Chapter 2

Then, too, I saw wild eddies of matter taking shape, of a subtlety that is as far beyond any known earthly conditions of matter as steam is above frozen stone. Great tornadoes whirled and poised; globes of spinning fire flew off on distant errands of their own, as when the heavens were made; and I saw, too, the crash of world with world, when satellites that had lost their impetus drooped inwards upon some central sun, and merged themselves at last with a titanic leap. All this enacted itself before me, while life itself flew like a pulse from system to system, never diminished, never increased, withdrawn from one to settle on another. All this I saw and knew.

III

I thought I could never be satiated by this infinite procession of wonders. But at last there rose in my mind, like a rising star, the need to be alone no longer. I was passing through a kind of heavenly infancy; and just as a day comes when a child puts out a hand with a conscious intention, not merely a blind groping, but with a need to clasp and caress, or answers a smile by a smile, a word by a purposeful cry, so in a moment I was aware of some one with me and near me, with a heart and a nature that leaned to mine and had need of me, as I of him. I knew him to be one who had lived as I had lived, on the earth that was ours,--lived many lives, indeed; and it was then first that I became aware that I had myself lived many lives too. My human life, which I had last left, was the fullest and clearest of all my existences; but they had been many and various, though always progressive. I must not now tell of the strange life histories that had enfolded me--they had risen in dignity and worth from a life far back, unimaginably elementary and instinctive; but I felt in a moment that my new friend's life had been far richer and more perfect than my own, though I saw that there were still experiences ahead of both of us; but not yet. I may describe his presence in human similitudes, a presence perfectly defined, though apprehended with no human sight. He bore a name which described something clear, strong, full of force, and yet gentle of access, like water. It was just that; a thing perfectly pure and pervading, which could be stained and troubled, and yet could retain no defilement or agitation; which a child could scatter and divide, and yet was absolutely powerful and insuperable. I will call him Amroth. Him, I say, because though there was no thought of sex left in my consciousness, his was a courageous, inventive, masterful spirit, which gave rather than received, and was withal of a perfect kindness and directness, love undefiled and strong. The moment I became aware of his presence, I felt him to be like one of those wonderful, pure youths of an Italian picture, whose whole mind is set on manful things, untroubled by the love of woman, and yet finding all the world intensely gracious and beautiful, full of eager frankness, even impatience, with long, slim, straight limbs and close-curled hair. I knew him to be the sort of being that painters and poets had been feeling after when they represented or spoke of angels. And I could not help laughing outright at the thought of the meek, mild, statuesque draped figures, with absurd wings and depressing smiles, that encumbered pictures and churches, with whom no human communication would be possible, and whose grave and discomfiting glance would be fatal to all ease or merriment. I recognised in Amroth a mirthful soul, full of humour and laughter, who could not be shocked by any truth, or hold anything uncomfortably sacred--though indeed he held all things sacred with a kind of eagerness that charmed me. Instead of meeting him in dolorous pietistic mood, I met him, I remember, as at school or college one suddenly met a frank, smiling, high-spirited youth or boy, who was ready at once to take comradeship for granted, and walked away with one from a gathering, with an outrush of talk and plans for further meetings. It was all so utterly unlike the subdued and cautious and sensitive atmosphere of devotion that it stirred us both, I was aware, to a delicious kind of laughter. And then came a swift interchange of thought, which I must try to represent by speech, though speech was none.

"I am glad to find you, Amroth," I said. "I was just beginning to wonder if I was not going to be lonely."

"Ah," he said, "one has what one desires here; you had too much to see and learn at first to want my company. And yet I have been with you, pointing out a thousand things, ever since you came here."

"Was it you," I said, "that have been showing me all this? I thought I was alone."

At which Amroth laughed again, a laugh full of content. "Yes," he said, "the crags and the sunset--do you not remember? I came down with you, carrying you like a child in my arms, while you slept; and then I saw you awake. You had to rest a long time at first; you had had much to bear--uncertainty--that is what tires one, even more than pain. And I have been telling you things ever since, when you could listen."

"Oh," I said, "I have a hundred things to ask you; how strange it is to see so much and understand so little!"

"Ask away," said Amroth, putting an arm through mine.

"I was afraid," I said, "that it would all be so different--like a catechism 'Dost thou believe--is this thy desire?' But instead it seems so entirely natural and simple!"

