"Like some great guiding Thought within her mind--some flaming
_motif_--interpreting her love and splendor--leading me straight."
"As you felt at Marseilles, a clue--a vital clue?" For I remembered
the singular phrase he had used in the notebook.
"Not a bad word," he laughed; "certainly, as far as it goes, not a wrong
one. For he--_it_--was at the same time within myself. We merged, as
our life grew and spread. We swept things along with us from the banks.
We were in flood together," he cried. "We drew the landscape with us!"
The last words baffled me; I found no immediate response. He pushed
away the plates on the table before us, where we had been lunching in
the back room of a dingy Soho restaurant. We now had the place to
ourselves. He drew his chair a little nearer.
"Don't ye see--our journey also was _within_," he added abruptly.
The pale London sunlight came through the window across chimneys,
dreary roofs, courtyards. Yet where it touched his face it seemed at
once to shine. His voice was warm and eager. I caught from him, as it
were, both heat and light.
"You moved actually, though, over country--?"
"While at the same time we moved within, advanced, sank deeper,"
he returned; "call it what you will. Our condition moved. There was this
correspondence between the two. Over her face we walked, yet into her
as well. We 'traveled' with One greater than ourselves, both caught and
merged in her, in utter sympathy with one another as with herself..."
This stopped me dead. I could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic
understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience. Nor, it
was clear, did he expect it of me. Even his own heart was troubled, and
he knew he spoke of things that only few may deal with sanely, still
fewer hear with patience.
But, oh, that little room in Greek Street smelt of forests, dew, and
dawn as he told it,--that dear wayward Child of Earth! For "his voice
fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication
of keen joy." I watched those delicate hands he spread about him
through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that
glowed. I noted the real strength in the face,--a sort of nobility it
was--his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the
collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in
London--"policeman boots" as we used to call them with a laugh.
So vivid was the picture that he painted! Almost, it seemed, I knew
myself the pulse of that eternal Spring beneath our feet, beating in vain
against the suffocating weight of London's bricks and pavements laid
by civilization--the Earth's delight striving to push outwards into
visible form as flowers. She flashed some scrap of meaning thus into
me, though blunted on the way, I fear, and crudely paraphrased.
Yes, as he talked across the airless gloom of that little back room, in
some small way I caught the splendor of his vision. Behind the words,
I caught it here and there. My own wee world extended. My being stretched
to understand him and to net in fugitive fragments the scenes of wonder
that he knew complete.
Perhaps his larger consciousness fringed my own to "bruise" it, as he
claimed the Earth had done to him, so that I glimpsed in tinier measure
an experience that in himself blazed whole and thundering. It was, I
must admit, exalting and invigorating, if a little breathless; and the
return to streets and omnibuses painful--a descent to ugliness and
disappointment. For things I can hardly understand now, even in my
own descriptions of them, seemed at the time quite clear--or clear-ish
at any rate. Whereas normally I could never have compassed them at all.
It taught me: that, at least, I know. In some spiritual way I quickened
to the view that all great teaching really comes in some such curious
fashion--via a temporary stretching or extension of the "heart" to
receive it. The little normal self is pushed aside to make room, even to
the point of loss, in order to contain it. Later, the consciousness
contracts again. But it has expanded--and there has been growth. Was
this, I wondered, perhaps what mystics speak of when they say the
personal life must slip aside, be trampled on, submerged, before there
can be room for the divine Presences...?
At any rate, as he talked there over coffee that grew cold and cigarette
smoke that made the air yet thicker than it naturally was, his words
conveyed with almost grandeur of conviction this reality of a profound
inner experience. I shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so
that when I saw it in his written form I marveled to find the thing so
thin and cold and dwindled. The key his personal presence supplied, of
guidance and interpretation, of course was gone.