knowledge at my disposal, they
remained. History went back step by step to that darkness whence
ignorance emerged; evolution traced a gradual rise from animal
conditions; to no dim, former state of exalted civilisation, either
remembered or imagined, could this deeper part of me track its home
and origin. Yet that home, that origin, I felt, existed, and were
accessible. I could no more resign their actuality than I could cease
to love, to hate, to live. The mere thought of them woke emotions
independent of my will, contemptuous of my intellect--emotions that
were of indubitable reality. They remained convictions.
Had I, then, known some state antedating history altogether, some
unfabled land of which storied Atlantis, itself a fragment, lingered
as a remnant of some immenser life? Had I experienced a mode of being
less cabined than the one I now experienced in a body of blood and
flesh--another order of consciousness, yet identity retained--upon
another star? ... The centuries geology counts backwards were but
moments, the life of a planet only a little instant in the universal
calendar. Was there, a million years ago, a civilisation of another
kind, too ethereal to leave its signatures in sand and rocks, yet in
its _natural_ simplicity nearer, perhaps, to deity? Was here the origin
of my unrewarded yearnings? Could reincarnation, casting back across
the æons to lovelier or braver planets, give the clue? And did this
older self trail literally clouds of glory from a golden age of light
and heat and splendour that lay nearer to the shining centre of our
corner of the heavens...?
At intervals I flung my queries like leaves upon the wind; and the
leaves came back to me upon the wind. I found no answer. Speculation
became gradually less insistent, though the yearnings never died.
Deeper than doubt or question, they seemed ingrained--that my
pre-existence has been endless, that I continue always.... And it
was this strange, buried self in me, already beginning to fade a
little when I went to Motfield Close to train my modern mind in
modern knowledge--it was this curious older self that Julius LeVallon
vitalised anew. Back came the flood of mighty questions:--Whence have
we come? From what dim corner of the unmeasured cosmos are we derived,
descended, making our little way on to the earth? Where have these
hints of an immenser life their sweet, terrific origin, and--why this
unbridged hiatus in our memory...?
* * * * *
The subsequent events lie somewhat confused in me until the night that
heralded the Equinox. Whether two days or three intervened between the
night-scene of Mrs. LeVallon’s Older Self already described, and the
actual climax, I cannot remember clearly. The sequence of hours went
so queerly sliding; incidents of external kind were so few that the
interval remained unmarked; little happened in the sense of outward
happenings on which the mind can fasten by way of measurement. We
lived, it seems, so close to Nature that those time-divisions we call
hours and days flowed _with_ us in a smooth undifferentiated stream. I
think we were too much in Nature to observe the size or length of any
particular parcels. We just flowed forward with the tide itself. Yet to
explain this, now that for years I am grown normal and ordinary again,
is hardly possible. I only remember that larger scale; I can no longer
realise it.
I recall, however, the night of that conversation when Julius left
me to my hurricane of thoughts and feelings, and think I am right in
saying it immediately preceded the September day that ushered in the
particular “attitude” of our earth towards the rest of the Universe we
call the Autumnal Equinox.
Sleep and resistance were equally impossible; I swam with an enormous
current upon a rising tide. And this tide bore stars and worlds within
its irresistible momentum. It bore also little flowers; moisture felt,
before it is seen, as dew or rain; heat that is latent before the
actual flame is visible; and air that lies everywhere until the rush of
wind insists on recognition. I was aware of a prophecy that included
almost menace. An uneasy sense that preparations of immense, portentous
character were incessantly in progress, not in the house and in
ourselves alone, but in the entire sweep of forest, vale and mountain,
pressed upon me from all sides. Nature conspired, I felt, through her
most usual channels to drive into a corner where she would drip over,
so to speak, into amazing manifestation. And that corner, waiting and
inviting, was ourselves....
Towards morning I fell asleep, and when I woke a cloudless day lay
clear and fresh upon the world, the meadows shone with dew, cobwebs
shimmered past my open window, and a keen breeze from the heights
stung my nostrils with the scent from miles of forest. A sparkling
vitality poured almost visibly with the air and sunshine into my
human blood. I bathed and dressed. Frost had laid silvery fingers
upon the valley during the night, and the shadows beneath the woods
still shone in white irregular patches of a pristine loveliness. The
feeling that Nature brimmed over was even stronger than before, and
I went downstairs half conscious that the “corner” we prepared would
show itself somehow fuller, _different_. The little arena waiting for
it--that arena occupied by our human selves--would proclaim the risen
tide. I almost expected to find Julius and his wife expressing in
their physical persons the advent of this power, their very bodies,
gestures, voices increased and grown upon a larger scale. And when I
met them at the breakfast table, two normal, ordinary persons, merely
full of the exhilarating autumn morning, I knew a moment of surprise
that at the same time included relief, though possibly, too, a touch of
disappointment. They were both so simple and so natural.
