Peter Ibbetson Part 38

But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes, and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir pa.s.se par la!' or no after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.

One cannot teach a born deaf-mute how to understand a musical score, nor a born blind man how to feel color. To Beethoven, who had once heard with the ear, his deafness made no difference, nor their blindness to Homer and Milton.

Can you make out my little parable?

Sound and light and heat, and electricity and motion, and will and thought and remembrance, and love and hate and pity, and the desire to be born and to live, and the longing of all things alive and dead to get near each other, or to fly apart--and lots of other things besides! All that comes to the same--'C'est comme qui dirait bonnet blanc et blanc bonnet,' as Monsieur le Major used to say. 'C'est simple comme bonjour!'

Where I am, Gogo, I can hear the sun s.h.i.+ning on the earth and making the flowers blow, and the birds sing, and the bells peal for birth and marriage and death--happy, happy death, if you only knew--'C'est la clef des champs!'

It s.h.i.+nes on moons and planets, and I can hear it, and hear the echo they give back again. The very stars are singing; rather a long way off!

but it is well worth their while with such an audience as lies between us and them; and they can't help it....

I can't hear it here--not a bit--now that I've got my ears on; besides, the winds of the earth are too loud....

Ah, that _is_ music, if you like; but men and women are stone-deaf to it--their ears are in the way! ...

Those poor unseen flat fish that live in the darkness and mud at the bottom of deep seas can't catch the music men and women make upon the earth--such poor music as it is! But if ever so faint a murmur, borne on the wings and fins of a sunbeam, reaches them for a few minutes at mid-day, and they have a speck of marrow in their spines to feel it, and no ears or eyes to come between, they are better off than any man, Gogo.

Their dull existence is more blessed than his.

But alas for them, as yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be content to wait, like you.

The blind and deaf?

Oh yes; _la bas_, it is all right for the poor deaf-mutes and born blind of the earth; they can remember with the past eyes and ears of all the rest. Besides, it is no longer _they_. There is no _they_! That is only a detail.

You must try and realize that it is just as though all s.p.a.ce between us and the sun and stars were full of little specks of spinal marrow, much too small to be seen in any microscope--smaller than anything in the world. All s.p.a.ce is full of them, shoulder to shoulder--almost as close as sardines in a box--and there is still room for more! Yet a single drop of water would hold them all, and not be the less transparent. They all remember having been alive on earth or elsewhere, in some form or other, and each knows all the others remember. I can only compare it to that.

Once all that s.p.a.ce was only full of stones, rus.h.i.+ng, whirling, meeting, and crus.h.i.+ng together, and melting and steaming in the white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed--the precious, indestructible harvest of how many millions of years of life!

And this I know: the longer and more strenuously and completely one lives one's life on earth the better for all. It is the foundation of everything. Though if men could guess what is in store for them when they die, without also knowing _that_, they would not have the patience to live--they wouldn't wait! For who would fardels bear? They would just put stones in their pockets, as you did, and make for the nearest pond.

They mustn't!

Nothing is lost--nothing! From the ineffable, high, fleeting thought a Shakespeare can't find words to express, to the slightest sensation of an earthworm--nothing! Not a leaf's feeling of the light, not a loadstone's sense of the pole, not a single volcanic or electric thrill of the mother earth.

All knowledge must begin on earth for _us_. It is the most favored planet in this poor system of ours just now, and for a few short millions of years to come. There are just a couple of others, perhaps three; but they are not of great consequence. 'Il y fait trop chaud--ou pas a.s.sez!' They are failures.

The sun, the father sun, _le bon gros pere_, rains life on to the mother earth. A poor little life it was at first, as you know--gra.s.ses and moss, and little wriggling, transparent things--all stomach; it is quite true! That is what we come from--Shakespeare, and you, and I!

After each individual death the earth retains each individual clay to be used again and again; and, as far as I can see, it rains back each individual essence to the sun--or somewhere near it--like a precious water-drop returned to the sea, where it mingles, after having been about and seen something of the world, and learned the use of five small wits--and remembering all! Yes, like that poor little exiled wandering water-drop in the pretty song your father used to sing, and which always manages to find its home at last--

_'Va pa.s.saggier' in fiume, Va prigionier' in fonte, Ma sempre ritorn' al mar.'_

Or else it is as if little grains of salt were being showered into the Mare d'Auteuil, to melt and mingle with the water and each other till the Mare d'Auteuil itself was as salt as salt can be.

Not till that Mare d'Auteuil of the sun is saturated with the salt of the earth, of earthly life and knowledge, will the purpose be complete, and then old mother earth may well dry up into a cinder like the moon; its occupation will be gone, like hers--'adieu, panier, les vendanges sont faites!'

And, as for the sun and its surrounding ocean of life--ah, that is beyond _me_! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever.

You must understand that it is not a bit like an ocean, nor a bit like water-drops, or grains of salt, or specks of spinal marrow; but it is only by such poor metaphors that I can give you a glimpse of what I mean, since you can no longer understand me, as you used to do on earthly things, by the mere touch of our hands.

Gogo, I am the only little water-drop, the one grain of salt that has not yet been able to dissolve and melt away in that universal sea; I am the exception.

It is as though a long, invisible chain bound me still to the earth, and I were hung at the other end of it in a little transparent locket, a kind of cage, which lets me see and hear things all round, but keeps me from melting away.

And soon I found that this locket was made of that half of you that is still in me, so that I couldn't dissolve, because half of me wasn't dead at all; for the chain linked me to that half of myself I had left in you, so that half of me actually wasn't there to be dissolved.... I am getting rather mixed!

But oh, my heart's true love, how I hugged my chain, with you at the other end of it!

With such pain and effort as you cannot conceive, I have crept along it back to you, like a spider on an endless thread of its own spinning.

Such love as mine is stronger then death indeed!

I have come to tell you that we are inseparable forever, you and I, one double speck of spinal marrow--'Philipschen!'--one little grain of salt, one drop. There is to be no parting for _us_--I can see that; but such extraordinary luck seems reserved for you and me alone up to now; and it is all our own doing.

But not till you join me shall you and I be complete, and free to melt away in that universal ocean, and take our part, as One, in all is to be.

That moment--you must not hasten it by a moment. Time is nothing. I'm even beginning to believe there's no such thing; there is so little difference, _la-bas_, between a year and a day. And as for s.p.a.ce--dear me, an inch is as as an ell!

Things cannot be measured like that.

A midge's life is as long as a man's, for it has time to learn its business, and do all the harm it can, and fight, and make love, and marry, and reproduce its kind, and grow disenchanted and bored and sick and content to die--all in a summer afternoon. An average man can live to seventy years without doing much more.

And then there are tall midges, and clever and good-looking ones, and midges of great personal strength and cunning, who can fly a little faster and a little farther than the rest, and live an hour longer to drink a whole drop more of some other creature's blood; but it does not make a very great difference!

No, time and s.p.a.ce mean just the same as 'nothing.'

But for you they mean much, as you have much to do. Our joint life must be revealed--that long, sweet life of make-believe, that has been so much more real than reality. Ah! where and what were time or s.p.a.ce to us then?

And you must tell all we have found out, and how; the way must be shown to others with better brains and better training than _we_ had. The value to mankind--to mankind here and hereafter--may be incalculable.