Chapter VI (6)

Count Hector, who took a great pleasure in explaining all the past history of the place to Mary, had built himself a fine new house in what remained of the old park, and a quarter of a mile away from the old manor-house. Every room of the latter was shown to her; old wood panels still remained, prettily painted in a by-gone fashion; old documents, and parchment deeds, and leases concerning fish-ponds, farms, and the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, _la belle Verriere_ (also nicknamed _la reine de Hongrie_, it seems) still lingered in the county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago had been in everybody's mouth.

She was said to have been the tallest and handsomest woman in Anjou, of an imperious will and very masculine character, but immensely popular among rich and poor alike; of indomitable energy, and with a finger in every pie; but always more for the good of others than her own--a typical, managing, business-like French woman, and an exquisite musician to boot.

Such was our common ancestress, from whom, no doubt, we drew our love of music and our strange, almost hysterical susceptibility to the power of sound; from whom had issued those two born nightingales of our race--Seraskier, the violinist, and my father, the singer. And, strange to say, her eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose just like mine, and from under them beamed the luminous, black-fringed, gray-blue eyes of Mary, that suffered eclipse whenever their owners laughed or smiled!

During this interesting journey of Mary's in the flesh, we met every night at "Magna sed Apta" in the spirit, as usual; and I was made to participate in every incident of it.

We sat by the magic window, and had for our entertainment, now the Verrerie de Verny le Moustier in its present state, all full of modern life, color, and sound, steam and gas, as she had seen it a few hours before; now the old chateau as it was a hundred years ago; dim and indistinct, as though seen by nearsighted eyes at the close of a gray, misty afternoon in late autumn through a blurred window-pane, with busy but silent shadows moving about--silent, because at first we could not hear their speech; it was too thin for our mortal ears, even in this dream within our dream! Only Gatienne, the authoritative and commanding Gatienne, was faintly audible.

Then we would go down and mix with them. Thus, at one moment, we would be in the midst of a charming old-fashioned French family group of shadows: Gatienne, with her lovely twin-daughters Jeanne and Anne, and her gardeners round her, all trailing young peach and apricot trees against what still remained of the ancient buttresses and walls of the Abbaye de Verny le Moustier--all this more than a hundred years ago--the pale sun of a long-past noon casting the fainter shadows of these faint shadows on the shadowy garden-path.

Then, presto! Changing the scene as one changes a slide in a magic-lantern, we would skip a century, and behold!

Another French family group, equally charming, on the self-same spot, but in the garb of to-day, and no longer shadowy or mute by any means. Little trees have grown big; big trees have disappeared to make place for industrious workshops and machinery; but the old abbey walls have been respected, and gay, genial father, and handsome mother, and lovely daughters, all pressing on "la belle Duchesse Anglaise" peaches and apricots of her great-great-grandmother's growing.

For this amiable family of the Chamorin became devoted to Mary in a very short time--that is, the very moment they first saw her; and she never forgot their kindness, courtesy, and hospitality; they made her feel in five minutes as though she had known them for many years.

I may as well state here that a few months later she received from Mademoiselle du Chamorin (with a charming letter) the identical violin that had once belonged to _la belle Verriere_, and which Count Hector had found in the possession of an old farmer--the great-grandson of Gatienne's coachman--and had purchased, that he might present it as a New-year's gift to her descendant, the Duchess of Towers.

It is now mine, alas! I cannot play it; but it amuses and comforts me to hold in my hand, when broad and wide awake, an instrument that Mary and I have so often heard and seen in our dream, and which has so often rung in by-gone days with the strange melody that has had so great an influence on our lives. Its aspect, shape, and color, every mark and stain of it, were familiar to us before we had ever seen it with the bodily eye or handled it with the hand of flesh. It thus came straight to us out of the dim and distant past, heralded by the ghost of itself!

* * * * *

To return. Gradually, by practice and the concentration of our united will, the old-time figures grew to gain substance and color, and their voices became perceptible; till at length there arrived a day when we could move among them, and hear them and see them as distinctly as we could our own immediate progenitors close by--as Gogo and Mimsey, as Monsieur le Major, and the rest.

The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne de Boismorinel (who married Francois Pasquier de la Mariere). It was her father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.

I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were called out of nothingness into life.

Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo, again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical, was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain where all the cobwebs are.

And these cobwebs?

Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.

Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors, windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions, village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.

That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal" to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long dead and buried and forgotten!

Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more easily and completely than we have done.

It is something like listening for the overtones of a musical note; we do not hear them at first, though they are there, clamoring for recognition; and when at last we hear them, we wonder at our former obtuseness, so distinct are they.

