V
I said suddenly, "The joy of this place is not the security of it, butthe fact that one has not to think about security. I am not afraid ofanything that may happen, and there is no weariness of thought. One doesnot 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 gratefulto the body for many pleasant things it gave me--breathing the air,feeling the sun, eating and drinking, games and exercise, and thestrange thing one called love."
"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or toappear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; butof course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of thehappiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that onedesired, but the real thing behind it; even the purest thing of all, thesight and contact of one whom one loved, let us say, with no sensualpassion at all, but with a perfectly pure love; what a torment thatwas--desiring something which one could not get, the real fusion offeeling 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 anddrugged by the body? I don't feel that I am losing anything by losingthe body."
"No, not losing," said Amroth, "but, happy though you are, you are notgaining things as fast now--it is your time of rest and refreshment--butwe shall go back, both of us, to the other life again, when the timecomes: and the point is this, that we have got to win the best thingsthrough trouble and struggle."
"But even so," I said, "there are many things I do not understand--thechild that opens its eyes upon the world and closes them again; theyoung child that suffers and dies, just when it is the darling of thehome; and at the other end of the scale, the helpless, fractiousinvalid, 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 andeverything, past feeling and hoping and thinking--or, worst of all, thepeople with diseased minds, whose pain makes them suspicious andmalignant. What is the meaning of all this pain, which seems to dopeople nothing but harm, and makes them a burden to themselves andothers too?"
"Oh," said he, "it is difficult enough; but you must remember that weare all bound up with the hearts and lives of others; the child thatdies in its helplessness has a meaning for its parents; the child thatlives long enough to be the light of its home, that has a significancedeep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, tolighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surelyfor all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives,why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportionso wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we arebound in the body--some few of us do, and many of us say that we do. Butwe do not realise that the little life is but one in a great chain oflives, that each spirit lives many times, over and over. There is nosuch thing as waste or sacrifice of life. The life is meant to do justwhat it does, no more and no less; bound in the body, it all seems solong or so short, so complete or so incomplete; but now and here we cansee that the whole thing is so endless, so immense, that we think nomore of entering life, say, for a few days, or entering it for ninetyyears, than we should think of counting one or ninety water-drops in theriver that pours in a cataract over the lip of the rocks. Where we dolose, in life, is in not taking the particular experience, be it smallor great, to heart. We try to forget things, to put them out of ourminds, to banish them. Of course it is very hard to do otherwise, in abody so finite, tossed and whirled in a stream so infinite; and thus weare happiest if we can live very simply and quietly, not straining tomultiply our uneasy activities, but just getting the most and the bestout of the elements of life as they come to us. As we get older inspirit, we do that naturally; the things that men call ambitions andschemes are the signs of immaturity; and when we grow older, those slipoff us and concern us no more; while the real vitality of feeling andemotion runs ever more clear and strong."
"But," I said, "can one revive the old lives at will? Can one look backinto the long range of previous lives? Is that permitted?"
"Yes, of course it is permitted," said Amroth, smiling; "there are norules here; but one does not care to do it overmuch. One is just glad itis all done, and that one has learnt the lesson. Look back if youlike--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 goingaway somewhere; there were other huts at hand; there was a fire, in theside of a mound, where some women seemed to be cooking something andwrangling over it; the smoke went up into the still air. A child cameout of the hut, and ran to me. I bent down and kissed it, and it clungto me. I was sorry, in a dim way, to be going out--for I saw otherfigures armed too, standing about the clearing. There was to be fightingthat 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 havebeen I.
"It is not very nice," said Amroth with a smile; "one does not care torevive that! You were young then, and had much before you."
Another picture flashed into the mind. Was it true? I was a woman, itseemed, looking out of a window on the street in a town with high, darkhouses, strongly built of stone: there was a towered gate at a littledistance, with some figures drawing up sacks with a pulley to a door inthe gate. A man came up behind me, pulled me roughly back, and spokeangrily; I answered him fiercely and shrilly. The room I was in seemedto be a shop or store; there were barrels of wine, and bags of corn. Ifelt that I was busy and anxious--it was not a pleasant retrospect.
"Yet you were better then," said Amroth "you thought little of yourdrudgery, and much of your children."
Yes, I had had children, I saw. Their names and appearance floatedbefore me. I had loved them tenderly. Had they passed out of my life? Ifelt bewildered.
Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again. "No, you came near tosome of them again. Do you not remember another life in which you loveda friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness? He hadbeen 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 wrongthing, for whom I had felt a curious and unreasonable responsibility. Ihad always tried to explain him to other people, to justify him; and hehad turned to me fop help and companionship in a singular way. I sawmyself 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 cannotbe as if we had never loved them."
"No, indeed," said Amroth, "they are all there or here; but there liesone of the great mysteries which we cannot yet attain to. We shall beall brought together some time, closely and perfectly; but even now, inthe world of matter, the spirit half remembers; and when one isstrangely and lovingly drawn to another soul, when that love is not ofthe body, and has nothing of passion in it, then it is some closeancient tie reasserting itself. Do you not know how old and remote someof our friendships seemed--so much older and larger than could beaccounted for by the brief days of companionship? That strange hungerfor the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what hasbeen. Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you willmove 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 regainsthe spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours."
"Can I revisit," I said, "the scene of my last life--see and know whatthose I loved are doing and feeling?"
"Not yet
," said Amroth; "that would not profit either you or them. Thesorrow 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, howmuch of time has passed already since you came here--it seems to youlike yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet lossand sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of thefinest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if wehere could make our presence known at once to the friends we leavebehind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that itsvirtue lies."
"Yes," I said, "I do not desire to return. This is all too wonderful. Itis the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me. I donot desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think ofit, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body wasfaint and weary. The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and lovedand exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because onewas content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were. It wasthe longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence wasthe shame."