The Passion for Life Part 55

I think I must have fallen into a kind of waking dream, for, as it seemed to me, some moments pa.s.sed when I had no consciousness of my surroundings. Then suddenly the dog at my feet gave a savage yelp. It was well he did so, for I saw two forms close by me, both of which seemed to be in the act of pouncing upon me.

I have read somewhere of a man who, when facing a great crisis, felt that he lived a lifetime in a few seconds. I realized now that this can be true. Within a few seconds of the time when the dog yelped, the whole panorama of the past twelve months, and all the details of that panorama, flashed before my eyes. It came to me with a vividness which I had never realized before. That I was indeed at the heart of a scheme whereon depended the lives of many people; that these tins of petrol were intended for German submarines; that this little cove had been used as a storehouse for the fuel whereby the Germans had been able to do their fiendish work; that in some way unknown to the authorities, hundreds of cans of this spirit had been stored there from time to time, and then, as they were needed, taken to those deadly monsters which operated beneath the sea; and that I had, partly by chance, partly by reasoning, but more by intuition, got at the heart of it all. I felt, too, that on me depended the failure or success of the German scheme. By some means or other Liddicoat, or one of his minions, had discovered or suspected what I had done.

It was one of those moments, so tense, so weighted with vital issues, that the human body and the human mind are made capable of what in ordinary circ.u.mstances would be impossible. Without waiting a second, without giving time to think, and yet feeling all the while that I was acting upon reason rather than upon impulse, I leapt upon what seemed to me the form of a man, and was instantly engaged in a deadly struggle.

Even now that struggle does not seem to me real. It is like the memory of a dream rather than something which actually took place. But that it did take place I have tremendous proof. I do not remember making any noise of any sort, but I do remember the deathly grip which was laid upon me and the fight which I knew was to the death. I cannot explain why, but life never was so dear to me as at that moment. I felt, too, as though Dr. Rhomboid had been somehow mistaken in his diagnosis; that life was strong in me, but that pa.s.sion was swallowed up in a greater pa.s.sion, a n.o.bler pa.s.sion--it was to render service to my country, to save the lives of my fellow-countrymen.

Even while I struggled I saw what the success of my plans meant; what their failure meant. I remember, too, that I wondered why the second person I had seen took no part in the struggle; why, although there were two who prepared to attack me, only one fought me. Yet such was the case; it was man to man. Who the man was I was not sure, although I had a dim consciousness that I was fighting with the man Liddicoat; neither had I any clear conception as to the meaning of that deadly struggle; all the same, I knew that I must struggle till I had mastered him. I did not remember the precautions I had taken or the agencies I had set on foot; everything was swallowed up in the one thought--I must master the man who I was sure meant to kill me.

How long the encounter lasted I have not the remotest idea; indeed, as I think of it now, I was robbed of all human personality. I was simply Fate, and as Fate I must accomplish my purpose, heedless of everything.

I fancied that I was gaining the upper hand of him; fancied, too, that others were coming upon the scene of action; but of this I was not sure, for a great darkness came upon me suddenly, and I knew nothing more.

XXVII

VISION

And now I have come to that part of my experiences which I find difficult to relate. It is probable that if these lines are read by eyes other than my own, they will be disbelieved, yet I will set them down as I remember them. This is no easy matter, for I feel as though I were recalling the incidents which happened in a far-off dream rather than something which actually took place. And yet not altogether. What I am going to tell is very real to me, even although the reality is utterly different from what I ever experienced before. Even as I remember, I find myself thinking out of ordinary grooves, and my thoughts are of such a nature that I find no language sufficient to express them.

I was dead. I knew that my spirit, my essential self, had left my body, and that I was no longer a habitant of the world in which I had lived.

My first sensation, for I can find no better word to express my thought, was that of freedom, and with that sense of freedom came a consciousness of utter loneliness. I felt as the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's immortal poem must have felt:

"Alone, alone, all alone, Alone on a wild, wide sea, So lonely it was that G.o.d Himself, Scarce seemed there to be."

I felt no pain, no weariness, and I was free; but I was alone.

