Peter Ibbetson Part 39

For some day, when all is found out that can be found out on earth, and made the common property of all (or even before that), the great man will perhaps arise and make the great guess that is to set us all free, here and hereafter. Who knows?

I feel this splendid guesser will be some inspired musician of the future, as simple as a little child in all things but his knowledge of the power of sound; but even little children will have learned much in those days. He will want new notes and find them--new notes between the black and white keys. He will go blind like Milton and Homer, and deaf like Beethoven; and then, all in the stillness and the dark, all in the depths of his forlorn and lonely soul, he will make his best music, and out of the endless mazes of its counterpoint he will evolve a secret, as we did from the "Chant du Triste Commensal," but it will be a greater secret than ours. Others will have been very near this hidden treasure; but he will happen right _on_ it, and unearth it, and bring it to light.

I think I see him sitting at the key-board, so familiar of old to the feel of his consummate fingers; painfully dictating his score to some most patient and devoted friend--mother, sister, daughter, wife--that score that he will never see or hear.

What a stammerer! Not only blind and deaf, but _mad_--mad in the world's eyes, for fifty, a hundred, a thousand years. Time is nothing; but that score will survive....

He will die of it, of course; and when he dies and comes to us, there will be joy from here to Sirius, and beyond.

And one day they will find out on earth that he was only deaf and blind--not mad at all. They will hear and _understand_--they will know that he saw and heard as none had ever heard or seen before!

For 'as we sow we reap'; that is a true saying, and all the sowing is done here on earth, and the reaping beyond. Man is a grub; his dead clay, as he lies coffined in his grave, is the left-off coc.o.o.n he has spun for himself during his earthly life, to burst open and soar from with all his memories about him, even his lost ones. Like the dragon-fly, the b.u.t.terfly, the moth ... and when _they_ die it is the same, and the same with a blade of gra.s.s. We are all, _tous tant que nous sommes_, little bags of remembrance that never dies; that's what we're _for_. But we can only bring with us to the common stock what we've got. As Pere Francois used to say, 'La plus belle fille au monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a.'

Besides all this I am your earthly wife, Gogo--your loving, faithful, devoted wife, and I wish it to be known.

And then at last, in the fulness of time--a very few years--ah, then----

"Once more shall Neuha lead her Torquil by the hand."

"Oh, Mary!" I cried, "shall we be transcendently happy again? As happy as we were--_happier_ even?"

Ah, Gogo, is a man happier than a mouse, or a mouse than a turnip, or a turnip than a lump of chalk? But what man would be a mouse or a turnip, or _vice versa_? What turnip would be a lump--of anything but itself? Are two people happier than one? You and I, yes; because we _are_ one; but who else? It is one and all. Happiness is like time and s.p.a.ce--we make and measure it ourselves; it is a fancy--as big, as little, as you please; just a thing of contrasts and comparisons, like health or strength or beauty or any other good--that wouldn't even be noticed but for sad personal experience of its opposite!--or its greater!

"I have forgotten all I know but this, which is for you and me: we are inseparable forever. Be sure we shall not want to go back again for a moment."

"And is there no punishment or reward?"

Oh, there again! What a detail! Poor little naughty perverse midges--who were _born_ so--and _can't_ keep straight! poor little exemplary midges who couldn't go wrong if they tried! Is it worth while?

Isn't it enough for either punishment or reward that the secrets of all midges' hearts shall be revealed, and for all other midges to see?

Think of it!

There are battles to be fought and races to be won, but no longer against '_each other_.' And strength and swiftness to win them; but no longer any strong and swift. There is weakness and cowardice, but no longer any cowards or weaklings. The good and the bad and the worst and the best--it is all mixed up. But the good comes to the top; the bad goes to the bottom--it is precipitated, as papa used to say. It is not an agreeable sediment, with its once useful cruelty at the lowest bottom of all--out of sight, out of mind--all but forgotten. _C'est deja le ciel_.

"And the goal? The cause, the whither, and the why of it all? Ah!

Gogo--as inscrutable, as unthinkable as ever, till the great guesser comes! At least so it seems to me, speaking as a fool, out of the depths of my poor ignorance; for I am a new arrival, and a complete outsider, with my chain and locket, waiting for you.

"I have only picked up a few grains of sand on the sh.o.r.e of that sea--a few little sh.e.l.ls, and I can't even show you what they are like. I see that it is no good even talking of it, alas! And I had promised myself _so_ much.

"Oh! how my earthly education was neglected, and yours! and how I feel it now, with so much to say in words, mere words! Why, to tell you in words the little I can see, the very little--so that you could understand--would require that each of us should be the greatest poet and the greatest mathematician that ever were, rolled into one! How I pity you, Gogo--with your untrained, unskilled, innocent pen, poor scribe! having to write all this down--for you _must_--and do your poor little best, as I have done mine in telling you! You must let the heart speak, and not mind style or manner! Write _any_ how! write for the greatest need and the greatest number.