It brought me up short, as though before a promised hope not justified,
a balked anticipation. But the next moment my mistake was clear. The
sense of something dwindled gave place to its very opposite--a fuller
realisation. The three of us were so intimate--I might say so divinely
intimate--that my failure to see them “grander” arose from my attempt
to see them “separate”--from myself. For actually we floated, all
three, upon the risen tide together. It was the “mind” in me that
sounded the old false note. Having increased like themselves, I was of
equal stature with them; to see them “different” was impossible.
And this amazing quality was characteristic of all that followed.
Ever since my arrival I had been slowly rising with the tide that
brimmed the valley now to the very lips of the surrounding mountains.
It brimmed our hearts as well. My companions were quiet because they,
like myself, were part of it. There was no sense of disproportion or
exaggeration, much less of dislocation; we shared Nature’s powers
without effort, without struggle, as naturally as sunshine, wind or
rain. We stood within; the day contained all three. The Ceremony,
which was living-with Nature, tuned to the universal life, had been
in progress from the instant Julius had welcomed me a week ago. Our
attitude and the earth’s were one. The Equinox was in us too.
In that moment when we met at breakfast, the flash of clearer sight
left all this beyond dispute. Memory shot back in a lightning glance
over recent sensations and events. I realised my gradual growth into
the larger scale, I grasped the significance of the various moods and
tenses my changing consciousness had known as in a kind of initiation.
Premonitions of another mode of mind had stolen upon me out of ordinary
things. The habitual had revealed its marvellous hidden beauty.
There had been transmutation. The ensouling life behind broke loose
everywhere, even through the elements themselves: but particularly
through the two of them that are so closely levelled to the little
division we call human life: air-things and fire-things had become
alert and eager. There was commotion in the palaces of Wind and Fire.
And so the bigger truth explained itself to me. What happened later
seems only incredible on looking back at it from my present dwindled
consciousness. At the time it was natural and quiet. A tourist, passing
through our lonely valley, need not have been aware either of tumult
or of wonder. He would have been too remote from us, too centred in
the consciousness of To-day that accepts only what is expected, or
explicable--too different, in a word, to have noticed anything beyond
the presence of three strangely quiet people in a lonely châlet of the
mountains.
But for us, the gamut of experience had stretched; there was in our
altered state both a microscope and telescope; but a casual intruder,
unprovided with either, must have gone his way, I think, unaware,
unstimulated, and uninformed.
CHAPTER XXVI
“_With virtue the point is perhaps clearer.... I have forgotten
the greater number of the good and evil acts which I have done
in my present life. And yet each must have left a trace on my
character. And so a man may carry over into his next life the
dispositions and tendencies which he has gained by the moral
contests of this life, and the value of those experiences will
not have been destroyed by the death which has destroyed the
memory of them._”--Ibid.
The day that followed lives with me still as an experience of paradise
beyond intelligible belief. Yet I unquestionably experienced it. The
touch of dread was but the warning of the little mind, which shrank
from a joy too vast for it to comprehend. Of Mrs. LeVallon this
was similarly true. Julius alone, sure and steadfast in the state
from which since early boyhood he had never lapsed, combined Reason
and Intuition in that perfect achievement towards which humanity
perhaps slowly seems moving now. He remained an image of strength
and power; he lived in full consciousness what she and I lived half
unconsciously. Yet to record the acts and words which proved it I find
now stammeringly difficult; they were so ordinary. The point of view
which revealed their “otherness” I have so wholly lost.
“The Equinox comes to-night--the pause in Nature,” he said at
breakfast, joy in his voice and eyes. “We shall have greater life. The
moment is ours, because we know how to use it.” Yet what pregnant truth
came with the quiet words, what realisation of simple, overflowing
beauty, what incalculable power, no language known to me can possibly
express.
And his wife, equally, was aglow with happiness and splendour as of a
forgotten age. In myself, too, remained no vestige of denial or alarm.
The day seemed a long, sweet period without divisions, a big, simple
sacrament of unconditioned bliss. Memory came back upon me in a flood,
yet a memory of states, and never once of scenes or places. I re-lived
a time, a state, when men knew greater purposes than they realised,
dimly and instinctively perhaps, not blindly altogether, yet taught of
Nature and the Nature Powers close upon their daily lives. They knew
these Powers direct, experiencing them, existing side by side with them
in definite mutual relationship. They neither reasoned nor, possibly,
even thought. They knew.
For my nature was no longer in opposition to the rest of things, nor
set over against the universe, as apart from it. I felt my acts related
in a vital manner to the planet, as to the entire cosmos, and the
elemental side of Nature moved alongside of my most trivial motions.
