Watersprings Part 20

"Of course, of course," said Howard, "but I mean much more than that.

Is there something really THERE, open to all, possible to all, from which I am shut out by what the Bible calls my hardness of heart? Do you really think yourself that a living spirit drew near and made itself known to Maud thus? or is it a beautiful dream, a sort of subjective attempt at finding comfort, an instinctive effort of the mind towards saving itself from sorrow?"

"Ah," said Mrs. Graves, "who shall say? Of course I do not see any real objection to the former, when I think of all the love and the emotion that went to the calling of the little spirit from the deeps of life; but then I am a woman, and an old woman. If I were a man of your age who had lived an intellectual life, I should feel very much as you do."

"But if you believe it," said Howard, "can you give me reasons why you believe it? I am not unreasonable at all. I hate the att.i.tude of mind of denying the truth of the experience of others, just because one has not felt it oneself. Here, it seems to me, there are two explanations, and my scepticism inclines to what is, I suppose, the materialistic one. I am very suspicious of experiences which one is told to take on trust, and which can't be intellectually expressed. It's the sort of theory that the clergy fall back upon, what they call spiritual truth, which seems to me merely unchecked, unverifiable experience. I don't, to take a crude instance, believe in statues that wink; and yet the tendency of the priest is to say that it is a matter of childlike faith; yet to me credulity appears to be one of the worst of sins. It is incredulity which has disposed of superst.i.tion."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves. "I fully agree with you about that; and there is a great deal of very objectionable nonsense which goes by the name of mysticism, which is merely emotion divorced from commonsense."

"Yes," said Howard, "and if I may speak quite frankly, I do very much respect your own judgment and your convictions. It seems to me that you have a very sceptical turn of mind, which has acted as a solvent upon a whole host of stupid and conventional beliefs. I don't think you take things for granted, and it always seems to me that you have got rid of a great many foolish traditions which ordinary people accept--and it's a fine att.i.tude."

"I'm not too old to be insensible to a compliment," said Mrs. Graves, smiling. "What you are surprised at is to find that I have any beliefs left, I suppose? And I expect you are inclined to think that I have done the feminine thing ultimately, and compromised, so as to retain just the comfortable part of the affair."

"No," said Howard, "I don't. I am much more inclined to think that there is something which is hidden from me; and I want you to explain it, if you can and will."

"Well, I will try," said Mrs. Graves. "Let me think." She sate silent for a little, and then she said: "I think that as I get older, I recognise more and more the division between the rational part of the mind and the instinctive part of the mind. I find more and more that my deepest convictions are not rational--at least not arrived at by reason--only formulated by it. I think that reason ought to be able to formulate convictions; but they are there, whether expressed or not.

Most women don't bring the reason to bear at all, and the result is that they hold a ma.s.s of beliefs, some simply inherited, some mere phrases which they don't understand, and some real convictions. A great deal of the muddle comes from the feminine weariness of logic, and a great deal, too, from the fact that they never learn how to use words--words are the things that divide people! But I believe more and more, by experience, in the SOUL. I do not believe that the soul begins with birth or ends with death. Now I have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink of life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some need for experience, take shape. I don't know how or why this is--I only believe that it is so. If your child had lived, you would have become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt from you, and which you could not affect or change. All those qualities are in it from the time of birth--but it takes a soul some time to learn the use of the body. But the connection between the soul and the father and mother who give it a body is a real one; I don't profess to know what it is, or why it is that some parents have congenial children and some quite uncongenial ones--that is only one of the many mysteries which beset us. Holding all this, it does not seem to me on the face of it impossible that the soul of the child should have been brought into contact with Maud's soul; though of course the whole affair is quite capable of a scientific and material explanation. But I have seen too many strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific explanation as conclusive. I have known men and women who, after a bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of the beloved spirit with them and near them. I have experienced it myself; and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of beauty. If one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can't give good reasons for one's emotion to a person who does not think the same thing beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of explaining it away lies on the one who does NOT feel it. One can't say that beauty is a purely subjective thing, because when two people think a thing beautiful, they understand each other perfectly. Do I make myself clear at all, or is that merely a bit of feminine logic?"

"No, indeed," said Howard slowly, "I think it is a good case. The very last thing I would do is to claim to be fully equipped for the understanding of all mysteries. My difficulty is that while there are two explanations of a thing--a transcendental one and a material one--I hanker after the material one. But it isn't because I want to disbelieve the transcendental one. It is because I want to believe it so much, that I feel that I must exclude all possibility of its being anything else."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "and I think you are perfectly right; one must follow one's conscience in this. I don't want you to swallow it whole at all. I want you, and I am sure that Maud wants you, just to wait and see. Don't begin by denying the possibility of its being a transcendental thing. Just hold the facts in your mind, and as life goes on, see if your experience confirms it, and until it does, do not pretend that it does. I don't claim to be omniscient. Something quite definite, of course, lies behind the mystery of life, and whatever it is, is not affected by what you or I believe about it. I may be wholly and entirely mistaken, and it may be that life is only a chemical phenomenon; but I have kept my eyes open, and my heart open; and I am as sure as I can be that there is something very much bigger behind it than that. I myself believe that each being is an immortal spirit, hampered by contact with mortal laws, and I believe that consciousness and emotion are something superior even to chemistry. But to use emotion to silence people would be entirely repugnant to me, and equally to Maud. She isn't the sort of woman who would be content if you only just said you believed her. She would hate that!"

