Kitabı oku: «Up and Down», sayfa 16

He grew drowsy after this, and presently his nurse, a nun from a convent in the mainland, settled him for the night. Seraphina came from the kitchen after I had dined, and wept a little, and told me how Francis, "il santo signorino," saw her every day, and took no less interest than before in her affairs and the little everyday things. Pasqualino was at the war, and the new boy who waited at dinner was a fat-head, as no doubt I had noticed, and Caterina (if so be I remembered about Caterina and Pasqualino and the baby) was in good service, and the baby throve amazingly. Provisions were dear; you had to take a foolish card with you when you wanted sugar, but the vegetables were coming on well, and we should not do so badly. The Signorino liked to hear all the news, and, if God willed, he would have no more pain; but she wished he would eat more, and then perhaps he would get his strength back, and cheat the undertaker after all. There was a cousin of hers who had done just that; he was dying, they all said, and then, Dio! all of a sudden he got better from the moment Seraphina had cooked him a great beefsteak for his dinner.

To those who have loved the lovely and the jolly things of this beautiful world, the day of little things is never over, and next morning, at Francis's request, I went down to the bathing-beach with orders not to mind if the water was chilly, but swim out to the rock of the cache and bring the tin box home. From his window he could not see the garden itself, but only the pine-tree, but would it not be possible to fix a looking-glass on the slant in the window-sill, so that from his bed he could see as well as smell the freesias and the narcissus and the wall-flowers? The success of this made him want to see more, and now that the weather was warm, there surely could not be any harm in transplanting him, bed and all, on to the paved platform at the end of the pergola, and letting him spend the rest of his days and nights in the garden. With a few sheets of canvas, to be let down at night, and could we not engineer a room for him there? He often used to sleep out there before. The question was referred to the nurse and met with her approval and that of the doctor; so that afternoon we made everything ready, and by tea-time had carried him out on his mattress with the aid of Seraphina and the fat-head, to his great contentment. This out-of-door bedroom was screened from the north by the house, and between the pillars of the pergola to east and south and west the nimble fingers of Seraphina had rigged up curtains of canvas that could be drawn or withdrawn according to the weather, while overhead was the matting underneath which we dined in the summer. The electric light was handy to his bed, and on the table by it was a bell with which he could summon the nurse, who slept in the bedroom overlooking the pergola. His bedside books stood there also: "Alice in Wonderland," a New Testament, "Emma," and a few more. The stone-pine whispered to the left of his bed, and the wind that stirred there blew in the wonderful fragrance of the spring-flowering garden.

Francis had been very drowsy all day, but for an hour that evening we talked exactly as we might have talked nearly three years ago, before the flame of war had scorched Europe. There were plans we had been making then for certain improvements in the house, and those we discussed anew. We spoke of the odd story concerning the footstep that walked in the studio, and wondered if the strega would be heard again; the tin box, which I had obediently fetched from its cache, was opened; Seraphina came out with commissariat suggestions for next day, and the news that Pasqualino had got a week's leave and would be here several days before Easter to see the bambino on which he had never yet set eyes. Soon the stars began to appear in the darkening night-blue of the sky, and the breeze from the garden bore in no longer the scent of open flowers, but the veiled fragrance of their closing, and the smell of the damp earth, irrigated by the heavy dew, came with it…

We talked of pleasant and humorous little memories of the past, and plans for the future, just as if we were spending one of the serene summer evenings the last time we were here together, three years ago, and it seemed perfectly natural to do so. Among those plans for the future there came up the question of my movements, and we settled that I should go back to Rome the day after to-morrow, and return here if possible for Easter.

"For that," said Francis cheerfully, "will be about the end of my tether. The end of it, I mean, in the sense that I shan't be tethered any more. Oh, and there's one thing I forgot. Be sure you go to some medium about the packet I sealed up on the last time I was in England. Don't you remember? We both sealed up a packet?"

"Oh, don't!" said I. "I hate the thought of it."

"But you mustn't shirk," he said. "If it had been you, not me, I shouldn't have shirked. You've got to go to some medium, and see if he can tell you what's in my packet. And the interesting thing is that I can't remember for the life of me what I put there, and certainly nobody else knows. So if any medium can tell you what's inside it, it will really be extremely curious. Mind you tell me – oh, I forgot."

"Would you mind not being quite so horrible?" I said.

"I'm not horrible. If anybody is being horrible it's you in not feeling that I shall be living, not only as much as before, but much more. I say, do get hold of that."

"Yes, I'll try. But the flesh is weak."

He was silent a moment.

"It's through weakness that His strength is made perfect," he said. "And here's my nurse coming to settle me. What a jolly talk we've had!"