The drift of happenings, in things “external” to me, were related to
that drift of inner sensation that I called myself. Thoughts, desires,
emotions found themselves completed in trees and grass, in rocks and
flowers, in the flowing rivulet, in the whir of wind, the drip of
water, the fire of the sunshine. They told me things about myself;
they revealed a pregnant story of information by their attitudes and
aspects; they were related to my very fate and character. The sublime
simplicity of it lies beyond description. For this sacramental tone
changed ordinary daily life into something splendid as eternity. I
shared the elemental power of “inanimate” things. They affected me
and I affected them. The Universe itself, but especially the known
and friendly Earth, was hand in hand and arm in arm with me. It was
feeling-with; it was the cosmic point of view.
And thus, I suppose, it was that I realised humanity as but a little
portion of the whole--important, of course, as the animalculæ in a drop
of water are important, yet living towards extinction only if they
live apart from the surrounding ocean which divinely mothers them.
To this divinity seemed due the presumption with which man To-day
imagines himself the centre of this colossal ocean, and lays down the
law so insolently for the entire Universe. The birth of a soul--its
few years of gaining experience in a material form called body--was
vital certainly for itself, yet whether that body should be informed
by a “human” soul, or by another type of life of elemental kind--this,
seen in proportion to the gigantic scale of universal life, left me
unshocked and undismayed. To provide a body for any life was a joy, a
proud delight, a duty to the whole, but whether Mrs. LeVallon bore a
girl or a boy, or furnished a vehicle for some swift marvellous progeny
of another kind, seemed in no sense to offer an afflicting alternative.
My _present_ point of view may be imagined--the ghastliness and terror,
even the horror of it--but at the time I faced it otherwise, regarding
the possibility with a kind of reverent wonder only. It was not
terrible, but grand.
The certainty of all this I realised at the time. I see it now less
vividly. The intensity has left me. So overwhelming was its perfection,
however, that, as I have said, the contingency to which Mrs. LeVallon,
as mother, was exposed, held no dire or unmoral suggestion for me, as
it now must hold. Nor did the correlative conditions appear otherwise
than true and possible. And that these two, Julius and his wife,
staked an entire lifetime to correct an error of the past, meant no
more--viewed in this vaster proportion--than if I ran upstairs to
close a door I had foolishly left open. An open door is a little
thing, yet may cause currents of air that can disarrange the harmony
of the objects in its path, upsetting the purpose and balance of the
entire household. It must be closed before the occupants of the house
can do their work effectively. They owe it to the house as well as to
themselves. There was this door left open. It must be closed.
But it could not be closed by one. We three, a group, alone could
compass this small act. We who had opened it alone could close it. The
potential strength of three in one was the oldest formula of effective
power known to life. Such a group was capable of a claim on Nature
impossible to an individual--the method of evocation we had used
together in the long ago.
CHAPTER XXVII
“_There remains love. The gain which the memory of the past
gives us here is that the memory of past love for any person can
strengthen our present love of him. And this is what must be
preserved if the value of past love is not to be lost. But love
has no end but itself. If it has gone, it helps us little that we
keep anything it has brought us...._
“_What more do we want? The past is not preserved separately in
memory, but it exists, concentrated and united in the present....
If we still think that the past is lost, let us ask ourselves
whether we regard as lost all those incidents in a friendship
which, even before death, are forgotten._”--Ibid.
Here, then, as well as the mind in me can set it down, was the
background against which the various incidents of this final day
occurred. This was my “attitude” towards them; these thoughts and
feelings, though unexpressed in words, were the “mood” which accepted
and understood each slightest incident of those extraordinary hours.
The length of the day amazed me; it seemed endless. Time went another
gait. The sequence of little happenings that marked its passage remains
blurred in the memory, and I look back to these with the curious
feeling that they happened all at once. Yet the strongest impression,
perhaps, is that time, the sense of duration, was arrested or at least
moved otherwise. There was a pause in Nature, the pause before the
approaching Equinox. A river halted a moment at the bend. And hence
came, of course, the sensation of pressure accumulating everywhere in
the valley. Acceleration would come afterwards, but first this wondrous
pause.
And this pressure that brimmed the valley forced common details into
an uncommon view. The rising tide drove objects on the banks above
high-water mark. There was exhilaration without alarm, as when an
exceptional tide throws a full ocean into unaccustomed inlets. The
thrill was marvellous. The forest made response, offering its secret
things without a touch of fear ... as when the deer came out and grazed
upon the meadow before the châlet windows, not singly but in groups,
and invariably, I noticed, groups of three and three. We passed close
in and out among them; I stroked the thick rough hair upon their
flanks; I remember Mrs. LeVallon’s arm about their necks, and once in
particular, when she was lying down, that a fawn, no hint of fear in
its beautiful, gracious eyes, pushed her hair aside with its shining
muzzle to nibble the grass against her neck. The mood of an ancient and
divining prophecy lay in the sight, linking Nature with human-nature
in natural harmony when the lion and the lamb might play together, and
a little child might lead them. For--significant, arresting item--the
very air came sweetly down among us too, and the friendly intimacy of
the birds brought this exquisite touch of love into the entire day.
