“I don’t want you to think I spent all my spare time knocking about pubs and bookies. I didn’t. All I did was to have an occasional night out. Most nights I worked. I had a desire for learning, for its own sake, and I had no idea then that I was going to make a fortune in the way I did. I wanted to get rich largely because I hated being in a position of subservience to people who I felt were my intellectual inferiors—in the office I mean. It was quite by chance that I started to take an interest in the stock-exchange—in fact, I had a dream in which I found myself reading the stock-exchange prices instead of the racing results.”
Mr. Burnaby’s attitude to these past successes was a curious mixture of pride and shame. At times he liked to talk of them, at others he would brush any references to them aside as if this part of his career had been rather disreputable. He disliked business people as a class, though formerly he appeared to have had a good many friends among them.
“But how did you make yourself dream the future?” Marcus asked him one autumn evening, during his third year at The Garrison, when they were walking along the shore before dinner. A wet July and August had been followed by a lovely September. It was then about the middle of September. Every day the sky was clear and the sea in the sunlight was a pale, golden green.
“It’s not that one makes oneself dream of the future,” Mr. Burnaby replied. “Probably a great many people dream of the future, but by the time they wake up they’ve forgotten all about it. We know very little about our own minds, any of us.”
He paused reflectively and Marcus seized the opportunity to raise a point about which he had thought a good deal from time to time. “I don’t see how you can dream the future. I mean I know you have, and I have, but I don’t see how we can, all the same—how it’s possible I mean. I don’t see how you can get ahead of time, and that’s what you do do, isn’t it?”
Mr. Burnaby didn’t answer at once: presently he said, “I suppose you can understand dreaming of the past.”
“That’s just remembering,” Marcus responded.
“It may be,” Mr. Burnaby admitted. “But some people think that time’s all there—the past, the present and the future. . . . Like space, we are just conscious of the particular part of it in which we happen to find ourselves.” He knocked out his pipe against the heel of his right shoe and felt in his pocket for his tobacco-pouch.
“Space-time,” Marcus put in—he had read a magazine article on the subject—“the fourth dimension.”
“I don’t care much for that term—the fourth dimension,” Mr. Burnaby objected, “and now I think they’ve any number of them, haven’t they? If one tries, after all, one can define several new dimensions oneself. My own favourite is through the looking-glass.”
Marcus wasn’t quite sure whether he was making fun or in earnest. “Through the looking-glass,” he repeated doubtfully.
“Yes, the dimension you see when you look in the mirror. Things are turned round in a way they can’t be by any physical means we know of—your right hand becomes your left for instance.”
Perhaps Marcus had not been paying complete attention. At any rate he didn’t take in this theory until Mr. Burnaby had repeated his explanation and enlarged on it a little. Then he returned to space-time. “Do you believe in it?” he demanded.
“I don’t disbelieve it,” Mr. Burnaby answered, “but I can’t say I thoroughly understand it. At times it appears delusively simple, but as soon as I try to make it definite the simplicity vanishes. I can think of another explanation for these visions of the future which seems to me a good deal more plausible and does not involve any monkeying about with time: nor do I think it clashes with what we know about our minds—what you and I know about them—not that we really know very much. We know more than most people, but that isn’t saying a great deal.”
“What is your explanation?” Marcus asked immediately. He was afraid that if he didn’t keep him to the point Mr. Burnaby might drift on to something else.
“There’s nothing very new about it,” Mr. Burnaby responded, “and I don’t say I believe in it. It’s a theory, a theory capable of a good deal of modification and variation. Can you imagine a universal consciousness to which your mind—and every other mind—is always transmitting every impression it receives, every idea it receives—like a gramophone record of an orchestra?”
Marcus thought he could.
“Well then,” Mr. Burnaby went on, “forget about the record: imagine this universal consciousness, or universal mind. Everything that has ever happened would be stored in that mind, everything that happens would go onto it the moment it occurs, everything that is thought the moment it is thought.
“Now each one of us in our everyday waking life is constantly forecasting the future. The farmer ploughs in November and sows his seeds in the springtime because he can foretell the cycle of the seasons. The only reason we cannot foretell the future more largely is that we cannot know all the factors which are contributing to it and could not relate them if we did. But there may be some portion of our unconscious minds, or perhaps I should say more conscious minds, which can get in touch with the universal consciousness, assess what it finds there, and present occasional glimpses of the result to our ordinary, waking, everyday minds. Very often these glimpses are in the form of visions or dreams. Because they occur among ordinary dreams, and are remembered with the ordinary dreams, may be why these visions are sometimes distorted to a greater or less degree. There seems to be some sort of a barrier between the two portions of our mind. Like St. Paul ‘we see through a glass darkly’—and not only is the glass dark, it is faulty.
“All the same I incline to the theory that the power of assessment is not in the part of the human mind of which we are unconscious, but with the total consciousness, in the universal mind.
