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 Another Random Document on
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 “Describe it, and pass on,” urged Julius patiently. There was
unalterable decision in his quiet voice. And in her tone a change was
also noticeable. I was profoundly moved; only with a great effort I
controlled myself.

“They crowd so eagerly about me,”—the choice of words seemed

no longer quite “Mrs. LeVallon’s”—“with little arms outstretched and
pleading eyes. They seek to enter, they implore ...”

“Who are they?”

“The Returning Souls.” The love and passion in her voice brought
near, as in a picture, the host of reincarnating souls eager to find a
body for their development in the world. They besieged her,
clamouring for birth—for a body.

“Your thoughts invite them,” replied Julius, “but you have the
power to decide.” And then he asked more sternly: “Has any entered
yet?”

It was unspeakably moving—this mother willing to serve with

anguish the purpose of advancing souls. Yet this was all of To-day. It
was not the thing he sought. The general purpose must stand aside
for the particular. There was an error to be set right first. She had to
seek its origin among the ages infinitely far away. The guidance
Julius sought lay in the long ago. But the safety of the little unborn
body troubled him, it seemed.

“As yet,” she murmured, “none. The little body of the boy is empty
... though besieged.”

“By whom besieged?” he asked more loudly. “Who hinders?”

The little body of the boy! And it was then a further change came
suddenly, both in her face and voice, and in the voice of Julius too.
 That larger expression of some forgotten grandeur passed into her
features, and she half sat up in the chair; there was a stiffening of
the frame; resistance, power, an attitude of authority, replaced the
former limpness. The moment was, for me, electrifying. Ice and fire
moved upon my skin.

She opened her lips to speak, but no words were audible.

“Look close—and tell me,” came from Julius gravely.

She made an effort, then shrank back a little, this time raising one
arm as though to protect herself from something coming, then
sharply dropping it again over the heart and body.

“I cannot see,” she murmured, slightly frowning; “they stand so

close and ... are ... so splendid. They are too great ... to see.”

“Who—what—are they?” he insisted. He took her hand in his. I

saw her smile.

The simple words were marvellously impressive. Depths of untold

memory stirred within me as I heard.

“Powers ... we knew ... so long ago.”

Some ancient thing in me opened an eye and saw. The Powers we

evoked came seeking an entrance, brought nearer by our invitation.
They came from the silent valley; they were close about the
building. But only through a human channel could they emerge from
the spheres where they belonged.

“Describe them, and pass on,” I heard Julius say, and there came
a pause then that I thought would never end. The look of power
rolled back upon her face. She spoke with joy, with a kind of
happiness as though she welcomed them.
 “They rush and shine.... They flood the distance like a sea, and
yet stand close against my heart and blood. They are clothed in wind
and fire. I see the diadems of flame ascending and descending.
Their breath is all the winds. There is such roaring. I see mountains
of wind and fire ... advancing ... nearer ... nearer.... We used them—
we invited ... long, long ago.... And so they ... come again about
us....”

His following command appalled me:

“Keep them back. You must protect the vacant body from
invasion.”

And then he added in tones that seemed to make the very air
vibrate, although the voice but whispered, “You must direct them—
towards me.”

He moved to a new position, so that we formed a triangle again.

Dimly at the time I understood. The circle signified the union which,
having received, enclosed the mighty forces. Only it enclosed too
much; the danger of misdirection had appeared. The triangle, her
body forming the apex towards the open night, aimed at controlling
the immense arrival by lessening the entry. Another thing stood out,
too, with crystal clearness—at the time: the elemental Powers
sought the easiest channel, the channel of least resistance, the body
still unoccupied: whereas Julius offered—himself. The risk must be
his and his alone. There was—in those few steps he took across the
dim-lit room—a sense of tremendous, if sinister, drama that swept
my heart with both tenderness and terror. The significance of his
changed position was staggering.

I watched the sleeper closely. The lips grew more compressed,

and the fingers of both hands clenched themselves upon the dark
dress on her lap. I saw the muscles of the altering face contract with
effort; the whole framework of the body became more rigid. Then,
after several minutes, followed a gradual relaxation, as she sank
back again into her original position.

“They retire ...” she murmured with a sigh. “They retire ... into
darkness a little. But they still ... wait and hover. I hear the rush of
their great passing.... I see the distant shine of fire ... still.”

