‘To get experience that can only be got through the pains of limitation,’ the answer sang within him, as he lay there upon the lawn beneath the cedars, absorbing the spring beauty. ‘Everything is doing the same thing everywhere—from Smoke, Mrs. Tompkyns and Madmerzelle, right up to you, me, Daddy, and the waifs! They all have a bit of Reality in them working upwards to God. Even stones and plants and trees are learning experiences they could learn only in those particular forms—’
‘I know it! Of course, I know it!’ Paul interrupted, with a rush of joy in his heart he could not restrain; ‘but go on and tell me more, for I love to hear your little voice say it all.’
‘It’s only, perhaps, that the stones are learning patience and endurance; the flowers sweetness; the trees strength and comfort; and the rivers joy. Later they change about, so that in the end each ‘Bit of Reality’ has gathered all possible experiences in nature before it passes on into men and women.
‘Think, Uncle Paul, of the joy of a stone, who after centuries of patience and endurance, cramped and pressed down, knows suddenly the freedom of wind and sea! Of the restlessness of flame that, after ages of leaping unsatisfied to the sky, learns the repose of a tree, moved only by the outside forces of wind and rain! And think of the delight of all these when they pass still further upwards and reach the stage of consciousness in animals and men—and in time enter the region of development where I—where you and I, and all we knew and loved, continue together, ever climbing, fighting, learning——’
It was curious. Afterwards he could never remember the way she ended the sentence. For the life of him he could not write it down. Definite recollection failed him, together with the loss of the actual words. Only the general sense remained in such a way as to open to his inner eye a huge vista of spiritual endeavour and advance that left him breathless and dizzy when he contemplated it, but at the same time charged most splendidly with courage and with hope.
‘Then the pains of limitation,’ he remembered asking, ‘the anguish of impossible yearnings that vainly seek expression—these are symptoms of growth that in the end may produce something higher and nobler?’
‘Must!’ he heard the answer amid a burst of happy laughter, as though from where she stood it were possible to look back upon earthly pangs and see them in the terms of joy; ‘just like any other suffering! Like the stress of heat and pressure that turns common clay into gems——’
He interrupted her swiftly, high hopes crowding through his spirit like the rush of an army.
‘Then the life in us all—the “Bits of Reality” in you and me—have passed through all possible forms in their huge upward journey to reach our present stage——?’ He stammered amid a multitude of golden memories, half captured.
‘Of course, Uncle Paul, of course!’ he caught deep, deep within him the silvery faint reply. ‘And your love and sympathy with trees, winds, hills, with all Nature, even with animals’—again her laughter ran out to him like a song—‘is because you passed long ago through them all, and half remember. You still feel with them, and your imagination for ever strives to reconstruct the various beauty known in each stage. You remember in the depths of you the longings of every particular degree—even of the time when your soul was less advanced, and groping upwards as your London waifs grope even now. This is why your sympathy with them, too, is deep and true. You half remember.’