I got up.

"Good-night, then," I said.

"Good-night. Sleep as well as I shall."

It was still early and I went to the studio to read a little before I went to bed. But I found a book was not a thing one could attend to, and I sat doing nothing, scarcely even thinking. I did not want to think; all I wanted to do was to look at what was going on here. Thought, with its perplexities and conjectures and burrowings, did not touch the heart of the situation. I could only contemplate; the best friend I had in the world lay dying, and yet there must be no sorrow. He was too utterly triumphant; banners and trumpets were assembling for his passing, and he called on the joy of the world to congratulate him. He was not dying, in his view, any more than a man dies who leaves a little sphere for a larger one. Death was not closing in upon him, but opening out for him! I saw him walking, not through a dark valley, but upon hill-tops at the approach of dawn, and soon for him the dim night world would burst into light and colour. Already had he been through the night, and now he lay there with morning in his eyes, assured of day. All that he waited for now was the dimming of the terrestrial stars, and the flooding with sun of the infinite heavens. He knew it; all I could decently do was to try to look at it through his eyes and not through my own, which were blinded with tears that should never have been shed…

I did not doubt the truth of his conviction, I knew it in my bones. But the flesh on my bones was weak, and it cried out for him.

APRIL, 1917

It was on the evening of the Thursday before Easter that I got back to Alatri. Once more the outline of the island, that had been a soft cloud-like shape afloat on the sea, grew distinct, and before we got there it lay dark against an orange sunset and a flame of molten waters. There stood the little crowd on the pier waiting the steamer's arrival, but to-night I needed not to look for Francis among them. During the last ten days I had had frequent news from his nurse, always of the same sort: he suffered no more pain, but each day he was sensibly weaker. But there among the crowd stood Pasqualino very smart in his Bersaglieri uniform; he had come down to meet me with a similar message. He had arrived two days before on a week's leave, and, so he told me, spent most of the day up at the villa, helping in the house and weeding in the garden. Sometimes when the Signorino was awake he called to him, and they talked about all manner of things, as in the good days before he was ill and before the accursed war came. "And shall we all be as happy as the Signorino when we come to our last bed?" asked Pasqualino.

There was a great change in Francis since ten days ago; he had drifted far on the tide that was carrying him so peacefully away. He just recognized me, said a few words, and then dozed off again into the stupor in which he had lain all day. Through the morning of Good Friday also, and into the afternoon he lay unconscious. But now for the first time his sleep was troubled, and he kept stirring and muttering to himself, unintelligibly for the most part, though now and then there came a coherent sentence. Some inner consciousness, I think, was aware of what day this was, for once he said, "It was I, my Lord, who scourged Thee, and crowned Thee with the thorns of many sorrows." During these hours the nurse and I remained at his bedside, for his breathing was difficult, and his pulse very feeble, and it was possible that at any moment the end might come. Pasqualino went softly about the garden barefooted, doing his weeding, and once or twice came to look at his Signorino. A cat dozed in the hot sunshine, the lizards scuttled about the pillars of the pergola, and in the stone-pine a linnet sang.

But about three o'clock in the afternoon his breathing grew more quiet, his pulse grew stronger, and he slept an untroubled sleep for another hour. After that he awoke, and that evening and all Saturday morning he was completely conscious and brimming over with a serene happiness. Sometimes we talked, sometimes I read to him out of "Emma," or "Alice in Wonderland," and during the afternoon he asked me to read him the few verses in St John about Easter Eve.

"Do come very early to-morrow morning," he said, when this was done, "and read the next chapter, the Easter morning chapter."

I put down the Bible, still open, on his table.

"Very well," I said, "I'll come at sunrise. But aren't you tired now? You've been talking and listening all day."

"Yes; I'll go to sleep for a bit. And won't you go for a walk? You always get disagreeable towards evening if you've had no exercise."

"Where shall I go?" I asked.

He thought a moment, smiling,

"Go to the very top of Monte Gennaro," he said, "to get the biggest view possible, and stand there and in a loud voice thank God for everything that there is. Say it for yourself and for me. Say 'Francis and I give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory.' That's about all that there is to say, isn't it?"

"I can't think of anything else."

"Off you go, then," he said. "Oh, Lor'! I wish I was coming too. But I'll go to sleep instead. Good-bye."

I woke very early next morning, before sunrise, with the impression that somebody had called to me from outside, and putting on a coat, I went out into the garden to see whether it was Francis's voice that I heard. But he lay there fast asleep, and I supposed that the impression that I had been called was but part of a dream. Overhead the stars were beginning to burn dim in a luminous sky, and in the East the sober dove-colour of dawn was spreading upwards from the horizon, growing brighter every moment. Very soon now the sun would rise, and as I had promised to come out then and read Francis the chapter in St John about the Resurrection morning, it was not worth while going back to bed again.

