It was unspeakably moving — this mother willing to serve with anguish the purpose of advancing souls. Yet this was all of Today. It was not the thing he sought. The general purpose must stand aside for the particular. There was an error to be set right first. She had to seek its origin among the ages infinitely far away. The guidance Julius sought lay in the long ago. But the safety of the little unborn body troubled him, it seemed.
“As yet,” she murmured, “none. The little body of the boy is empty... though besieged.”
“By whom besieged?” he asked more loudly. “Who hinders?”
The little body of the boy! And it was then a further change came suddenly, both in her face and voice, and in the voice of Julius too.
That larger expression of some forgotten grandeur passed into her features, and she half sat up in the chair; there was a stiffening of the frame; resistance, power, an attitude of authority, replaced the former limpness. The moment was, for me, electrifying. Ice and fire moved upon my skin.
She opened her lips to speak, but no words were audible.
“Look close — and tell me,” came from Julius gravely.
She made an effort, then shrank back a little, this time raising one arm as though to protect herself from something coming, then sharply dropping it again over the heart and body.
“I cannot see,” she murmured, slightly frowning; “they stand so close and... are... so splendid. They are too great... to see.”
“Who — what — are they?” he insisted. He took her hand in his. I saw her smile.
The simple words were marvellously impressive. Depths of untold memory stirred within me as I heard.
“Powers... we knew... so long ago.”
Some ancient thing in me opened an eye and saw. The Powers we evoked came seeking an entrance, brought nearer by our invitation. They came from the silent valley; they were close about the building. But only through a human channel could they emerge from the spheres where they belonged.
“Describe them, and pass on,” I heard Julius say, and there came a pause then that I thought would never end. The look of power rolled back upon her face. She spoke with joy, with a kind of happiness as though she welcomed them.
“They rush and shine.... They flood the distance like a sea, and yet stand close against my heart and blood. They are clothed in wind and fire. I see the diadems of flame ascending and descending. Their breath is all the winds. There is such roaring. I see mountains of wind and fire... advancing... nearer... nearer.... We used them — we invited... long, long ago.... And so they... come again about us....”
His following command appalled me:
“Keep them back. You must protect the vacant body from invasion.”
And then he added in tones that seemed to make the very air vibrate, although the voice but whispered, “You must direct them — towards me.”
He moved to a new position, so that we formed a triangle again. Dimly at the time I understood. The circle signified the union which, having received, enclosed the mighty forces. Only it enclosed too much; the danger of misdirection had appeared. The triangle, her body forming the apex towards the open night, aimed at controlling the immense arrival by lessening the entry. Another thing stood out, too, with crystal clearness — at the time: the elemental Powers sought the easiest channel, the channel of least resistance, the body still unoccupied: whereas Julius offered — himself. The risk must be his and his alone. There was — in those few steps he took across the dim-lit room — a sense of tremendous, if sinister, drama that swept my heart with both tenderness and terror. The significance of his changed position was staggering.
I watched the sleeper closely. The lips grew more compressed, and the fingers of both hands clenched themselves upon the dark dress on her lap. I saw the muscles of the altering face contract with effort; the whole framework of the body became more rigid. Then, after several minutes, followed a gradual relaxation, as she sank back again into her original position.
“They retire...” she murmured with a sigh. “They retire... into darkness a little. But they still... wait and hover. I hear the rush of their great passing.... I see the distant shine of fire... still.”
“And the souls?” he asked gently, “do they now return?”
She lowered her head as with a gesture of relief.
“They are crowding, crowding. I see them as an endless flight of birds....” She held out her arms, then shrank back sharply. An expression I could not interpret flashed across the face. Behind a veil, it seemed. And the stern voice of Julius broke in upon the arrested action:
“Invite them by your will. Draw to you by desire and love one eager soul. The little vacant body must be occupied, so that the Mighty Ones, returning, shall find it thus impossible of entry.”
It was a command; it was also a precaution; for if the body of the child were left open it would inevitably attract the invading Powers from — himself. I watched her very closely then. I saw her again stretch out her arms and hands, then once again — draw sharply back. But this time I understood the expression on the quivering face. The veil had lifted.
By what means this was clear to me, yet hidden from Julius, I cannot say. Perhaps the ineradicable love that she and I bore for one another in that long-forgotten time supplied the clue. But of this I am certain — that she disobeyed him. She left the little waiting body as it was, empty, untenanted. Life — a soul returning to rebirth — was not conceived and did not enter in. The reason, moreover, was also clear to me in that amazing moment of her choice: she divined his risk of failure, she wished to save him, she left open the channel of least resistance of set purpose — the unborn body. For a love known here and now, she sacrificed a love as yet unborn. If Julius failed, at least he would not now be destroyed; there would be another channel ready.
That thus she thought, intended, I felt convinced. If her mistake was fraught with more danger than she knew, my lips were yet somehow sealed. Our deeper, ancient bond gave me the clue that to Julius was not offered, but no words came from me to enlighten him. It seemed beyond my power; I should have broken faith with her, a faith unbelievably precious to me.