There was communion everywhere between our Selves and Nature. The
birds were in my room when I went upstairs, one hopping across the
pillow on my bed, its bright eyes shining as it perched an instant
on my shoulder, two others twittering and dancing along the narrow
window-sill. There was no fear in them; they fluttered here and there
at will, and my quickest movements caused them no alarm. From the
table they peeped up into my face; they were downstairs flitting in
and out among the chairs and sofas; they did not fly away when we came
in. And in threes I saw them, always in threes together. It was like
reading natural omens; I understood the significance that lay in omens;
and in this delightful sense, but in no other, these natural signs
were--ominous.
Over the face of Nature, and in our hearts as well, lay everywhere
this attitude of divine carelessness. Everything felt-with everything
else, and all were neighbours. The ascension of the soul through all
the natural kingdoms seemed written clear upon the trees and rocks
and flowers, upon birds and animals, upon the huge, quiet elements
themselves.
For the pause and stillness, these were ominous, too. This hush of
Nature upon the banks of Time, this beautiful though solemn pause upon
the heart of things, was but the presage of an accelerated rushing
forward that would follow it. The world halted and took breath. It was
the moment just before the leap.
With midnight the climax would be reached--the timeless instant of
definite arrest, too brief, too swift for mechanism to record, the
instant when Julius would enforce his ancient claim. Then the impetuous
advance would be resumed, but resumed with the increased momentum,
moreover, of natural forces whose outward manifestation men call the
equinoctial gales. Those elemental disturbances, that din and riot in
the palaces of heat and air, of wind and fire--how little the sailors,
the men upon the heights, the dwellers in the streets of crowded
cities might guess the free divinity loose upon the earth behind the
hurricanes! The forgotten majesty of it broke in upon me as I realised
it. For realise it I most assuredly did. The channels here, indeed,
were open.
There seemed a halo laid upon the day; sanctity and peace in all its
corners; the valley was a temple, the splendour of true old-world
worship ushering in the Equinox: Earth’s act of adoration to the sun,
the breathless moment when she sank upon her knees before her source of
life, her progeny aware, participating.
For the joy and power that vibrated with every message of light and
sound about us came to me in the terms of love, as though a love
which broke all barriers down flowed in from Nature. It woke in me
an unmanageable, an infinite yearning; I burned to sweep all modern
life into this lonely mountain valley, to share its happiness with
the entire world; the tired ones, the sick and weary, the poor, those
who deem themselves outcast and useless in the scheme of things,
the lonely, the destitute in spirit, the failures, the wicked, and,
above all, the damned. For here all broken and shattered lives, it
seemed to me, must find that sense of wholeness which is confidence
and that peace due to the certainty of being cared for by the
universe--divinely mothered. The natural sacrament of elemental powers,
in its simplicity, could heal the nations. I yearned to bring humanity
into the power of Nature and the joy of Nature-Worship.
So complete, moreover, was my inclusion in this sacramental attitude
towards Nature, that I saw the particular purpose for which we three
were here--as Julius saw it. I experienced a growing joy, an ever
lessening alarm. Three human souls met here upon this island of a
moment’s restitution, important certainly, yet after all an episode
merely, set between a series of lives long past and of countless
lives to follow after. The elements, and the Earth to which they
were consciously related, the Universe of which, with ourselves, she
formed an integral constituent--all were relatively and in their just
proportions involved in this act of restitution. Hence, in a dim way,
it was out of time and space. Our very acts and feelings were those of
Nature and of that vaster Whole, wherein Nature, herself but a little
item, lies secure. The Universe felt and acted with us. The gentian in
the field would be aware, but Sirius, too.
Three human specks would act out certain things, but the wind in the
forest would co-operate and feel glad, and the fire in Orion’s nebula
would be aware.
An older form of consciousness was operative. We were not separate.
Instead of _thinking_ as separate items apart from the rest of the
cosmos, we _felt_ as integral bits of it--and here, perhaps, lay the
essence of what I call another kind of consciousness than the one known
to-day.
CHAPTER XXVIII
My mind retains with photographic accuracy the detail of that
sinister yet gorgeous night. One thing alone vitiates the value of my
report--while I remember what happened, I cannot remember _why_ it
happened.
At the actual time, I understood the meaning of every word and
action because the power to do so was in me. I was in another state
of consciousness. That state has passed, and with it the ability to
interpret. I am in the position of a man who remembers clearly the
detail of some dream to which, on waking, he has lost the key. While
dreaming it, the meaning was daylight clear. The return to normal
consciousness has left him with a photograph he no longer can explain.