“And the souls?” he asked gently, “do they now return?”

She lowered her head as with a gesture of relief.

“They are crowding, crowding. I see them as an endless flight of

birds....” She held out her arms, then shrank back sharply. An
expression I could not interpret flashed across the face. Behind a
veil, it seemed. And the stern voice of Julius broke in upon the
arrested action:

“Invite them by your will. Draw to you by desire and love one
eager soul. The little vacant body must be occupied, so that the
Mighty Ones, returning, shall find it thus impossible of entry.”

It was a command; it was also a precaution; for if the body of the

child were left open it would inevitably attract the invading Powers
from—himself. I watched her very closely then. I saw her again
stretch out her arms and hands, then once again—draw sharply
back. But this time I understood the expression on the quivering
face. The veil had lifted.

By what means this was clear to me, yet hidden from Julius, I
cannot say. Perhaps the ineradicable love that she and I bore for one
another in that long-forgotten time supplied the clue. But of this I
am certain—that she disobeyed him. She left the little waiting body
as it was, empty, untenanted. Life—a soul returning to re-birth—was
not conceived and did not enter in. The reason, moreover, was also
clear to me in that amazing moment of her choice: she divined his
risk of failure, she wished to save him, she left open the channel of
least resistance of set purpose—the unborn body. For a love known
here and now, she sacrificed a love as yet unborn. If Julius failed, at
least he would not now be destroyed; there would be another
channel ready.

That thus she thought, intended, I felt convinced. If her mistake

was fraught with more danger than she knew, my lips were yet
somehow sealed. Our deeper, ancient bond gave me the clue that to
Julius was not offered, but no words came from me to enlighten
him. It seemed beyond my power; I should have broken faith with
her, a faith unbelievably precious to me.

For a long time, then, there was silence in the little room, while
LeVallon continued to make slow passes as before. The anguish left
her face, drowned wholly in the grander expression that she wore.
She breathed deeply, regularly, without effort, the head sunk
forward a little on the breast. The rustle of his coat as his arm went
to and fro, and the creaking of the wicker chair were all I heard.
Then, presently, Julius turned to me with a low whisper I can hear to
this very day. “I, and I alone,” he said, “am the rightful channel. I
have waited long.” He added more that I have forgotten; I caught
something about “all the aspects being favourable,” and that he felt
confidence, sure that he would not fail.

“You will not,” I interrupted passionately, “you dare not fail....” And
then speech suddenly broke down in me, and some dark shadow
seemed to fall upon my senses so that I neither heard nor saw nor
felt anything for a period I cannot state.

An interval there certainly was, and of some considerable length

probably, for when I came to myself again there was change
accomplished, though a change I could not properly estimate. His
voice filled the room, addressing the sleeper as before, yet in a way
that told me there had been progress accomplished while I had been
unconscious.
 “Deeper yet,” I heard, “pass down deeper yet, pass back across a
hundred intervening lives to that far-off time and place when first—
first—we called Them forth. Sink down into your inmost being and
remember!”

And in her immediate answer there was a curious faintness as of

distance: “It is ... so ... far away ... so far beyond ...”

“Beyond what?” he asked, the expression of “Other Places”

deepening upon his face.

Her forehead wrinkled in a passing frown. “Beyond this earth,” she

murmured, as though her closed eyes saw within. “Oh, oh, it hurts.
The heat is awful ... the light ... the tremendous winds ... they blind,
they tear me...!” And she stopped abruptly.

“Forget the pain,” he said; “it is already gone.” And instantly the
tension of her face relaxed. She drew a sigh of deep relief. Before I
could prevent it, my own voice sounded: “When we were nearer to
the sun!”

She made no reply. He took my hand across the table and laid it
on her own. “She cannot hear your voice,” he said, “unless you
touch us. She is too far away. She does not even know that you are
here beside me. You of To-day she has forgotten, and the you of
that long ago she has not yet found.”

“You speak with someone—but with whom?” she asked at once,

turning her head a little in my direction. Not waiting for his reply she
at once went on: “Upon another planet, yes ... but oh, so long
ago....” And again she paused.

“The one immediately before this present one?” asked Julius.