Let a man with an average ear, however uncultivated, strike the C low down on a good piano-forte, keeping his foot on the loud pedal. At first he will hear nothing but the rich fundamental note C.

But let him become _expectant_ of certain other notes; for instance, of the C in the octave immediately above, then the G immediately above that, then the E higher still; he will hear them all in time as clearly as the note originally struck; and, finally, a shrill little ghostly and quite importunate B flat in the treble will pulsate so loudly in his ear that he will never cease to hear it whenever that low C is sounded.

By just such a process, only with infinitely more pains (and in the end with what pleasure and surprise), will he grow aware in time of a dim, latent, antenatal experience that underlies his own personal experience of this life.

We also found that we were able not only to assist as mere spectators at such past scenes as I have described (and they were endless), but also to identify ourselves occasionally with the actors, and cease for the moment to be Mary Seraskier and Peter Ibbetson. Notably was this the case with Gatienne. We could each be Gatienne for a space (though never both of us together), and when we resumed our own personality again we carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again--a strange phenomenon, if the reader will but think of it, and constituting the germ of a comparative personal immortality on earth.

At my work in prison, even, I could distinctly remember having been Gatienne; so that for the time being, Gatienne, a provincial French woman who lived a hundred years ago, was contentedly undergoing penal servitude in an English jail during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

A questionable privilege, perhaps.

But to make up for it, when she was not alive in me she could be brought to life in Mary (only in one at a time, it seemed), and travel by rail and steamer, and know the uses of gas and electricity, and read the telegrams of "our special correspondents" in the _Times_, and taste her nineteenth century under more favorable conditions.

Thus we took _la belle Verriere_ by turns, and she saw and heard things she little dreamed of a hundred years ago. Besides, she was made to share in the glories of "Magna sed Apta."

And the better we knew her the more we loved her; she was a very nice person to descend from, and Mary and I were well agreed that we could not have chosen a better great-great-grandmother, and wondered what each of our seven others was like, for we had fifteen of these between us, and as many great-great-grandfathers.

Thirty great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers had made us what we were; it was no good fighting against them and the millions at their backs.

Which of them all, strong, but gentle and shy, and hating the very sight of blood, yet saw scarlet when he was roused, and thirsted for the blood of his foe?

Which of them all, passionate and tender, but proud, high-minded, and chaste, and with the world at her feet, was yet ready to "throw her cap over the windmills," and give up all for love, deeming the world well lost?

* * * * *

That we could have thus identified ourselves, only more easily and thoroughly, with our own more immediate progenitors, we felt certain enough. But after mature thought we resolved to desist from any further attempt at such transfusion of identity, for sacred reasons of discretion which the reader will appreciate.

But that this will be done some day (now the way has been made clear), and also that the inconveniences and possible abuses of such a faculty will be obviated or minimized by the ever-active ingenuity of mankind, is to my mind a foregone conclusion.

It is too valuable a faculty to be left in abeyance, and I leave the probable and possible consequences of its culture to the reader's imagination--merely pointing out to him (as an inducement to cultivate that faculty in himself) that if anything can keep us well within the thorny path that leads to happiness and virtue, it is the certainty that those who come after us will remember having been ourselves, if only in a dream--even as the newly-hatched chicken has remembered in its egg the use of eyes and ears and the rest, out of the fulness of its long antenatal experience; and more fortunate than the helpless human infant in this respect, can enter on the business and pleasures of its brief, irresponsible existence at once!

* * * * *

Wherefore, oh reader, if you be but sound in mind and body, it most seriously behooves you (not only for the sake of those who come after you, but your own) to go forth and multiply exceedingly, to marry early and much and often, and to select the very best of your kind in the opposite sex for this most precious, excellent, and blessed purpose; that all your future reincarnations (and hers), however brief, may be many; and bring you not only joy and peace and pleasurable wonderment and recreation, but the priceless guerdon of well-earned self-approval!

For whoever remembers having once been you, wakes you for the nonce out of--nirvana, shall we say? His strength, his beauty, and his wit are yours; and the felicity he derives from them in this earthly life is for you to share, whenever this subtle remembrance of you stirs in his consciousness; and you can never quite sink back again into--nirvana, till all your future wakers shall cease to be!

It is like a little old-fashioned French game we used to play at Passy, and which is not bad for a dark, rainy afternoon: people sit all round in a circle, and each hands on to his neighbor a spill or a lucifer-match just blown out, but in which a little live spark still lingers; saying, as he does so--

_"Petit bonhomme vit encore!"_

And he, in whose hand the spark becomes extinct, has to pay forfeit and retire--"Helas! petit bonhomme n'est plus! ... Pauv' petit bonhomme!"

Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness, when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!

And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as filial love and ancestral pride can make them....

And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood, so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will soon, thanks to

_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_

* * * * *

Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused, in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!

* * * * *

And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education. I am but a poor scribe!

Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes.

We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier--and the more difficult to leave.

What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive, unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory for ages and ages yet to come!

It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to foretell the past and remember the future all in one!

To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him! Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon!

_"O corse a cheveux plats, que la France etait belle Au soleil de Messidor!"_

And Mirabeau and Robespierre, and Danton and Marat and Charlotte Corday! we have seen them too; and Marie Antoinette and the fish-wives, and "the beautiful head of Lamballe" (on its pike!) ... and watched the tumbrils go by to the Place du Carrousel, and gazed at the guillotine by moonlight--silent and terror-stricken, our very hearts in our mouths....

And in the midst of it all, ridiculous stray memories of Madame Tussaud would come stealing into our ghastly dream of blood and retribution, mixing up past and present and future in a manner not to be described, and making us smile through our tears!

Then we were present (several times!) at the taking of the Bastille, and indeed witnessed most of the stormy scenes of that stormy time, with our Carlyle in our hands; and often have we thought, and with many a hearty laugh, what fun it must be to write immortal histories, with never an eye-witness to contradict you!

And going further back we have haunted Versailles in the days of its splendor, and drunk our fill of all the glories of the court of Louis XIV!

What imposing ceremonials, what stupendous royal functions have we not attended--where all the beauty, wit, and chivalry of France, prostrate with reverence and awe (as in the very presence of a god), did loyal homage to the greatest monarch this world has ever seen--while we sat by, on the very steps of his throne, as he solemnly gave out his royal command! and laughed aloud under his very nose--the shallow, silly, pompous little snob--and longed to pull it! and tried to disinfect his greasy, civet-scented, full-bottomed wig with wholesome whiffs from a nineteenth-century regalia!

Nothing of that foolish but fascinating period escaped us. Town, hamlet, river, forest, and field; royal palace, princely castle, and starving peasants' hut; pulpit, stage, and salon; port, camp, and marketplace; tribunal and university; factory, shop, studio, smithy; tavern and gambling-hell and den of thieves; convent and jail, torture-chamber and gibbet-close, and what not all!

And at every successive step our once desponding, over-anxious, over-burdened latter-day souls have swelled with joy and pride and hope at the triumphs of our own day all along the line! Yea, even though we have heard the illustrious Bossuet preach, and applauded Moliere in one of his own plays, and gazed at and listened to (and almost forgiven) Racine and Corneille, and Boileau and Fenelon, and the good Lafontaine--those five ruthless persecutors of our own innocent French childhood!

And still ascending the stream of time, we have hobnobbed with Montaigne and Rabelais, and been personally bored by Malherbe, and sat at Ronsard's feet, and ridden by Froissart's side, and slummed with Francois Villon--in what enchanted slums! ...

Francois Villon! Think of that, ye fond British bards and bardlets of to-day--ye would-be translators and imitators of that never-to-be-translated, never-to-be-imitated lament, the immortal _Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis_!

And while I speak of it, I may as well mention that we have seen them too, or some of them--those fair ladies _he_ had never seen, and who had already melted away before his coming, like the snows of yester year, _les neiges d'antan!_ Bertha, with the big feet; Joan of Arc, the good Lorrainer (what would she think of her native province now!); the very learned Heloise, for love of whom one Peter Esbaillart, or Abelard (a more luckless Peter than even I!), suffered such cruel indignities at monkish hands; and that haughty, naughty queen, in her Tower of Nesle,

_"Qui commanda que Buridan Fut jecte en ung Sac en Seine...."_

Yes, we have seen them with the eye, and heard them speak and sing, and scold and jest, and laugh and weep, and even pray! And I have sketched them, as you shall see some day, good reader! And let me tell you that their beauty was by no means maddening: the standard of female loveliness has gone up, even in France! Even _la tres sage Helois_ was scarcely worth such a sacrifice as--but there! Possess your soul in patience; all that, and it is all but endless, will appear in due time, with such descriptions and illustrations as I flatter myself the world has never bargained for, and will value as it has never valued any historical records yet!

Day after day, for more than twenty years, Mary has kept a voluminous diary (in a cipher known to us both); it is now my property, and in it every detail of our long journey into the past has been set down.

Contemporaneously, day by day (during the leisure accorded to me by the kindness of Governor----) I have drawn over again from memory the sketches of people and places I was able to make straight from nature during those wonderful nights at "Magna sed Apta." I can guarantee the correctness of them, and the fidelity of their likenesses; no doubt their execution leaves much to be desired.

