CHAPTER XV
‘Dear Jim,’ said Gundred, ‘how happy he sounds!’ She folded up her son’s letter again, and put it deftly back into its envelope. He wrote to her once a week without fail from school, a neat, colourless letter, breathing duty and regard. To his father the boy wrote as the mood took him—careless, untidy epistles about the topic of the moment. ‘Another cup of tea, dear?’ she asked her husband, smiling at him across the table.
Kingston looked at her with the approval that her appearance never failed to challenge. A crystalline perfection always hung about her, a clear, precise faultlessness that was always cool and fresh and pleasant. Age could do nothing against her. This morning, as for a thousand mornings past, as she would be for a thousand mornings to come, she was tranquil, exquisite, satisfactory. If she did not actually sparkle, she was always in a serene glow of elegance, her clear golden hair unalterably waved and curled, her garments refreshing in their unobtrusive charm of cut and make,her hands well-kept, white, delightful, flickering here and there from tea-caddy to cream-jug with a charming, housewifely preoccupation.
Kingston, with a vivid recollection of the sibylline untidiness that haunted spiritualistic circles, brought a new appreciation to bear on Gundred’s unchangeably well-bred calm of look and dress and manner. She was very restful to be with. Pure milk, after all, certainly was better, in the long run, than intoxicants.
‘Thanks, dear,’ he replied, accepting a cup of tea into which Gundred had dutifully poured the cream that he still hated as much as ever, but which twenty years’ experience of her immitigable firmness had taught him to accept without vain murmurings. ‘I think I will run down and see Jim one of these days. You come with me?’
‘Well,’ replied his wife, ‘I have such a terrible lot to crowd into these last few days before we leave town. The end of the Season is such a rush, and one does dislike to leave anything undone. Besides, you know, I think it is a pity to unsettle Jim, and I really do rather dread the motor at this time of year. The dust is too truly horrible. Nothing can keep it out of one’s hair, try as one will; and then poor Morgan has such trouble getting it out again; and one ought always to consider the servants when one can—yes?’
‘Very well, then; I will go down alone, to-day or to-morrow. Haven’t you got some sort of show on here this afternoon?’
‘Yes, dear, a Mothers’ Educational Union Meeting. They wanted to hold it here, and one feels that one should do what one can for others while one is alive.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose I shall be missed or mourned,’ said her husband; ‘so I shall just slip quietly off, and take the motor down to Eton. You can receive themothers, and so on, without me to help you. And I can have a good time with Jim.’
‘Dear little Jim!’ said Gundred, smiling affectionately. Her son was fifteen, and rather unusually large for his age. But no size, no age could ever have cured his mother of talking and thinking of him as a little child. She had all the good woman’s utter, tragic inability to understand that her child becomes a boy and a man. Her Jim was still a baby. Of the real Jim she knew nothing whatever. Their relations were sometimes strained already, and in the future the strain would become fiercer and more unceasing, through Gundred’s idea of ruling the adolescent Jim by ideas that applied to the only Jim she had ever known—the kilted, white-frocked creature of the nursery, who had passed out of existence at least ten years ago.
‘Then that is settled,’ replied Kingston happily. ‘I’ll take Jim your love, Gundred. Anything else to send him?’
The father was always giving the boy presents. Anything that took his fancy he had a habit of buying for Jim. Gundred, no less affectionate, considered such indulgence spoiling and undesirable. She did not think it quite suitable to be so lavish, and her generosity was restricted to the orthodox seasons of Christmas and the birthday.
‘My love, of course, dear,’ she replied, with a momentary primming of her lips; ‘and tell him how much I hope that he reads the little book I gave him on his birthday. Say that he will find it the greatest help. I myself have got the most wonderful comfort from it; the prayers seem to suit one so perfectly, and the hymns for each day are so uplifting and helpful.’
Kingston, secretly unsympathetic towards Gundred’shabit of collecting small devotional works and showering them round upon her near relations, glided hastily away from the topic. Sincerely pious and devout herself, she made the common mistake of wishing to impose her own precise form of devotion on everyone else, and could not conceive it possible that any right-minded person should not derive as great a benefit as she did from her little pietistic volumes. To her son, in particular, she talked religion with that terrible intimate candour which the good woman feels to be so natural, and the normal man feels to be so horribly irreverent. From his mother, then, the boy shrank and hid himself, outraged in all his most intimate feelings of decency by the freedom with which she discoursed to him of God and Heaven and Good, and half a hundred secret, private matters that nothing would have induced him to discuss even with his dearest friend.