So waiting for him to awake, I took up the Bible, which still lay open on his table where I had laid it yesterday, with "Emma" and "Alice in Wonderland," and as I waited I read to myself the verses that I should presently read aloud to him. Just as I began the first ray of the sun overtopped the steep hill-side to the East, and shone full on the page. It did not yet reach the bed where Francis lay asleep.

"And when she had thus said, she turned herself and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

"Jesus saith unto her, 'Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?' She, supposing him to be the gardener…"

At that moment I looked up, for I thought I heard footsteps coming towards me along the terrace, and it crossed my mind that this was Pasqualino arriving very early to help in the house and garden, though, as it was Sunday, I had not expected him. But there was no one visible; only at the entrance to the pergola, which was still in shadow, there seemed to be a faint column of light. I saw no more than that, and the impression was only vague and instantaneous, and perhaps the first sunray on the book had dazzled me…

And then I looked there no more, for a stir of movement from the bed made me turn, and I saw Francis sitting up with his hands clasped together in front of him. And whether it was but the glory of the terrestrial dawn that now shone on his face or the day-spring of the light invisible, so holy a splendour illuminated it that I could but look in amazement on him. He was gazing with bright and eager eyes to the entrance of the pergola, and in that moment I knew that he saw there Him whom Mary supposed to be the gardener.

Then his clasped hands quivered, and in a voice tremulous with love and with exultation:

"Rabboni!" he said, and his joyful soul went forth to meet his Lord.

Never have I felt the place so full of his dear and living presence as in the days that followed. It was so little of him that we laid in the English cemetery here, no more than the discarded envelope which he had done with, and the love of our comradeship seemed but to have been more closely knit. Day after day, and all day long, Francis was with me in an intensity of actual presence that never lost its security or its serenity. For a week I remained there, and hourly throughout it I expected to see him in bodily form or to hear the actual sound of his voice. But I am sure that no appearance of him, such as we call a ghost, or any hearing of his voice, could possibly have added to the reality of his companionship. What those laws are which sometimes permit us to be conscious with physical eye or ear of someone who has passed over that stream which daily seems to me more narrow, we do not certainly know; but never before did I realize how little the mere satisfaction of vision or audition matters, when the inward sense of the presence of the dead is so vivid. Nor was it I alone who felt this, for Seraphina has told me how often in those days she would hear the stir of a rattled door-handle or steps along the kitchen passage when she was at her cooking, and look round, expecting to see "her Signorino," before she recollected that she would see him no more. It was the same with Pasqualino, and, oddly enough, though the islanders are full of superstitious terror of the dead, and avoid certain places as haunted and uncanny, neither she nor he felt the slightest fear at the thought of seeing Francis, but looked round for him with bright eager faces which disappointment clouded again.

And for me he was always there: in that hot blink of premature summer he came down to bathe, and lay beside me on the beach; he swam with me to the rock of the cache; he sat with me at meals; one afternoon he came up to the top of Monte Gennaro, to pick the orchises of the spring and to say his Gloria for himself. There was no break at all in our companionship; indeed, it but seemed, as I have said, to have grown intenser and more vivid. And that which, when he lay dying, seemed quite impossible, namely, that I should come back to the island and the villa again now that I should not find him here, has become perfectly natural, since I shall most assuredly find him here. He will be with me in England, too, and wherever I may go during the period of my mortal days, I shall find him, not by any act of faith that the dead die not, nor by any theoretical conviction that his individuality survives, but from the plain experience that it is so… And when the dimness and the dream of life vanish from my awakening vision, I know also that among the first who will give me welcome will be Francis, and his grey merry eyes will greet me…

I arrived back to a cold and snowy England towards the end of the month, and as soon as I got home unlocked the drawer in which I had placed on a certain day last January the two "posthumous packets," as Francis called them, which we had severally prepared. As the reader may remember, we had packed them to serve as a test concerning the possibility of spirit-communication, and in mine I had placed a "J" nib, a five-franc piece and some carbolic tooth-powder, and had written directions on it that it was to be sent to him to deal with in the event of my dying first. While I was doing this upstairs, he was making ready his packet in the sitting-room, and on my return gave it me wrapped up and bound with string and sealed. There in its drawer it had lain till to-day, and the time was now come when the test could be put. The box in which he had disposed a certain object or objects unknown to me was some six inches long, and about the same across.