“Suppose for a moment that your mind is the universal mind and that each of your fingers is an individual, with at least the illusion that it possesses a mind of its own. Your fingers would be conscious of each other as individuals, but not conscious of your mind nor of what they themselves were going to do. But if they could see back into your mind they would not only know, but see, what each finger was likely to do in the immediate future. In your mind after all there is always a moving picture of your intended actions, and the picture is always a little ahead of the actions themselves. The picture is produced by your reasoning powers and projected on what you might call the screen of your imagination. It is a process developed during early childhood. In an adult it is automatic and almost unconscious. Now suppose you and I, and every living thing, while remaining individuals, are fingers belonging to the body of the same universal mind and that somehow we do occasionally see back into it. A few years to it would be like a few seconds to your conscious individual mind.”
“ ‘A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone,’” Marcus quoted, with a sudden memory of standing in the family pew in church. “You mean we see into God’s mind.”
“Yes,” Mr. Burnaby agreed. “That is if this theory is correct, but as I said it is capable of a good deal of modification and variation. At any rate such a mind would know what it was going to do with all the individuals it controlled for some time ahead—for a very long time by our ideas. When you and I dream of the future all that happens may be that for a moment we become aware of the knowledge or part of the knowledge of the complete mind.”
Marcus thought of this for a little and suddenly it seemed to him absurd. “You mean then that God is thinking of horse-racing and stocks and shares.”
“Ah no I don’t,” Mr. Burnaby returned. “But he is aware of these things—just as he is aware of everything else. That is my misfortune, or weakness if you like. I was able more easily than most to remember something of the knowledge of the universal mind and what does my own rotten little mind choose to bring back—next week�
��s winners or the stock exchange news. The trouble is that I got into the habit before I ever considered what might be happening. For years I thought of share prices and of how to make money and of almost nothing else. Even now, though I have gained a great deal of control of my waking thoughts, I still at times find my mind straying to such things, and my uncontrolled mind seems to have been formed in youth, formed in corruption. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.’ Have you ever thought of that text? It’s called a beatitude. It’s looked upon as a gift with which Christ will reward the pure in heart. But it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a statement of fact. The pure in heart will see God simply because He will not be hidden from them by other thoughts.”
“But you don’t only see share prices and racing results,” Marcus objected. “I mean in the experiments you are doing with me”—they nearly always referred to them as experiments—“you see everything, whatever you want.”
“But they only deal with the present,” Mr. Burnaby answered, “——so far at least. In them, probably, it is simply that our own minds are liberated from our bodies without being in touch with the universal mind at all. In that state I can know anything, anything in the present I want to know, but nothing of the future. You, if you are careful, may be able to know the future, not as a whole perhaps, but in something more than insignificant and sordid details. But I don’t know that it is a great thing to know the future of this worldly life. If we can learn the future of one of us, what happens to one of us after death, it will be more important to humanity than to see a vision of the whole human society in a hundred years time.
“If we could only once accompany the spirit of a person who has died we might find out something of what we want. There are great difficulties, the chief of which seems to be that the departing spirit does not want to be accompanied. I have made attempts, but the necessity of keeping in touch with my own body has always been a hindrance, has always made it easier for the spirit of the person who has died to get away from my spirit.
“Of course if the released spirit, the spirit of the dead person, were willing to co-operate the experiment should become much more simple—if for instance it was one of us.”
Marcus shivered. He didn’t want to die: he didn’t want to die and be followed into death by Mr. Burnaby.
“It’s all right,” Mr. Burnaby said. “It was my own death I was contemplating, not yours. I would like to find out without having to die, to have the satisfaction of knowing while I am still in this life. Such an experiment, as I told you once before, would only be a sort of desperate last throw—not that if we already know we may not make it in any case when I do come to die.”
Mr. Burnaby and Marcus had many conversations of this sort. Indeed, like most people who are a great deal together, they had what were almost the same conversations again and again. The conclusions might vary slightly, and the strength of Mr. Burnaby’s belief in his own theories varied too with his mood. “I don’t know,” he would say when Marcus appeared unduly optimistic. “There may be some perfectly simple explanation for it all that nobody has ever thought of. We have very little imagination you know—practically no creative imagination. The most we can achieve is a few variations on what we have seen and heard.”
Marcus too suffered from moods. At times he would be full of enthusiasm, both for the work and for his part in it. He would rejoice in his unique position and be glad that he had been taken out of the world, as it were. He would feel a contempt for ordinary people, for the very depth of their ordinariness.
But sometimes his feelings were quite different. He would feel that he was missing all the joys of youth, all the pleasures of that inconsequent period when the fetters of childhood have been removed and old age is still too distant a threat to be regarded as anything more than an incitement to make the most of the warm-blooded present. Then he hated Mr. Burnaby. Just how much could Mr. Burnaby do, he wondered. He had been so old when Marcus first came and now he seemed younger. He was a sinister old man, with his disdain for all the ordinary ways of life, all the usages of society. Marcus often suspected him of other curious powers, powers which he had not revealed to his pupil. Living here with his youth slipping away, might it not be that Mr. Burnaby was actually stealing it from him, sucking it up, living it himself. . . .
