Chapter XXVI

Mannheim died in this Congo forest, among these Pygmies. At first his sickness seemed but a low fever, obstinate, but not especially perilous. He lay in his tent and refused to let us trouble overmuch about him. "Go about your work. I do perfectly well, lying here, with a whole world to roam in!"

After a time his sickness was seen for the final one that it was. He wasted like snow in March. When he had lain there a week he himself said that he was going. John Sydney tended him well, but gave Sir Charles and the rest of us no false hopes. Mannheim himself never asked.

It seemed best that he should have one of us for nurse. This grew into my hands, with the others ready to give all needed relief. His mind was quite clear. At times there8 was great weakness following attacks of coughing. But for the most part he did not suffer.

He lay very quiet and easy to nurse. He liked to hear talk of the camp and daily happenings, and liked the few minutes' visits from Sir Charles and the others. He had humor, and he laughed at the stories Carthew Roberts brought. At other times, when we were alone, he lay most still, with an ingathered look. Now and then, in his stronger hours, he talked or bade me talk. He was entirely serene, really happy. "Everything that is can be perceived and shared," he said. "It is a matter of growing desire and will. This body is disintegrating, but I myself am integrating."

He could with no adequacy tell his visions any more than I could tell mine. But now and then word or phrase lit up a landscape. And occasionally he tried to describe what he was perceiving. I remember a velvet-black night when he could not sleep. He slept little at any time. "We are one Person," he said. "All these words--kind and kin and what not! What do they mean except that just somewhere all slip into one? All the partial consciousnesses flash into the whole. Give me water, Michael! I want to tell you--" I gave him to drink. He went on. "I saw just now, in picture, a little child--a babe--sitting upon its bed and bent upon observing and handling its foot. I saw that it believed that its foot was a separate thing, and that it had not yet said of each and all its members, 'That is me--I am that.' But it was beginning to suspect and to experiment. It was a determined child, and it made me laugh the way it went about it.... We live embedded in symbols. If I could bind together all the visions that ever I have had, it would come to something! ... Well, that was page the first of this vision. But page the second--" He lay still for a few moments. "I cannot well tell that. I saw the dim shape of man, and all the nations and all the ages and the rich and the poor and the fortunate and the unfortunate moved within the shape. But its mind was shadow and denied that this extremity or that member was itself. Limb gazed at limb, and organ upon organ as at a stranger, a foreigner, an unrelated existence across space. But for all that the great shape--and it was very great--was suspecting and experimenting, just as was doing the child on the first page." As Mannheim looked at me he visibly gathered energy. He assumed strength, he lifted himself on his arm. "Then, Michael, I saw the sun rise over the mind! No longer these myriad, myriad, partial, contending things, held only as by a film, an atmosphere, into a shape--but where they had been, a glory of light and warmth, essential, sufficing--a consciousness, a Being! Man conscious at last of Man's Self--the great Male-Female--the great Man-Woman-Child--the Trinity--the One! ... And all so simple, far simpler than being thousands apart!"

His face shone, he lay back; the light faded, and I thought for a moment that he was going. I gave him a stimulant. After a while he spoke again: "You're one of the new children. The new children will come into the sense of it. There has been preached brotherhood. But brotherhood supposes something closer yet. You will preach identity."

A few nights later he died. Sir Charles and Llewellyn, Sydney, and I watched him go. It was a quiet death, simple and silent, a gradual mounting a stair into light and distance.

We laid Mannheim's body in the forest, under a palm-tree.

The rains now were come. The stream poured dark and swollen, the forest was like sea moss, the sky all gray, the fall steady, flooding, and loud. We lived out this season in the Pygmy village. Routine life and work carried themselves on. We kept alike our own men and the small people our hosts in hand and in a mood of amity. With the former Ahasuerus was, throughout Africa, a mighty help. He became, as it were, their far-traveled prince and magician. What tales he told them I would not inquire too closely. But he was a tall, strong man, inside as outside, and he helped us greatly in many a pinch.

