These two became very dear to me, and I learnt much heavenly wisdom from them in long, quiet conferences, where we spoke frankly of all we had felt and known.



XIX

It was at this time, I think, that a great change came over my thoughts, or rather that I realised that a great change had gradually taken place. Till now, I had been dominated and haunted by memories of my latest life upon earth; but at intervals there had visited me a sense of older and purer recollections. I cannot describe exactly how it came about—and, indeed, the memory of what my heavenly progress had hitherto been, as opposed to my earthly experience, was never very clear to me; but I became aware that my life in heaven—I will call it heaven for want of a better name—was my real continuous life, my home-life, so to speak, while my earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like terms which a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not only learns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardened and consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher facts of life—duty, responsibility, friendships, angers, treacheries, temptations, routine. The boy returns with gladness to the serener and sweeter atmosphere of home; and just in the same way I felt I had returned to the larger and purer life of heaven. But, as I say, the recollection of my earlier life in heaven, my occupations and experience, was never clear to me, but rather as a luminous and haunting mist. I questioned Amroth about this once, and he said that this was the universal experience, and that the earthly lives one lived were like deep trenches cut across a path, and seemed to interrupt the heavenly sequence; but that as the spirit grew more pure and wise, the consciousness of the heavenly life became more distinct and secure. But he added, what I did not quite understand, that there was little need of memory in the life of heaven, and that it was to a great extent the inheritance of the body. Memory, he said, was to a great extent an interruption to life; the thought of past failures and mistakes, and especially of unkindnesses and misunderstandings, tended to obscure and complicate one's relations with other souls; but that in heaven, where activity and energy were untiring and unceasing, one lived far more in the emotion and work of the moment, and less in retrospect and prospect. What mattered was actual experience and the effect of experience; memory itself was but an artistic method of dealing with the past, and corresponded to fanciful and delightful anticipations of the future. "The truth is," he said, "that the indulgence of memory is to a great extent a mere sentimental weakness; to live much in recollection is a sign of exhausted and depleted vitality. The further you are removed from your last earthly life, the less tempted you will be to recall it. The highest spirits of all here," he said, "have no temptation ever to revert to retrospect, because the pure energies of the moment are all-sustaining and all-sufficing."

The only trace I ever noticed of any memory of my past life in heaven was that things sometimes seemed surprisingly familiar to me, and that I had the sense of a serene permanence, which possessed and encompassed me. Indeed I came to believe that the strange feeling of permanence which haunts one upon earth, when one is happy and content, even though one knows that everything is changing and shifting around one, and that all is precarious and uncertain, is in itself a memory of the serene and untroubled continuance of heaven, and a desire to taste it and realise it.

Be this as it may, from the time of my finding my settled task and ordered place in the heavenly community the memories of my old life upon earth began to fade from my thoughts. I could, indeed, always recall them by an effort, but there seemed less and less inclination to do so the more I became absorbed in my heavenly activities.

One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till I reflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange and mournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we live under the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehow or other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliterating all the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes and fancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from a temperament. Of course there are a good many of these things which disappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, and cloudy irritabilities, which are caused by fatigue and malaise, and by ill-health generally. But a man's whims and fancies and dislikes do not by any means disappear on earth when he is in good health; on the contrary, they are often apt to be accentuated and emphasised when he is free from pain and care and anxiety, and riding blithely over the waves of life. Indeed there are men whom I have known who are never kind or sympathetic till they are in some wearing trouble of their own; when they are prosperous and cheerful, they are frankly intolerable, because their mirth turns to derision and insolence.

But one of the reasons why the heavenly life is apt to appear in prospect so wearisome a thing is, because we are brought up to feel that the whole character is flattened out and charged with a serene kind of priggishness, which takes all the salt out of life. The word "saintly," so terribly misapplied on earth, grows to mean, to many of us, an irritating sort of kindness, which treats the interests and animated elements of life with a painful condescension, and a sympathy of which the basis is duty rather than love. The true sanctification, which I came to perceive something of later, is the result of a process of endless patience and infinite delay, and the attainment of it implies a humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic contests, as the tolerance of the shrewd man of science for the feminine logic of religious sentiment!

But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over the spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world. Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which we were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults and preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness, wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at work. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth. There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on earth—the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the fact that people use the same words with such different implications and meanings. All those became unnecessary, because one could pierce instantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, without the need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath the cross-currents of emotion. But love and affection waxed and waned in heaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred. Few souls are so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whom one loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and exciting emotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but which must withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of the intermitted relation.

It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships and intimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness, either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence of development. Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by the aggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.

I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the interests to me of our common life. One could see two spirits drawn together by some secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influence strike across and suspend it. One case of this I will mention, which is typical of many. There came among us an extremely lively and rather whimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man. I wondered at first why he was chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and even capricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness of perception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled. He had a power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to me how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our carefully formed conclusions.