Kingston ordered the motor, glad of an opportunity for escaping Gundred’s evangelistic activities. She herself made a faint pretence at deploring her inability to accompany him.
‘I should so like to,’ she said; ‘but the mothers will expect me to be here, of course, to receive them. It would be so shocking to play them false. And the movement is such a good one. I never feel that one is in the world solely for one’s own pleasure. One belongs to others, and one’s highest joy should always be to do one’s duty by one’s neighbours—yes?’
‘It is rather a nuisance at times, don’t you find?’ asked Kingston, on whom his wife’s habit of uttering edifying little speeches on all occasions never failed to have a slightly irritating effect, even after twenty years’ experience of them.
‘But one should not consider one’s self,’ answered Gundred correctly. ‘It is a terrible thing to be selfish.Besides, if God has given one special advantages, one should be glad to make use of them to make others happy. Houses and position and things like that are only precious because one can turn them to the use of others—yes? I should never like to think that I found my factory-girls and my mothers and my curates a nuisance. I look upon them as part of my duty in life. And duty is the truest pleasure.’
Kingston felt as if he were in a dream. How different was this atmosphere of tranquil platitude from the feverish, restless world of longing in which he had lately been so busy. His mind staggered at the thought that this cool, deliberate Gundred could be of one blood with the harried, lonely creatures who frequented the spirit-raiser’s in desperate craving for lost loves and silenced voices. What kin was he himself—he with his secret cult, his deep secret ambition, to this placid woman, so secure in the intimacy of her God, so sedate in the conscious enjoyment of all her duties? It was a grinning irony that held them linked; in actual fact, they were mere acquaintances, knowing nothing of each other, sympathizing in nothing, bound only by the soft amicable bonds of custom and convenience.
Breakfast was over. Gundred gathered up her letters in a tiny sheaf and rose. ‘I must go and see Motherley,’ she said, ‘about the arrangements for this afternoon. I think one ought to have iced coffee for the poor things in this hot weather, don’t you?’
Gundred could never, in any possible circumstances of rank or condition, have been induced to leave the reins of household management in the hands of those who were paid to hold them. She was one of the many women who are housekeepers from their birth. The exercise of diligent economy was very dear to her heart, and she made a merit of indulging herself in it, byinsisting that she attended to such matters only from a strong sense of duty. Kingston gave due weight to her question as he pondered it.
‘Yes,’ he said very gravely, ‘on the whole I really think you might allow the mothers iced coffee.’
‘I am so glad you think so, dear,’ responded Gundred with an air of relief. ‘One is so glad if ever one can give the poor things some little extra pleasure. It is quite one of the compensations of one’s life—yes?’
‘But, then—these mothers—are they paupers, or what?’
‘Oh, dear me, no! They are the most excellent creatures—quite rich and comfortable, most of them. They generally live in Kensington or Campden Hill, and they are all so much interested in children and education. But, of course, they don’t often get inside a house like this, so that one is anxious to do whatever one can to make it a delightful memory for them. I have got myself such a charming frock, dear, to give them another little enjoyment to remember afterwards. Really, you know, it soon comes quite easy to think of others and forget one’s self. One makes a habit of unselfishness—at least, one must try to, in one’s own small way—and God is very good about helping them who try to help themselves.’
Kingston did not take the trouble to endorse this sentiment, and Gundred did not wait for him to do so. She knew it was too sound to need any such endorsement—so obvious, indeed, that she had only thrown it out in obedience to her unvarying custom of trying to improve her husband whenever she could.
‘Well,’ she went on, after a pause, ‘I must really go about my duties now. One has so much to do. I don’t suppose I shall see you again, dear, shall I, before you start? I hope you will have a delightful day. Do take care of your poor eyes. And give my love toJim, and tell him always to change his boots when he comes in, and be sure to read his Chapter morning and evening; he will find it such a help. And say how we are looking forward to the holidays—yes?’