"Ah," he said, "that is how we bewilder ourselves on earth. Why, it is hard to say! But all the real things remain. It is all just as surprising and interesting and amusing and curious as it ever was: the only things that are gone--for a time, that is--are the things that are ugly and sad. But they are useful too in their way, though you have no need to think of them now. Those are just the discipline, the training."

"But," I said, "what makes people so different from each other down there--so many people who are sordid, grubby, quarrelsome, cruel, selfish, spiteful? Only a few who are bold and kind--like you, for instance?"

"No," he said, answering the thought that rose in my mind, "of course I don't mind--I like compliments as well as ever, if they come naturally! But don't you see that all the little poky, sensual, mean, disgusting lives are simply those of spirits struggling to be free; we begin by being enchained by matter at first, and then the stream runs clearer. The divine things are imagination and sympathy. That is the secret."

IV

Once I said:

"Which kind of people do you find it hardest to help along?"

"The young people," said Amroth, with a smile.

"Youth!" I said. "Why, down below, we think of youth as being so generous and ardent and imitative! We speak of youth as the time to learn, and form fine habits; if a man is wilful and selfish in after-life, we say that it was because he was too much indulged in childhood--and we attach great importance to the impressions of youth."

"That is quite right," said Amroth, "because the impressions of youth are swift and keen; but of course, here, age is not a question of years or failing powers. The old, here, are the wise and gracious and patient and gentle; the youth of the spirit is stupidity and unimaginativeness. On the one hand are the stolid and placid, and on the other are the brutal and cruel and selfish and unrestrained."

"You confuse me greatly," I said; "surely you do not mean that spiritual life and progress are a matter of intellectual energy?"

"No, not at all," said he; "the so-called intellectual people are often the most stupid and youngest of all. The intellect counts for nothing: that is only a kind of dexterity, a pretty game. The imagination is what matters."

"Worse and worse!" I said. "Does salvation belong to poets and novelists?"

"No, no," said Amroth, "that is a game too! The imagination I speak of is the power of entering into other people's minds and hearts, of putting yourself in their place--of loving them, in fact. The more you know of people, the better chance there is of loving them; and you can only find your way into their minds by imaginative sympathy. I will tell you a story which will show you what I mean. There was once a famous writer on earth, of whose wisdom people spoke with bated breath. Men went to see him with fear and reverence, and came away, saying, 'How wonderful!' And this man, in his age, was waited upon by a little maid, an ugly, tired, tiny creature. People used to say that they wondered he had not a better servant. But she knew all that he liked and wanted, where his books and papers were, what was good for him to do. She did not understand a word of what he said, but she knew both when he had talked too much, and when he had not talked enough, so that his mind was pent up in itself, and he became cross and fractious. Now, in reality, the little maid was one of the oldest and most beautiful of spirits. She had lived many lives, each apparently humbler than the last. She never grumbled about her work, or wanted to amuse herself. She loved the silly flies that darted about her kitchen, or brushed their black heads on the ceiling; she loved the ivy tendrils that tapped on her window in the breeze. She did not go to church, she had no time for that; or if she had gone, she would not have understood what was said, though she would have loved all the people there, and noticed how they looked and sang. But the wise man himself was one of the youngest and stupidest of spirits, so young and stupid that he had to have a very old and wise spirit to look after him. He was eaten up with ideas and vanity, so that he had no time to look at any one or think of anybody, unless they praised him. He has a very long pilgrimage before him, though he wrote pretty songs enough, and his mortal body, or one of them, lies in the Poets' Corner of the Abbey, and people come and put wreaths there with tears in their eyes."

"It is very bewildering," I said, "but I see a little more than I did. It is all a matter of feeling, then? But it seems hard on people that they should be so dull and stupid about it all,--that the truth should lie so close to their hand and yet be so carefully concealed."

"Oh, they grow out of dulness!" he said, with a movement of his hand; "that is what experience does for us--it is always going on; we get widened and deepened. Why," he added, "I have seen a great man, as they called him, clever and alert, who held a high position in the State. He was laid aside by a long and painful illness, so that all his work was put away. He was brave about it, too, I remember; but he used to think to himself how sad and wasteful it was, that when he was most energetic and capable he should be put on the shelf--all the fine work he might have done interrupted; all the great speeches he would have made unuttered. But as a matter of fact, he was then for the first time growing fast, because he had to look into the minds and hearts of all sorrowful and disappointed people, and to learn that what we do matters so little, and that what we are matters so much. When he did at last get back to the world, people said, 'What a sad pity to see so fine a career spoilt!' But out of all the years of all his lives, those years had been his very best and richest, when he sat half the day feeble in the sun, and could not even look at the papers which lay beside him, or when he woke in the grey mornings, with the thought of another miserable day of idleness and pain before him."