"Well," said Howard, smiling, "you are two very wonderful women, and that's the truth. I am not surprised at YOUR wisdom--it IS wisdom--because you have lived very bravely and loved many people; but it's amazing to me to find such courage and understanding in a girl. Of course you have helped her--but I don't think you could have produced such thoughts in her unless they had been there to start with."

"That's exactly what I have tried to say," said Mrs. Graves. "Where did Maud's fine mixture of feeling and commonsense come from? Her mother was a woman of some perception, but after all she married Frank, and Frank with all his virtue isn't a very mature spirit!"

"Ah," said Howard, "my marriage has done everything for me! What a blind, complacent, petty a.s.s I was--and am too, though I at least perceive it! I see myself as an elderly donkey, braying and capering about in a paddock--and someone leans over the fence, and all is changed. I ought not to think lightly of mysteries, when all this astonis.h.i.+ng conspiracy has taken place round me, to give me a home and a wife and a whole range of new emotions--how Maud came to care for me is still the deepest wonder of all--a loveless prig like me!"

"I won't be understood to subscribe to all that," said Mrs. Graves, laughing, "though I see your point of view; but there's something deeper even than that, dear Howard. You care for me, you care for Maud; but it's the power of caring that matters more than the power of caring for particular people. Does that seem a very hard saying? You see I do not believe--what do you say to this--in memory lasting. You and I love each other here and now; when I die, I do not feel sure that I shall have any recollection of you or Maud or my own dear husband--how horrible that would sound to many men and nearly all women--but I have learned how to love, and you have learned how to love, and we shall find other souls to draw near to as the ages go on; and so I look forward to death calmly enough, because whatever I am I shall have souls to love, and I shall find souls to love me."

"No," said Howard, "I can't believe that! I can't believe in any life here or hereafter apart from Maud. It is strange that I should be the sentimentalist now, and you the stern sceptic. The thought to me is infinitely dreary--even atrocious."

"I am not surprised," said Mrs. Graves, "but that's the last sacrifice.

That is what losing oneself means; to believe in love itself, and not in the particular souls we love; to believe in beauty, not in beautiful things. I have learned that! I do not say it in any complacency or superiority--you must believe me; but it is the last and hardest thing that I have learned. I do not say that it does not hurt--one suffers terribly in losing one's dear self, in parting from other selves that are even more dear. But would one send away the souls one loves best into a loveless paradise? Can one bear to think of them as hankering for oneself, and lost in regret? No, not for a moment! They pa.s.s on to new life and love; we cannot ourselves always do it in this life--the flesh is weak and dear; and age pa.s.ses over us, and takes away the close embrace and the sweet desire. But it is the awakening of the soul to love that matters; and it has been to me one of the sweetest experiences of my life to see you and Maud awaken to love. But you will not stay there--nothing is ultimate, not the dearest and largest relations of life. One climbs from selfishness to liking, and from liking to pa.s.sion, and from pa.s.sion to love itself."

"No," said Howard, "I cannot rise to that yet; I see, I dimly feel, that you are far above me in this; but I cannot let Maud go. She is mine, and I am hers."

Mrs. Graves smiled and said, "Well, we will leave it at that. Kiss me, dearest boy; I don't love you less because I feel as I do--perhaps even more, indeed."

x.x.xVI

THE TRUTH

It was a sunny day of winter with a sharp breeze blowing, just after the birth of the New Year, that Howard and Maud left Windlow for Cambridge. The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard by doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business. Furnis.h.i.+ng even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity involved intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things which it seemed inconceivable that anyone should need. The very number and variety of brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage on the love of cheap beauty, so epigrammatically praised by Thucydides; he said with a groan to Maud that it was indeed true that the Nineteenth Century would stand out to all time as the period of the world's history in which more useless things had been made than at any epoch before!

But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed to slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at about eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the library and demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly, admiringly, adoringly at his wife. She had regained a look of health and lightness more marked than he had ever before seen in her. Her illness had proved a rest, in spite of all the trouble she had pa.s.sed through. Some new beauty, the beauty of experience, had pa.s.sed into her face without making havoc of the youthful contours and the girlish freshness, and the beautiful line of her cheek outlined upon the dark fur, with the wide-open eye above it, came upon Howard with an almost tormenting sense of loveliness, like a chord of far-off music. He flung down his pen, and took his wife in his arms for an instant. "Yes," he said in answer to her look, "it's all right, darling--I can manage anything with you near me, looking like that--that's all I want!"

They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped gra.s.s and leafless shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind. "How it blows!" said Howard:

"''Twould blow like this through holt and hanger When Uricon the city stood: 'Tis the old wind, in the old anger, But then it threshed another wood!'

How beautiful that is--'the old wind, in the old anger!'--but it isn't true, for all that. If one thing changes, everything changes; and the wind has got to march on, like you and me: there's nothing pathetic about it. The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!"