Kingston promised vaguely to give his wife’s messages. Then Gundred passed on her way to interview the cook, and complete arrangements for the effectual dazzling of the mothers from Kensington and Campden Hill. Left alone, her husband took refuge for a moment or two in dreamland. This life of his, orderly, decorous, colourless, with Gundred superintending its details, and seeing that its food was good and hot—this life of his was not a real life at all. It was a vapour, a phantom, having no part in the true life of his soul. His body moved on its appointed course from breakfast through the day to bed, bandying banalities with its tongue, looking out on Gundred’s world with amiable eyes; but he himself, the real man, belonged to a remoter world. In strange, far-off lands he roamed, seeking that which for a time was lost; the gorgeous, sombre mysteries of life and death were about his head, shedding a glamour of ecstasy on the secret byway that he was treading. How Gundred would stare, what pious sillinesses would she not utter, if for a moment—if only for the smallest fragment of a moment—her eyes could be unsealed to see the magic tangle of visions in which her husband was wandering, all the while that his earthly gaze was fixed on her, his earthly ears politely attentive to her talk, his earthly stomach contentedly absorbing the food that she made it her daily duty to provide. Dressed, brushed, washed, and fed, the simulacrum of her husband passed through the world at her side, but the thing she walked with was a changeling; the man she loved and looked after was the mere shell of a stranger—of a stranger whose eyes were fixed on the immensities,whose ears received her words as jargon in a tongue unknown, whose whole life was passed in that world of reality whose shadows now and then are cast across this life of ours that we call real, in the glimpses of what we call a dream. Little, visible, tangible, clear was the life that Gundred thought the true; vast, illimitable, without end or beginning was that enormous infinite where the soul of Kingston ceaselessly went seeking for the lost.
‘By kind permission of the Lady Gundred Darnley, the Mothers’ Educational Union—called for short the M.E.U.—held a most enjoyable meeting at 53, Grosvenor Street. The hostess’s demeanour gave great satisfaction, and her gown was held to shed real lustre on the occasion. It was a wonderful arrangement in blue and mauve, and no other woman of her age could have worn it; but the delicacy of her colouring, the serene charm of her features, were only enhanced by it, and the mothers from Kensington and Campden Hill spent a happy hour in devising means of copying its most successful features. Meanwhile, an American spinster, of world-wide renown but unappetizing appearance, gave an interesting and exhaustive address on the proper upbringing of children; and a Bishop’s wife in voluminous black brocade, with a bonnet built of bluebells, brought up the rear with an account of how her own darlings had been triumphantly reared on a system of perfect freedom tempered by whippings administered officially by each other. A discussion followed, in which old maids and childless widows vied with the mothers in expounding the secrets of education. The Lady Gundred Darnley herself contributed a brief but very pleasant little allocution, in which she insisted on the efficacy of prayer, and attributed her own success in dealing with her dear little son entirely to her inculcation of sound religious principles.’Gundred was at the height of her glory; her graciousness was delightful, her condescension so profound that neither she herself nor anyone else could guess that it was condescension at all. When the meeting had concluded in a volley of mutual compliments, and a unanimous vote of thanks had been offered to their charming hostess, she shepherded the mothers down to food with the sublimest cordiality. The iced coffee flowed like milk and honey; tea was nothing accounted of, any more than was silver in King Solomon’s time. Eclairs, sandwiches, and buns disappeared like snow in summer; of every dish Gundred felt a calm confidence that each mother present was eyeing it carefully with a view to imitation. Of all life’s duties, Gundred perhaps best loved that of setting an example to others. She felt that the Creator had specially ordained her for that end, and was never so completely and conscientiously happy as when possessed with the certainty that she was duly fulfilling His design.
But at last the meeting began to melt away, and Gundred was left alone in the large deserted room. Up and down among the little gilded chairs she roamed, pondering with complacency the success of the entertainment. In the course of her wanderings, she came into view of the great mirror that filled the space between two of the windows. She stood for a while in front of it, contemplating the perfections that it reflected. From the crown of her head to the glistering point of her shoe, she, ‘the Lady Gundred Darnley,’ the fastidious critic, had not the smallest fault to find. Her gown was an inspiration, and its fit an earthly manifestation of the ideal.
‘Really,’ said Gundred to herself, ‘God has been very good to me indeed. I declare I do not look a day over twenty-five. No one would ever believethat I am forty. That is what comes of having a good conscience, and being a little careful what one eats. And it is not many women of five-and-twenty that could dare to wear a colour like this. My figure is positively girlish, and my complexion—well, one does not often see a better one, even among quite young girls.’ But at this point her meditations were interrupted by the sound of a ringing at the bell. She concluded that it must be some belated mother, who would be politely turned away by the butler. So she gave no further attention to the sound, but still stood admiring what the mirror revealed, with both hands caressing the beautiful lines of her waist. In this pleasant employment, however, she was startled by a discreet cough behind her. She wheeled hastily round.