She shook her head gently. “Still further back than that ... the one
before the last, when first we knew delight of life ... without these
heavy, closing bodies. When the sun was nearer ... and we knew
deity in the fiery heat and mighty winds ... and Nature was ...
ourselves....” The voice wavered oddly, broke, and ceased upon a
sigh. A thousand questions burned in me to ask. An amazing
certainty of recognition and remembrance burst through my heart.
But Julius spoke before my tongue found words.

“Search more closely,” he said with intense gravity. “The time and
place we summoned Them is what we need—not where we first
learned it, but where we practised it and failed. Confine your will to
that. Forget the earlier planet. To help you, I set a barrier you
cannot pass....”

“The scene of our actual evocation is what we must discover,” he

whispered to me. “When that is found we shall be in touch with the
actual Powers our worship used.”

“It was not there, in that other planet,” she murmured. “It was
only there we first gained the Nature-wisdom. Thence—we brought
it with us ... to another time and place ... later ... much nearer to To-
day—to Earth.”

“Remember, then, and see——” he began, when suddenly her

unutterably wonderful expression proclaimed that she at last had
found it.

It was curiously abrupt. He moved aside. We waited. I took up my

pencil between fingers that were icy cold. My gaze remained fixed
upon the motionless body. Those fast-closed eyes seemed cut in
stone, as if they never in this world could open. The forehead
gleamed pale as ivory in the lamplight. The soft gulping of the lamp
oil beside me, the crumbling of the firewood in the grate deepened
the silence that I feared to break. The pallid oval of the sleeper’s
countenance shone at me out of a room turned wholly dark. I forgot
the place wherein we sat, our names, our meanings in the present.
For there grew vividly upon that disc-like countenance the face of
another person—and of one I knew.
 And with this shock of recognition—there came over me both
horror and undying sweetness—a horror that the face would smile
into my own with a similar recognition, that from those lips a voice
must come I should remember; that those arms would lift, those
hands stretch out; an ecstasy that I should be remembered.

“Open!” I heard, as from far away, the voice of Julius.

And then I realised that the eyes were open. The lids were raised,
the eyeballs faced the lamp. Some tension drew the skin sideways.
They were other eyes. The eternal Self looked out of them bringing
the message of a vast antiquity. They gazed steadily and clearly into
mine.
 CHAPTER XXXI
To-day retired. I remembered Yesterday, but a Yesterday more
remote, perhaps, than the fire-mist out of which our little earth was
born....

I half rose in my chair. The first instinct—strong in me still as I

write this here in modern Streatham—was to fall upon my knees as
in the stress of some immense, remembered love. That glory caught
me, that power of an everlasting passion that was holy. Bathed in a
sea of perfect recollection, my eyes met hers, lost themselves, lived
back into a Past that had been joy. A flood of shame broke fiercely
over me that such a union could ever have seemed “forgotten.” That
To-day could smother Yesterday so easily seemed sacrilege. For this
memory, uprising from the mists of hoary pre-existence, brought in
its train other great emotions of recovered grandeur, all stirred into
life by this ancient ceremony we three acted out. Our purpose then
had been, I knew, no ordinary, selfish love, no lust of possession or
ownership behind it. Its aim and end were not mere personal
contentment, mere selfish happiness that excluded others, but,
rather, a part of some vast, co-ordinated process that involved all
Nature with her powers and workings, and fulfilled with beauty a
purpose of the entire Universe. It was holy in the biggest sense; it
was divine. The significance of our attitudes To-day was all explained
—Julius, herself and I, exquisitely linked to Nature, a group-soul
formed by the loves of Yesterday and Now.

We gazed at one another in silence, smiling at our recovered

wonder. We spoke no word, we made no gesture; there was perfect
comprehension; we were, all three, as we had been—long ago. An
earlier state of consciousness took this supreme command.... And
presently—how long the interval I cannot say—her eyelids dropped,
she drew a deep sigh of happiness, and lay quiescent as before.

