And I will explain briefly, too, how it is that this copybook maxim is now for me a practical reality. For at first, with my growing perception, I was distressed at what seemed to me the lavish waste, the reckless, spendthrift beauty, not in nature merely but in human nature, that passed unrecognized and unacknowledged. The loss seemed so extravagant. Not only that a million flowers waste their sweetness on the desert air, but that such prodigal stores of human love and tenderness remain unemployed, their rich harvest all ungathered—because, misdirected and misunderstood, they find no receptacle into which they may discharge.
It has now come to me, though only by & slow and almost imperceptible advance, that these stores of apparently unremunerative beauty, this harvest so thickly sown about the world, unused, ungathered—prepare yourself, please, for an imaginative leap—ore used, are gathered, are employed. By Whom?
I can only answer: By some one who is pleased; and probably by many such. How, why, and wherefore—I catch your crowd of questions in advance—we need not seek exactly to discover, although the answer of no uncertain kind, I hear within the stillness of a heart that has learned to beat to a deeper, sweeter rhythm than before.
Those who loved beauty and lived it in their lives, follow that same ideal with increasing power and passion afterwards—and for ever.
The shutter of black iron we call Death hides the truth with terror and resentment; but what if that shutter were, after all, transparent?
A glorious dream, I hear you cry. Now listen to my answer. It is, for me, a definite assurance and belief, because—I know.
Long before you have reached this point you will, I know, have reached also the conclusion (with a sigh) that I am embarked upon some commonplace experience of ghostly return, or, at least, of posthumous communication. Perhaps I wrong you here, but in any case I would at once correct the inference, if it has been drawn. You remember our adventures with the seance-mongers years ago? ... I have not changed my view so far as their evidential value is concerned. Be sure of that.
The dead, I am of opinion, do not return; for, while individuals may claim startling experiences that seem to them of an authentic and convincing kind, there has been no instance that can persuade us all—in the sense that thunderstorm convinces us all. Such individual experiences I have always likened to the auto-suggestion of those few who believe the advertisements of the hair-restorers—you will forgive the unpoetic simile for the sake of its exactitude—as against the verdict of the world that a genuine discovery of such a remedy would leave no single doubter in Europe or America, nor even in the London Clubs! Yet each time I read the cunning article (I have less hair than when I ran away from Sandhurst that exciting July night and met you in the Strand!), and look upon the picture of the man, John Henry Smith, "before and after using," I admit the birth of an unreasonable belief that there may be something in it after all.
Of such indubitable proof, however, there is, alas, as yet no sign.
And so with the other matter—the dead do not "return." My story, therefore, be comforted, has no individual instance to record. It may, on the other hand, be held to involve a thread of what might be called—at a stretch—posthumous communication, yet a thread so tenuous that the question of personal direction behind it need hardly be considered at all. For let me confess at once that, the habit of the "thrill" once established, I was not long in asking myself point blank this definite question: Dared I trace its origin to my own unfruitful experience of some years before?—and, discovering no shred of evidence, I found this positive answer: Honestly I could not.