The first tentative approach, however, of those Intelligences men call
Fire and Wind--their first contact with this other awakened Self in me,
I remember perfectly. Wind came first, then Fire; yet at first it was
merely that they made their presence known. I became aware of them. And
the natural, simple way in which this came about I may describe to some
extent perhaps.
The ruins of a flaming sunset lay above the distant ridges when Julius
left my room, and, after locking away the private papers entrusted to
my charge, I stood for some time watching the coloured storm-clouds
hurrying across the sky. For, though the trees about the châlet were
motionless, a violent wind ran high overhead, and on the summits it
would have been impossible to stand. Round the building, however,
sunken in its protected valley, and within the walls especially,
reigned a still, delightful peace. The wind kept to the summits. But
of some Spirit of Wind I was aware long before the faintest movement
touched a single branch.
Upon me then, gathering with steady power, stole the advance-guard of
these two invasions--air and warmth, yet an inner air, an inner warmth.
For, while I watched, the silence of those encircling forests conveyed
the sound and movement of approaching life. There grew upon me, first
as by dim and curious suggestion, a sense of ordered preparation
slowly accumulating behind the mass of shadowy trees. The picture
then sharpened into more definite outline. The forest was busy with
the stirrings of a million thread-like airs that built up together
the body of a rising wind, yet not of wind as commonly experienced,
but rather of some subtler, more acute activity of which wind is but
the outer vehicle. The inner activity, of which it is the sensible
manifestation--the body--was beginning to move. The soul of air itself
was stirring. These million ghost-like airs were lifting wings from
their invisible, secret lairs, all running as by a word of command
towards a determined centre whence, obeying a spiritual summons, they
would presently fall upon the valley in that sensible manifestation
called the equinoctial gales. Behind the material effect, the spiritual
Cause was active.
This imaginative picture grew upon me, as though in some way I was
let into the inner being of that life which prompts all natural
movements and hides, securely veiled, in every stock and stone. A new
interpretative centre was awake in me. In the movement of wind I was
aware of--life. Then, while this subtle perception that an intelligent,
directing power lay behind the very air I breathed, a similar report
reached me from another, equally elemental, quarter, though it is less
easy to describe.
From the sun? Originally, yes--since primarily from the sun emerges
all the heat the earth contains. It first stirred definite sensation
in me when my eye caught the final gleam upon the turreted walls of
vapour where still the sunset stood emblazoned. From that coloured sea
of light, and therefore of heat, something flashed in power through
me; a vision of running fire broke floodingly above the threshold of
my mind, ran into every corner of my being, left its inspiring trail,
became part of my very nerves and blood. Consciousness was deepened and
intensified.
Yet it was neither common heat I felt nor common flame I pictured,
but rather a touch of that primordial and ethereal fire which dwells
at the heart of all manifested life--latent heat. For it was neither
yellow, red, nor white with any aspect of common flame, but what I can
only dare to describe as a fierce, dark splendour, black and shining,
yet of intense, incandescent brilliance. The contradictory adjectives
catch a ghost of it. Moreover, I was aware of no discomfort, for while
it threatened to overwhelm me, the chief effect was to leave a glow, a
radiance, an enthusiasm of strengthened will and confidence, combined
with a sense of lightning’s power. It was spiritual heat, of which fire
is but a physical vehicle. The central fire of the universe burned in
my heart.
I realised, in a word, that both elements were vehicles of intelligent
and living Agencies. Of their own accord they became active, and
natural laws were but their method of activity. They were alert; the
valley was alive, combining, co-operating with myself--and taking
action.
This was their first exquisite approach. But presently, when I moved
away from the window, the sunset clouds grown dark and colourless
again, I realised lesser manifestations of this new emotion which may
seem more intelligible when I set them down in words. The candle flame,
for instance, and the flaring match with which I lit my cigarette
seemed not so much to produce fire by a chemical device, as to puncture
holes through a curtain into that sea of latent fire that lies in all
material things. The breath of air, moreover, that extinguished the
flame did not annihilate it, but merged it into the essential being of
its own self. The two acted in sympathy together. Both Wind and Fire
drew attention to themselves of set intention, insisting upon notice,
as if inviting co-operation.
And something leviathan leaped up in me to welcome them. The standing
miracle of fire lit up the darkened valley. Pure flame revealed itself
suddenly as the soul in me, the eternal part that remembered and grew
wise, the deathless part that survived all successive bodies.
And I realised with a shock of comprehension the danger that Julius ran
in the evocation that his “experiment” involved: Fire, once kindled,
and aided naturally by air, must seek to destroy the prison that
confines it....
