... Straightway I was ’ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
‘Guess now who holds thee?’—‘Death,’ I said. But there
The silver answer rang—‘Not Death, but Love.’
E. B. B.
... It was only when the sky grew dark and the shadow of clouds fell
over that sunny landscape that he realised he was still standing half
dressed beside a dying fire, and that through the open window behind him
the cold night air brought discomfort that made him shiver. He drew the
curtains, lit a candle, spoke a soft word or two to the curled—up forms
of Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke, who were far too busy in their own
Crack-land to trouble about replying, and so finally got into bed.
He felt happier, strangely comforted. The wings of memory and phantasy,
withdrawing softly, left a soothed feeling in his heart. In that region
of creative imagination known as the ‘Crack’ he always found peace and
at least a measure of joy. Until sleep should come to captain his
forces, he deliberately turned the current of his thoughts to the work
he was about to take up in London. Nixie, Joan, Dick—all helped him. His
will erected an iron barrier against the insidious attacks of
sadness—the disease which strikes at the roots of effort. He would dream
his dreams, but also, he would do his work....
The shadows thickened about the house, crowding from the heart of
winter. The fire died down. The room lay still. It was between one and
two o’clock in the morning, when silence in the country is a real
silence, and the darkness weighs. Chasing Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns down
the winding corridors of dream—Paul slept.
A faint sound in the room a little later made him stir in his sleep and
smile. His lips moved, as though in that land of dreams where he
wandered some one spoke to him and he answered. Then the sound was
repeated, and he woke with a start, sat up in bed, and stared hard into
the darkness.
The fire was quite out; nothing was visible but the dim frame of the
window on his right where he had forgotten to draw the curtains. A
glimmer of light revealed the sash. Thinking it must be the winter dawn,
he was about to lie down again and resume his slumbers, when the sound
that had first wakened him again made itself audible.
A slight shiver ran down his spine, for the sound seemed to bring over
some of the wonder of his dreams into that dark and empty room. Then,
with a tiny revelation of certainty, the knowledge came that he was wide
awake, and that the sound was close in front of him. Moreover, he knew
at once that it was neither Smoke nor Mrs. Tompkyns. It was a sound,
deliberately produced, with conscious intelligence behind it. And it
shot through him with the sweetness of music. It was like a breath of
wind that rustled through a swinging branch—of a birch tree; as though
such a branch waved to and fro softly above his head.
His first idea was that some one was in the room, and had taken down the
spray of withered leaves from the wall; and he strained his eyes in the
direction of the mantelpiece, trying to pierce the darkness. In vain, of
course. All he could distinguish was that something moved gently to and
fro like a spot of light—almost like a fire-fly, yet white—about the
room.
From some deep region of sleep where he had just been, the atmosphere of
dream was still, perhaps, about him. Yet this was no dream. There _was_
somebody in the room with him, somebody alive, somebody who wished to
claim his attention—who had already spoken to him before he woke. He
knew it unmistakably; he even remembered what had been said to him while
yet asleep! ‘How _can_ you go on sleeping when I am here, trying to get
at you?’
It was just as if the words still trembled on the air. Confusedly,
scarcely aware what he did, yet already thrilling with happiness, his
lips formed an answer:
‘Who are you? What is it you want?’
There was a pause of intense silence, during which his heart hammered in
his temples. Then a very faint whisper gathered through the darkness:
‘I promised....’
The point of light wavered a little in the air, then came low and seemed
to settle on the end of the bed. Into the clear and silent spaces of his
lonely soul there swam with it the presence of some one who had never
died, and who could never die.
‘Is that _you_——?’ The name seemed incredible, for this was no Aventure
through the Crack, yet he uttered it after an imperceptible moment of
hesitation——‘_Nixie?_’
Even then he could not believe an answer would be forthcoming. The
light, however, moved slightly, and again came the faint tones of a
voice, a singing voice:
‘Of course it is!’ There was a curious suggestion of huge distance about
it, as though it travelled like an echo across vast spaces. ‘I’m here,
close beside you; closer than ever before.’
He heard the words with what can only be described as a spiritual
sensation—the peace and gratitude that follow the passion of strong
prayer, of prayer that believes it will be heard and answered.
