... Ne son già morto; e ben ch’ albergo cangi,
resto in te vivo, ch’ or mi vedi e piangi,
se l’ un nell’altro amante si trasforma.
And one of the clearest impressions that remained next morning when he
woke was that he had actually _seen_ her. The reality of it increased
with the daylight instead of faded. While he dressed he sang to himself,
until it occurred to him that his signs of joy might be misunderstood by
any of the household who heard; and then he stopped singing and moved
about the room, smiling and contented.
Something of the radiance of that little white torch still seemed in the
air. The heavy gloom of the chill December morning could not smother it.
Something of it remained too about him all day like a halo; looking out
of his eyes; communicable, as it were, from the very surface of his skin
to all with whom he came in contact. His sister, especially, and the
children felt the comfort of his presence. They followed him about from
room to room; they clung close; they were instinctively aware that peace
and strength emanated from him, though little guessing the real source
of his serene and tranquil atmosphere.
For, of course, he told no one of what had happened. During the day,
indeed, it lay in him submerged and unassertive, like the presence of
some great glowing secret, feeding the sources of energy for all his
little outward duties and activities, yet never claiming individual
attention itself. Only with the fall of night, when the doings of the
day were instinctively laid aside like a garment no longer required, did
it again swim up upon him out of the depths, and speak.
‘Now!’ he heard the tiny singing voice, ‘we can be alone. Your body’s
tired. I can get closer to you.’
‘I’ve felt you by me all day, though,’ he said, as though it were the
most natural thing in the world.
‘Of course,’ came the answering whisper, soft as moonlight, ‘because I
never left you for a single moment. I was in everything you did—in your
very words. Once or twice, I even got into mother too, _through you_,
and made her feel better. Wasn’t that splendid?’
Paul longed to give the child one of his old hugs—to feel her little
warm and sunny body pressed against his own. Instead, her laughter
echoed suddenly all about the room.
‘That’s impossible now!’ he heard. ‘I’m ever so much closer this way.
You’ll soon get used to it, you know!’
This spontaneous laughter was the music to which all their talks were
set. He laughed too, and blew the candles out.
‘I tried very hard to say the true things,’ he murmured, referring to
her remark about comforting his sister.
‘I know you did. That’s how I got into her—through you. You must go on
and on trying. In the end we’ll get her all soft and happy again. She’ll
feel me without knowing it.’
Suddenly it struck him that, although the room was dark, he did not see
the light of the little torch as before. He missed it. He was just going
to ask why it was absent when the child caught his thought and replied
of her own accord:
‘Because it’s spread all over now, instead of being just a point. You
are in it, I mean. There’s light everywhere about you now, and I see you
much clearer than last time.’
The explanation described exactly what he felt himself.
‘Let them in, please,’ Nixie suddenly interrupted his thoughts again.
‘They’re both coming up the stairs. It was very naughty of you to forget
them, you know.’
After a moment of puzzled hesitation he understood what she meant, and
was out of bed and across the floor. He did not wait to light a candle,
but opened the door and stood there waiting in the darkness. Almost at
once two soft, furry things brushed past his feet as Smoke, followed by
Mrs. Tompkyns, marched into the room, uttering that curious sharp sound
of pleasure which is something between a purr and a cry. They
disappeared among the shadows beyond the fireplace, and Paul sprang back
into bed again pleased that they were there, yet annoyed with himself
for having forgotten them.
‘But it was my fault _really_,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve been with them out in
the garden, and they’ve only just got in through the pantry window. My
presence excites them awfully. Oh, it’s all right,’ she added quickly,
in reply to his further thought; ‘Barker’s very late to-night doing the
silver. But he’ll shut the window before he goes.’
It was his turn to laugh. She had caught his thought about the window
almost before it reached the surface of his mind. Moreover, he found
that both Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke had very cold wet soles under their
padded little feet.
In this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial
details of their daily life as they had always known it together,
intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and
pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their
former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge—almost
as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached
in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting
guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had
come back on purpose to help and inspire him.
For more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine
inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation
or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly
enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths.
There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed.
‘I knew all this before,’ she said, after a singular exchange of
questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible
sources of mood and feeling, ‘only I suppose my brain had not got big
enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell
me about who couldn’t find their rhymes, perhaps.’
And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly
woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a
communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the
experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular
bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.
He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at
all—that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion—but that she put
her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order
to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and
language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She _blew_
the ideas into his heart and mind.
And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his
own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him.
‘Then, over there, where you now are, is it—more real? Are you, as it
were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What’s it like——?’
‘It’s through the real “Crack,” I think,’ she answered. ‘Everything is
here that I imagined—but _really_ imagined—on earth. And people who
imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.’
