Part 2

“You knew that I was there?” I cried.

“Yes,” he said, “I knew it.”

“And why did you not answer me?”

“I could not answer you, brother?” And then with a sudden gesture he checked me. “I could not even tell you _why_,” he said. “It must suffice you, Edward, to know that this must be, and that you cannot help it.”

“But it will kill me!” I cried.

“Perhaps,” he said very quietly, “or perhaps it will kill me first. I cannot tell.”

We stood for some minutes without speaking. “Daniel,” I ventured at last, “I had hoped that in the external ways I might assist you—your food, perhaps——”

“I could not let you serve me,” he answered; “I have no way to serve you in return. And, besides that, I have learned to do cheerfully what little physical toil I must. The island is covered with food, you know.”

“But if you should be sick?” I cried.

“If I should be sick,” he said, “I should either get well again, or else die.”

“Then you do not feel pain?”

“To learn to bear pain has been one of my tasks,” was the response. “I should think,” he continued, changing the subject abruptly, “that if you had studied all your life as you did when we lived together, by this time you would not fear solitude—that you would find in this new world enough to fill all your time.”

“I might—perhaps I shall,” I said; “but, Daniel, you have been here twenty years, and never seen a ship! So how could I know that the result of any studies of mine would ever be made known to the world? I have not even any paper to write upon.”

The other sat gazing ahead of him at the moonlit water through the trees; I saw the strange smile upon the lips again.

“All that sorrow,” he said—“I fought with it once myself, and how I wish that I could help you to fight with it! For a year or so I also waited for a ship, and wrote down the best of my music, and poured out the tears of my soul. But, Edward, I no longer write my music, and I no longer fear lest my work be not made known to the world.”

His voice had sunk low. Over the tree-tops a silver moon was gleaming, and his eyes were fixed upon it. “On that huge ball of iron and rock,” said he, “there was once power and life and beauty; and now it rolls there through the years and the ages, cold and dead and still. And some day this planet, too, will roll through the years and the ages; and no eye will behold it, and no mind will be aware of it; and the voices of men will be hushed upon it, and the monuments of men will be dust upon it; and Edward, what then of my music, what then of your science and your books?”

I answered nothing.

“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.”

I started.

“As a scientist,” he said—“what do you believe about the universe? Is there life throughout it?”

“I do not know, it is a possibility.”

“Yes,” said Daniel; “but for me it is a certainty. It is a fact in which I live, day after day.”

I had caught him by the arm.

“Daniel!” I cried.

“It is just so,” he said.

“Another planet?”

“I do not know,” was the answer. “Another race of beings, is all that I can tell you.”

“And are they human beings?”

“They have passed entirely beyond anything which those words can mean to me.”

“And you know them?”

“Yes.”

“And personally?”

“More than personally.”

“How do you mean?”

“I know them directly. I live in their lives. I know them as I know the symphony I hear—as one drop of water knows the sea.”

I was dazed; I could hardly think. “And their name?” I asked.

“They have no name,” said my brother, “they have no words. They have passed the need of language—they communicate with each other by immediate spiritual union. Their life is upon a higher plane than ours; they do not deal in ideas, but in imaginative intuitions.”

“And then, Daniel, when you—when you pass into that trance—it is that!”

“It is that,” said he. “By an effort of my will I lift myself into their consciousness; but because my physical and mental faculties have not been prepared by long ages of development, my time with them is limited, and I fall back to recruit my strength.”

“And this has been going on for years?”

“For ten or twelve years,” was his reply.

It will, perhaps, be best for me to give the substance of what he told me in the long conversation which ensued. “I do not know where these people are,” he told me. “I only know that throughout universal space they are the race which is nearest in its development to our own. I do not know what they look like. I have never seen nor heard them. I only live their lives. I do not ask them any questions; our relation is nothing of that sort. It is as if they were playing music which I heard; but also as if their music was their whole life, so that I know all they have and do. Their presence comes to me as the inwelling of universal joy; of love and worship and rapture, unending and unthinkable. Their life is infinite variety—immediate and perpetual expansion—spiritual insight developing in a ratio determined by the will of the individuals. It is as if a man were to witness the springtime arising of Nature, but taking place in an hour instead of three months; and he comprehending it, not from the outside, but living it, as a bursting forth of song.”