For a long time, then, there was silence in the little room, while LeVallon continued to make slow passes as before. The anguish left her face, drowned wholly in the grander expression that she wore. She breathed deeply, regularly, without effort, the head sunk forward a little on the breast. The rustle of his coat as his arm went to and fro, and the creaking of the wicker chair were all I heard. Then, presently, Julius turned to me with a low whisper I can hear to this very day. “I, and I alone,” he said, “am the rightful channel. I have waited long.” He added more that I have forgotten; I caught something about “all the aspects being favourable,” and that he felt confidence, sure that he would not fail.
“You will not,” I interrupted passionately, “you dare not fail....” And then speech suddenly broke down in me, and some dark shadow seemed to fall upon my senses so that I neither heard nor saw nor felt anything for a period I cannot state.
An interval there certainly was, and of some considerable length probably, for when I came to myself again there was change accomplished, though a change I could not properly estimate. His voice filled the room, addressing the sleeper as before, yet in a way that told me there had been progress accomplished while I had been unconscious.
“Deeper yet,” I heard, “pass down deeper yet, pass back across a hundred intervening lives to that far-off time and place when first — first — we called Them forth. Sink down into your inmost being and remember!”
And in her immediate answer there was a curious faintness as of distance: “It is... so... far away... so far beyond...”
“Beyond what?” he asked, the expression of “Other Places” deepening upon his face.
Her forehead wrinkled in a passing frown. “Beyond this earth,” she murmured, as though her closed eyes saw within. “Oh, oh, it hurts. The heat is awful... the light... the tremendous wind
s... they blind, they tear me... I” And she stopped abruptly.
“Forget the pain,” he said; “it is already gone.” And instantly the tension of her face relaxed. She drew a sigh of deep relief. Before I could prevent it, my own voice sounded: “When we were nearer to the sun!”
She made no reply. He took my hand across the table and laid it on her own. “She cannot hear your voice,” he said, “unless you touch us. She is too far away. She does not even know that you are here beside me. You ‘ of Today she has forgotten, and the you of that long ago she has not yet found.”
“You speak with someone — but with whom?” she asked at once, turning her head a little in my direction. Not waiting for his reply she at once went on: “Upon another planet, yes... but oh, so long ago....” And again she paused.
“The one immediately before this present one?” asked Julius.
She shook her head gently. “Still further back than that... the one before the last, when first we knew delight of life... without these heavy, closing bodies. When the sun was nearer... and we knew deity in the fiery heat and mighty winds... and Nature was... ourselves....” The voice wavered oddly, broke, and ceased upon a sigh. A thousand questions burned in me to ask. An amazing certainty of recognition and remembrance burst through my heart. But Julius spoke before my tongue found words.
“Search more closely,” he said with intense gravity. “The time and place we summoned Them is what we need — not where we first learned it, but where we practised it and failed. Confine your will to that. Forget the earlier planet. To help you, I set a barrier you cannot pass....”
“The scene of our actual evocation is what we must discover,” he whispered to me. “When that is found we shall be in touch with the actual Powers our worship used.”
“It was not there, in that other planet,” she murmured. “It was only there we first gained the Nature-wisdom. Thence — we brought it with us... to another time and place... later... much nearer to Today — to Earth.”
“Remember, then, and see —” he began, when suddenly her unutterably wonderful expression proclaimed that she at last had found it.
It was curiously abrupt. He moved aside. We waited. I took up my pencil between fingers that were icy cold. My gaze remained fixed upon the motionless body. Those fast-closed eyes seemed cut in stone, as if they never in this world could open. The forehead gleamed pale as ivory in the lamplight. The soft gulping of the lamp oil beside me, the crumbling of the fire-wood in the grate deepened the silence that I feared to break. The pallid oval of the sleeper’s countenance shone at me out of a room turned wholly dark. I forgot the place wherein we sat, our names, our meanings in the present. For there grew vividly upon that disc-like countenance the face of another person — and of one I knew.
And with this shock of recognition — there came over me both horror and undying sweetness — a horror that the face would smile into my own with a similar recognition, that from those lips a voice must come I should remember; that those arms would lift, those hands stretch out; an ecstasy that I should be remembered.
“Open!” I heard, as from far away, the voice of Julius.
And then I realised that the eyes were open. The lids were raised, the eyeballs faced the lamp. Some tension drew the skin sideways. They were other eyes. The eternal Self looked out of them bringing the message of a vast antiquity. They gazed steadily and clearly into mine.
CHAPTER XXXI
..................
TODAY RETIRED. I REMEMBERED YESTERDAY, but a Yesterday more remote, perhaps, than the fire-mist out of which our little earth was born....
