Shadowings

by Lafcadio Hearn

  "It is a cursed world!" cried the Man—"why did ye not guide me?"

  The Souls replied to him:—

  "Thou wouldst not heed the guiding of ghosts that were wiser than we. . . . Cowards and weaklings curse the world. The strong do not blame the world: it gives them all that they desire. By power they break and take and keep. Life for them is a joy, a triumph, an exultation. But creatures without power merit nothing; and nothingness becomes their portion. Thou and we shall presently enter into nothingness."

  "Do ye fear?"—asked the Man.

  "There is reason for fear," the Souls answered. "Yet no one of us would wish to delay the time of what we fear by continuing to make part of such an existence as thine."

  "But ye have died innumerable times?"—wonderingly said the Man.

  "No, we have not," said the Souls,—"not even once that we can remember; and our memory reaches back to the beginnings of this world. We die only with the race."

  The Man said nothing,—being afraid. The Souls resumed:—

  "Thy race ceases. Its continuance depended upon thy power to serve our purposes. Thou hast lost all power. What art thou but a charnel-house, a mortuary-pit? Freedom we needed, and space: here we have been compacted together, a billion to a pin-point! Doorless our chambers and blind;—and the passages are blocked and broken;—and the stairways lead to nothing. Also there are Haunters here, not of our kind,—Things never to be named."

  For a little time the Man thought gratefully of death and dust. But suddenly there came into his memory a vision of his enemy's face, with a wicked smile upon it. And then he wished for longer life,—a hundred years of life and pain,—only to see the grass grow tall above the grave of that enemy. And the Souls mocked his desire:—

  "Thine enemy will not waste much thought upon thee. He is no half-man,—thine enemy! The ghosts in that body have room and great light. High are the ceilings of their habitation; wide and clear the passageways; luminous the courts and pure. Like a fortress excellently garrisoned is the brain of thine enemy;—and to any point thereof the defending hosts can be gathered for battle in a moment together. His generation will not cease—nay! that face of his will multiply throughout the centuries! Because thine enemy in every time provided for the needs of his higher ghosts: he gave heed to their warnings; he pleasured them in all just ways; he did not fail in reverence to them. Wherefore they now have power to help him at his need. . . . How hast thou reverenced or pleasured us?"

  The Man remained silent for a space. Then, as in horror of doubting, he questioned:—

  "Wherefore should ye fear—if nothingness be the end?"

  "What is nothingness?" the Souls responded. "Only in the language of delusion is there an end. That which thou callest the end is in truth but the very beginning. The essence of us cannot cease. In the burning of worlds it cannot be consumed. It will shudder in the cores of great stars;—it will quiver in the light of other suns. And once more, in some future cosmos, it will reconquer knowledge—but only after evolutions unthinkable for multitude. Even out of the nameless beginnings of form, and thence through every cycle of vanished being,—through all successions of exhausted pain,—through all the Abyss of the Past,—it must climb again."

  The Man uttered no word: the Souls spoke on:—

  "For millions of millions of ages must we shiver in tempests of fire: then shall we enter anew into some slime primordial,—there to quicken, and again writhe upward through all foul dumb blind shapes. Innumerable the metamorphoses!—immeasurable the agonies! . . . And the fault is not of any Gods: it is thine!"

  "Good or evil," muttered the Man,—"what signifies either? The best must become as the worst in the grind of the endless change."

  "Nay!" cried out the Souls; "for the strong there is a goal,—the goal that thou couldst not strive to gain. They will help to the fashioning of fairer worlds;—they will win to larger light;—they will tower and soar as flame to enter the Zones of the Divine. But thou and we go back to slime! Think of the billion summers that might have been for us!—think of the joys, the loves, the triumphs cast away!—the dawns of the knowledge undreamed,—the glories of sense unimagined,—the exultations of illimitable power! . . . think, think, O fool, of all that thou hast lost!"

  Then the Souls of the Man turned themselves into worms, and devoured him.

  In a Pair of Eyes

  In a Pair of Eyes

  THERE is one adolescent moment never to be forgotten,—the moment when the boy learns that this world contains nothing more wonderful than a certain pair of eyes. At first the surprise of the discovery leaves him breathless: instinctively he turns away his gaze. That vision seemed too delicious to be true. But presently he ventures to look again,—fearing with a new fear,—afraid of the reality, afraid also of being observed;—and lo! his doubt dissolves in a new shock of ecstasy. Those eyes are even more wonderful than he had imagined—nay! they become more and yet more entrancing every successive time that he looks at them! Surely in all the universe there cannot be another such pair of eyes! What can lend them such enchantment? Why do they appear divine? . . . He feels that he must ask somebody to explain,—must propound to older and wiser heads the riddle of his new emotions. Then he makes his confession, with a faint intuitive fear of being laughed at, but with a strange, fresh sense of rapture in the telling. Laughed at he is—tenderly; but this does not embarrass him nearly so much as the fact that he can get no answer to his question,—to the simple "Why?" made so interesting by his frank surprise and his timid blushes. No one is able to enlighten him; but all can sympathize with the bewilderment of his sudden awakening from the long soul-sleep of childhood.

  Perhaps that "Why?" never can be fully answered. But the mystery that prompted it constantly tempts one to theorize; and theories may have a worth independent of immediate results. Had it not been for old theories concerning the Unknowable, what should we have been able to learn about the Knowable? Was it not while in pursuit of the Impossible that we stumbled upon the undreamed-of and infinitely marvellous Possible?

  Why indeed should a pair of human eyes appear for a time to us so beautiful that, when likening their radiance to splendor of diamond or amethyst or emerald, we feel the comparison a blasphemy? Why should we find them deeper than the sea, deeper than the day,—deep even as the night of Space, with its scintillant mist of suns? Certainly not because of mere wild fancy. These thoughts, these feelings, must spring from some actual perception of the marvellous,—some veritable revelation of the unspeakable. There is, in very truth, one brief hour of life during which the world holds for us nothing so wonderful as a pair of eyes. And then, while looking into them, we discover a thrill of awe vibrating through our delight,—awe made by a something felt rather than seen: a latency,—a power,—a shadowing of depth unfathomable as the cosmic Ether. It is as though, through some intense and sudden stimulation of vital being, we had obtained—for one supercelestial moment—the glimpse of a reality, never before imagined, and never again to be revealed.

  There is, indeed, an illusion. We seem to view the divine; but this divine itself, whereby we are dazzled and duped, is a ghost. Not to actuality belongs the spell,—not to anything that is,—but to some infinite composite phantom of what has been. Wondrous the vision— but wondrous only because our mortal sight then pierces beyond the surface of the present into profundities of myriads of years,—pierces beyond the mask of life into the enormous night of death. For a moment we are made aware of a beauty and a mystery and a depth unutterable: then the Veil falls again forever.

  The splendor of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning-star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,—a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,—eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.

  Thus, and only thus, the depth of that gaze is the depth of the Sea of Death and Birth,—and its mystery is the World-Soul's vision,
watching us out of the silent vast of the Abyss of Being.

  Thus, and only thus, do truth and illusion mingle in the magic of eyes,—the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present;—and the sudden splendor in the soul of the Seër is but a flash,—one soundless sheet-lightning of the Infinite Memory.

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