All-Story Weekly/Volume 98/Number 3/Fires Rekindled/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
THE RENDING OF THE VEIL.
AN unexpected message from Joan, who has arrived back in London with Philip; the armistice is concluded; she and her husband are proposing to visit America, and she asks me to come to them to-morrow—they wish me to go with them.
I feel no present inclination to do so. It is true that I have no intention of further pursuing the investigation for which I came here. Like Saul, who went forth inquest of his father's asses, I have found a kingdom—a kingdom of spiritual revelation, the discovery of which has worked changes in me that are deep-lying, but which I believe have not yet arrived at a satisfactory conclusion—something, I don't know what, still awaits me. This may be a baseless assumption, but I shall remain here until it is either exposed as such, or some alternative is confirmed. However, I will call on the Dalrymples to-morrow. It will be easy to excuse my refusal of their invitation.
I have just lighted my lamp, and my watch tells me that two hours have passed since I wrote the preceding passage. At this time of year London daylight is brief. But those two hours have sufficed me to complete the longest journey mortal man can undertake, and return to the place whence he set forth. In Homer's story, the touch of Athene causes Ulysses to recover the youth that he had lost many years before, and the youthful love that was its inspiration.
I can read into that episode a meaning truer and broader than any I had perceived in it hitherto. The transformation is not magical, but may take place in the life of the humblest. It may be suggested in the statement that love and beauty are not subject to the accidents of time, but, in measure as their temporal manifestation alters and decays, these deathless qualities retire into their own purer sphere, where they shine and bless immortally.
The event that has just happened is as natural and simple as the genesis of flower from seed—miraculous only as any function of nature involves miracle, that is, by the concealment behind the screen of cause-and-effect of the intrinsic, infinite marvel. I cannot term it unexpected, because, at the moment of its arrival, I recognized it as inevitable—the perfect consummation of an approach subtly heralded from the beginning. Nothing is changed, except that the horizon which was confined to a span, now finds its arc sweeping beyond the galaxy. And as no one's character can be understood until death places the episodes of his life in their right light and proportions, so the nature of spirit remains enigmatic until the riddle of death is solved.
The state of which I have just had experience has been succeeded by another—the "every-day" state of a man in possession of his proper senses, and subjected to his customary limitations. The difference between the two, immense though it be, evades description, because it is a difference not of scene but of quality. This homely little apartment of mine, its furnishings and trivial characteristics, didn't withdraw from sight and touch; they remained as matter-of-course and obvious as they do now. But something additional, which has now ceased to manifest itself, became manifest, and in its due season will return, obeying the rhythmic law of its order.
I know it will never be lost to me, because it is in union with my own being—as would the turning round of a Greek vase by turns reveal and withdraw a figure sculptured upon it. I cannot see and touch, now, what was sensible to me a few minutes ago; this argues no change in the object, but only in my faculty of apprehending it. My vision cannot penetrate the marble vase, nor can it—save in its periods of exaltation—pass through the veil between physical and spiritual.
I set down these obvious reflections merely as a sop to reason; but reason, as I have said before, is superseded by the certainties of the soul. These are on a superior plane, which corresponds with the lower as does wisdom with light; but we cannot demonstrate from one to the other, any more than we can prove the mind in terms of the body—though the latter be nevertheless but the cast, in matter, of the former.
The bodily senses are the debatable ground—the no-man's land—between the two camps. It is conceivable that they are designed to function on both sides—that man, in his full estate, should be as freely conscious of spiritual as of physical phenomena. But we have either lost, or have not yet attained that double faculty: and in consequence of this defect we are prone to regard the radii of our senses as determining the limits of creation. It would rather seem that most matters of true importance lie beyond it.
I linger at the threshold of what I have to tell like a child that covers his eyes with his hands, lest the too-much beauty of the Christmas tree overpower him!
When the dusk made me lay aside my pen, I fell into a fit of pleasant musing in this roomy old chair. The singular incidents of the preceding months passed before me, from that first shock of what Joan called the "been-here-before feeling," to the barrister's memoranda of this morning. Discoveries in the realm of material facts had, all along, fitted in with disclosures, impressions, suggestions from the spiritual region, in a sympathetic cooperation, like the systole and diastole of the heart. It was as if matter and spirit had alternately taken me by the hand, as it were, and both had led me toward the same goal. But the goal itself—what was it?