‘Then is the change very great——?’
‘It doesn’t seem to me like a change at all. I’ve been here before for
visits. Now I’ve come to stay, that’s all!’
‘You yourself have not changed?’
She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really
absurd.
‘Of course not! How can I change? I’m always Nixie, wherever I am!’
‘But you feel different——?’ he insisted.
‘I feel better,’ she answered, still laughing. ‘I feel awfully jolly.’
Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a
question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never
yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn
heart:
‘Are you nearer to—God, do you think?’
It was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on
earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying.
Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly
what he meant.
‘I’m _in_ and _with_ Everything there is—Everywhere,’ she said softly.
‘And I couldn’t possibly be nearer to anything than I am.’
More than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar
questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable.
And it was the same with other thoughts, thoughts referring to the
fundamental conditions of temporal existence, that is. Nothing, for
instance, made time and space seem less real than the way she answered
questions involving one or other. Out of curiosity he had gone to the
trouble of reading up other records of spirit communion—the literature
(saving the mark) of Spiritualism brims over with them—and he had asked
her some question with regard to the detailed geography there given.
‘But there’s no _place_ at all where I am,’ the child laughed. ‘I am
just _here_. There was no place really in our Aventures, was there?
Place is only with you on earth!’
And another time, talking of the ‘future’ when he should come to join
herself and Dick at the close of his earthly pilgrimage, she said
between bursts of the merriest laughter he had ever known: ‘But that’s
now! already! You come; you join us; we _are_ all together—always!’
And when he insisted that he could not possibly be in two places at
once, and reminded her that she had already told him she was ‘waiting’
for his arrival, the only reply he could get was this jolly laughter,
and the assurance that he was ‘awfully muddled and c’fused’ and would
‘never understand it _that_ way!’
The main thing these ‘silent’ conversations taught him seemed to be that
Death brings no revolutionary change as regards character; the soul does
not leap into a state much better or much worse than it knew before; the
opportunities for discipline and development continue gradually just as
they did in the body, only under different conditions; and there is no
abrupt change into perfection on the one hand, or into desolation on the
other. He gathered, too, that these ‘conditions’ depended very largely
upon the kind of life—especially the kind of thought—that the
personality had indulged on earth. The things that Nixie ‘imagined’ and
yearned for, she found.
His communion with her became, as time passed, more frequent and more
real, and soon ceased to confine itself only to the quiet night hours.
She was with him all day long, whenever he needed her. She guided him in
a thousand unimportant details of his life, as well as in the bigger
interests of his work in London with his waifs. And in murky London she
was just as close to him as in the perfumed stillness of the Dorsetshire
garden, or in the retirement of his own chamber....
And one singular feature of their alliance was that it continued even in
sleep. For, sometimes, he would wake in the morning after what had been
apparently a dreamless night, yet later in the day there would steal
over him the memory of a long talk he had enjoyed with the child during
the hours of so-called unconsciousness. Dreams, forgotten in the
morning, often, of course, return in this fashion during the day. There
is nothing new or unusual in it. Only with him it became so frequent
that he now rose to the day’s work with a delightful sense of
anticipation: ‘Perhaps later in the day I shall remember! Perhaps we
have been together all night!’
And in this connection he came to notice two things: first, that after
these nights together, at first forgotten, he woke wonderfully
refreshed, blessed, peaceful in mind and body; and secondly, that what
recalled the conversation later was always contact with some object or
other that had been associated with the child. Thus—the
picturesquely-mended socks, the medicine bottle for scratches, or the
spray of birch leaves, now preserved between the pages of his Blake,
never failed in this latter respect.
It was curious, too, how the alliance persisted and fortified itself
during the repose of the body; as though, during sleep, the eternal
portion of himself with which the child communed, enjoyed a greater
measure of freedom. It recalled the closing lines of a sonnet he had
always admired, though his own experience was true in a literal sense
hardly contained, probably, in the heart of the poetess:
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away—
_With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart._
He filled a book with these talks as the years passed, though to give
them in more detail could serve little purpose but to satisfy a possible
curiosity. They had value and authority for himself, but for the
majority might seem to contain little sense, or even coherence. They
expressed, of course, his own personal interpretation of life and the
universe. And this was quite possibly poetic, queer, fantastic—for
others. Yet it was his own. He had learned his own values in his own
way, and was now engaged in sorting them out with Nixie’s fairy help to
guide him.
And all souls that find themselves probably do likewise. The strength
and blessing they shed about them as a result is beneficial, but the
close details of the process by which they have ‘arrived’ can only seem
to the world at large unintelligible, possibly even ridiculous; and this
late interior blossoming of Uncle Paul, though it actually happened,
must seem to many a tissue of dreams knit together with a strange
fantastic nonsense.