It was then, I think, that the sense of worship in me became so

imperative that denial seemed impossible. Some inner act of
adoration certainly accomplished itself although no physical act
resulted, for I remember dropping back again into my chair, not
knowing what exactly I meant to do. The old desire for the long,
sweet things of the soul burst suddenly into flame, the inner
yearning to know the deathless Nature Powers which were the gods,
and to taste divinity by feeling-with their mighty beings. That early
state of simpler consciousness, it seems, lay too remote from
modern things to be translatable in clear language. Yet at the time I
knew it, felt it, realised it, because I lived it once again. The flood of
aspiration that bore me on its crest left thinking and reason utterly
out of account. No link survives To-day with the state we then
recovered....

And both she and Julius changed before my eyes. The châlet
changed as well, slipping into the shadowy spaces of some vast,
pillared temple. The soul in me realised its power and knew its origin
divine. Bathed in a sea of long-forgotten glory, it rose into a
condition of sublimest bliss and confidence. It recognised its destiny
and claimed all Heaven. And this raging fire of early spiritual
ambition passed over me as upon a mighty wind; desire and will
became augmented as though wind blew them into flame.

“Watch ... and listen,” I heard, “and feel no fear!”

The change visibly increased; it seemed that curtains lifted in

succession.... The sunken head was raised; the lips quivered with
approaching speech; the pale cheeks deepened with a sudden flush
that set the cheekbones in a quick, high light; the neck bent slightly
forward, foreshortening, as it were, the presentment of the head
and shoulders; while some indescribable touch of power painted the
marble brows cold and almost stern. The entire countenance
breathed the august passion of a remoter age dropped close.... And
to see the little face I knew as Mrs. LeVallon, domestic servant in the
world To-day, unscreen itself thus before me, while its actual
structure yet remained unchanged, broke down the last resistance in
me, and rendered my subjugation absolute. Transfiguration was
visibly accomplished....

Once more she turned her head and looked at me. I met the eyes
that saw me and remembered. And, though I would have screened
myself from their tremendous gaze, there was no remnant of power
in me that could do so.... She smiled, then slowly withdrew her
eyes.... I passed, with these two beside me, back into the womb of
pre-existence. We were upon the Earth—at the very time and place
where we had used the knowledge brought from a still earlier globe.

“What do you see?” came in those quiet tones that rolled up time
and distance like a scroll. “Tell me now!” It was the scene of the lost
experiment he sought. We were close upon it.

She spread her arms; her hands waved slowly through the air to
indicate these immense enclosing walls of stone about us. The voice
reverberated as in great hollow space.

“Darkness ... and the Vacated Bodies,” was the reply. I knew that
we stood in the Hall of Silence where the bodies lay entranced while
their spirits went forth upon the three days’ quest. And one of these,
I knew, was mine.

“What besides?”

“The Guardians—who protect.”

“Who are they? Who are these Guardians?”

 An expression of shrinking passed across her face, and
disappeared again. The eyes stared fixedly before her into space.

“Myself,” she answered slowly, “you—Concerighé ... and ...”

“There was another?” he asked. “Another who was with us?”

She hesitated. At first no answer came. She seemed to search the

darkness to discover it.

“He is not near enough to see,” she murmured presently.

“Somewhere beyond ... he stands ... he lies ... I cannot see him
clearly.”

Julius touched my hand, and with the contact the expression on

her face grew clear. She smiled.

“You see him now,” he said with decision.

She turned her face towards me with a tender, stately movement.

The sterner aspect deepened into softness on the features. Great joy
for an instant passed into the strange sea-green eyes.

“Silvatela,” she whispered, slightly lowering the head. “He offered

himself—for me. He lies now—empty at our feet.” And the utterance
of the name passed through me with a thrill of nameless sweetness.
An infinite desire woke, yet desire not for myself alone.

“The time...?” asked Julius in that calm, reverent tone.

She rose with a suddenness that made me start, though,

somehow, I had expected it. At her full height she stood between
us. Then, spreading her hands from both the temples outwards, she
bowed her head to the level of the breast. Julius, I saw, did likewise,
and before I realised it, the same deep, instinctive awe had brought
me to my feet in a similar obeisance. A breath of air from the night
outside passed sensibly between us, enough to stir the hair upon my
head and increase the fire on the hearth behind. It ceased, and a
wave of comforting heat moved in, paused a moment, settled like a
great invisible presence, and held the atmosphere.

“It is the Pause in Nature,” I heard the answer, and saw that she
was seated in the chair once more. “The Third Day nears its end....
The Questing Souls ... draw near again to enter. We have kept their
vacated bodies safe for them. Our task is almost over....”