A small elderly gentleman was approaching, ushered by the butler. Gundred summoned her presence of mind to confront this unexpected apparition. The butler, meanwhile, was murmuring an unintelligible name. The visitor peered inquiringly up at her. For he was a very minute personage, smaller even than his hostess; he had an air of patient antiquity, and his thin neck poked forward till he had the look of a very shrunken, very wise, very benevolent little old tortoise. He was dressed, too, in the quaintest clothes, that somehow suggested that they had been bought ready-made, and were mysteriously, strangely inappropriate, seeming as if their present wearer were accustomed to quite different garb, and only wore these clumsy reach-me-downs in deference to European convention. He conveyed an impression of feeling fettered and uncomfortable in them, of longing for freer and more flowing vestments.
Gundred assumed a smile of gracious interrogation.
‘Mr. ——?’
‘You are Mr. Darnley’s wife?’ inquired the new-comer.
‘I am Lady Gundred Darnley, yes. What can I——?’
‘I am your husband’s uncle,’ replied the stranger. ‘I have been in Japan for many years.’
Gundred instantly flashed into recognition, and warmed into a less defensive smile. She tried vehemently to remember all she had heard of this semi-mythical uncle thus abruptly brought back into the land of the living.
‘Ah yes,’ she answered genially, ‘you have been there for a very long time, I know. I quite envy you. Such a wonderful little people, the Japanese—yes? And have you come to settle down at home again?’
‘My home,’ answered the little old man, in accents that betrayed a certain loss of familiarity with the English language—‘my home is still out there.’ He waved his hand vaguely, indicating the East. ‘But I was brought over for some business. I had not meant to come here. My kinship with your husband has been broken by fifty years of time, and twelve thousand miles of space. Why should I think he could be anything but a stranger? But lately I have heard him calling. There is something that he wants, something that he wishes to know. I have heard him incessantly calling. And so I came. Perhaps I can give him an answer. Is he here, your husband?’
‘Something that my husband wants, something that he has been asking for?’ repeated Gundred in a stupor. Kingston had no wishes that were not also hers. His whole life, she knew, was an open book to her. And, even if it had not been, how could this strange apparition have heard her husband’s voice? For one wild moment Gundred imagined her husbandbaying his ambitions to the moon, or ululating to the universe from the middle of Grosvenor Square. Otherwise how could his voice have penetrated to the ears of this mysterious old man?
The visitor answered her unspoken thought.
‘A wish,’ he said, speaking slowly in his faint, sad tones—‘a wish has a life of its own. It has wings, and flies to all the four quarters of the air. It only needs the opened eye to see it in its flight, the opened ear to receive it. I have seen many strange things in the air. I am a very old man now. And I heard your husband’s longing, and I came to see if I could give him any help. I am on my way. I can only be here an hour or two. Your husband will soon be here again. I may wait for him?’
All Gundred’s inquiries could elicit no more definite information. The old man merely repeated his statement, and asked to be allowed to await Kingston’s return. Baffled, interested, acutely puzzled, Gundred must needs leave the riddle of his mission unsolved, and take refuge in the customary platitudes about the charm of Oriental life. And thus it happened that when Kingston returned at last, dusty and hot, from his expedition, he found his wife sitting amid the gilded disorder of the drawing-room, engaged in a difficult dialogue with a stranger.
That this was the long-lost uncle Kingston was soon brought to realize, and heard with unmitigated amazement that the Abbot, or Bishop, or whatever his rank might be, had come in answer to some imagined call. The old man had a fantastic charm. His air of frail antiquity, the wistfulness of his voice, the very incongruousness of his clothes gave him a fascination not easy to describe. He was someone out of an alien life, a visitor from the world beyond Kingston’s ken. A flavour of mysterious knowledge hung about hiswandering glances, his soft, quiet, hesitating speech, his gentle, deprecatory manner; those misty eyes of his had the wonder and the wisdom of eyes that have pierced far into the hidden depths. His present surroundings, his present garments had a sharp and crying inappropriateness, yet, though in his air and build there was no obvious majesty, the comparison was all to the disadvantage of the surroundings and the garments. Even Gundred’s luxurious and splendid room seemed to grow tawdry and vulgar by contrast with this unimposing little figure in its midst. The manner of his irruption, too, into modern London life, as well as the announcement of his equally abrupt departure, increased the air of fantasy that hung round him. Flashing by out of another life, flashing on into another life, this grotesque little old tortoise was to spare them an hour on his road through the immensities. Kingston had no sense of kinship as he talked with this new-found uncle—hardly, indeed, any sense of talking with a fellow human being. The visitor was too clearly a dweller in strange worlds, belonged, in all his words and ways, too obviously to another sphere of existence. As for Gundred, her faint horror at entertaining a confessed Buddhist was tempered by the discovery that the Buddhist was an Abbot or a Bishop—at all events, held some conspicuous position in the heathen hierarchy. And even a heathen Bishop was clearly better than a heathen who was not a Bishop of any kind. She soon, however, thought it necessary to vindicate her superiority by attempting to convert the pagan prelate. After one effort, brief though bold, she was forced to desist. Mild, shrinkingly meek, the new uncle yet showed a certain confident command of spiritual weapons too mighty for his niece’s resisting powers.