And there was the horrible knowledge that his every act, his whole mind, was open to Mr. Burnaby’s inspection. It was worse than to be always naked before him. It was true that Mr. Burnaby had promised not to spy, but having such powers could anyone be trusted to refrain from using them?
Yet in spite of these discontents and suspicions Marcus progressed steadily with his work and for a great deal of the time he was reasonably happy. Mr. Burnaby was very widely read, and Marcus found him an amusing and entertaining companion. He was interested in all sorts of things—art, cricket, literature, the ballet, heresies in the early Christian Church. . . . He could talk for hours on any of these subjects and of the people connected with them. He liked gossip, but it was usually old gossip, some of it centuries old. He would tell Marcus stories about hermits in the Libyan desert, when Alexandria was the strongest centre of the Christian Church, or about Ranjitsinhji, and Jessop, and Grace, and cricket matches he had never seen. He had a passion for cricket, at least in the abstract, and always read the accounts of the test matches in the papers. Cricket was one of the things of which he felt he had been deprived by the misfortunes of his father. He liked to imagine himself playing in the Eton and Harrow match, or for Oxford against Cambridge. Such conversations were most likely to occur in the summer. They might be brought on by the sight of the smooth, shaven lawn behind the house on a hot afternoon. Just as often, however, he would talk of poetry, or music, or painting. He was fond of the Lake poets, and of the pre-Raphaelites, of describing concerts by Pachmann which he had attended. He collected prints. He was interested in the woodcuts of the eighteen-sixties and seventies, and in various black-and-white artists of the nineties. In time Marcus began to feel as if he himself had met them all, Charles Keene, Aubrey Beardsley, Whistler, Syme, Phil May, as well as the cricketers and the writers.
On the whole Mr. Burnaby’s taste in literature was inclined to be highbrow and ninety-ish, but there were a good many exceptions. He bought all P. G. Wodehouse’s novels as they came out, and he could read very indifferent school stories with pleasure. His interest in public schools was tremendous and he encouraged Marcus to talk about his life at Shellborough. He liked to hear about the services in chapel, the talking in the dormitories at night, the relations of prefects and fags. Marcus got to know eventually that Mr. Burnaby had created for himself an imaginary public school and that he liked to think of himself as a boy there. The school stories and Marcus’s reminiscences provided fresh material for his day-dreams.
CHAPTER XXIV
AFTER he had been four years with Mr. Burnaby Marcus was left alone at The Garrison for the first time. They had both been going to London to meet an Indian mystic with whom Mr. Burnaby had been in correspondence. Marcus had been looking forward to the trip, partly because he had never been to London, partly because the Indian had brought a pupil with him, who was about Marcus’s age.
Unfortunately the day before they were due to start Marcus took some kind of gastric chill. He was very sick and very miserable, and Mr. Burnaby was forced to start without him. It was three days before Marcus was able to get up, a week before he felt fit to travel. By that time the meeting with the Indian was over, and Mr. Burnaby had started on a round of visits. Marcus considered. The more he thought of it the less he wanted to encounter Mr. Burnaby’s English friends. One of them, a writer, he had already met. He had visited The Garrison the year before, and he and Mr. Burnaby had done nothing but discuss each other’s books. On the two occasions when Marcus and the writer had been left alone together the writer had taken care to impress on Marcus his extraordinary good
fortune in being Mr. Burnaby’s companion and collaborator. This had irritated Marcus extremely. He wanted to feel that he himself was something in life—something more than just a satellite of Mr. Burnaby. So now he sent a telegram to Mr. Burnaby:
“am better could travel but would prefer remain here marcus”
Mr. Burnaby replied:
“agree dont work holiday will do you good suggested reading buchan wodehouse wallace and if you must ian hay enjoy yourself burnaby”
Marcus was grateful, but he determined that even if he did amuse himself most of the time, he would do a little serious reading as well. While he was ill he had been reading Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. After lunch on the day the telegram arrived he went to the library to look for something which he could read with a feeling of virtue. He spent an hour or so going round the shelves, but none of the serious books that he took down appealed to him. Suddenly it occurred to him that he should try Shakespeare again. He had hated doing Shakespeare at school, and never since he left had he read any of the plays. All the same he felt that his dislike of Shakespeare was a weakness. He would try him again, and try to like him. He took down The Tempest, which he knew was Mr. Burnaby’s favourite play, and glanced at the opening scene. Somehow it didn’t appeal to him. He chose instead Twelfth Night. He knew nothing about it. He had never done it at school, and for fear of being put off he didn’t open it till he was outside lying on the short turf in a hollow at the edge of the rocks.
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
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