‘Your chance is now with you; through many ages you had been firmly bound on the wheel of desire, loving from life to life with a fire of anguish that grew with feeding. For of all the phantom joys love is the greatest and the most delusive. Love is an accumulation of memories from bygone loves, increasing by indulgence, from life to life, until at last the burden of pain is too great to be borne. You, Kingston, in this present person of yours, have suffered the incarnation of a very ancient deadly love. How else can you account for the mystic rapture, the violent, inexplicable sense of recognition which makes the essence of a tyrannous love? It is soul crying suddenly out to a soul loved long since and lost. It is the meeting of two selves that have grown together through a myriad years, separated by the gulfs of bodily deaths, but always certain to meet again, drawn irresistibly together by the clamour of mutual desire.’
‘Ah,’ replied Kingston, ‘if only one could be so certain of that meeting again! But when, and where, and how?’
‘Unhappy question! You that have been freed are eager to enter again into bondage. If that bondage is the keenest of all earthly pleasure, yet recognise that it is the pleasure of the phantasmal bodily self. It has no part with the perfect knowledge, except in so far as it is divorced from the earthly self. And even in this world, though of all pleasures the keenest, it is also of all agonies the keenest. You would suffer the pains of hell, I know, to gain the joys of that fancied heaven. Wisdom and clear sight have not come to you yet. You must make yourself yet another hell of sorrow before you can hope to attain the great emancipation. As it is, you do not even desire emancipation. Emancipation sounds cheerless to you—lonely, sterile, monotonous. Yet some day, at some point on your pilgrimage, desire will so fade in you that you will be able to understand how it is that perfect peace knows nothing of monotony, and that the agonies of passion do not prove that its joys are real or holy or satisfactory.’
‘How do you mean—make my own hell?’
‘Hell is nothing more than the dominion of passion that we establish over our lives—of passion and all the hellish torments that passion engenders. We make our own hells by dwelling obstinately in the world of false desire. If we felt the only true desire, the desire of those things that are real, then there would at once be no more pain, and our state would be heaven. Desire is hell. And that hell we build and stoke and kindle for ourselves—go on kindling from life to life, in our fancy that the fire we endure contains the ultimate pleasure our souls can taste. It is no capricious Personality above that sends us anguish and misery. Everything we suffer follows automatically from some action of our own in this or some bygone phase that our marred memories can no longer recall. Here in the West you do not understand how this can be, though in your heart of hearts you know that it is. But in the older, wiser East men have learned to train their recollection until it is as easy to recall the sorrows of a bygone life as those of yesterday or the day before; for time is a thing that has no real existence in the infinite life of the soul. You, because of that old tie, knew the woman, and loved her and lost her. Because of that fire of false desire that you had fed in yourself for so many existences, you suffered anew the hell of your own making—the hell of loss and loneliness. But kill such false desires, and you kill the false miseries of this life that men think real. You stand at a point where you might strike upwards towards the heaven of peace; the curse of your love had nearly wrought out its completion, and passed away. But by nourishing as you do the fever of longing for the dead, you are binding yourself anew with the chains that were beginning to weaken and drop.’
‘I don’t want to hear all this,’ replied Kingston impatiently. ‘If you know so much, tell me when and where I shall be able to find what I have lost. Shall I find it in this life? Shall I know it when I have found it? Remember how it passed away from me. You seem to understand all that happened, so tell me whether the change will affect our knowledge of each other.’
‘In one tremendous moment the woman rose far above all the false desires in which she had bred herself. She gave her life for the truth. She sacrificed utterly that false self of hers which was the thing that your false self had so loved through the ages. And for her great merit it must be that she must reap great rewards,—not rewards apportioned by a personal providence, but rewards that spring naturally out of her action. She has shaken herself free of the links that bound her to you. The Buddha enwombed in every mortal Karma has torn away many of the veils that shrouded him in that woman’s heart. Because, in her last moment she loved the true better than the false, and followed rather the higher love that led upwards than the lower love which would have kept her at your side—therefore she is released. The streams are sundered at last on the rock of parting. That bondage of hers has passed away—weak and erring and desirous, perhaps, she still may be—faulty and human, but at least that one chain of desire which held her is snapped and broken utterly. You go hunting for her through all the fields of your earthly life, and she, in an instant, she was cured of all vain longings. Therefore between you there is a gulf fixed for ever. You, in the days of your meeting, will know her and desire her, but she will not know you; she will be free of you for ever, and your recognition will wake in her no answering recognition, and thus of her merit will be doubled your damnation.’
‘I’ll take the risk of that,’ cried Kingston, wanting to smile at these august fantasies; but the low, husky voice, the faint tremulous manner filled with age and mystery and wisdom compelled his reverent attention. ‘I don’t care whether she knows me or not when we meet again, so long as I know her. The sundered streams must meet again somehow. As long as I feel that I have met her again, I can be perfectly happy. That is all I ask.’
‘The soul lies to itself,’ answered the old man sadly. ‘Festering sorrow you will have in this, and you know it. For all lust, whether of the body or the soul, is sorrow. It cannot be otherwise, for sorrow and lust are two words for the one great falsehood that pervades this visible world of phantoms.’
‘Tell me,’ interrupted Kingston, jesting uneasily to hide his earnestness, ‘as you have told me so much—can you tell me in what shape I shall find her, if find her I ever shall? Surely what she did will have brought her greater beauty than ever, if what you say is true, that our rewards are automatically developed out of our actions? As for knowing her, on your theory that all love is memory, of course I shall know her, whether she has gone beyond knowing me herself or not. I shall feel it in my blood when we meet again, overwhelmingly, fiercely, as I suppose I must have known her from the first, when she reappeared for a month or two in my life, twenty years ago. But can you say what form the result of her beautiful actions will take this time? Will she be a queen or a beggar?’ Kingston laughed, trying to lighten the impression of his eagerness. But the old man sighed.