‘Why, oh, why,’ said Gundred with seraphic sweetness,when the Bishop had let drop some pleasant little sentiment—‘why are you not a Christian, dear uncle? Surely you must love the truth—yes?’
Kingston felt hot with horror, but the visitor showed no discomposure at this sudden outburst of proselytising energy.
‘Yes,’ he replied, in a gentle, hesitating voice—‘yes, I love the truth. We all love the truth when we see it, I think. But I love a whole truth better than a half truth. When a man is reading the Book of Life by the light of the sun, you would not expect him to go back and read it in a cave by even the brightest of lamps? You have very bright lamps; I have the sun.’
Gundred collected all her forces for a theological argument such as her soul loved.
‘But what is the point exactly of being a Buddhist, uncle?’ she inquired, determined to fire the first shot.
However, the Bishop had not broken his journey through space in order to indulge in feminine polemics. He smiled demurely.
‘For one thing, niece,’ he answered slowly, ‘we are not required or permitted by our Faith to believe that two-thirds of the world are doomed inevitably to burn in fire for all eternity—as you, I understand, are bound to believe, by all your many different varieties of Christianity. Now that, dear niece, would be, I am sure, a very great comfort to your tender nature.’
Gundred was on the point of making a dignified rejoinder, to the effect that one does not talk of such things, or think of them, but hopes for the best. However, she felt a hostile influence compressing her words. A strange force was over her, compelling silence. In another minute she found that she could hold the field no longer. Wishing with all her heart to stay, she yet found herself mysteriously forced to rise and make her excuses. The uncle received her explanationsgently, and gave her thanks for the hospitable reception that she had extended to a stranger. He would not see her again, for in a few moments he must be on his way again. But though it might be long before they met again, he would tender her his blessing. Accepting the tribute with graceful reserve, Gundred passed reluctantly out of the room.
Kingston faced round eagerly towards the visitor. What strange message was it that had come to him through such unexpected lips? Was the whole story a fairy-tale? How could his secret wishes and longings have reached the notice of this stranger twelve thousand miles across the sea? Surely the soul has no system of wireless telegraphy? Kingston had a sudden uneasy recollection of telepathy, and the vast range of possibilities that it opened up. He fell silent, awaiting his uncle’s next word.
The little old man sat huddled in his chair, gazing straight before him. The withered claw-like hands were fastened one over the other; the pale mysterious eyes were fixed on things very far away.
‘Bound on the wheel,’ he said at last, ‘bound again and again on the wheel of false desire.’
Kingston asked him what he meant.
‘The fire of passion,’ replied the pale tired voice, ‘is a thing old as all life. Because of some strong passion, born many ages since, you now suffer the pangs of loss and separation. It is no new thing, this pain of yours. It rests with you now, my son, whether you will carry it on with you along the road, as you brought it with you into this stage of your journey.’
Astonishment, intense and paralytic, possessed the younger man as these evidences of insight into his own most secret feelings dropped so prosaically, so unemotionally from the lips of this worn old wanderer. But even astonishment yielded to the keen wonderaroused by the possibility that the words revealed. He demanded further revelations from his uncle.
‘Over all the fields of existence the opened eye can wander,’ replied the other. ‘I can see whence you have come, and in what dark places you are now wandering. Because of the help that I hoped I could give you, I have come here to-night. You are suffering the penalty of bygone folly, you are chained in the bond of a bad Karma. You have loved something, and you think now you have lost it. Worst of all, you long to recover it, you long to rivet round you again the fetters of desire and sorrow. Many and many are they that come to me, crying for the sound or the touch of some beloved dead. Women calling across the abysses to their dead children, their lovers, their husbands; men clamouring for reunion with the women they have loved. This life of yours, too, here in the West, is filled with the cry of those who seek what they have lost. ‘Give us back our dead,’ they say; ‘let us touch them, hear them, speak to them again.’ In hopes of this evil miracle your churches are crowded, your charlatans grow rich, your Heaven finds believers. A place to meet the dead again! Weak and foolish, weak and foolish, not to know that love is sorrow, and that the dead we loved stand for the heaviest grief of our lives.’
‘But then,’ answered Kingston, ‘what is love? Why do we feel it, if it is such a weak and foolish passion?’