Aline, I knew, had met me at my first coming here, and had ever since been near or remote, probably according to the posture of my own mind, though upon the whole each approach had been closer than the last. First, a vague impression, then, an imagination, not distinctly defined, later, a memory as of some one actually seen and known: later yet, a vivid and poignant vision, which had caught my breath and wrung my heart. I had seemed to hold her lifeless body in my arms. But not even then had I been led into confounding an event of the past with the living present. There had been no hallucination.
As Aline had advanced toward me on the one hand, Lionel Heathcote had come forward on the other. My flesh and bones had progressively become the vehicle of his manifestation. In the narrative that he had, through me, addressed to Aline, his possession of me had been, for the time, practically complete. But during that time, I—what I must call myself was unconscious of his action—I was in the condition known as trance. But during that brief and terrible scene at the theater there had been no question of distinguishing between him and me; and whether I should say that I was he, or that he was I, is irrelevant, since we were one and the same—or, to come yet closer to what seems to be the truth, my memory had become identified with his.
But what can be predicated of a person whose memory is that of another? True, I also have what I must call a memory of my own—a connected series of personal events from my early childhood to the present. There is no confusion between this memory and that of a hundred years ago. The only interpretation appears to be, that the one is the continuation of the other! And that would mean, in plain words, that Lionel Heathcote, after the natural termination of his own proper span of existence, was once more alive in me, and was intent upon establishing a conscious and full communion with the spirit of the woman he had loved and lost in the London of a century since!
This is as far as I can go toward placating uneasy reason. It is all in vain, and it does not really concern me. I am content with the revealed truth.
As I sat quietly in the dusk, I felt all at once, with a delicious tremor of the heart, that Aline was in the room. If I turned my head a little to the right, I should see her. A very little would suffice, only that I feared to make even the slightest movement, lest it cause her to vanish. I had had impressions somewhat similar before, and they had failed to develop. This influence, however, was more powerful than any preceding one. It was that of her substantial, breathing propinquity—something that might be touched and heard as well as seen; and indeed the faint fragrance always associated with her presence was clearly perceptible. She was there!
Faith is the key of miracle. "Have faith!" I said to myself.
I turned my head at last, and looked steadily in the direction where I felt her to be.
The dusk had become darkness there, but, to my unspeakable joy, I at once discerned the figure that I sought. It was she! She wore a flowing negligee of dark blue silk, with lace upon it, and a wide sash encircled her body just below the breasts; her arms and neck were bare, and, with her face, seemed warmly and softly luminous. Her hair was wound turban-wise about her head, one lock hanging down in a thick coil in front of her left shoulder. Her eyes, in shadow, rested upon me with a speaking intentness, as if awaiting a signal of recognition. There was a beautiful lightness in her pose, not as if she were unsubstantial, but were filled, like the upgush of a fountain, with a wonderful vigor of life.
At moments, however, she seemed to recede or to become dimmer. I recognized that these alternations accorded with the strength of my faith. Thereupon, with an indrawing of breath, I summoned into my gaze all the longing of my spirit. "Come—come! I believe—I believe!"
She responded; she was nearer; I caught the sparkle in her eyes, and her well-remembered smile trembled upon her lips. I cannot convey the emotion which her drawing near created in me—a vibrating triumph of the heart, like the shivering of sunlight on the ripples of a brook. The look which we now exchanged recalled those ineffable privacies of love when earthly hindrances fall away, and we pass beyond the veil to intimacies which mortality is powerless to recover. In such periods there is an upsurging of the soul, and love clothes itself with a body competent to fulfil its celestial aspirations. It is, doubtless, the body which will invest it in the kingdom of love, hereafter.