"But do just try and see this, dearest, and make the best of it you can: as far as _I_ can make it out, everything everywhere seems to be an ever-deepening, ever-broadening stream that makes with inconceivable velocity for its own proper level, WHERE PERFECTION IS! ... and ever gets nearer and nearer, and never finds it, and fortunately never will!

"Only that, unlike an earthly stream, and more like a fresh flowing tide up an endless, boundless, sh.o.r.eless creek (if you can imagine that), the level it seeks is immeasurably higher than its source. And everywhere in it is Life, Life, Life! ever renewing and doubling itself, and ever swelling that mighty river which has no banks!

"And everywhere in it like begets like, _plus_ a little better or a little worse; and the little worse finds its way into some backwater and sticks there, and finally goes to the bottom, and n.o.body cares. And the little better goes on bettering and bettering--not all man's folly or perverseness can hinder _that_, nor make that headlong torrent stay, or ebb, or roll backward for a moment--_c'est plus fort que nous_! ... The record goes on beating itself, the high-water-mark gets higher and higher till the highest on earth is reached that can be--and then, I suppose, the earth grows cold and the sun goes out--to be broken up into bits, and used all over again, perhaps! And betterness flies to warmer climes and higher systems, to better itself still! And so on, from better to better, from higher to higher, from warmer to warmer, and bigger to bigger--for ever and ever and ever!

"But the final superlative of all, absolute all--goodness and all-highness, absolute all-wisdom, absolute omnipotence, beyond which there neither is nor can be anything more, will never be reached at all--since there are no such things; they are abstractions; besides which, attainment means rest, and rest stagnation, and stagnation an end of all! And there is no end, and never can be--no end to Time and all the things that are done in it--no end to s.p.a.ce and all the things that fill it, or all would come together in a heap and smash up in the middle--and there _is_ no middle!--no end, no beginning, no middle! _no middle_, Gogo! think of _that_! it is the most inconceivable thing of all!!!

"So who shall say where Shakespeare and you and I come in--tiny links in an endless chain, so tiny that even Shakespeare is no bigger than we!

And just a little way behind us, those little wriggling transparent things, all stomach, that we descend from; and far ahead of ourselves, but in the direct line of a long descent from _us_, an ever-growing conscious Power, so strong, so glad, so simple, so wise, so mild, and so beneficent, that what can we do, even now, but fall on our knees with our foreheads in the dust, and our hearts brimful of wonder, hope, and love, and tender shivering awe; and worship as a yet unborn, barely conceived, and scarce begotten _Child_--that which we have always been taught to worship as a _Father_--That which is not now, but _is_ to be--That which we shall all share in and be part and parcel of in the dim future--That which is slowly, surely, painfully weaving Itself out of us and the likes of us all through the limitless Universe, and Whose coming we can but faintly foretell by the casting of its shadow on our own slowly, surely, painfully awakening souls!"

Then she went on to speak of earthly things, and ask questions in her old practical way. First of my bodily health, with the tenderest solicitude and the wisest advice--as a mother to a son. She even insisted on listening to my heart, like a doctor.

Then she spoke at great length of the charities in which she had been interested, and gave me many directions which I was to write, as coming from myself, to certain people whose names and addresses she impressed upon me with great care.

I have done as she wished, and most of these directions have been followed to the letter, with no little wonder on the world's part (as the world well knows) that such sagacious and useful reforms should have originated with the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum.

At last the time came for us to part. She foresaw that I should have to wake in a few minutes, and said, rising----

"And now, Gogo, the best beloved that ever was on earth, take me once more in your dear arms, and kiss me good-bye for a little while--_auf wiedersehen_. Come here to rest and think and remember when your body sleeps. My spirit will always be here with you. I may even be able to come back again myself--just this poor husk of me--hardly more to look at than a bundle of old clothes; but yet a world made up of love for _you_. Good-bye, good-bye, dearest and best. Time is nothing, but I shall count the hours. Good-bye...."

Even as she strained me to her breast I awoke.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "GOOD-BYE"]

I awoke, and knew that the dread black shadow of melancholia had pa.s.sed away from me like a hideous nightmare--like a long and horrible winter.

My heart was full of the sunshine of spring--the gladness of awaking to a new life.

I smiled at my night attendant, who stared back at me in astonishment, and exclaimed----

"Why, sir, blest if you ain't a new man altogether. There, now!"

I wrung his hand, and thanked him for all his past patience, kindness, and forbearance with such effusion that his eyes had tears in them. I had not spoken for weeks, and he heard my voice for the first time.

That day, also, without any preamble or explanation, I gave the doctor and the chaplain and the governor my word of honor that I would not attempt my life again, or any one else's, and was believed and trusted on the spot; and they unstrapped me.

I was never so touched in my life.