"A woman was leaving her lover," he added. "It had to be so. Each knew that. Just as she was going, the woman said, 'I forget—I forget why I have to go away.' ... It would be that way with the soldiers, if they could look down upon their own valleys and farms. They would forget war and hurry down, saying, 'I'm coming!'"
I wanted to get closer to Dreve's secret of peace and power. I wanted to tell it. Apparently Dreve wanted me to. Now, there's a price to pay for these big things, but many are willing to pay the price if the way is clear. Dreve had suffered all he could; then something had turned within him, and he found himself in Day again instead of Death.
"It must be told differently," he began. "For instance, if I should tell you that the way is to love your neighbour as yourself, you wouldn't have anything. Whitman said, 'Happiness is the efflux of soul,' which is exactly true, but it didn't help me until I had experience. Happiness is the loss of the sense of self. You can see that clearly. All pleasure-seeking is to forget self. We loosen something inside that sets us free for a moment, and we say we've had a good time.
"There are great powers within. The greater the man, the more he uses this fact. We thought of steam as a finished power until the big straight-line force of electricity was released. We can't explain it, but we have touched certain of the laws which it obeys. The materialist is inclined, as ever, to say that electricity is the last force to be uncorked on the planet, just as he said that the kerosene lamp was the last word in illumination. The occultist declares that there are still higher and hotter forces, touching Light itself, and indulging in the laughter of curves and decoration where the cold monster electricity moves only in straight lines.
"Men have died to tell the story that happiness is radiation, not reflection—that we have it all inside, if we could only turn it loose—that all pain and fear and anger and self-illusion disappear the instant we enter the larger dimension of life, exactly as the moon goes out of sight in the presence of the incandescent sun.
"I was emptied of all that life meant in the world—but something new flooded in. I saw that all was not lost, but that all was greater than I could dream; that all was waiting for fuller and finer expression. I saw that what I could do for you, or for any man or woman or child, brought me a living force of the love I was dying for. It became clear that I needed only to clear away the choking evil of self, in order to feel that I was a part of the tender and mighty Plan,—to touch the rhythm of the Source, from which all songs and heroisms and martyrdoms come.
"It has all been said again and again. There comes a moment usually after much pain when the human mind realises that it is invincible when working with the Plan; that it may even merge with a kind of Divine Potency yet retain itself; that it can actually perform its actions with the help of that mighty fluid energy in which the stars are swung and the avatars are born.
"A cold monster indeed is this electricity compared to the odic force, the dynamo of which is the human will. But the magic of it all lies in the reverse of the whole system of use. This force destroys when used for self, but constructs when it is turned outward. Here we touch the law again that happiness is in radiation—in the loss of the sense of self—in incandescence—"
Dreve smiled at me with sudden revealing charm. "I would say that it was all in loving one's neighbour," he added, "except that it has been said so much.... It is true. You seemed to know it to-day on the shore. You seemed to see the great ones passing there. If the world could only know the joy of seeing the sons of God in the eyes of passing men!"