I do not know that I felt fear; no terror possessed me; I did not think of my past life with dread, neither did past scenes haunt me. My thought of the past was rather the thought of emptiness, of purposelessness, of vacancy; it seemed to me as though my life had been a great opportunity of which I had failed to avail myself.

I had a feeling, too, that it was very cold. I seemed to be floating in infinite s.p.a.ce, through sunless air.

Kipling, I remember, in one of the most vivid poems he ever wrote, described a man who, when he died, was carried far away:

"Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford, the roar of the Milky Way.

Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down, and drone and cease....

Then Tomlinson looked up and down, and little gain was there For the naked stars gleamed overhead, and he saw that his soul was bare. But the wind that blows between the worlds had cut him like a knife...."

But the poet's imagination never saw in his vision an experience like mine. No winds blew between the worlds; there was no roar as of a rain-fed ford; all was silence. Not the silence of narrow s.p.a.ces, not even the silence of night, when the ears of listeners are filled with noise made by silence; it was the silence of illimitable s.p.a.ces, the silence of eternity.

I thought my spirit was mounting; at least that was the impression left upon me; I was going upward, not downward. But here words fail me again, because, as it seemed to me, there was no upward and no downward. More than that, there seemed to be a lack of standards whereby one could measure anything. There was no more time, and as a consequence there was no past, no present, no future. Everything, as I thought, was formless, meaningless.

I know I have failed to give a true idea of what I saw and felt. As a boy, I was for a short time fascinated by the study of astronomy, and I remember being made afraid by the thought of the distances between the worlds. Now all that was changed; I was floating, it appeared to me, between unnumbered worlds, but in a way they were near to me, so near that I could see what was happening on them.

How long I was alone I do not know, for, as I have said, time had no meaning. In a sense I felt as though I wandered through the silences for aeons, although scenes flashed before me with the speed of light. My experiences make me think of the words of the old Hebrew poet:

"A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday, when it is pa.s.sed, and as a watch in the night."

I have said that the worlds I saw were near me, so near that I could see their inhabitants and watch their movements and activities. But even in this I convey a wrong impression, for while I had this sense of nearness, I had also the consciousness that they were separated by vast distances. It was just as though I had a glimpse of the Universe. There were millions of worlds around me, and all were inhabited; everywhere was life, life that expressed itself in thought and action. On every hand were sentient thinking beings who played their part and did their work in the world from which they drew their life.

A sense of unutterable awe possessed me. I was between the worlds. I could watch what was being done on those worlds, and I felt myself to be the merest speck in infinity.

As I have stated, the thought which possessed me was that I was utterly alone, and that while I suffered no pain, and while I had a consciousness of freedom which made me exultant, my loneliness was beyond all thought....

I felt a presence; at least that is the only word I can think of to express my thought. I had no consciousness of a person being near me, and yet that Something was all around me, an Intelligence, a Will, a Power. What it was I could not tell, but that Something answered the questions which came to me....

The one predominating thought or consciousness which flooded and overwhelmed everything was the consciousness of G.o.d. While I had been in the body, something hid from me the reality of G.o.d; now everything was G.o.d. I lived in G.o.d; everything was submerged in this one great Fact of Facts, and I wondered at my blindness when I was alive. And yet I was overwhelmed by what, for want of a better word, I call the immensity of everything. I remember asking myself how G.o.d could care for such a life as mine; how He could take an interest in the myriads of beings who inhabited the worlds; how He, Who controlled planets and suns, could care for the little lives of men. For I seemed so infinitely little; I was but a speck in infinite s.p.a.ce, less to the Universe than the tiniest insect which crawled upon the face of the globe on which I had lived.

But even as the thought came to me came also the answer: because G.o.d was infinite in thought, in love, in power, so His Being enveloped all; that because He governed the infinitely Great, so He cared for the tiniest speck of life He had created....

I saw the world from which I had come; I was able to locate my own country. Europe stretched out before me like a plain, and there I saw the nations at war. At first the war appeared only like the struggle of ants upon their little hills, and it seemed of no more importance as to which army should conquer the other than if they had been so many insects at war.