‘You know _now_—don’t you?’ continued the tiny singing voice, ‘because
I’ve told you.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, also very low, ‘I know now.’ For at first he could
think of nothing else to say. A huge excitement moved in him. Those
invisible links of pure aspiration by which the soul knits herself
inwardly to God seemed suddenly tightened in the depths of his being. He
understood that this was a true thing, and possible.
‘You’ve come back—like the trees in the spring,’ he whispered
stammeringly, after another pause, gazing as steadily as he could at the
point of clear light so close in front of him.
‘The real part of me,’ she explained; ‘the real part of me has come
back.’
‘The real part,’ he echoed in his bewilderment. He began to understand.
But even then it all seemed too utterly strange and wonderful to be
true; and a subtle confirmation of the child’s presence that followed
immediately only added at first to his increasing amazement. For both
Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns, he became aware, had jumped up softly upon the
foot of the bed, and were sitting there, purring loudly with pleasure,
close beneath the fleck of light. And their action made him seek the
further confirmation of his own senses. He leaned forwards, hesitating
in his bewilderment between the desire to find the matches and the
desire to touch the speaker with his hands.
But even in that darkness his intention was divined instantly. The light
slid away like a wee torch carried on wings.
‘No, Uncle Paul,’ whispered the voice farther off, ‘not the matches.
Light makes it more difficult for me.’ He sank back against the pillows,
frightened at the reality of it all. The old familiar name, too, ‘Uncle
Paul,’ was almost more than he could bear.
‘Nixie——!’ he stammered, and then found it impossible to finish the
sentence.
Then she laughed. He heard her silvery laughter in the room, exactly as
he had heard it a hundred times before, spontaneous, mischievous, and
absolutely natural. She was amused at his perplexity, at his want of
faith; at the absurd difficulty he found in believing. He lay quite
still, breathing hard, wondering what would come next; still trying to
persuade himself it was all a dream, yet growing gradually convinced in
spite of himself that it was not.
‘And don’t come too near me,’ he heard her voice across the room. ‘Never
try and touch me, I mean. _Think of me at your centre._ That’s the real
way to get near.’
Very slowly then, after that, he began to accept the Supreme Aventure.
He talked. He asked questions, though never the obvious and detailed
sort of questions it might have been expected he would ask. For it was
now borne in upon him, as she said, that only her _real_ part had come
back, and that only _his_ real part, therefore, was in touch with her.
It was, so to speak, a colloquy of souls in which physical and material
things had no interest. His very first question brought the truth of
this home to him with singular directness. He asked her what the tiny
light was that he saw moving to and fro like a little torch.
‘But I didn’t know there was a light,’ she answered. ‘Where I am it is
all light! I see you perfectly. Only—you look so young, Uncle Paul! Just
like a boy! About my own age, I mean.’
And it is impossible to describe the delight, the mystical rapture that
came to him as he heard her. The words, ‘Where I am it is all light,’
brought with them a sudden sense of reality that was too convincing for
him to doubt any longer. From her simple description he recognised a
place that he knew. But, at the same time, he understood that it was no
_place_ in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a _state_ and a
_condition_. He himself in his deepest dreams had been there too. That
light had sometimes in brief moments of aspiration shone for him. And
the curious sense of immense distance that came so curiously with her
tiny voice came because there was really no distance at all. She was no
longer conditioned by space or time. Those were limitations of life in
the body, temporary scales of measurement adopted by the soul when
dealing with temporary things. Whereas Nixie was free.
A sense of happiness deep as the sea, of peace, bliss, and perfect rest
that could never know hurry or alarm, surged through him in a tide. He
thought, with a thrill of anticipation, of the time when his own eyes
would be opened, and he should see as clearly as she did. But instantly
the rebuke came.
‘Oh! You must not think about that,’ she said with a laugh; ‘you have a
lot to do first, a lot more aventures to go through!’
As she spoke the light slid nearer again and settled upon the foot of
the bed. His thoughts were evidently the same as spoken words to her.
She knew all that passed in his mind, the very feelings of his heart as
well. This was indeed companionship and intimacy. He remembered how she
had told him all about it in the Crack weeks ago, before he realised who
she was, and before he knew her face to face. And at the same moment he
noticed another curious detail of her presence, namely, that the little
torch—for so he now called it to himself—in passing before the mirror
produced no reflection in the glass. Yet, if his eyes could perceive it,
there ought to have been a refraction from the mirror as well—a
reflection! Did he then only perceive it with his interior vision? Was
his spiritual sight already partially opened?