She drew a deep, convulsive sigh. Then Julius, taking her right
hand, guided my left to hold the other one. I touched her fingers
and felt them instantly clasp about my own; she sighed again, the
frown went from her forehead, and turning her gaze upon us both
she murmured:

“I see clearly, I see everything.”

The past surged over me in a drowning flood.

“This is the moment, this the very place,” came the voice of Julius.
“It was at this moment we were faithless to our trust. We used your
body as the channel....” He turned slightly in my direction.

“The moment and the place,” she interrupted. “There is just time.
Before the Souls return.... You have called upon the Powers.... Yet
both cannot enter! ... he ... and they....”

There was a mighty, echoing cry.

She stopped abruptly. Her face darkened as with some great

internal effort. I darkened too. My vision broke.... There was a sense
of interval....

“And the channel——?” he asked below his breath.

She shook her head slowly to and fro. “It lies waiting still in the
Iron Slumber.... You used it ... it is shattered.... The soul returning
finds it not.... His soul ... whom I loved ...”

The voices ceased. A sudden darkness dropped. I had the

sensation that I was rushing, flying, whirling. The hand I clasped
seemed melted into air. I lost the final remnant of present things
about me. The circle of my own sensations, my identity, the identity
of my two companions vanished. A remarkable feeling of triumph
came upon me, of joyful power that lifted me high above all injury
and death, while something utterly gigantic asserted itself in the
place of what had just been “me”—something that could never be
maimed, subdued, held prisoner. The darkness then lifted, giving
way before a hurricane of light that swept me, as it were, upon a
pinnacle. Secure and strong I felt beyond all possible disaster, yet
breathless amid things too long unfamiliar.... And then, abruptly, I
knew searing pain, the pain of something broken in me, of spiritual
incompleteness, disappointment.... I was called back to lesser life—
before my time—before some high fulfilment due to me....

Julius and Mrs. LeVallon were no longer there beside me, but in
their place I saw two solemn figures standing motionless and grave
above a prostrate body. It lay upon a marble slab, and sunlight fell
over the face and folded hands. The two moved forward. They knelt
... there was a sound of voices as in prayer, a powerful, drawn-out
sound that produced intense vibrations, vibrations so immense that
the motion in the air was felt as wind. I saw gestures ... the body
half rose up upon its marble slab ... and then the blaze of some
incredible effulgence descended before my eyes, so fiercely brilliant,
and accompanied by such an intolerable, radiant heat ... that the
entire scene went lost behind great shafts of light that splintered
and destroyed it ... and an awful darkness followed, a darkness that
again had pain and incompleteness at the heart of it....

One thing alone I understood—that body on the shining slab was

mine. My absent soul, deprived of high glory elsewhere that was
mine by right, returned into it unexpectedly, aware of danger. It had
been used for the purposes of evocation. I had met the two Powers
evoked by means of it midway: Fire and Wind....

The vision vanished. I was standing in the châlet room again, he

and the woman by my side. There was a sense of enormous interval.

We were back among the present things again. I had merely re-
lived in a moment’s space a vision of that Past where these two had
sinned against me. The memory was gone again. We now resumed
our present reconstruction, by means of which the balance should
be finally restored. The same two elemental Powers were with us
still. Summoned once again—but this time that they might be
dismissed.

“The Messengers of Wind and Fire approach,” Julius was saying

softly. “Be ready for the Powers that follow after.”

“But—there poured through me but a moment ago——” I began,

when his face stopped my speech sharply.

“That ‘moment’ was sixty centuries ago! Keep hold now upon your
will,” he interrupted, yet without a trace of the vast excitement that I
felt, “lest they invade your heart instead of mine. The glory that you
knew was but the shadow of their coming—as long ago you returned
and met them—when we failed. Keep close watch upon your will. It
is the Equinox.... The pause now comes with midnight.”