I remained for some time in my room. My will, my power of choice,
seemed taken from me. My life moved with these vaster influences. I
argued vehemently with some part of me that still offered a vague
resistance. It was the merest child’s play. I figured myself in my
London lecture room, explaining to my students the course and growth of
the delusion that had captured me. The result was futile; I convinced
neither my students nor myself. It was the thinking mind in me that
opposed, but it was another thing in me that _knew_, and this other
thing was enormously stronger than the reasoning mind, and overwhelmed
it. No amount of arguing could stand against the power of knowledge
that had become established in me by feeling-with. I felt-with Nature,
especially with her twin elemental powers of wind and fire. And this
wisdom of feeling-with dominated my entire being. Denial and argument
were merely false.
All that evening this sense of the companionship of Wind and Fire
remained vividly assertive. Everywhere they moved about me. They
acted in concert, each assisting the other. I was for ever aware of
them; their physical manifestations were as great dumb gestures of
two living and intelligent Immensities in Nature. Yet it was only in
part, perhaps, I knew them. Their full, amazing power never came to
me completely. The absolute realisation that came to Julius in full
consciousness was not mine. I shared at most, it seems, a reflected
knowledge, seeing what happened as through some lens of half-recovered
memory.
* * * * *
Moreover, supper, when I came downstairs to find Julius and his wife
already waiting for me, was the most ordinary and commonplace meal
imaginable. We talked of the weather! Mrs. LeVallon was light-hearted,
almost gay, though I felt it was repressed excitement that drove
outwards this trivial aspect of her. But for the fact that all she
did now seemed individual and distinguished, her talk and gestures
might have scraped acquaintance with mere foolishness. Indeed, our
light talk and her irresponsibility added to the sense of reality I
have mentioned. It was a mask, and the mask dropped occasionally with
incongruous abruptness that was startling.
Such insignificant details revealed the immediate range of the Powers
that watched and waited close beside our chairs. That sudden, fixed
expression in her eyes, for instance, when the Man brought in certain
private papers, handed them to Julius who, after reading them,
endorsed them with a modern fountain pen, then passed them on to me!
That fountain pen and her accompanying remark--how incongruous and
insignificant they were! Both seemed symbolical items in some dwindled,
trivial scale of being!
“It isn’t everybody that’s got a professor for a secretary, Julius, is
it?”
She said it with her mouth full, her elbows on the table, and only
that other look in the watchful eyes seemed to contradict the
awkward, untaught body. There was a flash of tenderness and passion
in them, a pathetic questioning and wonder, as though she saw in her
husband’s act an acknowledgment of dim forebodings in her own deep
heart. She appealed, it seemed, to me. Was it that she divined he
was already slipping from her, farewells all unsaid, yet that she
was--inarticulate? ... The entire little scene, the words, the laughter
and the look, were but evidence of an attempt to lift the mask. Her
choice of words, their accent and pronunciation, that fountain pen, the
endorsement, the stupid remark about myself--were all these lifted by
those yearning eyes into the tragedy of a fateful good-bye message? ...
More significant still, though even less direct, was another
moment--when the Man stretched his arm across the table to turn the
lamp up. For in this unnecessary act she saw--the intuition came
sharply to me--an effect of the approaching Powers upon his untutored
soul. The wick was already high enough when, with an abrupt, impulsive
movement, he stooped to turn it higher; and instantly Mrs. LeVallon
was on her feet, her face first pale, then hotly flushed. She rose
as though to strike him, then changed the gesture as if to ward a
blow--almost to protect. It was an impetuous, revealing act.
Out of some similar impulse, too, only half understood, I sprang to her
assistance.
“There’s light enough,” I exclaimed.
“And heat,” she added quickly. “Good Lord! the room’s that hot, it’s
like a furnace!”
She flashed a look of gratitude at me. What exactly was in her mind
I cannot know, but in my own was the strange feeling that the less
_visible_ fire in the air the better. An expression of perplexed alarm
showed itself in the face of the faithful but inarticulate serving man.
Unwittingly he had blundered. His distress was acute. I almost thought
he would drop to his knees and lick his mistress’s hand for forgiveness.
Whether Julius perceived all this is hard to say. He looked up
calmly, watching us; but the glance he gave, and the fact that he
spoke no word, made me think he realised what the energy of her tone
and gesture veiled. The desire to assist the increase of heat, of
fire--co-operation--had acted upon the physical medium least able to
resist--the most primitive system present. The approach of the two
Activities affected us, one and all.
There were other incidents of a similar kind before the meal was over,
quite ordinary in themselves, yet equally revealing; my interpretation
of them due to this enhanced condition of acute perception that
pertained to awakening memory. Air and fire accumulated, flake by
flake. A kind of radiant heat informed all common objects. It was in
our hearts as well. And wind was waiting to blow it into flame.
CHAPTER XXIX
“_Not yet are fixed the prison bars;
The hidden light the spirit owns
If blown to flame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to pay us reverence._”--A. E.