"Oh yes," said Maud; "one wastes pity. I was inclined myself to be pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked into my little old room. The furniture and books and pictures seemed to me to reproach me with having deserted them; but, oh dear, what a fantastic, foolish, anxious little wretch I was, with all my plans for uplifting everyone! You don't know, dearest, you can't know, out of what a stagnant little pool you fished me up!"

"And yet _I_ feel," said Howard, "as if it was you who had saved me from a sort of death--what a charming picture! two people who can't swim saving each other from drowning."

"Well, that's the way that things are done!" said Maud decisively.

They left the garden, and betook themselves to the pool; the waters welled up, green and cold, from the depth, and hurried away down their bare channel.

"This is the scene of my life," said Howard; "I WILL be sentimental about this! This is where my ghost will walk, if anywhere; good heavens, to think that it was not three years ago that I came here first, and thought in a solemn way that it was going to have a strange significance for me. 'Significance,' that is the mischief! But it is all very well, now that every minute is full of happiness, to laugh at the old fears--they were very real at the time,--'the old wind, in the old anger'--one can't sit and dream, though it's pleasant, it's pleasant."

"It was the only time in my life," said Maud, "when I was ever brave!

Why isn't one braver? It is agreeable at the time, and it is almost overpaid!"

"It is like what a doctor told me once," said Howard, "that he had never in his life seen a patient go to the operating table other than calm and brave. Face to face with things one is all right; and yet one never learns not to waste time in dreading them."

They went on in silence up the valley, Maud walking beside him with all her old lightness. Howard thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. They were out of the wind now, but could hear it hiss in the gra.s.ses above them.

"What about Cambridge?" said Maud. "I think it will be rather fun. I haven't wanted to go; but do you know, if someone came to me and said I might just unpack everything, I should be dreadfully disappointed!"

"I believe I should be too," said Howard. "My only fear is that I shall not be interested--I shall be always wanting to get back to you--and yet how inexplicable that used to seem to me, that Dons who married should really prefer to steal back home, instead of living the free and joyous life of the sympathetic and bachelor; and even now it seems difficult to suppose that other men can feel as I do about THEIR wives."

"Like the boy in Punch," said Maud, "who couldn't believe that the two earwigs could care about each other."

A faint music of bells came to them on the wind. "Hark!" said Howard; "the Sherborne chime! Do you remember when we first heard that? It gave me a delightful sense of other people being busy when I was unoccupied.

To-day it seems as if it was warning me that I have got to be busy."

They turned at last and retraced their steps. Presently Howard said, "There's just one more thing, child, I want to say. I haven't ever spoken to you since about the vision--whatever it was--which you described to me--the child and you. But I took you at your word!"

"Yes," said Maud, "I have always been glad that you did that!"

"But I have wanted to speak," said Howard, "simply because I did not want you to think that it wasn't in my mind--that I had cast it all lightly away. I haven't tried to force myself into any belief about it--it's a mystery--but it has grown into my mind somehow, and become real; and I do feel more and more that there is something very true and great about it, linking us with a life beyond. It does seem to me life, and not silence; love, and not emptiness. It has not come in between us, as I feared it might--or rather it HAS come in between us, and seems to be holding both our hands. I don't say that my reason tells me this--but something has outrun my reason, and something stronger and better than reason. It is near and dear: and, dearest, you will believe me when I say that this isn't said to please you or to woo you--I wouldn't do that! I am not in sight of the reality yet, as you have been; but it IS a reality, and not a sweet dream."

Maud looked at him, her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with sudden tears. "Ah, my beloved," she said, "that is all and more than I had hoped. Let it just stay there! I am not foolish about it, and indeed the further away that it gets, the less I am sure what happened. I shall not want you to speak of it: it isn't that it is too sacred--nothing is too sacred--but it is just a fact I can't reckon with, like the fact of one's own birth and death. All I just hoped was that you might not think it only a girl's fancy; but indeed I should not have cared if you HAD thought that. The TRUTH--that is what matters; and nothing that you or I or anyone, in any pa.s.sion of love or sorrow, can believe about the truth, can alter it; the only thing is to try to see it all clearly, not to give false reasons, not to let one's imagination go."

"Yes, yes," said Howard, "that's the secret of love and life and everything; and yet it seems a hard thing to believe; because if it were not for your illusions about me, for instance--if you could really see me as I am--you couldn't feel as you do; one comes back to trusting one's heart after all--that is the only power we have of reading the writing on the wall. And yet that is not all; it IS possible to read it, to spell it out; but it is the interpretation that one needs, and for that one must trust love, and love only."

They went back to the house in a happy silence; but Maud slipped out again, and went to the little churchyard. There behind the chancel, in a corner of the b.u.t.tress, was a little mound. Maud laid a single white flower upon it. "No," she said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a child, "no, my darling, I am not making any mistake. I don't think of you as sleeping here, though I love the place where the little limbs are laid. You are awake, alive, about your business, I don't doubt. I'd have loved you, guarded you, helped you along; but you have made love live for me, and that, and hope, are enough now for us both! I don't claim you, sweet; I don't even ask you to remember and understand."