It was a few days later that Howard found himself sitting alone one
evening after dinner, with his aunt.
"There is something that I want to talk to you about," he said. "No
doubt Maud has told you all about her strange experience? She has
described it to me, and I don't know what to say or think. She was
wonderfully fine about it. She said she would not mention it again, and
she did not desire me to talk about it--or even believe it! And I don't
know what to do. It isn't the sort of thing that I believe in, though I
think it beautiful, just because it was Maud who felt it. But I can't
say what I really believe about it, without seeming unsympathetic and
even rough; and yet I don't like there being anything which means so
much to her, which doesn't mean much to me."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "I foresaw that difficulty, but I think Maud
did right to tell you."
"Of course, of course," said Howard, "but I mean much more than that.
Is there something really THERE, open to all, possible to all, from
which I am shut out by what the Bible calls my hardness of heart? Do
you really think yourself that a living spirit drew near and made
itself known to Maud thus? or is it a beautiful dream, a sort of
subjective attempt at finding comfort, an instinctive effort of the
mind towards saving itself from sorrow?"
"Ah," said Mrs. Graves, "who shall say? Of course I do not see any real
objection to the former, when I think of all the love and the emotion
that went to the calling of the little spirit from the deeps of life;
but then I am a woman, and an old woman. If I were a man of your age
who had lived an intellectual life, I should feel very much as you do."
"But if you believe it," said Howard, "can you give me reasons why you
believe it? I am not unreasonable at all. I hate the attitude of mind
of denying the truth of the experience of others, just because one has
not felt it oneself. Here, it seems to me, there are two explanations,
and my scepticism inclines to what is, I suppose, the materialistic
one. I am very suspicious of experiences which one is told to take on
trust, and which can't be intellectually expressed. It's the sort of
theory that the clergy fall back upon, what they call spiritual truth,
which seems to me merely unchecked, unverifiable experience. I don't,
to take a crude instance, believe in statues that wink; and yet the
tendency of the priest is to say that it is a matter of childlike
faith; yet to me credulity appears to be one of the worst of sins. It
is incredulity which has disposed of superstition."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves. "I fully agree with you about that; and there
is a great deal of very objectionable nonsense which goes by the name
of mysticism, which is merely emotion divorced from commonsense."
"Yes," said Howard, "and if I may speak quite frankly, I do very much
respect your own judgment and your convictions. It seems to me that you
have a very sceptical turn of mind, which has acted as a solvent upon a
whole host of stupid and conventional beliefs. I don't think you take
things for granted, and it always seems to me that you have got rid of
a great many foolish traditions which ordinary people accept--and it's
a fine attitude."
"I'm not too old to be insensible to a compliment," said Mrs. Graves,
smiling. "What you are surprised at is to find that I have any beliefs
left, I suppose? And I expect you are inclined to think that I have
done the feminine thing ultimately, and compromised, so as to retain
just the comfortable part of the affair."
"No," said Howard, "I don't. I am much more inclined to think that
there is something which is hidden from me; and I want you to explain
it, if you can and will."
"Well, I will try," said Mrs. Graves. "Let me think." She sate silent
for a little, and then she said: "I think that as I get older, I
recognise more and more the division between the rational part of the
mind and the instinctive part of the mind. I find more and more that my
deepest convictions are not rational--at least not arrived at by
reason--only formulated by it. I think that reason ought to be able to
formulate convictions; but they are there, whether expressed or not.
Most women don't bring the reason to bear at all, and the result is
that they hold a mass of beliefs, some simply inherited, some mere
phrases which they don't understand, and some real convictions. A great
deal of the muddle comes from the feminine weariness of logic, and a
great deal, too, from the fact that they never learn how to use
words--words are the things that divide people! But I believe more and
more, by experience, in the SOUL. I do not believe that the soul begins
with birth or ends with death. Now I have no sort of doubt in my own
mind that the soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has
lived before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink
of life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some
need for experience, take shape. I don't know how or why this is--I
only believe that it is so. If your child had lived, you would have
become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly
distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt from
you, and which you could not affect or change. All those qualities are
in it from the time of birth--but it takes a soul some time to learn
the use of the body. But the connection between the soul and the father
and mother who give it a body is a real one; I don't profess to know
what it is, or why it is that some parents have congenial children and
some quite uncongenial ones--that is only one of the many mysteries
which beset us. Holding all this, it does not seem to me on the face of
it impossible that the soul of the child should have been brought into
contact with Maud's soul; though of course the whole affair is quite
capable of a scientific and material explanation. But I have seen too
many strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific
explanation as conclusive. I have known men and women who, after a
bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of the
beloved spirit with them and near them. I have experienced it myself;
and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of beauty. If
one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can't give good
reasons for one's emotion to a person who does not think the same thing
beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of explaining it away
lies on the one who does NOT feel it. One can't say that beauty is a
purely subjective thing, because when two people think a thing
beautiful, they understand each other perfectly. Do I make myself clear
at all, or is that merely a bit of feminine logic?"