It was out of this accumulation of unusual emotion that a slight
but significant act of Julius recalled me to the outer world. I was
lighting my pipe--from the chimney of the lamp rather than by striking
a match--when I overheard him telling the Man that, instead of sitting
up as usual, he might go to bed at once. He went off obediently, but
with some latent objection, half resentment, half opposition, in his
manner. There was a sulkiness as of disappointment in his face. He
knew that something unusual was on foot, and he felt that he should by
rights be in it--he might be of use, he might be needed. There was this
dumb emotion in him, as in a faithful dog who, scenting danger, is not
called upon to fight, and so retires growling to his kennel.
He went slowly, casting backward glances, and at the door he turned and
caught my eye. I had only to beckon, to raise my hand a moment, to say
a word--he would have come running back with a bound into the room. But
the gaze of his master was upon him, and he went; and though he may
have lain down in his room beyond the kitchen, I felt perfectly sure he
did not sleep. His body lay down, but not his excited instincts.
For this dismissal of the Man was, of course, a signal. The three of
us were then in that dim-lit peasant’s room--alone; and for a long
time in a silence broken only by the sparks escaping from the burning
logs upon the hearth, and by the low wind that now went occasionally
sighing past the open window. We sat there waiting, not looking at each
other, yet each aware of the slightest physical or mental movement.
It was an intense and active silence in which deep things were being
accomplished; for, if Mrs. LeVallon and myself were negative, I was
alert to immense and very positive actions that were going forward in
the being of our companion. Julius, sitting quietly with folded hands,
his face just beyond the lamp’s first circle of light, was preparing,
and with a stress of extreme internal effort that made the silence
seem a field of crashing battle. The entire strength of this strange
being’s soul, co-operating with Nature, and by methods of very ancient
acquirement known fully to himself alone, sought an achievement that
should make us act as one. Through two natural elemental powers, fire
and wind--both vitally part of us since the body’s birth--we could
claim the incalculable support of the entire universe. It was a cosmic
act. Ourselves were but the channel. Later this channel would define
itself still more.
Beneath those smoke-stained rafters, as surely as beneath the vaulted
roof of some great temple, stepped worship and solemnity. The change
came gradually. From the sky above the star-lit valley this grave,
tremendous attitude swung down into our hearts. Not alone the isolated
châlet, but the world itself contained us, a temple wherein we,
insignificant worshippers, knelt before the Universe. For the powers we
invoked were not merely earthly powers, but those cosmic energies that
drove and regulated even the flocks of stars.
Mrs. LeVallon and I both knew it dimly, as we waited with beating
hearts in that great silence. She scarcely moved. Somehow divining the
part she had to play, she sat there motionless as a figure in stone,
offering no resistance. Her reawakened memory must presently guide
us; she knew the importance of her rôle, and the composure with which
she accepted it touched grandeur. Yet each one of us was necessary.
If Julius took the leader’s part, her contribution, as my own, were
equally essential to success. If the greater risk was his, our own risk
was yet not negligible. The elemental Powers would take what channel
seemed best available. It was not a personal consideration for us. We
were most strangely _one_.
My own measure of interpretation I have already attempted to describe.
Hers I guess intuitively. For we shared each other’s feelings as only
love and sympathy know how to share. These feelings now grew steadily
in power; and, obeying them, our bodies moved to new positions. We
changed our _attitudes_.
For I remember that while Julius rose and stood beside the table, his
wife went quietly from my side and seated herself before the open
window, her face turned towards the valley and the night. Instinctively
we formed a living triangle, Mrs. LeVallon at the apex. And, though
at the time I understood the precise significance of these changes,
reading clearly the language they acted out in motion, that discernment
is now no longer in me, so that I cannot give the perfect expression
of meaning they revealed. Upon Julius, however, some appearance,
definite as a robe upon the head and shoulders, proclaimed him a figure
of command and somehow, too, of tragedy. It set him in the centre.
Close beside me, within the circle of the lamplight, I watched him--so
still, so grave, the face of marble pallor, the dark hair tumbling as
of old about the temples whereon the effort of intensest concentration
made the pulsing veins stand out as thick as cords. Calm as an image
he stood there for a period of time I cannot state. Beyond him, in
the shadows by the window, his wife’s figure was just visible as she
leaned, half reclining, across the wooden sill into the night. There
was no sound from the outer valley, there was no sound in the room.
Then, suddenly of itself, a change approached. The silence broke.
“Julius...!” came faintly from the window, as Mrs. LeVallon with a
sudden gesture drew the curtain to shut out the darkness. She turned
towards us. “Julius!” And her voice, using the tone I had heard before
when she fled past me up that meadow slope, sounded as from some space
beyond the walls. I looked up, my nerves on the alert, for it came to
me that she was at the limit of endurance and that something now must
break in her.
Julius moved over to her side, while she put her hands out first to
welcome him, then half to keep him off. He spoke no word. He took her
outstretched hands in both of his, leading her back a little nearer
towards the centre of the room.