Both her task and mine (to the future publication of which this autobiography is but an introduction) have been performed with the minutest care and conscientiousness; no time or trouble have been spared. For instance, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone, which we were able to study from seventeen different points of view, cost us no less than two months' unremitting labor.

As we reached further and further back through the stream of time, the task became easier in a way; but we have had to generalize more, and often, for want of time and space, to use types in lieu of individuals. For with every successive generation the number of our progenitors increased in geometrical progression (as in the problem of the nails in the horseshoe) until a limit of numbers was reached--namely, the sum of the inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. In the seventh century there was not a person living in France (not to mention Europe) who was not in the line of our direct ancestry, excepting, of course, those who had died without issue and were mere collaterals.

We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.

The Mammoth!

We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even _through_ him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts with awe--blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph--merely the _type_, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at all, every one of whom _(exceptis excipiendis)_ was necessarily an ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.

There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye--almost perceive a suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.

Mary firmly believed that we should have got in time to our hairy ancestor with pointed ears and a tail, and have been able to ascertain whether he was arboreal in his habits or not. With what passionate interest she would have followed and studied and described him! And I! With what eager joy, and yet with what filial reverence, I would have sketched his likeness--with what conscientious fidelity as far as my poor powers would allow! (For all we know to the contrary he may have been the most attractive and engaging little beast that ever was, and far less humiliating to descend from than many a titled yahoo of the present day.)

Fate, alas, has willed that it should be otherwise, and on others, duly trained, must devolve the delightful task of following up the clew we have been so fortunate as to discover.

* * * * *

And now the time has come for me to tell as quickly as I may the story of my bereavement--a bereavement so immense that no man, living or dead, can ever have experienced the like; and to explain how it is that I have not only survived it and kept my wits (which some people seem to doubt), but am here calmly and cheerfully writing my reminiscences, just as if I were a famous Academician, actor, novelist, statesman, or general diner-out--blandly garrulous and well-satisfied with myself and the world.

During the latter years of our joint existence Mary and I engrossed by our fascinating journey through the centuries, had seen little or nothing of each other's outer lives, or rather I had seen nothing of hers (for she still came back sometimes with me to my jail); I only saw her as she chose to appear in our dream.

Perhaps at the bottom of this there may have been a feminine dislike on her part to be seen growing older, for at "Magna sed Apta" we were always twenty-eight or thereabouts--at our very best. We had truly discovered the fountain of perennial youth, and had drunk thereof! And in our dream we always felt even younger than we looked; we had the buoyancy of children and their freshness.

Often had we talked of death and separation and the mystery beyond, but only as people do for whom such contingencies are remote; yet in reality time flew as rapidly for us as for others, although we were less sensible of its flight.

There came a day when Mary's exuberant vitality, so constantly overtaxed, broke down, and she was ill for a while; although that did not prevent our meeting as usual, and there was no perceptible difference in her when we met. But I am certain that in reality she was never quite the same again as she had been, and the dread possibility of parting any day would come up oftener in our talk; in our minds, only too often, and our minds were as one.

She knew that if I died first, everything I had brought into "Magna sed Apta" (and little it was) would be there no more; even to my body, ever lying supine on the couch by the enchanted window, it she had woke by chance to our common life before I had, or remained after I had been summoned away to my jail.

And I knew that, if she died, not only her body on the adjacent couch, but all "Magna sed Apta" itself would melt away, and be as if it had never been, with its endless galleries and gardens and magic windows, and all the wonders it contained.

Sometimes I felt a hideous nervous dread, on sinking into sleep, lest I should find it was so, and the ever-heavenly delight of waking there, and finding all as usual, was but the keener. I would kneel by her inanimate body, and gaze at her with a passion of love that seemed made up of all the different kinds of love a human being can feel; even the love of a dog for his mistress was in it, and that of a wild beast for its young.

With eager, tremulous anxiety and aching suspense I would watch for the first light breath from her lips, the first faint tinge of carmine in her cheek, that always heralded her coming back to life. And when she opened her eyes and smiled, and stretched her long young limbs in the joy of waking, what transports of gratitude and relief!

Ah me! the recollection!

* * * * *

At last a terrible unforgettable night arrived when my presentiment was fulfilled.

I awoke in the little lumber-room of "Parva sed Apta," where the door had always been that led to and from our palace of delight; but there was no door any longer--nothing but a blank wall....

I woke back at once in my cell, in such a state as it is impossible to describe. I felt there must be some mistake, and after much time and effort was able to sink into sleep again, but with the same result: the blank wall, the certainty that "Magna sed Apta" was closed forever, that Mary was dead; and then the terrible jump back into my prison life again.

