“Perhaps in all the ages that have gone over this island,” he continued,
“no human foot ever trod upon it before.”
And so my brother passed on, pressing his hand upon my shoulder; and
through the watches of the night I saw him pacing backward and forward,
backward and forward, upon the long, white stretch of sand.
A month must have passed after that—I took little heed of the time. I
toiled at the cave, I played hunter and naturalist. I was busy with my
hands, but very seldom was I happy or at peace. For day after day that
silent figure roamed here and there before my eyes, and hour after hour
those strange, silent vigils to the black cavern continued. I grew more
and more restless and oppressed, until at last, one night, at the end of
a long and exhausting vigil, my impatience reached its climax.
I remember how I sat by his side and caught his hand, like a
supplicating child. “Daniel,” I asked, “has it never occurred to you
that you are unkind to me?”
“Unkind?” he asked gently.
“Unkind,” I said, “I have waited—how long have I waited. It seemed to me
that it could not last for ever—that you would not continue to treat me
always as if I were a child.”
“Edward,” he said, “I know what you are going to say. I wish that you
would spare me.”
“I cannot spare you!” I cried with sudden vehemence. “I tell you I
cannot bear it—I tell you I shall go mad! This loneliness and this
haunting perplexity—I swear to you that I cannot endure it any longer!”
My brother sat gazing before him. After a moment I went on, more
quietly, pleading with him. “Daniel,” I said, “you cannot ever persuade
me that you must needs treat me as you have treated me since I came to
this place. I came here to seek for you—for that purpose alone—and with
love in my heart. And you keep me from you, you treat me as if I were
not a human being!”
“Stop, Edward!” cried my brother imploringly; “do not say such things as
that! Ah! what can I tell you? How can I say it to you?—it is not enough
that you should be a human being.”
“Not enough!” I echoed.
“Ah! do you suppose—can you suppose—that if this thing of which we speak
were mine to give—if by losing it myself I could give it to you—can you
suppose I would not do it, and do it with joy? All that love could make
possible I would do—how much I would do I cannot tell you. But this that
you ask of me—this I _cannot_ do!”
“You mean”—I clung to the argument with my scientific instinct—“you mean
that there is in your own life, in your own mind, certain things which
could be conveyed to another’s?”
“I do,” he said.
“But the use of words——” I began.
“No words could have any relation to this,” he said.
“But ideas, Daniel!” I protested. “There may be ideas in the mind for
which we can find no words, but surely we can approximate them, we can
foreshadow them.”
“There are some things in my mind that are not ideas,” was the quick
reply.
“I do not understand that,” I exclaimed.
“I know it,” said my brother; “that is the point.”
“But,” I cried in vexation, “but what could such things be? How can one
think——”
“‘In that high hour thought was not,’” my brother quoted.
I sat silent, and a long pause followed. Then I began once more: “Let me
ask you, Daniel; perhaps you do not understand how difficult it is for
one mind to believe that it cannot grasp what is in another mind. But
this—this knowledge to which you have come—you must surely have come to
it by degrees, by a process?”
“Yes,” said he.
“And of that—surely you could explain to me at least the beginning,
which might help me to divine in what the difference consists?”
He answered nothing for a moment; I went on quickly: “Ah, I fear that
there must be another reason that you do not realise. Might it not be
true that you would find it easier to explain to another than to me? Is
it not at all that you shrink from my ways of thinking? Is it not that
you know that I have never understood your art?”
“Tell me,” he asked suddenly, “what have you thought about me since you
have been here?”
“What difference does it make what I think?” I cried. “What data have I
for thinking anything? I know that I am in the presence of something
which haunts me; and also that I have never been more wretched in my
life.
“Ah, Daniel,” I cried, “be fair with me—you have not been fair! Why
should you shrink from me as if I were a base person? What harm could it
do, even if I did not understand you? I cannot help it—the effect of
this thing upon me; I am a grown man, and yet you have turned me into a
child again. If you were to tell me about ghosts, I think I should take
it for the truth.”
“Ah,” said my brother.
“Yes, even that!” I cried. “But you think I am not worthy even to guess
at your life and your knowledge—no, do not try to stop me, I know that
this is the fact! If it were not so, you would trust to love—you would
not cast me away from you, you would do what you could!”
“Be still! Be still!” he whispered. “Do not speak to me that way—I will
do what I can—I will tell you what I am able.”
For a long time he sat with knit brows. Then at last he began his story.
“I go back,” he said, “to the time when I first landed on this island.
The ship was wrecked upon the bar just ahead of us; and later, when the
sea fell, we set to work to save from it as much as we could. The voyage
had restored my health, and I had my violin; and when I ascertained that
the place sheltered no wild beasts or men, I was myself well content to
remain as long as might be necessary. I had no doubt that some ship
would appear in the end; and meanwhile there was nothing to trouble me,
except the enforced companionship of men who did not understand me. In
the end, I escaped from that trouble with the plea that if I took up my
residence at the other side of the island I could better watch the sea;
and so I built a tiny hut, and was, I think, as happy as I had ever been
before.
“But as the months passed by and no vessel appeared, the situation
changed. I perceived that sooner or later my violin would be useless;
and about the same time the sailors came to me to say that they had
decided to rig a boat with a sail, and endeavor to reach some inhabited
island. It was the time of quiet seas, and they preferred to run the
risk to remaining longer in isolation.