‘What is love? It is the ghost of your own dead lives recalled to life again. What are we but the agglomeration of innumerable previous personalities? All our feelings are dim echoes of a hundred million fragmentary feelings that have lived before in the innumerable dead, who are dust of the ages. What is it that gives us the keen joy that we take in some piece ofmusic, in some corner of landscape? It is the harmony of countless memories that are awakened in us out of all our dead existences by the sound we hear, or the sight we see. Otherwise, it could mean nothing to us, if this life were our first, if we had no previous existence to build on. All life is memory made incarnate. All love is a recognition.’
‘Then you are talking of reincarnation,’ answered Kingston; ‘what has love to do with that?’
‘Reincarnation?’ said the other. ‘There is no such thing. Reincarnation would mean that the same You goes on into body after body, like one wine poured on from bottle into bottle. Think for a moment what it is that is You. What is your true personality? Is it the thing that has fears and foolish desires and dislikes? Or is it the secret higher thing that stands behind the common everyday self of you? It is not that everyday You which is indestructible. The You of your bodily loves and hates dies with your body, should be wiped out utterly and vanish; it is the real You that continues through all the ages, until at last it is made one with the Radiance from which it sprang. Your wishes and fears must not live after you; none of the many details that have gone to the making of you survive, but only the total that they make up. On the slate of life your qualities are set down and added together. Then bodily death wipes out the items, and only the result of the addition remains. That is Karma—the character you build up for yourself through the ages. And yet, if you will, you can perpetuate in some degree the evanescent passions of your earthly life. That is what so many long to do. Immortality, to them, means an infinite prolongation of bodily and emotional enjoyment. They cannot sunder their notion of heaven from their idea of their own earthly personality. In heaven they think they must carry theirearthly tastes, their earthly limbs unaltered. They imagine that without the limbs and the earthly tastes they will somehow cease to be themselves. They believe that these limbs and those tastes are themselves, and they want to enjoy them unchanged through eternity. They do not understand that desire is sorrow, and that to carry on the passions and the pleasures of earthly life is also to carry on the agonies and disappointments of earthly life. But in perfect happiness there can be no pain. Perfect happiness has no part in the earthly passing personality of man, for in the corporeal pleasures of that personality pain is always close at the side of pleasure. The Real Self suffers no pain; only the phantom self it is that suffers; you, and all like you, are forsaking the true for the false. You are seeking to prolong the sorrow instead of taking the opportunity of release.’
‘But what release?’
‘Your chance is now with you; through many ages you had been firmly bound on the wheel of desire, loving from life to life with a fire of anguish that grew with feeding. For of all the phantom joys love is the greatest and the most delusive. Love is an accumulation of memories from bygone loves, increasing by indulgence, from life to life, until at last the burden of pain is too great to be borne. You, Kingston, in this present person of yours, have suffered the incarnation of a very ancient deadly love. How else can you account for the mystic rapture, the violent, inexplicable sense of recognition which makes the essence of a tyrannous love? It is soul crying suddenly out to a soul loved long since and lost. It is the meeting of two selves that have grown together through a myriad years, separated by the gulfs of bodily deaths, but always certain to meet again, drawn irresistibly together by the clamour of mutual desire.’
‘Ah,’ replied Kingston, ‘if only one could be so certain of that meeting again! But when, and where, and how?’
‘Unhappy question! You that have been freed are eager to enter again into bondage. If that bondage is the keenest of all earthly pleasure, yet recognise that it is the pleasure of the phantasmal bodily self. It has no part with the perfect knowledge, except in so far as it is divorced from the earthly self. And even in this world, though of all pleasures the keenest, it is also of all agonies the keenest. You would suffer the pains of hell, I know, to gain the joys of that fancied heaven. Wisdom and clear sight have not come to you yet. You must make yourself yet another hell of sorrow before you can hope to attain the great emancipation. As it is, you do not even desire emancipation. Emancipation sounds cheerless to you—lonely, sterile, monotonous. Yet some day, at some point on your pilgrimage, desire will so fade in you that you will be able to understand how it is that perfect peace knows nothing of monotony, and that the agonies of passion do not prove that its joys are real or holy or satisfactory.’
‘How do you mean—make my own hell?’
