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Page 9
I had a curious sensation--I saw myself suddenly a stalwart savage,
strangely attired for war, near a hut in a forest clearing. I was going
away somewhere; there were other huts at hand; there was a fire, in the
side of a mound, where some women seemed to be cooking something and
wrangling over it; the smoke went up into the still air. A child came
out of the hut, and ran to me. I bent down and kissed it, and it clung
to me. I was sorry, in a dim way, to be going out--for I saw other
figures armed too, standing about the clearing. There was to be fighting
that day, and though I wished to fight, I thought I might not return.
But the mind of myself, as I discerned it, was full of hurtful, cruel,
rapacious thoughts, and I was sad to think that this could ever have
been I.
"It is not very nice," said Amroth with a smile; "one does not care to
revive that! You were young then, and had much before you."
Another picture flashed into the mind. Was it true? I was a woman, it
seemed, looking out of a window on the street in a town with high, dark
houses, strongly built of stone: there was a towered gate at a little
distance, with some figures drawing up sacks with a pulley to a door in
the gate. A man came up behind me, pulled me roughly back, and spoke
angrily; I answered him fiercely and shrilly. The room I was in seemed
to be a shop or store; there were barrels of wine, and bags of corn. I
felt that I was busy and anxious--it was not a pleasant retrospect.
"Yet you were better then," said Amroth "you thought little of your
drudgery, and much of your children."
Yes, I had had children, I saw. Their names and appearance floated
before me. I had loved them tenderly. Had they passed out of my life? I
felt bewildered.
Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again. "No, you came near to
some of them again. Do you not remember another life in which you loved
a friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness? He had
been your child long before; and one never quite loses that."
I saw in a flash the other life he spoke of. I was a student, it seemed,
at some university, where there was a boy of my own age, a curious,
wilful, perverse, tactless creature, always saying and doing the wrong
thing, for whom I had felt a curious and unreasonable responsibility. I
had always tried to explain him to other people, to justify him; and he
had turned to me fop help and companionship in a singular way. I saw
myself walking with him in the country, expostulating, gesticulating;
and I saw him angry and perplexed.... The vision vanished.
"But what becomes of all those whom we have loved?" I said; "it cannot
be as if we had never loved them."
"No, indeed," said Amroth, "they are all there or here; but there lies
one of the great mysteries which we cannot yet attain to. We shall be
all brought together some time, closely and perfectly; but even now, in
the world of matter, the spirit half remembers; and when one is
strangely and lovingly drawn to another soul, when that love is not of
the body, and has nothing of passion in it, then it is some close
ancient tie reasserting itself. Do you not know how old and remote some
of our friendships seemed--so much older and larger than could be
accounted for by the brief days of companionship? That strange hunger
for the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what has
been. Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you will
move farther afield, and you will come near to spirits you have loved.
You cannot bear it yet, though they are all about you; but one regains
the spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours."
"Can I revisit," I said, "the scene of my last life--see and know what
those I loved are doing and feeling?"
"Not yet," said Amroth; "that would not profit either you or them. The
sorrow of earth would not be sorrow, it would have no cleansing power,
if the parted spirit could return at once. You do not guess, either, how
much of time has passed already since you came here--it seems to you
like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet loss
and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the
finest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we
here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave
behind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that its
virtue lies."
"Yes," I said, "I do not desire to return. This is all too wonderful. It
is the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me. I do
not desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think of
it, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body was
faint and weary. The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and loved
and exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because one
was content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were. It was
the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was
the shame."
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