“I was then called upon to make the great decision. Should I chance my
life with the rest, or should I trust to the certainty that some day a
vessel would appear, and meanwhile devote myself to the work which
loomed before me—the living of my life, the seeking of the power which I
felt to be hidden in me, without any external assistance or reference
whatever? Perhaps had I seen the twenty years before me, I should have
shrunk from the task; but, as it was, I chose what was to be the bolder,
to my companions the more timid, course.
“After that, of course, there could be no halfway measures. I had to
make good my purpose; I had to face either absolute victory or absolute
defeat. As I had expected, my violin soon became useless, and, no ship
appearing, I perceived in the end that I had to give up that thought,
too.
“I have already hinted the grounds of my argument to you. It is my
belief that life is its own end, and needs no justification. It is also
my belief that each individual soul is a microcosm self-sufficient, and
its own excuse for being. Each day as I wrought, I came to be more and
more possessed with that truth, it came to be more and more self-evident
and final; until at last there came a day when I would not have hailed a
ship had I seen one—when the life that loomed up before me within my own
heart was a thing of so much interest that the rest of the world was
nothing in comparison.
“At first I had felt just as you feel now—I had been interested in food
and clothing and light, and what not else; but in the end I found myself
behaving as a soldier upon a long campaign—I strewed my path with the
things that had once been necessities, and that now were encumbrances.
It proved thus with my violin—strings or no strings; the music that
throbbed in my soul and swept me away into the far spaces of my being—it
was no longer to be limited and restrained by what human fingers could
achieve. It was as if I had once plodded upon the land and now
discovered wings. When the vision came to me, I no longer toiled for
weeks to shape it and record it—I went on where the new light shone,
where the new hope beckoned; and so, day after day, toward things with
which it is not easy for words to deal.”
My brother paused for a while; I did not speak.
“When I try to talk to you of these things,” he said at last, “I do not
know where I stand. I find myself thinking of the brother I remember—who
was content to call himself a materialist. You ask me what was this life
that I speak of—was it thought, was it motion, was it will? It was all,
I think; always it involved contemplation, the beholding of a universe
of being, and the comprehending of it as an utterance of power; and
always it was emotion, the flooding of one’s being with an oceantide of
joy and exultation; and always it was will—it was the concentration of
all the powers of one’s soul in one colossal effort. But chiefest of
all, I think—and what is hardest even to hint at—it was the fourth, and
the highest of the faculties of the mind—it was imagination.
“It is endless—that is the first thing that a man learns about it—it is
the very presence of the infinite. And also he learns that it is at his
command—that it is no accident, but his being itself; that he has but to
call, and it comes; that he has but to knock, and it is opened unto him.
It is that for which pilgrims and crusaders have fought, which prophets
and saints have sung. And it is that, of course, which is the life of
music. Music lies nearest to this mystery; to him who understands, it is
the living presence of the spirit. Its movement is the building up of
that ecstasy, its complexity is the infiniteness of that vision—all the
fulness and the wonder and the glory of it are there.”
I give but my recollection of my brother’s words. He paused again and
sat gazing before him. “I do not know,” he said, “how much these
metaphors convey to you. A long time had passed—some eight years, I
imagine, though I kept no count of the time. I was coming bit by bit to
a new and strange experience—one which is not of this life, and one
which would seem to you, I imagine, as altogether supernatural.
“So,” said Daniel, “you must believe me as you can. I have spoken of
strange bursts of vision, sudden gleams of insight which shake one’s
being to its depth. Such experiences are not unusual—poets have sung of
them; but now there came to be something which, strange as it may sound,
seemed to be not of a kind with my own soul—something which affected me
with an indescribable _fear_. I fought against the thought, for I had no
belief in the unseen. I strive to put into words something that cannot
be put into words—but I was like a man groping in utter darkness, and
touching something _alive_. I had fought my way into this unknown land,
and everywhere I had gone, so far, the things that I achieved were of my
own power, the impulses were those of my own will. But now, day by day,
I was haunted by the unthinkable suspicion that into my life was coming
something that was not myself. I was a bird mounting upon the air—and
the air had a will of its own! It was something that repelled
me—something that drew me. I wrestled with the thought day and night,
comparing it with anything of which I had ever heard or known. But in
vain—it was new to me.
“These things of which I speak you must understand as happening in the
midst of a tempest of emotions; I sat in a state which there is no
imagining—I ate nothing for days, I sat for days without moving, until
at last there came the climax, a desperate resolve, a mounting up, a
battling with unseen forces, a knocking upon unseen doors—and then a
sudden rending away of barriers, and the inpouring of a sea of life. I
can only use metaphors. I was a traveller, and I had toiled towards the
sunrise, climbing peak upon peak, and suddenly I had stepped out upon
the summit, and stood transfixed with the glory of an endless vision of
dawn.”
My brother’s voice had sunk to a whisper, and his hand lay upon my arm.
I cannot tell how his words had affected me.
“And this—this thing——” I ventured. “It is real?”
“It is real,” he said; “there is nothing else so real.”
“And it—it is a heaven?”
“No,” he said, “it is another earth.”