Part 9

Mr. Bosanquet had a story, it seemed, but had entirely refused to relate it to a mixed company. He had had a certain experience once which had changed his life, and it was not an experience to be described at random. There was no ghost in it; it was wholly unsensational, but it had, Father Brent thought, a peculiar interest of its own. He had persuaded his friend to sup with us, knowing that we should be but few, and hoping that the atmosphere might be found favorable. This was the gist of what he was saying, but he was interrupted by the entrance of Beppo with the coffee.

“Shall we have coffee upstairs?” he said.

Then we rose and went upstairs.

* * * * *

It was a few minutes before we settled down, and Mr. Bosanquet seemed in no hurry to begin. But a silence fell presently, and finally the young priest leaned forward.

“Now, Bosanquet,” he said.

Mr. Bosanquet set his cup down, crossed his legs, and began. He spoke in a very quiet, unemotional voice.

“My friend has told you that this experience of mine is unsensational. In a manner of speaking he is right. It is unsensational, since it deals with nothing other than that which we must all go through sooner or later; but I think it has a certain interest from the fact that it is an experience of which, except under very peculiar circumstances, none of us will ever be able to give an account. It concerns the act of dying....”

He paused for a moment.

“Yes; the act of dying,” he repeated; “for I firmly believe that that is precisely what I did. I passed the point at which death is dogmatically declared by the doctors to have taken place. I underwent, that is, what is called ‘legal death,’ but I did not, of course, reach that further state called ‘somatic death.’”

Father Brent voiced my question.

“Please explain,” he said.

“Oh, well, the body, as we know, consists of cells; but there is a certain unity, usually identified with the vital principle, which merges these into one entity, so that if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. Legal death is when this vital principle leaves the body. The lungs cease to act; the heart is motionless. But when this has taken place there yet remains a further stage. The cells, for a certain period, have a kind of life of their own. There is no vital union between them; the nerve system is suspended; and somatic death, marked by the _rigor mortis_, the stiffening of the cells, indicates the moment when the cells, too, even individually, cease to live. But the man is dead, doctors tell us, sometimes many hours before _rigor mortis_ sets in. In fact, in the case of some of the saints, _rigor mortis_ appears never to have set in at all; their limbs, we are told, retain softness and elasticity. There is no corruption, at least in the ordinary ‘sense.’”

Father Brent grunted and nodded.

“In my case,” pursued the Englishman, “I was declared dead, and, as I learned afterward, remained in that state about half an hour. It was after my body had been washed and the face bound up that I returned to life.”

I sat up in my chair at that. At least he was explicit enough. He glanced at me.

“I can show you my death certificate if you care to come to my hotel to-morrow,” he said. “I obtained it from the doctor--cancelled, however, you understand.

“Well, this is what took place.

“The cause of death was exhaustion, following upon angina pectoris, with other complications. I will spare you the details and begin at once at the point at which I was declared to be dying. Up to that point I had suffered extraordinary agony, tempered by morphia. I did not know that such pain was possible.... At the moments of the spasms, before each injection took effect, it seemed to me that I did not suffer pain so much as become pain. There was no room for anything else but pain. Then there came the beginning of the dulness of it; it retired and stood off from me. I was still conscious of it, as of a storm passing away, till all sank into a kind of peace. Then, after a long while as it seemed, the dulness lifted, and I came up again to the surface, becoming aware of the world, though of course this bore a certain aspect of unreality, owing to the effects of the drug....

“Well, I said I would leave all that out....

“The last time I came up I knew I was dying. It was all quite different. Things no longer bore that close relation to me that they had had before. I opened my eyes just enough to let me see my hands lying out on the counterpane, and the hillock of my feet, and even the lower part of the brass supports at the end of my bed; but I could not raise my eyelids higher, and almost immediately I closed them again.

“The sense of touch, too, was changed.... Once or twice when I have been falling asleep in my chair I have noticed the same phenomenon. I could not tell by feeling, unless I moved them, whether my fingers rested on the counterpane or not. I did move them, with that curious clawing motion that dying people use, simply in order to realize my relations with material surroundings. That, of course, as I know now, is the reason of those motions. It is not an involuntary contraction of the muscles; it is the will trying to get back into touch with the world.

“But the sense of hearing, oddly enough, was almost preternaturally acute. Others undergoing anæsthetics have told me the same. It is the last sense to leave them and the first to return. I could hear a continual minute series of sounds, not at all painfully loud, but absolutely distinct. There was my sister’s breathing, irregular and uneven, beside me. I knew by it that she was trying not to break down. I could hear four timepieces ticking--her watch and the doctor’s and that of the traveling-clock over the fire and the Dutch clock in the hall below. Then there were the country sounds in the distance and the breeze in the creepers outside my window.

