He made no direct reply; least of all did it occur to him to thank me. The storm that had shaken me had apparently not touched him. His tone was quiet and normal as he continued speaking, though its depth and power, with that steady drive of absolute conviction behind, could never leave it quite an ordinary voice.
“She, as I told you, knows nothing in her surface mind,” I heard. “Beyond occasional uprushes of memory that have come to her lately in dreams—she tells them naïvely, confusedly in the morning sometimes—she is aware of no more than a feeling of deep content, and that our union is right in the sense of being inevitable. Her pleasure that you have come is obvious. And more,” he added, “I do not wish the older memories to break through yet, for that might wake pain or terror in her and, therefore, unconscious opposition.”
He touched my arm a moment, looking at me with a significant expression. It was a suggestive thing he said: “For human consciousness is different at different periods, remember, and ages remotely separated cannot understand each other. Their points of view, their modes of consciousness, are too different. In her deeper state—separated by so huge an interval from the nineteenth century—with its origin long before we came to live upon this little earth—she would not, could not understand. There would be no sympathy; there might be terror; there must certainly be failure.”
I murmured something or other, heaven alone knows what it was.
“What we think fine and wonderful may then have seemed the crudest folly, superstition, wickedness—and vice versa. Look at the few thousand years of history we have—and you’ll see the truth of this. We cannot grasp how certain periods could possibly have done the things they did.” He paused, then added in a lower tone, more to himself than to me: “So with what we have to do now—though exceptional, utterly exceptional—it is a remnant that we owe to Nature—to the universe—and we must see it through....” His voice died away.
“I understand,” my voice dropped into the open pause he left.
“Though you neither believe nor welcome,” he replied.
“My promise,” I said quietly, “holds good. Also”—I blushed and half-stammered over the conventional words—“I will do nothing that can cause possible offence—to anyone.”
The hand that rested on my arm tightened its grasp a little. He made no other sign. It was remarkable how the topic that must have separated two other men—any two other men in the world, I suppose—had been subtracted from our relationship, laid aside as dealt with and admitted, calling for no further mention even. It all seemed, in some strange way, impersonal almost—another attitude to life—a faint sign, it may well have been, of that older mode of consciousness he spoke about.
I hardly recognised myself, so complete was the change in me, and so swiftly going forward. This dragnet from the Past drew ever closer. If the mind in me resisted still, it seemed rather from some natural momentum acquired by habit, than from any spontaneous activity due to the present. The modern, upper self surrendered.