Even before he had done speaking the majesties of Wind and Fire
were upon us. And Nature came in with them. A dislocating change,
swift as the shaking of some immense thick shutter that hides life
behind material things, passed in a flash about us. We stood in a
circle, hands firmly clasped. There was a first effect as if those very
hands were fused and ran into a single molten chain. There was no
outer sound. The silence in the air was deathlike. But the sensation
in my soul was—life. The momentary confusion was stupendous,
then passed away. I stood in that room, but I stood in the valley too.
I was in Nature everywhere. I heard the deer go past me, I heard
them on the soft, sweet grass, I heard their breathing and the
beating of their hearts. Birds fluttered round my face and shoulders,
I heard their singing in my blood and ears, I knew their wild desires
and freedom, their darting to and fro, their swaying on the boughs.
My feet were running water, while yet the solid mass of earth and
cliff stood up in me. I also knew the growing of the flowers by the
forests, tasted their fragrance in my breath, their tender, delicate
essence all unwasted. It passed understanding, yet was natural as
sight, for my hands went far away, while still quite close, dipping
among the stars that grew and piled like heaps of gathered sand. It
all was simple, easy, mine by right. Nature gave me her myriad
sensations without stint. I had forgotten. I remembered. The
universe stood open. “I” had entered with these other two beside
me.

She raised her arms aloft, taking our hands up with her own, and
cried with a voice like wind against great branches:

“They come! The Doors of Fire are wide, and the Gates of Wind
stand open! They enter the channel that is offered.”

And his voice, like a roar of flame, came answering hers:

“The salutations of the Fire and Wind are made! The channel is
prepared! There is no resistance!”

They stood erect and rigid, their outlines merged with some
strange extension into space. They were superb, tremendous. There
was no shrinking there. The deities of wind and fire came up,
seeking their channel of return.

And so “They” came. Yet not outwardly; nor was the terrific
impact of their advent known completely to any but himself alone
who sought to harbour them now within his little human organism.
Into my heart and soul poured but a fragment of their radiant,
rushing presences. About us all some intelligent power as of a living
wind brought in its mighty arms that ethereal fire which is not
merely living, but is life itself. Material objects wavered, then
disappeared, thin as transparent glass that increases light and heat.
Walls, ceiling, floor were burned away, yet not consumed; the atoms
composing all physical things glowed with a radiant energy they no
longer could conceal. The latent heat of inanimate Nature emerged,
not rebellious but triumphant. It was a deific manifestation of those
natural powers which are the first essentials of human existence—
heat and air. We were not alien to Nature, nor was Nature set apart
from us; we shared her inexhaustible life, and the glory of the
Universe in which she is a fragment.

“The Doors of the Creative Fire stand wide,” rang out her
triumphant voice again. “The golden splendour of the invisible Fire
loosens and flows free. The Breath of Life is everywhere ... our
own.... But what, oh what of—him!” The scene of their past
audacious error swept again before me. And, partially, I caught it.

Into a gulf of silence her words fell, recaptured from a mode of

invocation effective in forgotten ages. Quivering lightnings, like a
host of running stars, flashed marvellously about us, with bars of fire
that seemed to map all space, while there was a sense of prodigious
lifting in the heart as though some power like rushing wind drove
will and yearning to the summit of all possible achievement. I
realised simply this—that Nature’s powers and purposes became
mine too.

How long this lasted is impossible to state; duration disappeared.

The Universe, it seemed, had caught me up, joyful and unafraid, into
her bosom. It was too immense for little terrors.... And it was only
after what seemed an interminable interval that I became aware of
something that marred; of effort somewhere to confine and limit; of
conflict, in a word, as though some smaller force strove to impose
an order upon Powers that resented it. And I understood the
meaning of this too. Julius battled in his soul. He wrestled with the
Energies he had invoked, exerting to the utmost a trained, spiritual
will to influence their direction into himself, as expiatory channel.
Julius, after the lapse of centuries, fought to restore the balance he
had long ago disturbed.

Her voice, too, occasionally reached me with a sound as of wind

that rushed, but very far away. The words went past me with a heat
like flame. I caught fragments only ... “The King of Breath ... The
Master of the Diadems of Fire ... they seek to enter ... the channel of
safe return.... Oh, beware ... beware ...”

And it was then I saw this wonderful thing happen, poignant with
common human drama, intensifying the reality of the whole amazing
experience. For she turned suddenly to him, her face alight and
radiant. She would not let him accept the awful risk. Her arms went
out to hold him to her. He drove her back.