“With regard to taste and smell, they were there, a kind of sour sweetness, if I may say so; but they did not interest me; they were below my level, if I may express it like that....

“Well, I said just now that I knew I was dying. It was as if through all my being there was a steady, smooth retirement from the world. I was perfectly able to reflect--in fact, I reflected as I have never been able to before or since. Do you know the sensation of coming down from town and sitting out in the darkness after dinner in the garden? The silence, after the clatter and glare of London, makes it possible, seems to let the mind free. One is both alert and reflective--both at once. It was rather like that, only far more pronounced. And in that freedom from the pressure of matter I realized perfectly what was happening.

“Now, I must tell you at once that I was not at all frightened. My religion seemed to stand off from me with the rest of the world. I had been up to that time what may be called a ‘conventional believer.’ I had never doubted exactly, for I always realized that it was absurd for me to criticise what was so obviously the highest standard of morality and faith--I mean Christianity. But neither was I particularly interested. I had lived like other people. I attended church, I repeated my prayers, and I had conventional views of heaven, with which was mixed up a good deal of agnosticism. In a word, I think I may say that I had hope, but not faith, that is, as you Catholics seem to have it.”

This was the first hint I had had that Mr. Bosanquet was not a Catholic, and I glanced up at Father Brent. He, too, glanced at me in a half-warning, half-suggestive look. I understood.

“I was not frightened, then,” continued the other tranquilly. “My religion, as I see now, was altogether bound up with the world. Even my thoughts went no further than images. I conceived of heaven as in a picture, of Our Lord as a superhuman Man, of death as of a swift passage through the air.... We are all bound, of course, by our limitations to do that; but I had not realized the inadequacy of such images. I conceived of eternity and spiritual existence in terms of time and space, and I had not really even as much faith as that of the agnostic who recognizes that these are inadequate, and therefore foolishly believes that the reality is unknowable--as in one sense indeed it is.”

Once more the German priest murmured, and I saw now why this man had been encouraged to tell his story.

“Well, then,” he continued, “when the world retired from me with the approach of death, my religion retired naturally with it (that seems to me so obvious now!), and I was left, moving swiftly _inward_, if I may express it so, toward a state of which I was completely ignorant. I was dying as I suppose animals die. I never lost self-consciousness for a moment. As a rule, of course, one realizes self-consciousness, as philosophers tell us, by self-differentiation from what is not self. The baby learns it gradually by touching and looking. The dying lose it by ceasing to touch and see, or, rather, they lose that mode of realizing, and enter into themselves instead....

“I had then a vague kind of anxiety, but I was perfectly peaceful. I had no particular remembrance of sins, no faith or love or hope; nothing but a sense of extreme _naturalness_, if I may express it so. It seemed as if I had known all this all along, as a stone thrown into the air would, if it had consciousness, realize the inevitability of its curve as it neared the earth. I was to die; well, that was the corollary of having lived!

“Well, this inevitable movement inward went on, as it seemed to me, very swiftly. Each instant that I applied my consciousness it seemed to me as if I had gone a great way since the previous instant; the only thing that astonished me was the distance there was to travel. It was a sensation--how shall I express it?--a sensation of sinking swiftly into an inner depth of which I had not guessed the extent. I wondered in a complacent, half-curious kind of way as to what exactly would be the end, how things would be visualized when I passed finally from the body, and such things as I pictured, I pictured, of course, in terms of time and space. I--I thought my essential self, whatever that was, would at a certain moment pass a certain line and emerge on the other side; and the things would be rather as they had been on earth, thinner ... spiritual. I should see faces, perhaps; forms, places, ... all in a kind of delicate light.... What really happened was a complete surprise.”

Mr. Bosanquet paused, and in a meditative kind of way winked several times at the fire. He showed no emotion. He seemed to me merely to be recalling the best phrases to use.

“Well,” he said, “I have told this story before, and each time before telling it I have thought that I had got the point and could really describe what happened, and each time I have been disappointed.... Of course it must be so. There are simply no words or illustrations. I must do the best I can.

“Well, this process went on, and after a while I perceived plainly that my senses were fading. I believe I opened my eyes; so I was told afterwards--opened them wide; but, at any rate, I saw nothing this time except blurred lines and colors, rather like the reverse side of a carpet. They were rather bewildering; but they soon went, leaving nothing but a streaked grayness that darkened rapidly.

“I could no longer move my hands, or, in fact, recall to myself by feeling any material thing at all. I seemed to have lost relations with my body. Neither could I move my lips or tongue; taste had gone. I don’t think I had ever understood before how taste depends on the will and the movement of the tongue--much more so than any of the other senses, which are, more or less, passive.