"How little we must be to G.o.d!" I thought. "On earth we regarded the European War as something beyond all thought, all comprehension, yet seen from here it is less than a struggle of gnats. What does it matter to G.o.d whether England or Germany wins in what we call the Great World Struggle?" But even as the thought flashed through my spirit came the answer that G.o.d did care; that because we were the breath of His life we had a destiny to fulfil, a work to do; that the energies of G.o.d were on the side of those who sought to express His will.

It was all infinitely beyond me; I could not understand, and yet I had the consciousness that G.o.d watched the struggle of the creatures He had made, and that He was on the side of those who, perhaps unknown to themselves, were moving towards His own purposes. As I watched, the world seemed to become nearer to me, and such was my power of vision that I was able to visualize all the struggle and all the deadly warfare from Russia to France. I heard the boom of guns, I saw the flash of bayonets, I could plainly see the men in their trenches and could hear them talking with each other. I saw sh.e.l.ls flying from the mouths of the guns, I watched their pa.s.sage through the air. I beheld them as they fell, and I saw the stain on the battle-fields. I realized everything as I had never realized it before. I saw men in their death agony, I heard their groans, their shrieks of pain. I saw thousands of torn, mangled bodies, bodies which a moment before were full of life and vigor.

Then, as it seemed to me, I beheld the agony of the world. I saw blighted homes, broken lives, bleeding, broken hearts.

"O G.o.d!" I cried out, "let me not see! I cannot bear it!"

For death was horrible to me, and life a mockery. How could G.o.d care when He allowed these young lives, so full of hope and promise, to perish in a moment?

Then out of all the mad carnage and above the din and horror of war came a voice that filled my being and rang through the worlds:

"Fear not them who can kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul."

I saw that the great tragedy of the world was not the tragedy caused by war, but the tragedy of men killing their souls even while their bodies lived; that the death of those on the battle-fields was as nothing compared to the death of those who seemed to live and yet who were dead, because they had sacrificed truth and honor and love, and that death was impossible while honor and truth and love lived.

Then I looked again, and behold, the heavens were full of the spirits of those who had offered their all on the altar of duty, and that for them there was no death. I saw that instruments of war had no power to touch the real life of these men; that each had a Divine Spark of life, and that that life was still under the overshadowing wing of the Eternal love....

Ages appeared to pa.s.s; how long I knew not, cared not, for time had no meaning. I saw that the Eternal Love and the Eternal Life, which was everywhere, was bringing out of all that at first seemed a meaningless chaos an infinite order; that even the War of the World in which men lost their lives by thousands and hundreds of thousands, in which unholy pa.s.sions seemed to prevail, and in which Death stalked triumphant: I say I saw evolving out of all this, confused and contradictory as it all appeared, a higher life and a higher thought--a movement towards the Eternal Will and towards the Eternal Purpose which was behind everything.

I know I have badly expressed all this, because I find no words wherewith to make clear that which came to me; for in truth thought was lost in consciousness, and language fails to express that consciousness.

I only know that I saw order coming out of chaos, light out of darkness, love out of hatred, divinity out of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, life out of death.

For life and love were all.

I did not see G.o.d--that is, I was not able to visualize His Presence. I did not talk with G.o.d as a man talketh with his friend, and yet my whole being seemed to be filled with His Light and Love and Peace. I felt that I was breathing G.o.d, because G.o.d was all; that nothing was outside His Care, that nothing was too small for His Love. I wondered at my doubts and at my absence of faith, for G.o.d was everywhere, in everything; in all purposes, plans, desires. I was conscious that He was shaping and directing and controlling all the thoughts of men, and that everything was moving towards His Eternal Purposes.

In the light of what I saw, pain and wrong and misery were being overruled by the Eternal Love, so that even they were speeding men towards the greater, fuller life, and that in the march of untold ages Life and Love were everything.

A sense of triumph, of exultation filled me, bore me up as if on the wings of eagles. I saw everything from a new perspective. I realized as I never realized before the meaning of the words of the Apostle:

"Our light affliction, which is but for a _moment_, worketh for us a far more exceeding and Eternal weight of glory."

I saw that all things--all wrong, all pain, all darkness, everything which made life dark and terrible--were only for a _moment_, and that they were overruled by the Eternal G.o.d, so that those who suffered them merged through the ages into Eternal Love and Eternal Light.