This boy became extraordinarily attractive to an older woman who was one of our number, who was solitary and abstracted, and of an intense seriousness of devotion to her work. It was evident both that she felt his charm intensely and that her disposition was wholly alien to the disposition of the boy himself. In fact, she simply bored him. He took all that he did lightly, and achieved by an intense momentary concentration what she could only achieve by slow reflection. This devotion had in it something that was strangely pathetic, because it took the form in her of making her wish to conciliate the boy's admiration, by treating thoughts and ideas with a lightness and a humour to which she could by no means attain, and which made things worse rather than better, because she could read so easily, in the thoughts of others, the impression that she was attempting a handling of topics which she could not in the least accomplish. But advice was useless. There it was, the old, fierce, constraining attraction of love, as it had been of old, making havoc of comfortable arrangements, attempting the impossible; and yet one knew that she would gain by the process, that she was opening a door in her heart that had hitherto been closed, and learning a largeness of view and sympathy in the process. Her fault had ever been, no doubt, to estimate slow and accurate methods too highly, and to believe that all was insecure and untrustworthy that was not painfully accumulated. Now she saw that genius could accomplish without effort or trouble what no amount of homely energy could effect, and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers. It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with a hint that he must be prepared, if he could not exhibit a more elastic sympathy, to have his course suspended in favour of some more simple discipline, told me the whole matter. "What am I to do?" he said. "I cannot care for Barbara; her whole nature upsets me and revolts me. I know she is very good and all that, but I simply am not myself when she is by; it is like taking a run with a tortoise!"

"Well," I said, "no one expects you to give up all your time to taking tortoises for runs; but I suppose that tortoises have their rights, and must not be jerked along on their backs, like a sledge."

"Oh," said he, "you are all against me, I know; and I am not sure that this place is not rather too solemn for me. What is the good of being wiser than the aged, if one has more commandments to keep?"

Things, however, settled down in time. Barbara, I think, must have been taken to task as well, because she gave up her attempts at wit; and the end of it was that a quiet friendship sprang up between the incongruous pair, like that between a wayward young brother and a plain, kindly, and elderly sister, of a very fine and chivalrous kind.

It must not be thought that we spent our time wholly in these emotional relations. It was a place of hard and urgent work; but I came to realise that, just as on earth, institutions like schools and colleges, where a great variety of natures are gathered in close and daily contact, are shot through and through with strange currents of emotion, which some people pay no attention to, and others dismiss as mere sentimentality, so it was also bound to be beyond, with this difference, that whereas on earth we are shy and awkward with our friendships, and all sorts of physical complications intervene, in the other world they assume their frank importance. I saw that much of what is called the serious business of life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is really entirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, which underlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and cramped unkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth, finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide this impulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of the relation of the soul to God as two separate things. We pass over the words of Christ in the Gospel, which directly contradict this, and which make the one absolutely dependent on, and conditional on, the other. We speak of human affection as a thing which may come in between the soul and God, while it is in reality the swiftest access thither. We speak as though ambition were itself made more noble, if it sternly abjures all multiplication of human tenderness. We speak of a life which sacrifices material success to emotion as a failure and an irresponsible affair. The truth is the precise opposite. All the ambitions which have their end in personal prestige are wholly barren; the ambitions which aim at social amelioration have a certain nobility about them, though they substitute a tortuous by-path for a direct highway. And the plain truth is that all social amelioration would grow up as naturally and as fragrantly as a flower, if we could but refine and strengthen and awaken our slumbering emotions, and let them grow out freely to gladden the little circle of earth in which we live and move.



XX

It was at this time that I had a memorable interview with the Master of the College. He appeared very little among us, though, he occasionally gave us a short instruction, in which he summed up the teaching on a certain point. He was a man of extraordinary impressiveness, mainly, I think, because he gave the sense of being occupied in much larger and wider interests. I often pondered over the question why the short, clear, rather dry discourses which fell from his lips appeared to be so far more weighty and momentous than anything else that was ever said to us. He used no arts of exhortation, showed no emotion, seemed hardly conscious of our presence; and if one caught his eye as he spoke, one became aware of a curious tremor of awe. He never made any appeal to our hearts or feelings; but it always seemed as if he had condescended for a moment to put aside far bigger and loftier designs in order to drop a fruit of ripened wisdom in our way. He came among us, indeed, like a statesman rather than like a teacher. The brief interviews we had with him were regarded with a sort of terror, but produced, in me at least, an almost fanatical respect and admiration. And yet I had no reason to suppose that he was not, like all of us, subject to the law of life and pilgrimage, though one could not conceive of him as having to enter the arena of life again as a helpless child!