“And then quite suddenly I perceived that hearing had ceased also. There had been no drumming in my ears, as I had half expected; I think there had been at some time previously a clear singing of one high note, which had rather bothered me; and I suppose that it was then that hearing had gone, but I did not notice it till I thought about it.

“And then there was one more thing more strange than all.... I began to perceive that my will was not myself.

“Most of us are accustomed to think that it is. It is so closely united with that which is the very self that we usually identify them. Sometimes we are even more foolish, and identify our emotions with ourselves, and think that our moods are our character. The fact is, of course, that the intellect is the most superficial of our faculties; there are simply scores of things that we cannot understand in the least, but of which for all that we are as certain as of our own existence. Next to that comes the emotion: it is certainly nearer to us than intellect, though not much; and thirdly comes the will.

“Now the will is quite close to us; it is that through which we consciously act after having heard the reasons for or against action alleged by the other faculties. But the will is, after all, a faculty of self--not self itself.

“I began to see this from the way it was laboring, like an exhausted engine; it still throbbed and moved; it turned this way and that, directing the all but dead faculties outside to move in this or that direction--to think or to perceive. But I began to see clearly now that the real self was something altogether apart, existing simply in another mode. There, that is the point--_in another mode_....

“Now, in this matter I feel hopeless. I simply cannot express what I knew, and know, to be the central fact of our existence. I can say no more than that. Self, that which lies far behind everything else, exists in as different a mode from all else, as--as the inner meaning of a phrase of music is apart from the existence of a dog walking up the street. There is simply no common term which can be applied to them both.

“Well, I perceived my will to be laboring, very slowly and clumsily, and I perceived that it would not be able to move much longer. (You must understand that this ‘perceiving’ as I call it was not the act of my intellect; it was simply a deep intuitive knowledge dwelling in that which I call Self.)

“Then I suddenly became aware that it was important for my will to fall in the right direction; I understood that this would make--well, the whole difference to me.... I knew that this would be my last conscious act....

“You ask me how I knew what was the right direction. Well, I must go slowly here....”

He paused for a moment, then he went on very slowly, picking his words.

“I began, I think I may say, to be clearly and vividly conscious of two _centres_; there was Self, and there was Another. This Other was at present completely hidden from me; I was only aware of it as one may be aware of the presence of a huge personality behind an impenetrable curtain. But I perceived that this Other was the only important thing....

“Well, my will was reeling; there was no discomfort, no fear, or pain, or anxiety, and I--whatever that is--watched it as a man may watch a top in its last swift twistings on its side. I had still some control over it; I knew that it was my will; it still was linked to me in a way.... Then I put out my energy (remember, there was no conscious perception of anything; nothing but a perfectly blind instinct) and tried to wrench that rolling thing round to a position of rest--ah! how shall I put it?--a position of rest pointing toward this other centre.

“And as I made that effort I lost touch with it. I have no idea whether I succeeded, and at the same instant, if I may call it so, something happened.”

Mr. Bosanquet leaned back and sighed.

“Every word is wrong,” he said; “you understand that, do you not?”

I nodded two or three times. I kept my eyes on his face. He glanced round at the other two. Then he went on, shifting his attitude a little.

“Well, this something--I suppose I could give half a dozen illustrations, but none of them would be adequate. Let me give you two or three.

“When a man falls in love suddenly his whole centre changes. Up to that point he has probably referred everything to himself--considered things from his own point. When he falls in love the whole thing is shifted; he becomes a part of the circumference--perhaps even the whole circumference; some one else becomes the centre. For example, things he hears and sees are referred in future instantly to this other person; he ceases to be acquisitive; his entire life, if it is really love, is pulled sideways; he does not desire to get, but to give. That is why it is the noblest thing in the world.

“Secondly, imagine that you had lived all your life in a certain house, and had got to know every detail of it perfectly; you had walked about in the garden, too, and looked through the railings, and thought you knew pretty fairly what the country was like. Then one morning, after you had got up and dressed, you went to your bedroom door, opened it, and went out, and that very instant found yourself not in the passage, but on the top of a high mountain with a strange country visible for miles all round, and no house or human being near you.

“Thirdly (and this perhaps is the best illustration after all), imagine that you were looking at a picture, and had become absorbed in it, and then without any warning at all the picture suddenly became a chord of music which you heard, and which you recognized to be identical with the picture--not merely analogous to it, but the actual picture translated, transubstantiated, and transaccidentated into sound.

“Now, those are the three illustrations I generally use in telling this story; there are others, but I think these are the best.

