Peter Ibbetson Part 37

I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat motionless on the bench by the old willow.

I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged, with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent eyes were following me.

Then, as I drew nearer, she smiled and showed gleaming white teeth, and her eyes crinkled and nearly closed up as she did so.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" I shrieked; "it is Mary Seraskier!"

I ran to her--I threw myself at her feet, and buried my face in her lap, and there I sobbed like a hysterical child, while she tried to soothe me as one soothes a child.

After a while I looked up into her face. It was old and worn and gray, and her hair nearly white, like mine. I had never seen her like that before; she had always been eight-and-twenty. But age became her well--she looked so benignly beautiful and calm and grand that I was awed--and quick, chill waves went down my backbone.

Her dress and bonnet were old and shabby, her gloves had been mended--old kid gloves with fur about the wrists. She drew them off, and took my hands and made me sit beside her, and looked at me for a while with all her might in silence.

At length she said: "Gogo mio, I know all you have been through by the touch of your hands. Does the touch of mine tell you nothing?"

It told me nothing but her huge love for me, which was all I cared for, and I said so.

She sighed, and said: "I was afraid it would be like this. The old circuit is broken, and can't be restored--not yet!"

We tried again hard; but it was useless.

She looked round and about and up at the tree-tops, everywhere; and then at me again, with great wistfulness, and s.h.i.+vered, and finally began to speak, with hesitation at first, and in a manner foreign to her. But soon she became apparently herself, and found her old swift smile and laugh, her happy slight shrugs and gestures, and quaint polyglot colloquialisms (which I omit, as I cannot always spell them); her homely, simple ways of speech, her fluent, magnetic energy, the winning and sympathetic modulations of her voice, its quick humorous changes from grave to gay--all that made everything she said so suggestive of all she wanted to say besides.

"Gogo, I knew you would come. I _wished_ it! How dreadfully you have suffered! How thin you are! It shocks me to see you! But that will not be any more; we are going to change all that.

"Gogo, you have no idea how difficult it has been for me to come back, even for a few short hours, for I can't hold on very long. It is like hanging on to the window-sill by one's wrists. This time it is Hero swimming to Leander, or Juliet climbing up to Romeo.

"n.o.body has ever come back before.

"I am but a poor husk of my former self, put together at great pains for you to know me by. I could not make myself again what I have always been to you. I had to be content with this, and so must you. These are the clothes I died in. But you knew me directly, dear Gogo.

"I have come a long way--such a long way--to have an _abboccamento_ with you. I had so many things to say. And now we are both here, hand in hand as we used to be, I can't even understand what they were; and if I could, I couldn't make _you_ understand. But you will know some day, and there is no hurry whatever.

"Every thought you have had since I died, I know already; _your_ share of the circuit is unbroken at least. I know now why you picked up those stones and put them in your pockets. You must never think of _that_ again--you never will. Besides, it would be of no use, poor Gogo!"

Then she looked up at the sky and all round her again, and smiled in her old happy manner, and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and seemed to settle herself for a good long talk--an _abboccamento!_

Of all she said I can only give a few fragments--whatever I can recall and understand when awake. Wherever I have forgotten I will put a line of little dots. Only when I sleep and dream can I recall and understand the rest. It seems all very simple then. I often say to myself, "I will fix it well in my mind, and put it into well-chosen words--_her_ words--and learn them by heart; and then wake cautiously and remember them, and write them all down in a book, so that they shall do for others all they have done for me, and turn doubt into happy certainty, and despair into patience and hope and high elation."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IT IS MARY SERASKIER!"]

But the bell rings and I wake, and my memory plays me false. Nothing remains but the knowledge _that all will be well for us all, and of such a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content_.

Alas, this knowledge: I cannot impart it to others. Like many who have lived before me, I cannot prove--I can only affirm....

"How odd and old-fas.h.i.+oned it feels," she began, "to have eyes and ears again, and all that--little open windows on to what is near us. They are very clumsy contrivances! I had already forgotten them."

Look, there goes our old friend, the water-rat, under the bank--the old fat father--_le bon gros pere_--as we used to call him. He is only a little flat picture moving upsidedown in the opposite direction across the backs of our eyes, and the farther he goes the smaller he seems. A couple of hundred yards off we shouldn't see him at all. As it is, we can only see the outside of him, and that only on one side at a time; and yet he is full of important and wonderful things that have taken millions of years to make--like us! And to see him at all we have to look straight at him--and then we can't see what's behind us or around--and if it was dark we couldn't see anything whatever.

Poor eyes! Little bags full of water, with a little magnifying-gla.s.s inside, and a nasturtium leaf behind--to catch the light and feel it!

A celebrated German oculist once told papa that if his instrument-maker were to send him such an ill-made machine as a human eye, he would send it back and refuse to pay the bill. I can understand that now; and yet on earth where should we be without eyes? And afterwards where should we be if some of us hadn't once had them on earth?

I can hear your dear voice, Gogo, with both ears. Why two ears? Why only two? What you want, or think, or feel, you try to tell me in sounds that you have been taught--English, French. If I didn't know English and French, it would be no good whatever. Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head--a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind--and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time!

And so with all the rest. We can't even smell straight! A dog would laugh at us--not that even a dog knows much!

And feeling! We can feel too hot or too cold, and it sometimes makes us ill, or even kills us. But we can't feel the coming storm, or which is north and south, or where the new moon is, or the sun at midnight, or the stars at noon, or even what o'clock it is by our own measurement. We cannot even find our way home blindfolded--not even a pigeon can do that, nor a swallow, nor an owl! Only a mole, or a blind man, perhaps, feebly groping with a stick, if he has already been that way before.

And taste! It is well said there is no accounting for it.

And then, to keep all this going, we have to eat, and drink, and sleep, and all the rest. What a burden!

And you and I are the only mortals that I know of who ever found a way to each other's inner being by the touch of the hands. And then we had to go to sleep first. Our bodies were miles apart; not that _that_ would have made any difference, for we could never have done it waking--never; not if we hugged each other to extinction!

Gogo, I cannot find any words to tell you _how_, for there are none in any language that _I_ ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear and eye and the rest in _one_, and there is, oh, how much more besides!

Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a magnet--even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and _vice versa_. It is very simple, though it may not seem so to you now.

And the sounds! Ah, what sounds! The thick atmosphere of earth is no conductor for such as _they_, and earthly ear-drums no receiver. Sound is everything. Sound and light are one.

And what does it all mean?

I knew what it meant when I was there--part of it, at least--and should know again in a few hours. But this poor old earth-brain of mine, which I have had to put on once more as an old woman puts on a nightcap, is like my eyes and ears. It can now only understand what is of the earth--what _you_ can understand, Gogo, who are still of the earth. I forget, as one forgets an ordinary dream, as one sometimes forgets the answer to a riddle, or the last verse of a song. It is on the tip of the tongue; but there it sticks, and won't come any farther.

Remember, it is only in your brain I am living now--your earthly brain, that has been my only home for so many happy years, as mine has been yours.

How we have nestled!