For, ever and again, my thoughts returned to that: the spirit of the chief transgressor hovering now without a body, waiting for the River of the Lives to bring in some dim future another opportunity for atonement.
The failure...! In the glimmer of that pale, cold dawn I watched the outline of her slumbering form. I remembered her cry of sacrificing love that drew the great rushing Powers down into herself, and thus into the unresisting little body gathered now in growth against her heart. That human love the world deems great, seeking to save him to her own distress, had only blocked the progress of his soul she yearned to protect, so little understanding.... I heard her deep-drawn breathing in the darkness and wondered... for the child that she would bear... come to our modern strife and worldly things with this freight of elemental forces linked about his human heart and mind — fierce child of Wind and Fire... I A “natural,” perhaps a “supernatural” being....
This sense of woe and passion, haunting my long, silent vigil from night to dawn, and after it when the sunshine of the September morning lit the room and turned her face to silver — this it is that, after so many years, clings to the memory as though of yesterday.
And then, without a sign, or movement to prepare me, I saw that the eyes had opened and were fixed upon my face.
The whispered words came instantly:
“Where is he? Has he gone away?”
Stupid with distress and pain, my heart was choked. I stared blankly in return, the channels of speech too blocked to find a single syllable.
I raised my hands, though hardly knowing what I meant to do. She sat up in the chair and looked a moment swiftly about the room. Her lips parted for another question, but it did not come. I think in my face, or in my gesture perhaps, she read the message of despair. She hid her face behind her hands, leaned back with a dreadful drooping of the entire frame, and let a sigh escape her that held the substance of all unutterable words of grief.
I yearned to help, but it was my silence, of course, that brought the truth so swiftly home to her returning consciousness. The awakening was complete and rapid, not as out of common sleep. I longed to touch and comfort her, yet my muscles refused to yield in any action I could manage, and my tongue clung dry against the roof of my mouth.
Then, presently, between her fingers came the words below a whisper:
“1 knew that this would happen... I knew that once I slept, he’d go from me... and I should lose him. I tried... that hard... to keep awake.... But sleep would take me. An’ now... it’s took him... too. He’s gone for — for very long... again!” She did not say “for ever.”
It was the voice, the accent and the words again of Mrs. LeVallon.
“Not for ever,” I whispered, “but for a little time.”
She rose up like a figure of white death, taking my hand. She did not tremble, and her step was firm. And more than this I never heard her say, for the entire contents of the interval since she first fell asleep beneath her husband’s passes had gone beyond recall.
“Take me to him,” she said gently. “I want to say goodbye.”
I led her up those creaking wooden stairs and left her with her dead.
Her strength was wonderful. I can never forget the quiet self-control she showed through all the wretched details that the situation then entailed. She asked no questions, shed no tears, moving brave and calm through all the ghastly duties. Something in her that lay deeper than death understood, and with the resignation of a truly great heart, accepted. Far stronger than myself she was; and, indeed, it seemed that my pain for her — at the time anyhow — absorbed the suffering that made my own heart ache with a sense of loss that has ever since left me empty and bereaved. Only in her eyes was there betrayal of sorrow that was itself, perhaps, another half revival of yet dimmer memories... “eyes in which desire of some strange thing unutterably burned, unquenchable....” For the first time I understood the truth of another’s words — so like a statue was her appearance, so set in stone, her words so sparing and her voice so dead:
“I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries lieth silent-bore....”
Her soul lay silent, bare; her grief was hopeless.... To my shame it must be confessed that I longed to escape from all the strain and nightmare of what had passed. The few days had been charged with material for a lifetime. I knew the sharp desire to find myself in touch once more with common, wholesome things — with London noise and bustle, trains, telephones and daily newspapers, with stupid students who could not even remember what they had learned the previous week, and with all the great majority who never even dreamed of a consciousness less restricted than their own. I saw the matter through, however, to the bitter end, and did not lose sight of Mrs. LeVallon until I left her safely in Lausanne, and helped her find a woman who should be both maid and companion, at least for the immediate future. It cannot be of interest or value to relate here. She did not cross my path again; while, on the other hand, it has never been possible for me to forget her. To this day I hear her voice and accent, I feel the touch of that hand that drew me softly into such depths of inexplicable vision; above all, I see her luminous, strange eyes and her movements of strange grace across the chalet floor.... And sometimes, even now, I half... remember.
Yet never, till after this long interval of years, could I bring myself to set down any record of what had happened. Perhaps — most probably, I think — I feared that dwelling upon the haunting details that writing would involve might revive too obsessingly the memory of an experience so curiously overwhelming.