I at once went to a friend who is much immersed in spiritualistic affairs, and asked him to arrange a sitting for me with some medium whom he believed to have power, and believed not to be fraudulent. (It did not really matter whether the medium was fraudulent or not, since no amount of trickery could discover the contents of that package.) I asked that my name should not be given, but that a sitting should be arranged on some appointed day. I begged him, finally, to come with me, so that between us we might get a fairly complete account of what occurred, and to be a witness. I may add that I was not at all sanguine as to anything occurring.

Accordingly a few days afterwards Jack Barrett arrived, and together we drove off to the medium's house. The packet that Francis had made still lay in the locked drawer of a black oak table, and I said no word to my friend either about Francis, whom he had known slightly, or about the packet.

The procedure was of the kind common to trance-mediums. We sat in a small front-room of a rather dingy house in a dull respectable street. The room was partially darkened by the drawing of curtains over the window, but there was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and a lamp turned low was placed for my friend and me on a small round table, so that we could see sufficiently to write without difficulty. The medium herself was a pleasant-looking woman, about thirty years of age, with a slight cockney accent and a quiet level voice. Before the sitting began she made us an explanation of her powers, which I will give for what it is worth. Since she was a child she had often gone off into queer trances, which she could induce at will. When she awoke from them, she never knew more than that she had been having very vivid dreams, and talking to unknown people, but all recollection of what had passed instantly faded from her memory. Subsequently she married and had one child, a girl, who died at the age of ten. But, going into a trance a day or so after her death, the mother was aware when she awoke that she had been talking to her child. Thereafter she cultivated her gift, getting her husband or a friend to sit with her when she was in trance, and listen to and take down what she said. When in trance she spoke in Daisy's voice, not in her own, and the dead child told her about its present state of existence. Daisy described other dead people whom she came across, and could transmit messages from them. Such was Mrs. Masters's account of her gift.

She asked me only one question, and that was whether I wanted to get into communication with a dead friend. I told her that this was so, and then quite suddenly found myself harbouring a strong distaste for all these proceedings. I should certainly have gone away and had no sitting at all, if I had not recollected my promise to Francis to go through with it. It seemed to me like taking some sacred thing into a place of ill-fame…

All that follows is a compilation from our joint notes, and I have inserted nothing which did not appear in the notes or in the recollection of both of us.

The medium sat close to me in a high chair opposite the fire, so that her face was clearly visible. Her eyes were closed and she had her hands on her lap. For about five minutes she remained thus, and then her breathing began sensibly to quicken; she gasped and panted, and her hands writhed and wrestled with each other. That passed, and she sat quite quiet again.

Presently she began to whisper to herself, and though I strained my ears to listen, I could catch no words. Very soon her voice grew louder, but it was a perfectly different voice from that in which she had spoken to us before… It was a high childish treble, with a little lisp in it. The first coherent words were these:

"Yes, I'm here. Daisy's here. What shall I tell you about?"

"Ask her," said Barrett to me.

"I want to know if you can tell me anything about a friend of mine," I said.

"Yes, here he comes," she said.

She then told us that he – whoever it was – was in the room, and was looking into my face, and was rather puzzled because I did not appear to see him. He put his hand on my shoulder and was talking to me and smiling, and again seemed puzzled that I could not hear him. She proceeded to describe him at length with very great accuracy, and presently, in answer to a question, spelled out the whole of his name quite correctly. She told us that he had not long passed over; he had been on this side but a few weeks before, that he had died not in England, and not fighting, but he was connected with fighting. She said he was talking about an island in the sea, and about bathing, and about a garden where he had died; did I not recollect all those things?

Now so far all that had been told us could easily be arrived at and accounted for by mind-reading. All those things were perfectly well known to me, and contributed no shred of proof with regard to spirit-communication. For nearly an hour the medium went on in this manner, telling me nothing that I did not know already, and before the hour was up I had begun to weary of the performance. As a whole it was an extraordinary good demonstration of thought-reading, but nothing more at all. Indeed, I had ceased to take notes altogether, though Barrett's busy pencil went writing on, when quite suddenly I took my own up again, and attended as intently as I possibly could.

Francis told her, she said, that there was a test, and the test was in a box, and the box was in a big black drawer. "It's a test, he says it's a test," she repeated several times.

Then she stopped, and I could hear her whispering again.

"But it's silly, it's nonsense," she said. "It doesn't mean anything."

She laughed, and spoke again out loud.

"He says, 'Bow, wow, wow! Puss,'" she said. "He says, 'Gott strafe the V.C.' He says it's a parrot. He says it's a grey feather of a parrot and something else besides. Something about burning, he says. He says it's a cinder. It's a cinder and a parrot's feather. That's what he says is the test."