“I open wide the channel of my life and soul!” he cried, with a

gesture of the entire body that made it relaxed and unresisting. He
stepped backwards a little from her touch. “It must be through me!”

And there was anguish in her tone that seemed to press all
possible human passion into the single sentence:

“I, too, throw myself open! I cannot let you go from me!”

He moved still further from her. It seemed to me he went at

prodigious speed, yet grew no smaller to the eye. The withdrawal
belonged to some part of his being that I was aware of inwardly.
Streams of fire and wind went with him. They followed. And I heard
her voice in agonised pursuit. She raised her hands as in
supplication, but to whom or what I knew not. She fought to
prevent. She fought to offer herself instead.

But also she offered the body as yet unclaimed—untenanted.

 “He who is in the Fire and in the Sun ... I call upon His power. I
offer myself!” I heard her cry.

His answering voice seemed terrible:

“The Law forbids. You hold Them back from me.” And then as
from a greater distance, the voice continued more faintly: “You
prevent. It has to be! Help me before it is too late; help me ... or ...
I ... fail!”

Fail! I heard the awful word like thunder in the heavens.

The conflict of their wills, the distress of it was terrible. At this last
moment she realised that the strain was more than he could
withstand—he would go from her in that separation which is the
body’s death. She saw it all; there was division in her will and
energies. Opposing herself to the justice he had invoked, she
influenced the invasion of the elemental Powers, offering herself as
channel in the hope of saving him. Her human desire weighed the
balance—turning it just against him. Her insight clouded with
emotion. She increased the risk for him, and at the same time left
open to the great invading Powers another channel—the line of least
resistance, the empty vehicle all prepared within herself.

To me it was mercilessly clear. I tried to speak, but found no

words to utter; my tongue refused to frame a single sound; nor
could I move my limbs. I heard Julius only, his voice calling like a
distant storm.

“I call upon the Fire and Wind to enter me, and pass to their
eternal home ... whence you and I ... and he ...”

His voice fell curiously away into a gulf; there was weakness in it.
I saw her frail body shake from head to foot. She swayed as though
about to fall. And then her voice, strong as a bugle-call, rang out:

“I claim it by—my love....!”

 There was a burst of wind, a rush of sheeted fire. Then darkness
fell. But in that instant before the fire passed, I saw his form stand
close before my eyes. The face, alight with compassion and
resignation, was turned towards her own. I saw the eyes; I saw the
hands outstretched to take her; the lips were parted in a final
attempt at utterance which never knew completion. And I knew—the
certainty stopped the beating of my heart—that he had failed. There
was no actual sound. Like a gleaming sword drawn swiftly from its
scabbard, he rose past me through the air, borne from his body, as it
were, on wings of ascending flame. There was a second of
intolerable radiance, a rush of driving wind—and he was gone.

And far away, at the end of some stone corridor in the sunshine,
yet at the same time close beside me upon the floor of the little
mountain châlet, I heard the falling body as it dropped with a thud
before my feet—untenanted....
 CHAPTER XXXII
I remember what followed very much as one remembers the confusion
after an anæsthetic—fragments of extraordinary dream and of
sensational experience jostling one another on the threshold of
awakening. Then, very swiftly, like a train of gorgeous colour
disappearing into a tunnel of darkness, the memory slipped down
within me and was gone. The Past with a rush of lightning swept
back into its sheath.

The glory and sense of exaltation, that is, were gone, but not the
memory that they had been. I knew what had happened, what I had
felt, seen, yearned for; but it was the cold facts alone remained, the
feelings that had accompanied them vanished. Into a dull, chilled
world I dropped back, wondering and terrified. A long interval had
passed.

And the first thing I realised was that Mrs. LeVallon still lay
sleeping in that chair of wicker—profoundly sleeping—that the lamp
had burned low, and that the châlet felt like ice. Her face, even in
the twilight, I saw was normal, the older expression gone. I turned
the wick up higher, noting as I did so that the paper strewn about
me was thick with writing, and it was then my half-dazed senses
took in first that Julius was not standing near us, and that a shadow,
oddly shaped and huddled, lay on the floor where the lamplight met
the darkness.

The moving portion seemed at once to disentangle itself from the

rest, and a face turned up to stare at me. It was the serving-man
upon his knees. The expression in his eyes did more to bring me to
my normal senses than anything else. That scared and anguished
look made me understand the truth—that, and the moaning that
from time to time escaped his lips.