She was within arm's reach; my joy was tinged with awe as I realized the mystery that impended. She put forth her hand, and I felt her finger-tips pass down my face, and then her warm palm against mine. My arms opened, and her body entered into them and tenderly nestled itself up to me, with the lover's yearning to be one flesh. Now the baby-smoothness of her cheek touched mine, and rubbed against it with the childlike movement that I knew so well. Presently, slightly shifting her position, she lifted her head. I was conscious of the sweetness of her breath, and then she slowly set her parted lips on mine. The hazel darkness of her eyes passed into me under her half closed lids, in the dream-gaze that deepens joy into seriousness. And there followed an interval when the soul, too potent for further companionship with the body, withdrew into its invisible chambers, and performed there its holy rites.
Gradually we awoke to a mitigated intercourse.
"Lover of mine, it has been permitted us at last," she said. "We know and feel each other. Your Aline could never become herself till she was yours."
"Aline, soul of my heart! In what underground caves have I been groping, fearing to know what I could not understand? Let me never go back there!"
She gave a little laugh—such a laugh as I used to liken to the bubbling of golden wine from a flagon of silver, so soft was it, so full of sumptuous mirth.
"Must Lionel still see before he believes?" she asked.
"Love, you are in my arms!" I now said. "The weight and litheness of your body—I feel it! I breathe you! I shall never doubt any more!"
"I'll tell you a secret," she said, her whisper thrilling at my ear: "'Tis an old story that seeing is believing; but remember this—that belief is sight!"
"I have learned it! But, Aline, now that I have you again, I'll never let you go!"
A loving little cry, like a bird-note, broke from her as my arms tightened strongly about her. When she next spoke, she used the tender Quaker form of speech that we had been wont to use in our love-talks:
"Doesn't thee know that thee and I are immortal?"
But that recalled to me the gulf between us.
"That is true of thee; but I am still on the other side!" I answered.
"Thee does not know very much!" she retorted playfully and lovingly. "That thee is in thy mortal body does not change thee; and I tell thee again that this is immortality; but immortality is the flood-tide, which ebbs and flows like the sea, but after ebbing, always flows again; the flood-tide of life, beloved, whether the mortal body be with us or no!"
I wondered at this, and asked:
"Can there be immortality on earth?i—or anything in heaven but immortality?"
She nestled closer, and her bosom pressed to mine, so that I felt the beating of her heart, which throbbed with a low, continuous speech, reiterating love—nothing but love, yet conveying meanings and communings such as no speech can utter or mind conceive, though echoes of it may be divined in the varying intonations of an infant's murmur, between rest and waking. Between her soul and mine there was a mutual interflowing, as of sunlit oceans.
This was the intercourse of spirit with spirit. Our mortal utterance in a thing of space and time, one word painfully succeeding another, and step by step, like the building of a pyramid, constructing the thought or vision we would impart. But the speech of spirits is immediate revelation, as when, if a curtain be lifted, the whole breadth and depth of the landscape is revealed. The ear, in such interchanges, acquires the sovereign gift of the eye, and mind keeps pace with mind.
Thus Aline and I, in our dear, long-delayed embrace, lived again together scenes and thoughts and emotions of the past. Through it all we could now recognize the movement of a tender power that knows the end from the beginning and never ceases to incline the traveler thither—as a river gleaming through mountain mazes, and sometimes threading underground caverns, fails not to lead the wanderer at last to the ocean. In the passages that had seemed most fearful, that eternal current still flowed on. We had gone astray; we had suffered purgations; but we were safe at last.
"But our union is not yet complete, dearest," I said. "Why is your spirit free, and mine still obstructed by the flesh? When shall I be fully delivered?"
"I know only that the obstruction will vanish by and by," she replied, smiling on me. "Such joy as ours needs, at first, its intervals; our moments of meeting are our immortality, which flows and ebbs and flows again; but at last, perhaps, they will be endless moments. We were impatient before; we can be patient now! The penalty for the laws we broke has been suffered; thee knows how bitter it was; but it has passed, the hurt is healed, and soon there will be no more partings."
She stirred in my arms, as a bird about to take flight.
"But thee will come back to me?" I asked in fear.
"We do not really part," she said, touching my lips with hers. "Though I seem to go, thee will know that I am still here. Love is presence!"
She pressed her sweet hands over my eyes, as, in our old times, she would sometimes playfully do. After a while I no longer felt their pressure. I sat in darkness: but I knew—and know—that I am not alone.
Note—This volume of my journal contains no further entries.
(The end.)