"No, indeed," said Howard slowly, "I think it is a good case. The very
last thing I would do is to claim to be fully equipped for the
understanding of all mysteries. My difficulty is that while there are
two explanations of a thing--a transcendental one and a material one--I
hanker after the material one. But it isn't because I want to
disbelieve the transcendental one. It is because I want to believe it
so much, that I feel that I must exclude all possibility of its being
anything else."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "and I think you are perfectly right; one must
follow one's conscience in this. I don't want you to swallow it whole
at all. I want you, and I am sure that Maud wants you, just to wait and
see. Don't begin by denying the possibility of its being a
transcendental thing. Just hold the facts in your mind, and as life
goes on, see if your experience confirms it, and until it does, do not
pretend that it does. I don't claim to be omniscient. Something quite
definite, of course, lies behind the mystery of life, and whatever it
is, is not affected by what you or I believe about it. I may be wholly
and entirely mistaken, and it may be that life is only a chemical
phenomenon; but I have kept my eyes open, and my heart open; and I am
as sure as I can be that there is something very much bigger behind it
than that. I myself believe that each being is an immortal spirit,
hampered by contact with mortal laws, and I believe that consciousness
and emotion are something superior even to chemistry. But to use
emotion to silence people would be entirely repugnant to me, and
equally to Maud. She isn't the sort of woman who would be content if
you only just said you believed her. She would hate that!"
"Well," said Howard, smiling, "you are two very wonderful women, and
that's the truth. I am not surprised at YOUR wisdom--it IS
wisdom--because you have lived very bravely and loved many people; but
it's amazing to me to find such courage and understanding in a girl. Of
course you have helped her--but I don't think you could have produced
such thoughts in her unless they had been there to start with."
"That's exactly what I have tried to say," said Mrs. Graves. "Where did
Maud's fine mixture of feeling and commonsense come from? Her mother
was a woman of some perception, but after all she married Frank, and
Frank with all his virtue isn't a very mature spirit!"
"Ah," said Howard, "my marriage has done everything for me! What a
blind, complacent, petty ass I was--and am too, though I at least
perceive it! I see myself as an elderly donkey, braying and capering
about in a paddock--and someone leans over the fence, and all is
changed. I ought not to think lightly of mysteries, when all this
astonishing conspiracy has taken place round me, to give me a home and
a wife and a whole range of new emotions--how Maud came to care for me
is still the deepest wonder of all--a loveless prig like me!"
"I won't be understood to subscribe to all that," said Mrs. Graves,
laughing, "though I see your point of view; but there's something
deeper even than that, dear Howard. You care for me, you care for Maud;
but it's the power of caring that matters more than the power of caring
for particular people. Does that seem a very hard saying? You see I do
not believe--what do you say to this--in memory lasting. You and I love
each other here and now; when I die, I do not feel sure that I shall
have any recollection of you or Maud or my own dear husband--how
horrible that would sound to many men and nearly all women--but I have
learned how to love, and you have learned how to love, and we shall
find other souls to draw near to as the ages go on; and so I look
forward to death calmly enough, because whatever I am I shall have
souls to love, and I shall find souls to love me."
"No," said Howard, "I can't believe that! I can't believe in any life
here or hereafter apart from Maud. It is strange that I should be the
sentimentalist now, and you the stern sceptic. The thought to me is
infinitely dreary--even atrocious."
"I am not surprised," said Mrs. Graves, "but that's the last sacrifice.
That is what losing oneself means; to believe in love itself, and not
in the particular souls we love; to believe in beauty, not in beautiful
things. I have learned that! I do not say it in any complacency or
superiority--you must believe me; but it is the last and hardest thing
that I have learned. I do not say that it does not hurt--one suffers
terribly in losing one's dear self, in parting from other selves that
are even more dear. But would one send away the souls one loves best
into a loveless paradise? Can one bear to think of them as hankering
for oneself, and lost in regret? No, not for a moment! They pass on to
new life and love; we cannot ourselves always do it in this life--the
flesh is weak and dear; and age passes over us, and takes away the
close embrace and the sweet desire. But it is the awakening of the soul
to love that matters; and it has been to me one of the sweetest
experiences of my life to see you and Maud awaken to love. But you will
not stay there--nothing is ultimate, not the dearest and largest
relations of life. One climbs from selfishness to liking, and from
liking to passion, and from passion to love itself."
"No," said Howard, "I cannot rise to that yet; I see, I dimly feel,
that you are far above me in this; but I cannot let Maud go. She is
mine, and I am hers."
Mrs. Graves smiled and said, "Well, we will leave it at that. Kiss me,
dearest boy; I don't love you less because I feel as I do--perhaps even
more, indeed."