This happened several times during the night, and when the morning dawned I was a raving madman. I took the warder who first came (attracted by my cries of "Mary!") for Colonel Ibbetson, and tried to kill him, and should have done so, but that he was a very big man, almost as powerful as myself and only half my age.

Other warders came to the rescue, and I took them all for Ibbetsons, and fought like the maniac I was.

When I came to myself, after long horrors and brain-fever and what not, I was removed from the jail infirmary to another place, where I am now.

I had suddenly recovered my reason, and woke to mental agony such as I, who had stood in the dock and been condemned to a shameful death, had never even dreamed of.

I soon had the knowledge of my loss confirmed, and heard (it had been common talk for more than nine days) that the famous Mary, Duchess of Towers, had met her death at the ------ station of the Metropolitan Railway.

A woman, carrying a child, had been jostled by a tipsy man just as a train was entering the station, and dropped her child onto the metals. She tried to jump after it but was held back, and Mary, who had just come up, jumped in her stead, and by a miracle of strength and agility was just able to clutch the child and get onto the six-foot way as the engine came by.

She was able to carry the child to the end of the train, and was helped onto the platform. It was her train, and she got into a carriage, but she was dead before it reached the next station. Her heart, (which, it seems, had been diseased for some time) had stopped, and all was over.

So died Mary Seraskier, at fifty-three.

* * * * *

I lay for many weeks convalescent in body, but in a state of dumb, dry tearless, despair, to which there never came a moment's relief, except in the dreamless sleep I got from chloral, which was given to me in large quantities--and then, the _waking_!

I never spoke nor answered a question, and hardly ever stirred. I had one fixed idea--that of self-destruction; and after two unsuccessful attempts, I was so closely bound and watched night and day that any further attempt was impossible. They would not trust me with a toothpick or a button or a piece of common packthread.

I tried to starve myself to death and refused all solid food: but an intolerable thirst (perhaps artificially brought on) made it impossible for me to refuse any liquid that was offered, and I was tempted with milk, beef-tea, port, and sherry, and these kept me alive....

* * * * *

I had lost all wish to dream.

At length, one afternoon, a strange, inexplicable, overwhelming nostalgic desire came over me to see once more the Mare d'Auteuil--only once; to walk thither for the last time through the Chaussee de la Muette, and by the fortifications.

It grew upon me till it became a torture to wait for bedtime, so frantic was my impatience.

When the long-wished-for hour arrived at last, I laid myself down once more (as nearly as I could for my bonds) in the old position I had not tried for so long; my will intent upon the Porte de la Muette, an old stone gate-way that separated the Grande Rue de Passy from the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne--a kind of Temple Bar.

It was pulled down forty-five years ago.

I soon found myself there, just where the Grande Rue meets the Rue de la Pompe, and went through the arch and looked towards the Bois.

It was a dull, leaden day in autumn; few people were about, but a gay _repas de noces_ was being held at a little restaurant on my right-hand side. It was to celebrate the wedding of Achille Grigoux, the green-grocer, with Felicite Lenormand, who had been the Seraskiers' house-maid. I suddenly remembered all this, and that Mimsey and Gogo were of the party--the latter, indeed, being _premier garcon d'honneur_, on whom would soon devolve the duty of stealing the bride's garter, and cutting it up into little bits to adorn the button-holes of the male guests before the ball began.

In an archway on my left some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed and broken-winded, were patiently waiting, ready saddled and bridled, to be hired--Chloris, Murat, Rigolette, and others: I knew and had ridden them all nearly half a century ago. Poor old shadows of the long-dead past, so life-like and real and pathetic--it "split me the heart" to see them!

A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux. They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of view than Gogo's.

Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--

_"Il etait un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigue_...."

I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to the last verse--

"_Si cette histoire vous embete, Nous allons la recommencer_,"

I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and look about me.

I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas).

In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on (which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a whole one.

I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or interesting in the least.

Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the long-dead players.

Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mere Manette and Grandmere Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world. How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They sold many things: nougat, _pain d'epices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums, noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors, neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.

I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had never been old in a dream before.

I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus (which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.

I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness, the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later (twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy, stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots!

Never had I been shabby in a dream before.

Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a header _a la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once more, very badly.

This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it, and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth trying, anyhow.

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 God!" 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 shivered, 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.

"Nobody 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."

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-fashioned 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-glass 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!

* * * * *

But this I know: one must have had them all once--brains, ears, eyes, and the rest--on earth. 'Il faut avoir passe par la!' or no after-existence for man or beast would be possible or even conceivable.