‘That’s your ’terpretation of me—inside yourself,’ he caught her swift
whisper in reply, for again she _heard_ his thought; and he almost
laughed out aloud with pleasure to notice the long word decapitated as
her habit always was on earth. ‘In your thoughts I’m a sort of light,
you see.’
The explanation was delightful. He understood perfectly. The thought of
Nixie had always come to him, even in earthly life, in the terms of
brightness. And his love marvelled to notice, too, that she still had
the old piercing vision into the heart of things, and the
characteristically graphic way of expressing her meaning.
The purring of the cats made itself audible. They were both ‘kneading’
the bed-clothes by his feet, as happy as though being stroked.
‘No, they don’t see,’ she explained the moment the thought entered his
mind; ‘they only feel that I’m here. Lots of animals are like that. It’s
the way dogs know ’sti’ctively if a person’s good or bad.’
Oh, how the animals after this would knit him to her presence! No wonder
he had already found comfort with them that no human being could
give.... The thought of his sister flashed next into his brain—the
difficulty of helping her——
‘I tried to get at her before I came here to you,’ he heard, ‘but her
room was all dark. It was like trying to get inside a cloud. She’s cold
and shadowy—and ever such a long way off. It’s difficult to explain.’
‘I think I understand,’ he whispered.
‘You can get closer than I can.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Of course. You must.’
It was Nixie’s happiness that seemed so wonderful and splendid to him.
Her voice almost sang; and laughter slipped in between the shortest
sentences even. Brightness, music, and pure joy were about her like an
atmosphere. He was breathing a rarefied air, cool, scented, and
exhilarating. He had already known it when playing with the children and
enjoying their very-wonderful-indeed aventures; only now it was raised
to a still higher power. In its very essence he knew it.
‘Toby and Jonah are with me the moment they sleep,’ she continued, ever
following his least thought. ‘The instant their bodies fold up they
shoot across here to me. Toby comes easiest. She’s a girl, you see. And
Daddy’s here too——’
‘Dick?’ he cried, memory and affection surging through him with a sudden
passion.
‘Of course. You’ve thought about him so much. He says you’ve always been
close to each other——’
The voice broke off suddenly, and the torch of light moved to and fro as
though agitated. Paul heard no sound, and saw no sign, but again, into
the clear and silent spaces of his soul, now opened so marvellously, so
blessedly to receive, there swam the consciousness of another
Presence....
There was a long pause, while memory annihilated all the intervening
years at a single stroke....
His mind was growing slightly confused with it all. His mortal
intelligence wearied and faltered a little with the effort to understand
how time and distance could be thus destroyed. He was not yet free as
these others were free.
‘How is it, then, that you can stay?’ he asked presently, when the light
held steady again. By ‘you’ he meant ‘both of you.’ Yet he did not say
it. This was what seemed so wonderful in their perfect communion; words
really were not necessary. Afterwards, indeed, he sometimes wondered
whether he actually spoke at all.
‘I was going on—at first,’ came the soft answer, ‘when I heard something
calling me, and found I couldn’t. I had something to do here.’
‘What?’ he ventured under his breath.
‘_You!_’ She laughed in his face, so to speak. ‘You, of course. Part of
you is in me, so I couldn’t go on without you. But when you are ready,
and have done your work, we’ll go on together. Daddy is waiting, too.
Oh, it’s simply splendid—a very-splendid-indeed aventure, you see!’
Again she laughed through that darkened room till it seemed filled with
white light, and the light flooded his very soul as he heard her.
‘You _will_ wait, Nixie?’ he asked.
‘I _must_ wait. Both of us must wait. We are all together, you see.’
And, after another long pause, he asked another question:
‘This work, then, that keeps me here——?’
‘Your London boys, of course. There’s no one in the whole world who can
do it so well. You’ve been picked out for it; that’s what really brought
you home from America!’ And she burst out into such a peal of laughter
that Paul laughed with her. He simply couldn’t help himself. He felt
like singing at the same time. It was all so happy and reasonable and
perfect.
‘You’ve got the money and the time and the ’thusiasm,’ she went on; ‘and
over here there are thousands and millions of children all watching you
and clapping their hands and dancing for joy. I’ve told them all the
Aventures you wrote, but they think this is the best of all—the
London-Boys-Aventure!’
He felt his heart swell within him. It seemed that the child’s hair was
again about his eyes, her slender arms clasping his neck, and her blue
eyes peering into his as when she begged him of old in the nursery or
schoolroom for an aventure, a story.