I half rose in my chair. The first instinct — strong in me still as I write this here in modern Streatham — was to fall upon my knees as in the stress of some immense, remembered love. That glory caught me, that power of an everlasting passion that was holy. Bathed in a sea of perfect recollection, my eyes met hers, lost themselves, lived back into a Past that had been joy. A flood of shame broke fiercely over me that such a union could ever have seemed “forgotten.” That Today could smother Yesterday so easily seemed sacrilege. For this memory, uprising from the mists of hoary preexistence, brought in its train other great emotions of recovered grandeur, all stirred into life by this ancient ceremony we three acted out. Our purpose then had been, I knew, no ordinary, selfish love, no lust of possession or ownership behind it. Its aim and end were not mere personal contentment, mere selfish happiness that excluded others, but, rather, a part of some vast, coordinated process that involved all Nature with her powers and workings, and fulfilled with beauty a purpose of the entire Universe. It was holy in the biggest sense; it was divine. The significance of our attitudes Today was all explained — Julius, herself and I, exquisitely linked to Nature, a group-soul formed by the loves of Yesterday and Now.
We gazed at one another in silence, smiling at our recovered wonder. We spoke no word, we made no gesture; there was perfect comprehension; we were, all three, as we had been — long ago. An earlier state of consciousness took this supreme command.... And presently — how long the interval I cannot say — her eyelids dropped, she drew a deep sigh of happiness, and lay quiescent as before.
It was then, I think, that the sense of worship in me became so imperative that denial seemed impossible. Some inner act of adoration certainly accomplished itself although no physical act resulted, for I remember dropping back again into my chair, not knowing what exactly I meant to do. The old desire for the long, sweet things of the soul burst suddenly into flame, the inner yearning to know the deathless Nature Powers which were the gods, and to taste divinity by feeling-with their mighty beings. That early state of simpler consciousness, it seems, lay too remote from modern things to be translatable in clear language. Yet at the time I knew it, felt it, realised it, because I lived it once again. The flood of aspiration that bore me on its crest left thinking and reason utterly out of account. No link survives Today with the state we then recovered....
And both she and Julius changed before my eyes. The chalet changed as well, slipping into the shadowy spaces of some vast, pillared temple. The soul in me realised its power and knew its origin divine. Bathed in a sea of long-forgotten glory, it rose into a condition of sublimest bliss and confidence. It recognised its destiny and claimed all Heaven. And this raging fire of early spiritual ambition passed over me as upon a mighty wind; desire and will became augmented as though wind blew them into flame.
“Watch... and listen,” I heard, “and feel no fear!”
The change visibly increased; it seemed that curtains lifted in succession.... The sunken head was raised; the lips quivered with approaching speech; the pale cheeks deepened with a sudden flush that set the cheek-bones in a quick, high light; the neck bent slightly forward, foreshortening, as it were, the presentment of the head and shoulders; while some indescribable touch of power painted the marble brows cold and almost stern. The entire countenance breathed the august passion of a remoter age dropped close.... And to see the little face I knew as Mrs. LeVallon, domestic servant in the world Today, unscreen itself thus before me, while its actual structure yet remained unchanged, broke down the last resistance in me, and rendered my subjugation absolute. Transfiguration was visibly accomplished....
Once more she turned her head and looked at me. I met the eyes that saw me and remembered. And, though I would have screened myself from their tremendous gaze, there was no remnant of power in me that could do so.... She smiled, then slowly withdrew her eyes.... I passed, with these two beside me, back into the womb of preexistence. We were upon the Earth — at the very time and place where we had used the knowledge brought from a still earlier globe.
“What do you see?” came in those quiet tones that rolled up time and distance like a scroll. “Tell me now!” It was the scene of the lost experiment he sought. We were close upon it.
She spread her arms; her hands waved slowly through the air to indicate these immense enclosing walls of stone about us. The voice reverbera
ted as in great hollow space.
“Darkness... and the Vacated Bodies,” was the reply. I knew that we stood in the Hall of Silence where the bodies lay entranced while their spirits went forth upon the three days’ quest. And one of these, I knew, was mine.
“What besides?”
“The Guardians — who protect.”
“Who are they? Who are these Guardians?”
An expression of shrinking passed across her face, and disappeared again. The eyes stared fixedly before her into space.
“Myself,” she answered slowly, “you — Concerighe... and...”
“There Was another?” he asked. “Another who was with us?”
She hesitated. At first no answer came. She seemed to search the darkness to discover it.
“He is not near enough to see,” she murmured presently. “Somewhere beyond... he stands... he lies... I cannot see him clearly.”
Julius touched my hand, and with the contact the expression on her face grew clear. She smiled.
“You see him now,” he said with decision.
She turned her face towards me with a tender, stately movement. The sterner aspect deepened into softness on the features. Great joy for an instant passed into the strange sea-green eyes.
“Silvatela,” she whispered, slightly lowering the head. “He offered himself — for me. He lies now — empty at our feet.” And the utterance of the name passed through me with a thrill of nameless sweetness. An infinite desire woke, yet desire not for myself alone.
“The time...?” asked Julius in that cabn, reverent tone.
She rose with a suddenness that made me start, though, somehow, I had expected it. At her full height she stood between us. Then, spreading her hands from both the temples outwards, she bowed her head to the level of the breast. Julius, I saw, did likewise, and before I realised it, the same deep, instinctive awe had brought me to my feet in a similar obeisance. A breath of air from the night outside passed sensibly between us, enough to stir the hair upon my head and increase the fire on the hearth behind. It ceased, and a wave of comforting heat moved in, paused a moment, settled like a great invisible presence, and held the atmosphere.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 164