I said, "Then is it a bad thing to be busy in the world, because it takes off your mind from the things which matter?"

"No," said Amroth, "not a bad thing at all: because two things are going on. Partly the framework of society and life is being made, so that men are not ground down into that sordid struggle, when little experience is possible because of the drudgery which clouds all the mind. Though even that has its opportunities! And all depends, for the individual, upon how he is doing his work. If he has other people in mind all the time, and does his work for them, and not to be praised for it, then all is well. But if he is thinking of his credit and his position, then he does not grow at all; that is pomposity--a very youthful thing indeed; but the worst case of all is if a man sees that the world must be helped and made, and that one can win credit thus, and so engages in work of that kind, and deals in all the jargon of it, about using influence and living for others, when he is really thinking of himself all the time, and trying to keep the eyes of the world upon him. But it is all growth really, though sometimes, as on the beach when the tide is coming in, the waves seem to draw backward from the land, and poise themselves in a crest of troubled water."

"But is a great position in the world," I said, "whether inherited or attained, a dangerous thing?"

"Nothing is _dangerous_, child," he said. "You must put all that out of your mind. But men in high posts and stations are often not progressing evenly, only in great jogs and starts. They learn very often, with a sudden surprise, which is not always painful, and sometimes is very beautiful and sweet, that all the ceremony and pomp, the great house, the bows and the smiles, mean nothing at all--absolutely nothing, except the chance, the opportunity of not being taken in by them. That is the use of all pleasures and all satisfactions--the frame of mind which made the old king say, 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have builded?'--they are nothing but the work of another class in the great school of life. A great many people are put to school with self-satisfaction, that they may know the fine joy of humiliation, the delight of learning that it is not effectiveness and applause that matters, but love and peacefulness. And the great thing is that we should feel that we are growing, not in hardness or indifference, nor necessarily even in courage or patience, but in our power to feel and our power to suffer. As love multiplies, suffering must multiply too. The very Heart of God is full of infinite, joyful, hopeful suffering; the whole thing is so vast, so slow, so quiet, that the end of suffering is yet far off. But when we suffer, we climb fast; the spirit grows old and wise in faith and love; and suffering is the one thing we cannot dispense with, because it is the condition of our fullest and purest life."

V

I said suddenly, "The joy of this place is not the security of it, but the fact that one has not to think about security. I am not afraid of anything that may happen, and there is no weariness of thought. One does not think till one is tired, but till one has finished thinking."

"Yes," said Amroth, "that was the misery of the poor body!"

"And yet I used to think," I said, "in the old days that I was grateful to the body for many pleasant things it gave me--breathing the air, feeling the sun, eating and drinking, games and exercise, and the strange thing one called love."

"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or to appear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; but of course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of the happiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that one desired, but the real thing behind it; even the purest thing of all, the sight and contact of one whom one loved, let us say, with no sensual passion at all, but with a perfectly pure love; what a torment that was--desiring something which one could not get, the real fusion of feeling and thought! But the poor body was always in the way then, saying, 'Here am I--please me, amuse me.'"

"But then," I said, "what is the use of all that? Why should the pure, clear, joyful, sleepless life I now feel be tainted and hampered and drugged by the body? I don't feel that I am losing anything by losing the body."

"No, not losing," said Amroth, "but, happy though you are, you are not gaining things as fast now--it is your time of rest and refreshment--but we shall go back, both of us, to the other life again, when the time comes: and the point is this, that we have got to win the best things through trouble and struggle."

"But even so," I said, "there are many things I do not understand--the child that opens its eyes upon the world and closes them again; the young child that suffers and dies, just when it is the darling of the home; and at the other end of the scale, the helpless, fractious invalid, or the old man who lives in weariness, wakeful and tortured, and who is glad just to sit in the sun, indifferent to every one and everything, past feeling and hoping and thinking--or, worst of all, the people with diseased minds, whose pain makes them suspicious and malignant. What is the meaning of all this pain, which seems to do people nothing but harm, and makes them a burden to themselves and others too?"