‘Hell is nothing more than the dominion of passion that we establish over our lives—of passion and all the hellish torments that passion engenders. We make our own hells by dwelling obstinately in the world of false desire. If we felt the only true desire, the desire of those things that are real, then there would at once be no more pain, and our state would be heaven. Desire is hell. And that hell we build and stoke and kindle for ourselves—go on kindling from life to life, in our fancy that the fire we endure contains the ultimate pleasure our souls can taste. It is no capricious Personality above that sends us anguishand misery. Everything we suffer follows automatically from some action of our own in this or some bygone phase that our marred memories can no longer recall. Here in the West you do not understand how this can be, though in your heart of hearts you know that it is. But in the older, wiser East men have learned to train their recollection until it is as easy to recall the sorrows of a bygone life as those of yesterday or the day before; for time is a thing that has no real existence in the infinite life of the soul. You, because of that old tie, knew the woman, and loved her and lost her. Because of that fire of false desire that you had fed in yourself for so many existences, you suffered anew the hell of your own making—the hell of loss and loneliness. But kill such false desires, and you kill the false miseries of this life that men think real. You stand at a point where you might strike upwards towards the heaven of peace; the curse of your love had nearly wrought out its completion, and passed away. But by nourishing as you do the fever of longing for the dead, you are binding yourself anew with the chains that were beginning to weaken and drop.’
‘I don’t want to hear all this,’ replied Kingston impatiently. ‘If you know so much, tell me when and where I shall be able to find what I have lost. Shall I find it in this life? Shall I know it when I have found it? Remember how it passed away from me. You seem to understand all that happened, so tell me whether the change will affect our knowledge of each other.’
‘In one tremendous moment the woman rose far above all the false desires in which she had bred herself. She gave her life for the truth. She sacrificed utterly that false self of hers which was the thing that your false self had so loved through the ages. And for her great merit it must be that she must reap great rewards,—notrewards apportioned by a personal providence, but rewards that spring naturally out of her action. She has shaken herself free of the links that bound her to you. The Buddha enwombed in every mortal Karma has torn away many of the veils that shrouded him in that woman’s heart. Because, in her last moment she loved the true better than the false, and followed rather the higher love that led upwards than the lower love which would have kept her at your side—therefore she is released. The streams are sundered at last on the rock of parting. That bondage of hers has passed away—weak and erring and desirous, perhaps, she still may be—faulty and human, but at least that one chain of desire which held her is snapped and broken utterly. You go hunting for her through all the fields of your earthly life, and she, in an instant, she was cured of all vain longings. Therefore between you there is a gulf fixed for ever. You, in the days of your meeting, will know her and desire her, but she will not know you; she will be free of you for ever, and your recognition will wake in her no answering recognition, and thus of her merit will be doubled your damnation.’
‘I’ll take the risk of that,’ cried Kingston, wanting to smile at these august fantasies; but the low, husky voice, the faint tremulous manner filled with age and mystery and wisdom compelled his reverent attention. ‘I don’t care whether she knowsmeor not when we meet again, so long as I knowher. The sundered streams must meet again somehow. As long as I feel that I have met her again, I can be perfectly happy. That is all I ask.’
‘The soul lies to itself,’ answered the old man sadly. ‘Festering sorrow you will have in this, and you know it. For all lust, whether of the body or the soul, is sorrow. It cannot be otherwise, for sorrow and lustare two words for the one great falsehood that pervades this visible world of phantoms.’
‘Tell me,’ interrupted Kingston, jesting uneasily to hide his earnestness, ‘as you have told me so much—can you tell me in what shape I shall find her, if find her I ever shall? Surely what she did will have brought her greater beauty than ever, if what you say is true, that our rewards are automatically developed out of our actions? As for knowing her, on your theory that all love is memory, of course I shall know her, whether she has gone beyond knowing me herself or not. I shall feel it in my blood when we meet again, overwhelmingly, fiercely, as I suppose I must have known her from the first, when she reappeared for a month or two in my life, twenty years ago. But can you say what form the result of her beautiful actions will take this time? Will she be a queen or a beggar?’ Kingston laughed, trying to lighten the impression of his eagerness. But the old man sighed.
