As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
forms, and conjure away these modern intruders. The power to do this
seemed almost within my reach: I willed and willed and willed with all
my might, but in vain; I could not cheat my sight or hearing for a
moment. There they remained, unconscious and undisturbed, those happy,
well-mannered, well-appointed little French people, and fed the gold
and silver fish; and there with an aching heart I left them.
Oh, surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of
possessing the past more fully and completely than we do. Life is not
worth living for many of us, if a want so desperate and yet so natural
can never be satisfied. Memory is but a poor rudimentary thing that we
had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of
consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake.
The touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a voice that is still, the
tender grace of a day that is dead, should be ours forever at our beck
and call, by some exquisite and quite conceivable illusion of the
senses.
Alas! alas! I have hardly the hope of ever meeting my beloved ones
again in another life. Oh, to meet their too dimly remembered forms in
this, just as they once were, by some trick of my own brain! To see
them with the eye, and hear them with the ear, and tread with them the
old obliterated ways as in a waking dream! It would be well worth
going mad, to become such a self-conjurer as that.
* * * * *