Carthew Roberts, too, the born laugher, helped. Once, as we sat around our fire, he gave us his philosophy. "Haven't you seen in some park or estate, perched on some big viewpoint, a pavilion or some such structure where each side is set with glass of a different color? There used to be one in the grounds of some villa above Genoa. Through this window showed a red world, through this one a blue. One saw everything cut in bronze, and another had a leaden earth and sky, and to another the entire thing was bathed in _couleur de rose_. The world's the way you look at it! You're the seer. It's perfectly possible to view the whole great toyshop as filled with the friendliest, grinning, grotesque, pleasant things. To a seer with a certain apparatus it's an amusing place, quite profoundly odd and funny! That's me. The instant that isn't amusing gives the fillip to the next instant that is. I've heard the very skies laugh--and as for the small things that laugh--! Don't you know what it is for a situation piece of the pattern, length of Penelope's web--to laugh?"

"It's ironic laughter, often," said Ferraro.

"Oh yes! I see, too, when the hook doesn't hit the eye--but there's a laugh of pure delight because there's fun in the heart of things!"

"Oh, I grant you," answered the Italian. "The thing that isn't at the heart of things isn't anywhere. And as for your windows, one may look out of them all in turn. Were we more evolved perhaps we might look out of all at once! But that would be fused rays--light of glory--"

At night, ere I slept, I went from this village, this forest, to Restwell and Flowerfield. I now definitely ceased to say, "I go in memory," or, "in imagination," or, "I go there because the reasoning mind, holding these places to be in being, attended by such-and-such features, can, by its own power, collect them before it--nay more, because it is brought into a condition of calm and unhurry and, speaking relatively, can see somewhat into the depth of things and set them in wholes, it can give with correctness a heightened reality." I ceased to explain to myself. I acted. I simply went to Flowerfield and Restwell--went in leading-strings, with the limitations and inabilities of that but one degree advance in powers, but went, as you, too, O reader, may go! And if I went, or if I said, "Arise in me!" what odds, so long as there came into presence the desired?

Restwell--Flowerfield. I lay in my old bed, in my old room. Mammy sang to me. She sang "Golden Slippers," or she sang:

"Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home--"

The stars looked in at the window. The dawn blossomed. The crowing cock cried, "Boy, it's day!" I went about the farm with my grandfather. His gentle, drawling voice said this, said that. My mother and I walked in the orchard.... Aunt Sarah and I kept the gravestones clean. The fire burned in Daddy Guinea's cabin, and he told me how the fox and the bear and the deer and the rabbit grew acquainted.

A thousand, thousand days and hours--great picture-books turned, leaf by leaf--and all capable of a strange, rich vivification! The farther road brought to the aid of the earlier road--poems learned long ago seen into now.... The past lost nothing worth the while; it stood through and through to be the gainer.

I pervaded, like the ether, the big, unencumbered, singing house at Flowerfield. Every house, every place, had always for me its own note, flavor, odor, personality, effect built from innumerable effects.... Flowerfield and Miriam and I in one there.... John, too, was with us.

Madam Black. Swiftly, decisively, came awareness of our old teacher. Now it was something more than that, now she was better understood. There was communication between adults.

An old, wise, rich spirit was here.

Death is not an idle word, nor is change, nor absence. But they are far other than that which to most of us they seem.

Now far away from the surface mind, behind the golden vase that hides so much, there was talk again with Madam Black, and in a surer, swifter language than the surface tongue has mastered.

"You three," she said, "are all new children." She used the term that Mannheim had used. "I felt that when I taught you, but it is clearer now.... For those who can touch and hold there is endless magic, richness, goodness! Every single thing is a key and a portal. What so many call life is only the skin of the grape."

Madam Black and Miriam and John and I went far afield together. She was like an old and very wise chieftainess, priestess, prophetess--a great person with whom to mark the earth and the history of it.

"Of course we are many--that is much--in one!" she said. "Everybody is everybody else. We bathe in one another's beams and find they are our own. What is the Great Day but the day when All remembers All? The glorious Recollection. Then we all find our market that we've been weaving for and planning for. The market is Life Everlasting. The road to Recollection is by recollecting--to Recognition by recognizing--to All Love is by loving. Come! Let us remember in great landscapes and streams. Where we dive in does not greatly matter. One thing leads to another."

I said to her, "What about that which should be forgotten?"

I felt her smile within me. "Well--! It forgets itself--in light."

We who were always together went far and wide with Madam Black. And as she said, there is magic and richness and goodness.

There was now a deep world back of the outward point of attention that called itself, that was called, Michael Forth. Behind that point, as behind all such points, are interpenetrative spheres.