“Julius,” she whispered, “what frightens me to-night? I’m all a-shiver.
There’s something coming?--but what is it? And why do I seem to know,
yet not to know?”
He answered her quietly, the voice deep with tenderness:
“We three are here together”--I saw the shining smile I knew of
old--“and there is no cause to feel afraid. You are tired with your
long, long waiting.” And he meant, I knew, the long fatigue of ages
that she apprehended, but did not grasp fully yet. She was Mrs.
LeVallon still.
“I’m both hot and cold together, and all oppressed,” she went on;
“like a fever it is--icy and yet on fire. I can’t get at myself, to
keep it still. Julius ... what is it?” The whisper held somehow for
me the potentiality of scream. Then, taking his two hands closer,
she raised her voice with startling suddenness. “Julius,” she cried,
“I know what frightens me--it’s _you!_ What are you to-night?” She
looked searchingly a moment into his face. “And what is this thing
that’s going to happen to you? I hear it coming nearer--outside”--she
moved further from the curtained window with small, rushing steps,
looking back across her shoulder--“all down the valley from the
mountains, those awful mountains. Oh, Julius, it’s coming--for you--my
husband----! And for him,” she added, laying her eyes upon me like a
flame.
I thought the tears must come, but she held them back, looking
appealingly at me, and clutching Julius as though he would slip from
her. Then, with a quick movement and a little gust of curious laughter,
she clapped her hand upon her mouth to stop the words. Something she
meant to say to me was left unspoken, she was ashamed of the momentary
weakness. “Mrs. LeVallon” was still uppermost.
“Julius,” she added more softly, “there’s something about to-night I
haven’t known since childhood. There’s such heat and--oh, hark!”--she
stopped a moment, holding up her finger--“there’s a sound--like riggin’
in the wind. But it ain’t wind. What is it, Julius? And why is that
wonderful?”
Yet no sound issued from the quiet valley; it was as still as death.
Even the sighing of the breeze had ceased about the walls.
“If only I understood,” she went on, looking from his face to mine, “if
only I knew exactly. It was something,” she added almost to herself,
“that used to come to me when I was little--on the farm--and I put it
away because it made me”--she whispered the last two words below her
breath--“feel crazy----”
“Crazy?” repeated Julius, smiling down at her.
“Like a queen,” she finished proudly, yet still timid. “I couldn’t feel
that way and do my work.” And her long lashes lifted, so that the eyes
flashed at me across the table. “It made everything seem too easy.”
I cannot say what quality was in his voice, when, leading her gently
towards a wicker chair beside the fire, he spoke those strange words of
comfort. There seemed a resonant power in it that brought strength and
comfort in. She smiled as she listened, though it was not her brain his
language soothed. That other look began to steal upon her face as he
proceeded.
“_You!_” he said gently, “so wonderful a woman, and so poised with the
discipline these little nerves forget--you cannot yield to the fear
that loneliness and darkness bring to children.” She settled down into
the chair, gazing into his face as he settled the cushions for her
back. Her hands lay in her lap. She listened to every syllable, while
the expression of perplexity grew less marked. And the change upon her
features deepened as he continued: “There are moments when the soul
sees her own shadow, and is afraid. The Past comes up so close. But the
shadow and the fear will pass. We three are here. Beyond all chance
disaster, we stand together ... and to our real inner selves nothing
that is sad or terrible can ever happen.”
Again her eyes flashed their curious lightning at me as I watched; but
the sudden vague alarm was passing as mysteriously as it came. She
said no more about the wind and fire. The magic of his personality,
rather than the words which to her could only have seemed singular and
obscure, had touched the sources of her strength. Her face was pale,
her eyes still bright with an unwonted brilliance, but she was herself
again--I think she was no longer the “upper” self I knew as “Mrs.
LeVallon.” The marvellous change was slowly stealing over her.
“You’re cold and tired,” he said, bending above her. “Come closer to
the fire--with us all.”
I saw her shrink, for all the brave control she exercised. The word
“fire” came on her like a blow. “It’s not my body,” she answered;
“that’s neither cold nor tired. It’s another thing--behind it.” She
turned toward the window, where the curtain at that moment rose
and fell before a draught of air. “I keep getting the feeling that
something’s coming to-night for--one of us.” She said it half to
herself, and Julius made no answer. I saw her look back then at the
glowing fire of wood and peat. At the same moment she threw out both
hands first as if to keep the heat away, then as though to hold her
husband closer.
“Julius! If you went from me! If I lost you----!”
I heard his low reply:
“Never, through all eternity, can _we_ go--away from one
another--except for moments.”
She partly understood, I think, for a great sigh, but half suppressed,
escaped her.
“Moments,” she murmured, “that are very long ... and lonely.”