It was not long after this that the coherent speaking ceased and whisperings began again. Presently the medium said, still in the child's voice, that the power was getting less. Then the voice stopped altogether, and soon afterwards I saw her hands twisting and wrestling together. She stretched out her arms with the air of a tired woman, and rubbed her eyes, and came out of trance.

My friend and I went home, and before we opened the box we compared and collated our notes. Then I unlocked the drawer, took out Francis's packet and broke the seals and cut the string. The cardboard box contained a piece of paper folded round one of Matilda's grey feathers and a fragment of burned coal.

Now I see no possible way of accounting for this unless we accept Mrs. Masters's explanation, and believe that in some mysterious manner Francis, his living self, was able to tell her while in this trance what were the contents of the packet he had sealed up. No possible theory of thought-transference between her and anyone living in the conditions of this earthly plane will fit the case, for the simple reason that no one living here and now has ever had the smallest knowledge of what the packet contained. That information had never, until the moment that Mrs. Masters communicated it to me and my friend, been known to more than one person. Francis had made the packet, had sealed it up, and in that locked drawer it had remained till we opened it after this sitting. I can conceive of no possible channel of communication except one, namely, that Francis himself spoke in some mysterious way to the medium's mind. My reason and my power of conjecture are utterly unable to think of any other explanation.

So accepting that (for a certain reason to be touched on later, I rather shrink from accepting it), it follows as possible that all the earlier part of the sitting, which can certainly be accounted for by the established phenomenon of thought-transference, may not have been due to thought-transference at all, but to direct communication also with Francis. And yet while the medium was speaking, telling me that he was looking into my face, and wondering that I could not see him, I, who have so continually with me the sense of his personal presence, had no such feeling. That Francis whom I knew, the same one who is now so constantly with me, did not seem to be there at all …

Now I reject altogether the theory of the Roman Catholic Church, namely, that when we try to communicate with the dead and apparently succeed in so doing, we are not really brought into connection with them, but into connection with some evil spirit who impersonates them. I cannot discover or invent the smallest grounds for believing that; it seems to me more a subject for some gruesome magazine tale than a spiritual truth. But what does seem possible is this, that we are brought into connection not with the soul of the departed, his real essential personality, the thing we loved, but with a piece of his mere mechanical intelligence. Otherwise it is hard to see why those who have passed over rarely, if ever, tell us, except in the vaguest and most unconvincing manner, about the conditions under which they now exist. They speak of being happy, of being busy, of waiting for us, but they tell us nothing that the medium could not easily have invented herself. No real news comes, nothing that can enable us to picture in the faintest degree what their life over there is like. Possibly the conditions are incommunicable; they may find it as hard to convey them as it would be to convey the sense and the effect of colour to a blind man. Material and temporal terms must naturally have ceased to bear any meaning to them, since they have passed out of this infinitesimal sphere of space and time into the timeless and immeasurable day, the sun of which for ever stands at the height of an imperishable noon. If they could tell us of that, perhaps we should not understand.

The upshot, then, is this: I believe that when the medium, sitting opposite the fire in that dim room, said what was in the sealed packet, the discarnate mind of Francis told her what was there. I believe the door between the two worlds not to be locked and barred; certain people – such as we call mediums – have the power of turning the handle and for a little setting this door ajar. But what do we get when the door is set ajar? Nothing that is significant, nothing that brings us closer to those on the other side. If I had not already believed in the permanence and survival of individual life, I think it more than possible that the accurate and unerring statement of what was in the sealed packet might have convinced me of it. But it brought me no nearer Francis.

A great event has happened, for America has joined the cause of the Allies. That was long delayed, but there is now no possibility of doubting the wisdom of such delay, if from it sprang the tremendous enthusiasm which shows how solid is the nation's support. What this event means to the cause of the Allies cannot be over-estimated, for already it is clear that Russia is as unstable as a quicksand, and none knows what will be swallowed up next in those shifting, unfathomable depths. There is something stirring there below, and the first cries of liberty and unity which hailed the revolution have given place to queer mutterings, unconjecturable sounds…

April is nearly over, and spring, which came so late here in England that long after Easter the land lay white under unseasonable snows, has suddenly burst out into full choir of flower and bird-song. The blossoms that should have decked last month, the daffodils that should have "taken the winds of March with beauty," have delayed their golden epiphany till now, and it is as if their extra month of sleep had given them a vigour and a beauty that spring never saw before. The April flowers are here too, and the flowers of May have precociously joined them, and never was there such bustle among the birds, such hurried transport of nest-building material. But through all the din of the forest-murmurs sounds the thud of war.

How still it was on that Easter morning…

THE END