Now time has brought the necessity, as it were, of this confession; and I have done my best with material that really resists the mould of language, at least as I can use it. Later reading — for I devoured the best authorities and ransacked even the most extravagant records in my quest — has come to throw a little curious light upon some parts of it; and the results of this subsequent study no doubt appear in this report. At the time, however, I was ignorant of all such things, and the effect upon me of what I witnessed thus for the first time may be judged accordingly. It was dislocating.
Two facts alone remain to mention. And the first seems to me perhaps the most singular of the entire experience. For the pages I had covered with writing showed suddenly an abrupt and extraordinary change of script. Although the earlier sheets were in my own handwriting, roughly jotting down question and reply as they fell from the lips of Julius or his wife, there came midway in them this inexplicable change that altered them into the illegible scribble of a language that I could not read, yet recognised. It changed into that curious kind of ideograph that Julius used at school, that he showed me many a time in the sand at the end of the football field where we used to lie and talk, and that he claimed then was the ancient sacerdotal cipher we had used together in our remotest “Temple Days.” I cannot read a word of it, nor can any to whom I have shown it decipher a single outline. The change began, it seems, at the point where “Mrs. LeVallon” went “deeper” at his word of command, and entered the layer of memories that dealt with that most ancient “section.” This accounts, too, for the confusion and incompleteness of my record as written. A page of this script is framed upon my walls today; my eye rests on it as I write these words upon a modern typewriter — in Streatham.
The other fact I have to mention might well be the starting point for study and observation of an interesting kind. Yet, though it sorely tempted me, I resisted the temptation, and now, after twenty years, it is too late, and I, too old. This record, if published, may fall beneath the eye of someone to whom the chance and the desire may possibly combine to bring the opportunity.
For some weeks after the events that have been here described, Mrs. LeVallon gave birth to a boy, s
urviving him, alas! by but a single day.
This I heard long afterwards by the merest chance. But my strenuous efforts to trace the child proved unavailing, and I only learned that he was adopted by a French family whose name even was not given to me. If alive he would be now about twenty years of age.
THE BRIGHT MESSENGER
..................
CHAPTER 1
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EDWARD FILLERY, SO FAR AS may be possible to a man of normal passions and emotions, took a detached view of life and human nature. At the age of thirty-eight he still remained a spectator, a searching, critical, analytical, yet chiefly, perhaps, a sympathetic spectator, before the great performance whose stage is the planet and whose performers and auditorium are humanity.
Knowing himself outcast, an unwelcome deadhead at the play, he had yet felt no bitterness against the parents whose fierce illicit passion had deprived him of an honourable seat. The first shock of resentment over, he had faced the situation with a tolerance which showed an unusual charity, an exceptional understanding, in one so young.
He was twenty when he learned the truth about himself. And it was his wondering analysis as to why two loving humans could be so careless of their offspring’s welfare, when the rest of Nature took such pains in the matter, that first betrayed, perhaps, his natural aptitude. He had the innate gift of seeing things as they were, undisturbed by personal emotion, while yet asking himself with scientific accuracy why and how they came to be so. These were invaluable qualities in the line of knowledge and research he chose for himself as psychologist and doctor. The terms are somewhat loose. His longing was to probe the motives of conduct in the first place, and, in the second, to correct the results of wrong conduct by removing faulty motives. Psychiatrist and healer, therefore, were his more accurate titles; psychiatrist and healer, in due course, he became.
His father, an engineer of ability and enterprise, prospecting in the remoter parts of the Caucasus for copper, and making a comfortable fortune in so doing, was carried off his feet suddenly by the beauty of a Khaketian peasant girl, daughter of a shepherd in these lonely and majestic mountains, whose intolerable grandeur may well intoxicate a man to madness. A dangerous and disgraceful episode it seems to have been between John Fillery, hitherto of steady moral fibre, and this strange, lovely pagan girl, whose savage father hunted the pair of them high and low for weeks before they finally eluded him in the azalea valleys beyond Artvine.
Great passion, possibly great love, born of this enchanted land whose peaks touch heaven, while their lower turfy slopes are carpeted with lilies, azaleas, rhododendrons, contributed to the birth of Edward, who first saw the light in a secret chamber of a dirty Tiflis house, above the Koura torrent. That same night, when the sun dipped beneath the Black Sea waters two hundred miles to the westward, his mother had looked for the last time upon her northern lover and her wild Caucasian mountains.
Edward, however, persisted, visible emblem of a few weeks’ primal passion in a primal land. Intense desire, born in this remote wilderness of amazing loveliness, lent him, perhaps, a strain of illicit, almost unearthly yearning, a secret nostalgia for some lost vale of beauty that held fiercer sunshine, mightier winds and fairer flowers than those he knew in this world.