“And to this song there is no limit?” I asked him.

“When you speak of the soul as being infinite,” said Daniel, “you do not mean that it extends merely beyond your thoughts, but you mean that you may heap quantity upon quantity, and multiply quantity by quantity, in any ratio and at any speed you please, and still have infinity before you.”

“You mean that these beings understand what is going on in each other’s mind?”

“They understand all minds as you understand your own. It is of the nature of spiritual passion to mingle at a certain stage of intensity, like electricity in the lightning flash. This race has developed a new sense, just as man has developed senses which are not possessed by lower animals.”

“And these people were once men?”

“Presumably.”

“And then they have escaped altogether from the sorrows of life?”

“Say, rather,” he answered, “that they have escaped to the sorrows of life. The essence of life is sorrow.”

“It does not seem so, from your picture,” I said.

“That is simple because my picture is not understood. Every one of these beings of whom I speak bears in his bosom a pain for which there are no words; every one of them—there are countless numbers of them, living each in my consciousness as the voice of one instrument lives in a symphony—each one is a Titan spirit, wrestling day and night without end, without possibility of respite, and bearing on his shoulders a universal load of woe. In no way could you imagine one better than as a soldier in the crisis of the battle, panting, and blind with pain, dying amid the glory of his achievement.”

“And such a life!” I cried “Why do they live it?”

“They lived it because it demands with the voice of all their being to be lived; because the presence of it is rapture and unutterable holiness; because it will allow no questions, because it is instant, imperative, and final—_it will be lived!_”

I sat in silence. “Do I gather from your words,” I asked, “that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race?”

He smiled again. “The spiritual life,” he said, “does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. A man’s duty looms up before him—and in his weakness he will not do it, but puts the fruition of his life into another world, where the terms are not so hard!”

“This people,” I asked—“what do they know about God?”

“They know no more than men do,” was the answer, “except that they know they know nothing. They know that the veil is not lifted. It is not that for which they seek—life is their task, and life only; to behold its endless fruition; to dwell in the beauty of it, to wield power of it; to toil at its whirling loom, to build up palaces of music from it. Ah, my brother, why have you never lived a symphony?”

“These people have no physical life?” I asked.

“Assuredly, they have,” was his answer, “it is a life which does not enter their consciousness—any more than, for instance, the beating of your heart and the renewing of your tissues. They have attained to mastery over the world of matter. They temper the seasons to their wish; disease and ill-health they have banished entirely; and understanding the ways of Nature, they create their food at will.”

“And their society knows no rich and no poor? Their government?”

“They have no government,” he said, “their law is their inspiration.”

Until far into the night we sat talking; and then, early in the morning, as I went out upon the beach—I saw a ship standing in towards the shore! I recall, as if it were yesterday, how my heart leaped up, and with what an agony of uncertainty I stood waving a signal.

And then I rushed to see my brother, shouting the news aloud. Startled with his own thoughts, he gazed at me in perplexity.

“A ship has come!” I cried. “A ship!”

“A ship!” he echoed; and then with a sudden light: “Oh, I see!”

“Come!” I cried. “They will take us aboard!”

But my brother shook his head. “No Edward,” he replied, “I cannot do that.”

I started. “No,” he said again, “do not ask me. You go—but let me stay here until the end!”

“What can you mean?” I cried. “Can you really suppose that I would leave you?”

“I am not fitted to travel,” he said—“I do not wish to change. And I could not face the thing which you call civilisation. It has no interest for me.”

“But we can live in the country,” I cried. “I have money—nothing need trouble you!” But all my arguments made no impression upon him; he would only repeat that he desired to be left alone. I tried to move him by saying that I would not leave him. I might stay if I chose, he said—he could not help that; but if I were wise, I would leave him to his own life; and I would not subject him to the pain of meeting the strangers upon the ship. They would not understand, and they would only cause him vexation. And even while I was protesting with him, we heard the shouts of men upon the shore. He rose up and laid his hand upon my shoulder, and kissed me upon the forehead, saying: “Be wise—or let me be wise for you. Respect my judgment and let me go.”

And so he turned and started away toward the centre of the island. At the edge of the thicket he turned and waved his hand to me. I never saw him again.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.