CHAPTER V
When a woman's imagination, still young and ardent, begins to find the things of earth as Hamlet found them, "weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable," it is only natural that she should turn with a longing mind to the life that earth cannot give, the something unseen and mysterious that certain gifted individuals have attributed to themselves the power of seeing. Vera, after six years of marriage, six years of unlimited wealth and unconscious self-indulgence, had begun to discover that most things were stale, and some things weary, and all things unprofitable; and then, to a mind steeped in modern poetry and modern romance, and the modern music that always means something more than mere combinations of harmonious sounds, there had come a yearning for the higher life, the transcendental life that only the elect can realise, and only the earth-weary can ardently desire.
Francis Symeon was the philosopher to whom she turned with unquestioning faith; for even those who had spoken lightly of his creed and of his reasoning faculty had admitted that the man was essentially sincere, and that the faith he offered his followers was for him as impregnable as the rock of Holy Scripture.
He was announced on the following day as the clock in Vera's morning-room struck three, a punctuality so exceptional as to seem almost uncanny, when compared with the vague sense of time in the rest of her acquaintance. She received him in a room where there was no fear of interruption—her sanctuary, more library than boudoir, where the books she loved, her poets and novelists and philosophers, in the bindings she had herself invented, filled her book-cases, alternating with black-and-white portraits of the gods of her idolatry—Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Scott, de Musset, Heine, Henry Irving, Gounod. Only the dead had place there—the dead musician, the dead poet, the dead actor. It was death that made them beloved and longed for. They had gone from her reach for ever; and it was this sense of something for ever lost that made them adorable.
Mr. Symeon looked round the walls with evident admiration.
"I see you prefer the faces of the noble dead to water-colour sketches and majolica plates," he said. "Divine books, divine faces, those are the best companions a woman can have."
"I spend a good deal of my life in this room," Vera answered. "I have no children. I suppose if I had I should spend most of my time with them. I should not have to choose my companions among the dead."
"You have chosen them among the living," Mr. Symeon answered in a voice that thrilled her. "Do you think that Tennyson is dead? He who knew that the whole question of religion hinges upon the after life: immortality or a godless universe. Or Browning, who has gone to the very core of religion, whose magnificent mind grasped the highest and deepest in Divine love and Divine power? Such spirits are unquenchable. This rag of mortality upon which they hang must lie in the dust, but for the elect death is only the release of the immaterial from the material, the escape of the butterfly from the worm. You have the assurance from the lips of Christ: God is the God of the living; and for those whose existence on earth is only the apprenticeship to immortality, there is no such thing as death."
This was the chief article in Mr. Symeon's creed; hinted at, but not formally stated in his contributions to the magazine which he edited. He claimed immortality only for the elect—for those in whom the spirit predominated over the flesh. To Vera there was no new idea in his exposition of faith. She had a feeling that she had always known this, from the time she stood beside Shelley's grave in the shadow of the Roman Cenotaph, and that other grave under the hill, the resting-place of Shelley's Adonais. The thought of corruption had been far from her mind, albeit she knew that the heart of one poet and the wasted form of the other were lying in the darkness below those spring flowers on which her tears were falling, and it was no surprise to her to hear a serious man of sixty years of age declare his faith in the unbroken chain of life.