"Oh," said he, "it is difficult enough; but you must remember that we are all bound up with the hearts and lives of others; the child that dies in its helplessness has a meaning for its parents; the child that lives long enough to be the light of its home, that has a significance deep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, to lighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surely for all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives, why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportion so wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we are bound in the body--some few of us do, and many of us say that we do. But we do not realise that the little life is but one in a great chain of lives, that each spirit lives many times, over and over. There is no such thing as waste or sacrifice of life. The life is meant to do just what it does, no more and no less; bound in the body, it all seems so long or so short, so complete or so incomplete; but now and here we can see that the whole thing is so endless, so immense, that we think no more of entering life, say, for a few days, or entering it for ninety years, than we should think of counting one or ninety water-drops in the river that pours in a cataract over the lip of the rocks. Where we do lose, in life, is in not taking the particular experience, be it small or great, to heart. We try to forget things, to put them out of our minds, to banish them. Of course it is very hard to do otherwise, in a body so finite, tossed and whirled in a stream so infinite; and thus we are happiest if we can live very simply and quietly, not straining to multiply our uneasy activities, but just getting the most and the best out of the elements of life as they come to us. As we get older in spirit, we do that naturally; the things that men call ambitions and schemes are the signs of immaturity; and when we grow older, those slip off us and concern us no more; while the real vitality of feeling and emotion runs ever more clear and strong."

"But," I said, "can one revive the old lives at will? Can one look back into the long range of previous lives? Is that permitted?"

"Yes, of course it is permitted," said Amroth, smiling; "there are no rules here; but one does not care to do it overmuch. One is just glad it is all done, and that one has learnt the lesson. Look back if you like--there are all the lives behind you."

I had a curious sensation--I saw myself suddenly a stalwart savage, strangely attired for war, near a hut in a forest clearing. I was going away somewhere; there were other huts at hand; there was a fire, in the side of a mound, where some women seemed to be cooking something and wrangling over it; the smoke went up into the still air. A child came out of the hut, and ran to me. I bent down and kissed it, and it clung to me. I was sorry, in a dim way, to be going out--for I saw other figures armed too, standing about the clearing. There was to be fighting that day, and though I wished to fight, I thought I might not return. But the mind of myself, as I discerned it, was full of hurtful, cruel, rapacious thoughts, and I was sad to think that this could ever have been I.

"It is not very nice," said Amroth with a smile; "one does not care to revive that! You were young then, and had much before you."

Another picture flashed into the mind. Was it true? I was a woman, it seemed, looking out of a window on the street in a town with high, dark houses, strongly built of stone: there was a towered gate at a little distance, with some figures drawing up sacks with a pulley to a door in the gate. A man came up behind me, pulled me roughly back, and spoke angrily; I answered him fiercely and shrilly. The room I was in seemed to be a shop or store; there were barrels of wine, and bags of corn. I felt that I was busy and anxious--it was not a pleasant retrospect.

"Yet you were better then," said Amroth "you thought little of your drudgery, and much of your children."

Yes, I had had children, I saw. Their names and appearance floated before me. I had loved them tenderly. Had they passed out of my life? I felt bewildered.

Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again. "No, you came near to some of them again. Do you not remember another life in which you loved a friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness? He had been your child long before; and one never quite loses that."

I saw in a flash the other life he spoke of. I was a student, it seemed, at some university, where there was a boy of my own age, a curious, wilful, perverse, tactless creature, always saying and doing the wrong thing, for whom I had felt a curious and unreasonable responsibility. I had always tried to explain him to other people, to justify him; and he had turned to me fop help and companionship in a singular way. I saw myself walking with him in the country, expostulating, gesticulating; and I saw him angry and perplexed.... The vision vanished.

"But what becomes of all those whom we have loved?" I said; "it cannot be as if we had never loved them."

"No, indeed," said Amroth, "they are all there or here; but there lies one of the great mysteries which we cannot yet attain to. We shall be all brought together some time, closely and perfectly; but even now, in the world of matter, the spirit half remembers; and when one is strangely and lovingly drawn to another soul, when that love is not of the body, and has nothing of passion in it, then it is some close ancient tie reasserting itself. Do you not know how old and remote some of our friendships seemed--so much older and larger than could be accounted for by the brief days of companionship? That strange hunger for the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what has been. Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you will move farther afield, and you will come near to spirits you have loved. You cannot bear it yet, though they are all about you; but one regains the spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours."

"Can I revisit," I said, "the scene of my last life--see and know what those I loved are doing and feeling?"

"Not yet," said Amroth; "that would not profit either you or them. The sorrow of earth would not be sorrow, it would have no cleansing power, if the parted spirit could return at once. You do not guess, either, how much of time has passed already since you came here--it seems to you like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet loss and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the finest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave behind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that its virtue lies."