‘So you’ll never give it up, will you, Uncle Paul?’ she sang, in that
tiny soft voice through the darkness.
‘Never,’ he said.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ he replied.
The thought of those ‘thousands and millions’ of children watching his
work from the other side of death was one that would come back to
strengthen him in the future hours of discouragement that he was sure to
know.
And much more she told him besides. They talked, it seemed, for ever—yet
said so little. Into mere moments—such was the swift and concentrated
nature of their intimacy—they compressed hours of earthly conversation;
for his thoughts were heard and answered as soon as born within him, and
a whole train of ideas that the lips ordinarily stammer over in
difficult detail crowded easily into a single expression—a thought, a
desire, a question half uttered, and then a reply that comprehended all.
There was no labour or weariness, no sense of effort.
Moreover, when at length he heard her faint whisper, ‘Now I must go,’ it
conveyed no sense of departure or loss. She did not leave him. It was
more as though he closed a much-loved book and replaced it in his
pocket. The pictures evoked do not leave the mind because the cover is
closed; they remain, on the contrary, to be absorbed by the heart.
Nixie’s silvery presence was _in him_; he would always feel her now,
even when his thoughts seemed busy with outer activities.
The little torch flickered and was gone; but as Paul gazed into the
darkness of the room he knew that the light had merely slipped down deep
into himself to burn as an unfailing beacon at the centre of his soul.
And then it was that he realised other curious details for the first
time. Some of the more ordinary faculties of his mind, it seemed, had
been in suspension during the amazing experience, while others had been
exalted as in trance. For it now came to him that he had actually _seen_
her—with a clearness that he had never known before. That torch lit up
her little form as a lantern lights up a person holding it in darkness.
Just as he had felt all the sweet and essential points of her
personality, so also he had been vividly aware of her figure in the
terms of sight—eyes, hair, sunburned little hands, and twinkling feet.
Her very breath and perfume even!
If the working of his ordinary senses had been in abeyance so that he
hardly knew the hunger for common sight and touch, he now realised that
it was because they had been replaced by these higher senses with their
keener, closer satisfaction. And this intimate knowledge of her was as
superior to the ordinary methods as flying is to crawling—or, better
still, as a draught of water in the throat is to dipping the fingers in
the cup.
For who, indeed, shall define the standard of reality? And who, when the
senses are such sorry reporters, shall declare with authority that one
thing is false and could not happen, and another is true and actually
did happen?
Experiences of the transcendental order are, perhaps, beyond the power
of precise words to describe, for they are not common enough to have
become incorporated into the language of a race. And words are clumsy
and inadequate symbols at best. The deepest thoughts, as the deepest
experiences, ever evade them. It is difficult to convey the sense of
fierce reality the presence of Nixie brought to him. It flooded and
covered him; spread through and over him like light; entered into his
essential being to cherish and to feed, just as the body assimilates
earthly nourishment. He absorbed her. She nourished while she blessed
him.
She had told him the secret: _to think centrally_. He now began to
understand how much nearer he could be to others by thinking strongly of
them than by walking at their side. Physical touch is distant compared
to the subtle intimacy of the desiring mind. The mystical conception of
union with God came home to him as something practically possible.
Yet when he got up a few minutes later to write down the conversation as
he remembered it, the mere lighting of the candle, the noise of the
match, the dipping of his pen in the ink—all contrived somehow to bring
him down to a lower order of things that dimmed most strangely the
memory of what had just passed. Most of what he had heard escaped him.
He could not frame it into words. All he could recapture is what has
been here set down so briefly and baldly.
It then seemed to him—the thought laboured to and fro in his mind as he
got back into bed and sleep came over him—that it was only the Higher
Self in him that had been in communication with the child. The eternal
part of him had talked with the eternal part of her. In the body,
however, this was commonly submerged. Her presence had temporarily
evoked it. It now had returned to its Throne at the core of his being.
All that he remembered of the colloquy was the little portion that, as
it were, had filtered through into his normal self. The rest, the main
part, however, was not lost. He had absorbed it. If he could not recall
the actual words and language, he understood—it was his last thought
before sleep caught him—that its _results_ would remain for ever.
And those who have known similar experiences will understand without
more words. The rest will never understand. Perhaps, after all, the best
and purest form of memory is—_results_.