At the age of four he was brought to England; his Russian memories faded, though not the birthright of his primitive blood. Settling in London, his father increased his fortune as consulting engineer, but did not marry. To the short vehement episode he had given of his very best; he remained true to his gorgeous memory and his sin; the cream of his life, its essence and its perfume, had been spent in those wild wind-swept azalea valleys beyond Artvine. The azalea honey was in his blood, the scent of the lilies in his brain; he still heard the Koura and Rion foaming down towards ancient Colchis. Edward embodied for him the spirit of these sweet, passionate memories. He loved the boy, he cherished and he spoilt him.
But Edward had stuff in him that rendered spoiling harmless. A vigorous, independent youngster, he showed firmness and character as a lad. To the delight of his father he knew his own mind early, reading and studying on his own account, possessed at the same time by a vehement love of nature and outdoor life that was far more than the average English boy’s inclination to open air and sport. There lay some primal quality in his blood that was of ancient origin and leaned towards wildness. There seemed almost, at the same time, a faunish strain that turned away from life.
As a tiny little fellow he had that strange touch of creative imagination other children have also known an invisible playmate. It had no name, as it, apparently, had no sex. The boy’s father could trace it directly to no fairy tale read or heard; its origin in the child’s mind remained a mystery. But its characteristics were unusual, even for such fanciful imaginings: too full-fledged to have been created gradually by the boy’s loneliness, it seemed half goblin and half Nature-spirit; it replaced, at any rate, the little brothers and sisters who were not there, and the father, led by his conscience, possibly, to divine or half divine its origin, met the pretence with sympathetic encouragement.
It came usually with the wind, moreover, and went with the wind, and wind accordingly excited the child. “Listen! Father!” he would exclaim when no air was moving anywhere and the day was still as death. Then: “Plop! So there you are!” as though it had dropped through empty space and landed at his feet. “It came from a tremenjus height,” the child explained. “The wind’s up there, you see, today.” Which struck the parent’s mind as odd, because it proved later true. An upper wind, far in the higher strata of air, came down an hour or so afterwards and blew into a storm.
Fire and flowers, too, were connected with this invisible playmate. “He’ll make it burn, father,” the child said convincingly, when the chimney smoked and the coals refused to catch, and then became very busy with his friend in the grate and about the hearth, just as though he helped and superintended what was being invisibly accomplished. “It’s burning better, anyhow,” agreed the father, astonished in spite of himself as the coals began to glow and spurt their gassy flames. “Well done; I am very much obliged to you and your little friend.”
“But it’s the only thing he can do. He likes it. It’s his work really, don’t you see keeping up the heat in things.”
“Oh, it’s his natural job, is it? I see, yes. But my thanks to him, all the same.”
“Thank you very much,” said grave Edward, aged five, addressing his tiny friend among the fire-irons. “I’m much mobliged to you.”
Edward was a bit older when the flower incident took place with the geranium that no amount of care and coaxing seemed able to keep alive. It had been dying slowly for some days, when Edward announced that he saw its “inside” flitting about the plant, but unable to get back into it. “It’s got out, you see, and can’t get back into its body again, so it’s dying.”
“Well, what in the world are we to do about it?” asked his father.
“I’ll ask,” was the solemn reply. “Now I know!” he cried, delighted, after asking his question of the empty air and listening for the answer. “Of course. Now I see. Look, father, there it is its spirit!” He stood beside the flower and pointed to the earth in the pot.
“Dear me, yes! Where d’you see it? I don’t see it quite.”
“He says I can pick it up and put it back and then the flower will live.” The child put out a hand as though picking up something that moved quickly about the stem.
“What’s it look like?” asked his father quickly.
“Oh, sort of trinangles and things with lines and corners,” was the reply, making a gesture as though he caught it and popped it back into the red drooping blossoms. “There you are! Now you’re alive again. Thank you very much, please” this last remark to the invisible playmate who was superintending.
“A sort of geometrical figure, was it?” inquired the father next day, when, to his surprise, he found the geranium blooming in full health and be
auty once again. “That’s what you saw, eh?”
“It was its spirit, and it was shiny red, like fire,” the child replied. “It’s heat. Without these things there’d be no flowers at all.”
“Who makes everything grow?” he asked suddenly, a moment later.
“You mean what makes them grow.”
“Who,” he repeated with emphasis. “Who builds the bodies up and looks after them?”
“Ah! the structure, you mean, the form?”
Edward nodded. His father had the feeling he was not being asked for information, but was being cross-examined. A faint pressure, as of uneasiness, touched him.
“They develop automatically that means naturally, under the laws of nature,” he replied.
“And the laws who keeps them working properly?”
The father, with a mental gulp, replied that God did.
“A beetle’s body, for instance, or a daisy’s or an elephant’s?” persisted the child undeceived by the theological evasion. “Or mine, or a mountain’s?”
John Fillery racked his brain for an answer, while Edward continued his list to include sea-anemones, frost-patterns, fire, wind, moon, sun and stars. All these forms to him were bodies apparently.
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