‘Lots of people do,’ protested Kingston. ‘I suppose they have the Elizabethan feeling that the play is more important than its setting.’
‘Oh, but they don’t die at all,’ cried Isabel. ‘Very few people are great and holy enough to die. Nine people out of ten just change shapes and go on again. You can tell that by the fuss they make. One always fusses more when one harries about at a junction than when one arrives at a terminus. Most people, when they come to die, are simply getting out of one train and into another on their journey. Arriving at the end is a much more simple solemn business. That is what I mean by dying. And for that one needs a splendid stage. It is a far leap into Nirvana, and if one is to make it, one wants a good take-off, a running jump from a strong springy board, with nothing to trammel one and lessen one’s movements. To hop along into another mean little manifestation, as most people do, requires very little outside help. It is hardly more than a shuffle from one bed to another. One does not want any spring-board for that.’
‘I expect,’ said Kingston, ‘that a vast number of quiet good people reach Nirvana without big jumps or spring-boards, or anything of the sort. They go on living obscure, kindly lives, and then, at the end of everything, they just gently slip away and cease, and enter Nirvana without any splash at all.’
‘Ah, those are the people who go on the great journey without luggage. But the average person takes any amount of packages and parcels with him, all kinds of fears and fusses and hopes and terrors. And the reason why he makes such a to-do whenever he has to change trains or carriages is because he is so afraid he may leave one of the precious bundles behind. He thinks they are his individuality, just as a decent woman thinks that her clothes are hers. In fact, scarcely anyone can conceive an idea of himself without his trappings. And so, all along the Great Railway, you have people wailing and shrinking at the thought of death. They know, in their heart of hearts, that at each change they leave one or two of the bundles behind—a fear or a hate or a habit—and they cannot understand that they can continue to be themselves without the bundles. They think, as I said, that the bundles are an essential part of themselves; whereas it is not till one has gradually shed all one’s bundles that one can hope to arrive, one’s own real unhampered self, at the Terminus. It is only the Self that is meant to arrive, not the bundles. They are the common property of all, like clothes and rugs and umbrellas, but each man’s self is a lone, isolated thing.’
She spoke with her usual fire, urgently, with hands lavishly waved, and blazing eyes. Gundred, quite out of the talk, left behind in the lower world, looked on with bewildered disapproval.
‘Travelling is a great trouble—yes?’ she hazarded. ‘I always have as little luggage as possible.’
Kingston dropped back into Gundred’s world with a crash. He had been interested and uplifted on the wings of his cousin’s fantasies. He could meet her flying in that empyrean of ideas. He loved the vague, dim regions of her thought. Gundred, without clipping his wings, kept him tethered to her own perch. Happily she clucked and hopped with him in the glittering cage—a hen-soul yoked with a restless hawk’s. Now, out of the free air beyond, had appeared a second hawk, and insensibly Kingston’s wings began to flutter uneasily for a flight.
‘Yes,’ he said rather savagely, answering an unspoken question. ‘No wonder poor Gundred can’t understand such mists and inanities. Have you any idea what you mean, Isabel?’
His irritation was all against Gundred’s inadequacy. It showed her almost in an inferior light. Characteristically, though, he diverted his annoyance to the score of his cousin’s mysticism, and unburdened on her the feelings that his wife had engendered.
‘Idea?’ replied Isabel scornfully. ‘No; why should I? If anyone ever stopped to think what their words really meant, and refused to speak until they had found out, why, no one would ever open their lips again. Man sends the words, and Heaven, we trust, sends the meaning. I have vague notions of a meaning very far away above and beyond all the harassing futilities of language, beyond the domain of grammar and derivations and split infinitives and metaphors and things. But of course one can’t hit it; one can only aim at it. One shoots off into the clouds in the hope of sometimes winging a truth. There’s no use sitting and aiming, aiming, aiming; one has to up with the gun of one’s mind and blaze away. Nine times out of ten one misses dead, but bit by bit one gets practice, just as in earthly shooting, until at last one has attained a good average level of success, though I am afraid till the end of the chapter one only wings Truth, never gets it fair and square in the heart.’