“We three are at last together again, and must bring the Balance to a final close. As the stars are but dust upon the pathway of the gods, so our mistakes are but dust upon the pathway of our lives. What we let fall together, we must together remove.”
Then, with an abruptness that pertained sometimes to these curious irruptions from the past, the values shifted. He became more and more the Julius LeVallon whom I knew to-day. Speech changed to a modern and more usual key. And the effect upon myself was of vague relief, for while the impression of great drama did not wholly pass, the uneasiness lightened in me, and I found my tongue again. I told my own experience—all that I had seen and felt and thought. Brewing the cocoa, and setting out the bread and marmalade upon the table, Julius listened to every word without interruption. Our intimacy was complete again as though no separation, either of lives or days, had been between us.
“Inside me, of course,” I concluded the recital; “in some kind of interior sight I saw it all——”
“The only true sight,” he declared, “though what you saw was but the reflection at second-hand of memories I evoked in there.” He pointed to the inner room. “In there,” he went on significantly, “where nothing connected with the Present enters, no thought, no presence, nothing that can disturb or interrupt,—in there you would see and remember as vividly as I myself. The room is prepared.... The channels all are open. As it was, my pictures flashed into you and set the great chain moving. For no life is isolated; all is shared; and every detail, animate or so-called inanimate, belongs inevitably to every other.”
“Yet what I saw was so much clearer than our schoolday memories,” I said. “Those pictures, for instance, of the pastoral people where we came together first.”
An expression of yearning passed into his eyes as he answered.
“Because in our Temple Days you led the life of the soul instead of the body merely. The soul alone remembers. There lies the permanent record. Only what has touched the soul, therefore, is recoverable—the great joys, great sorrows, great adventures that have reached it. You feel them. The rest are but fugitive pictures of scenery that accompanied the spiritual disturbances. Each body you occupy has a different brain that stores its own particular series. But true memory is in, and of, the Soul. Few have any true soul-life at all; few, therefore, have anything to remember!”
His low voice ran on and on, charged with deep earnestness; his very atmosphere seemed to vibrate with the conviction of his words; about his face occasionally were flashes of that radiance in which his body of light—his inmost being—dwelt for ever. I remember moving the marmalade pot from its precarious position on the table edge, lest his gestures should send it flying! But I remember also that the haunting reality of “other days and other places” lay about us while we talked, so that the howling of the storm outside seemed far away and quite unable to affect us. We knew perfect communion in that dingy room. We felt together.
“But it is difficult, often painful, to draw the memories up again,” he went on, still speaking of recovery, “for they lie so deeply coiled about the very roots of joy and grief. Things of the moment smother the older pictures. The way of recovery is arduous, and not many would deem the sacrifice involved worth while. It means plunging into yourself as you must plunge below the earth if you would see the starlight while the sun is in the sky. To-day’s sunlight hides the stars of yesterday. Yet all is accessible—the entire series of the soul’s experiences, and real forgetting is not possible.”
A movement as of wind seemed to pass between us over the faded carpet, bearing me upwards while he spoke, sweeping me with his own conviction of our eternal ancestry and of our unending future.