Of speech from him I hardly got a word; he was inarticulate to the

last as ever, and all that I could learn was that he had felt his
master’s danger and had come....

We carried the body upstairs and laid it on the bed. I strove to

regard it merely as the “instrument” he had used awhile, strove to
find still his real undying Presence close to me—but that comfort
failed me too. The face was very white. Upon the pale marble
features lay still that signature of “Other Places” which haunted his
life and soul. We closed the staring eyes and covered him with a
sheet. And there the servant crouched upon the floor for the
remaining five hours until the dawn, when I came up from watching
that other figure of sleep in the room below, and found him in the
same position. All that day as well he watched indeed, until at last I
made him realise that the sooner he got the farmer’s horse below
and summoned a doctor, the better for all concerned.

But that was many hours later in the day, and meanwhile he just
crouched there, difficult of approach, eyeing me savagely almost
when I came, his eyes aflame with a kind of ugly, sullen resentment,
but faithful to the last. What the silent, devoted being had heard or
seen during our long hours of sinister struggle and experiment, I
never knew, nor ever shall know.

My memory hardly lingers upon that; nor upon the unprofitable

detail of the doctor’s tardy arrival in the evening, his ill-concealed
suspicion and eventual granting of a death certificate according to
Swiss law; nor, again, upon his obvious verdict of a violent heart-
stroke, or the course of procedure that he bade us follow.

Even the distressing details of the burial have somewhat faded,

and I recall chiefly the fact that the Man established himself in the
village where the churchyard was and began his watch that kept him
near the grave, I believe, till death relieved him. My memory lingers
rather upon the hours that I watched beside the sleeping woman,
and upon the dreadful scene of her awakening and discovery of the
truth.

For hours we had the darkness and the silence to ourselves, a

silence broken only by the steady breathing of her slumber. I dared
not wake her; knowing that the trance condition in time exhausts
itself and the subject returns to normal waking consciousness
without effort or distress, I let her slumber on, dreading the moment
when the eyes would open and she must question me. The cold
increased with the early hours of the morning, and I spread a rug
about her stretched-out form. Slowly with the failing of the oil, the
little lamp flame flickered and died, then finally went out, leaving us
in the chill gloom together. All heat had long since left the fire of
peat.

It was a vigil never to be forgotten. My thoughts revolved the

whole time in one and the same circle, seeking in vain support from
common things. Slowly and by degrees my mind found steadiness,
though with returning balance my pain grew keener and more
searching. The poignant minutes stretched to days and years. For
ever I fell to reconstructing those vanished scenes of memory, while
striving to believe that the whole thing had been but a detailed vivid
dream, and that presently I, too, should awake to find our life in the
châlet as before, Julius still alive and close....

The moaning from the room overhead, where the Man watched
over that other, final sleep, then brought bitterly again the sad
reality, and set my thoughts whirling afresh with anguish. I was
distraught and trembling.... London and my lectures, the recent
climbing in the Dolomites, cities and trains and the business of daily
modern life, these were the dreams.... The reality, truth, lay in that
world of vision just departed ... Concerighé, Silvatela, the woman of
that ancient, splendid past, the re-capture of the Temple Days when
we three trod together that strange path of questing; the broken
fragment of it all; the Chamber of the Vacated Bodies, and the sin of
long ago; then, chief of all, the attempt to banish the Powers,
evoked in those distant ages, back to their eternal home—his effort
to offer himself as channel—her fear to lose him and her offering of
herself—the failure ... and that appalling result upstairs.

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...! A “natural,”
perhaps a “super-natural” 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:

“I 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 good-bye.”

 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-bare....”

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 châlet 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 to-day; 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, surviving 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.

Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C.

 Transcriber’s Note:
Variations in hyphenations have been retained as they appear in
the original publication. Changes have been made as follows:

Page 26
euclid, mathematics, and the dead languages changed
to
Euclid, mathematics, and the dead languages
Page 36
the coming of a—third changed to
the coming of a—third.
Page 178
by surprise, as it were.” changed to
by surprise, as it were.
Page 271
Le Vallon’s personality and changed to
LeVallon’s personality and
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