‘Sorrow, thick and thick, are you calling down upon yourself,’ he said, ‘the bitterness of vain longing, doubled and redoubled. How can I tell you when and where you may meet again? Wander from magic incantation to incantation, strengthening your disappointment as you strengthen your longing. And—at the end, that meeting which shall be only on one side. Dread that reunion, dread that rediscovery of the lost. You will not find the lost again; you will find only the new, more beautiful thing into which her own beautiful action has transformed that which seemed lost. For merit plays its part in change, inward and outward. Through what endless trials had the holy lady Yasodhara to come before her high spotless Karma brought her at last to the side of the Blessed One Himself. Through all the ages she had lived on, ever higher and holier, before she couldattain the end. And why should that which wore a woman’s shape continue still a woman, in its glorification? It was the man’s courage that showed. Can you be certain that what she was is not now a man—a man, perhaps, weak and earthly, but, after all, a man, by virtue of that one instant in which all woman’s weaknesses died in her, and only the bravery held firm. Life is freer, bolder, wider for a man; should not the free, bold soul pass on into a more fitting frame, where its opportunities will be greater and its trammels fewer? But why look forward into the great darkness of desire? Her Karma may even yet have dreadful sorrows to work out, yet from one sorrow, at least, it is now free. But I had come to you to-night because, after all my many years of life and much questioning, it has come to me to see farther than many across the fields of life, and sometimes to hear voices that other ears are not opened to hear. So I heard the crying voice of your hunger growing fierce in its loneliness, and I saw its sorrow deepening down the road of the future, and it seemed to me that perhaps I might give you help in loosening the bonds that bind you to the wheel of false desire. But now I know once more, as all life has taught me, that it is given to none to help his neighbour. Heaven and Hell we make for ourselves, sometimes thinking Hell is Heaven, and Heaven Hell, and no man can unseal our eyes or divert our course. So you must go on your way, Kingston, and I on mine, neither seeing what the other sees, strangers speaking unintelligible tongues. And it will be long before you see what I have grown to see. And yet, in the distance of time, that day will come, and you will be healed of all your sorrows. But now, in this life of yours, for a test and a hell and a torment will be the gratification of your longing when it comes. As a trial and a condemnation of you and yours will itcome, suddenly, with disaster and despair, and the possessing of it will bring an anguish bitterer than any that has gone before, for that is the unchanging law of Desire. So I have brought you my message and my vain warning. The force of your craving will bring about its own accomplishment, as, sooner or later, all longing must bring about its accomplishment, and, at the same time, its penalty. For a terrible moment you will see your wish made flesh again, then all will pass away into darkness, and your last state, through your own action, will be worse than the first.’
Kingston might, in saner circumstances, have smiled at denunciations so fantastic. But the little old man, so quiet yet so earnest, had a strange inexplicable dominance. He might not be believed, but he must at any rate be respected. In all he said there was a deep passion of earnestness, wistful and solemn, that gave the wizened little figure in the outrageous European clothes something of the prophet’s tragic grandeur. Now, his mission being discharged, the visitor arose to start once more on his way. Kingston, in the feeling that he had no real part in this earthly world, could make no effort to detain him. Nor would any effort have succeeded. As he had come, abruptly, unannounced, so he would go, abruptly, without mitigating gradation of farewells.
Gently he gave his hand to Kingston.
‘Very far apart are we two,’ he said, with a whimsical smile of his dried lips. ‘We speak in different languages, across a barrier of worlds. Yet one day we shall draw together, and our hearts be made kin again. And now I must go. Say good-bye for me to your wife. Out of our passions we make whips for our own backs, and there are other passions besides that of love for others. She too, your wife, must pay the penalty that she has appointed for herself, and outof her fancied strength shall come the great weakness that shall impose on her, and you, and all, that punishment which wisdom would have helped you to avoid. None is good but he who does not know it.’
Kingston was not paying close attention. His mind was fixed on the hope thus made so definite, if perilous, of reunion with Isabel. He foresaw a second meeting, a second recognition, even though it might be one-sided. In the rapture of his hope he laughed at risks, and would face all the vague punishments foretold by the old man without a moment’s fear or hesitation, for the chance of setting eyes again, for however short a time, on the love that he had lost. In that hour the fires of youth flamed high in his heart, and he cared nothing what bitter waters might quench them once more in the end. In a dream he escorted the old man to the door, and watched him pass gently away into the void from which he had so suddenly emerged. Into the crowd of moving figures in the street the old man passed, and melted like a phantom. It was with almost the feeling of having been asleep and strangely dreamed that Kingston went back to the drawing-room, and found himself once more in the prosaic calm world where Gundred sat in a perpetual atmosphere of duty and terrestrial activities. When she returned to her husband with many questions as to the Bishop’s message, plans, and present whereabouts, Kingston could almost have believed that the last hour had been wiped out of his life, or, rather, had never formed a part of it. Her arrival made the whole episode so remote and so fantastic to look back upon that he could scarcely feel that it had really occurred at all. She was so practical, so busy, so matter-of-fact; visions and abstractions could not breathe in her neighbourhood, grew faint, vague, unreal, until the earthly life inwhich she moved appeared to be the only one with which sensible people could ever have to reckon. She had the not uncommon gift of making the invisible seem non-existent.