“Well, it was like that; but you must please to remember that these are only like charcoal sketches of something which is color rather than shape. But briefly, those are the nearest similitudes I can think of.

“First, although I remained the same, I became aware that I simply was not the centre of what I experienced. It was not I who primarily existed at all. There was Something--I call it Something, because the word Person simply bears no resemblance to the Personality of this Other Existence; at least, no more than a resemblance, because this Other Personality was as different from and as far above our own as the personality of a philosopher is different from the corresponding thing in a pebble. I became aware--at least, this was what I told myself afterwards--I became aware of real Existence for the first time in my experience. I myself then became merely a speck in a circumference, yet--and this is why I spoke of love--I also became aware that while I had not lost my individuality, yet this Other Being was the only thing that mattered at all, and, further--well, I may as well say it outright, that in the very depth of this Existence was Human Nature; yes, Human Nature. I knew it instantly. I never before had had the faintest idea of what the Incarnation really meant.

“Secondly, the whole of everything was different--as startlingly different as the change of my second illustration. I had expected to find a kind of continuation. There was, in one sense, no continuation at all; nothing in the least like what experience had led me to expect. It was completely abrupt.

“Thirdly, in another sense, what I found was not only the consequence of what had preceded, it was not simply the result, but it was identical with what had preceded. It was the picture becoming sound--the essence of my previous life was here in other terms. It simply was. The whole thing was complete. You may call this Judgment; well, that will do; but it was a Judgment in which there was no question of concurrence or protest. It was inevitably true.

“Let me take even one more illustration.

“Once I went with my brother into a glass-house in autumn. He smelled a certain flower, and then rather excitedly asked me to smell it. I shut my eyes and smelled it. Practically instantly the whole thing became sound and sight. I saw the terrace at home in summer, and heard the bees. I looked up.

“‘Well?’ he said.

“‘The terrace in summer,’ I said.

“‘Exactly.’

“Well, it was like that. There was no question about it.

“Now, I have taken some time to tell this; but I must make it clear that there was absolutely no time in the experience--no sense of progression. It was not merely that I was absorbed, but that time had no existence. This is how I knew it.

“Simultaneously with all this I heard one noise; and immediately time began--I began to consider. Presently I heard another noise, then another, like a great drum being beaten. Then the noises went, and there was absolute silence of which I was aware; and others came in--a rustling, a footstep, the sound of words. I was entirely absorbed in these. I heard the sound of water, a door opening, the ticking of a clock. I was conscious of no consideration about these things, and no sensation of any kind; it was as if my brain had become one ear which heard. This went on--well, I may say it was ten seconds or ten years. Time meant nothing to me. I only know even now that it existed because one thing followed another. I did not reflect at all.

“At last, after this had gone on, it was as if a new note had struck; another sense began to move, the sense of sight. I first became aware of darkness, then came a glimmer, with a sensation of flickering. Then touch. I became aware of a constraint somewhere in the universe; it was a long time before I knew that I myself was feeling it. I did not perceive sensation; I was it.

“Well, these waxed and waxed; then my will stirred; and I became aware that I could choose, that I could acquiesce or resent. Then emotion, and I found myself disliking certain sensations. Then I began to wonder and question again, and ask myself why and what----”

Mr. Bosanquet broke off abruptly.

“Well, I needn’t go on. To put it in a word, I was coming back to ordinary life. Half an hour after the doctor had said that I was dead, and about three minutes after the nurse had finished with me--just as she was looking at me, in fact, before going out of the room--I made a sound with my lips. The rest happened as you would expect; there was nothing interesting in that.

“But this is the point I want to make clear. Those noises I heard like a drum followed by the silence were without doubt the sounds my own body made in dying.

“It was at that point that I died; and the next sounds that I began to hear were the noises the nurse made in washing me and laying me out. There is no question about that. I asked about all the details minutely.

“But the thing that seemed to me so strange at first was the fact that I had died ‘before’ that, as we say. That complete change of the mode of existence undoubtedly marked death, and the particular instant of death must have been that at which I became aware of the change, and of the severance of my will from myself.

“But I understood it presently. The explanation, I think, must be this.

“There is always a certain space of time between an incident happening and our perception of it--infinitesimally small if we are observing it, but yet it is there. Well, when I made that final effort of will I died, but dying had begun before that. I had only regarded dying from the purely internal side; it took in my soul the form of severance from my will. At that same instant, since we must speak in terms of time, I was in the spiritual mode of existence, where there is simply no time but which includes all time and all one’s previous experience; and in practically the same ‘instant’ I was back again, and experiencing the physical phenomena of dying. The drum-note was either my throat or heart, I suppose; the silence that followed was the body’s perception of death worked out in terms of time.