On this occasion I was summoned suddenly to his presence. I found him, as usual, bent over his work, which he did not intermit, but merely motioned me to be seated. Presently he put away his papers from him, and turned round upon me. One of the disconcerting things about him was the fact that his thought had a peculiarly compelling tendency, and that while he read one's mind in a flash, his own thoughts remained very nearly impenetrable. On this occasion he commended me for my work and my relations with my fellow-students, adding that I had made rapid progress. He then said, "I have two questions to ask you. Have you any special relations, either with any one whom you have left behind you on earth, or with any one with whom you have made acquaintance since you quitted it, which you desire to pursue?"

I told him, which was the truth, that since my stay in the College I had become so much absorbed in the studies of the place that I seemed to have became strangely oblivious of my external friends, but that it was more a suspension than a destruction of would-be relations.

"Yes," he said, "I perceive that that is your temperament. It has its effectiveness, no doubt, but it also has its dangers; and, whatever happens, one ought never to be able to accuse oneself justly of any disloyalty."

He seemed to wait for me to speak, whereupon I mentioned a very dear friend of my days of earth; but I added that most of those whom I had loved best had predeceased me, and that I had looked forward to a renewal of our intercourse. I also mentioned the names of Charmides and Cynthia, the latter of whom was in memory strangely near to my heart.

He seemed satisfied with this. Then he said, "It is true that we have to multiply relationships with others, both in the world and out of it; but we must also practise economy. We must not abandon ourselves to passing fancies, or be subservient to charm, while if we have made an emotional mistake, and have been disappointed with one whom we have taken the trouble to win, we must guard such conquests with a close and peculiar tenderness. But enough of that, for I have to ask you if there is any special work for which you feel yourself disposed. There is a great choice of employment here. You may choose, if you will, just to live the spiritual life and discharge whatever duties of citizenship you may be called upon to perform. That is what most spirits do. I need not perhaps tell you"—here he smiled—"that freedom from the body does not confer upon any one, as our poor brothers and sisters upon earth seem to think, a heavenly vocation. Neither of course is the earthly fallacy about a mere absorption in worship a true one—only to a very few is that conceded. Still less is this a life of leisure. To be leisurely here is permitted only to the wearied, and to those childish creatures with whom you have spent some time in their barren security. I do not think you are suited for the work of recording the great scheme of life, nor do I think you are made for a teacher. You are not sufficiently impartial! For mere labour you are not suited; and yet I hardly think you would be fit to adopt the most honourable task which your friend Amroth so finely fulfils—a guide and messenger. What do you think?"

I said at once that I did not wish to have to make a decision, but that I preferred to leave it to him. I added that though I was conscious of my deficiencies, I did not feel conscious of any particular capacities, except that I found character a very fascinating study, especially in connection with the circumstances of life upon earth.

"Very well," he said, "I think that you may perhaps be best suited to the work of deciding what sort of life will best befit the souls who are prepared to take up their life upon earth again. That is a task of deep and infinite concern; it may surprise you," he added, "to learn that this is left to the decision of other souls. But it is, of course, the goal at which all earthly social systems are aiming, the right apportionment of circumstances to temperament, and you must not be surprised to find that here we have gone much further in that direction, though even here the system is not perfected; and you cannot begin to apprehend that fact too soon. It is unfortunate that on earth it is commonly believed, owing to the deadening influence of material causes, that beyond the grave everything is done with a Divine unanimity. But of course, if that were so, further growth and development would be impossible, and in view of infinite perfectibility there is yet very much that is faulty and incomplete. But I am not sure what lies before you; there is something in your temperament which a little baffles me, and our plans may have to be changed. Your very absorption in your work, your quick power of forgetting and throwing off impressions has its dangers. But I will bear in mind what you have said, and you may for the present resume your studies, and I will once more commend you; you have done well hitherto, and I will say frankly that I regard you as capable of useful and honourable work." He bowed in token of dismissal, and I went back to my work with unbounded gratitude and enthusiasm.



XXI

Some time after this I was surprised one morning at the sudden entrance of Amroth into my cell. He came in with a very bright and holiday aspect, and, assuming a paternal air, said that he had heard a very creditable account of my work and conduct, and that he had obtained leave for me to have an exeat. I suppose that I showed signs of impatience at the interruption, for he broke into a laugh, and said, "Well, I am going to insist. I believe you are working too hard, and we must not overstrain our faculties. It was bad enough, in the old days, but then it was generally the poor body which suffered first. But indeed it is quite possible to overwork here, and you have the dim air of the pale student. Come," he said, "whatever happens, do not become priggish. Not to want a holiday is a sign of spiritual pride. Besides, I have some curious things to show you."

I got up and said that I was ready, and Amroth led the way like a boy out for a holiday. He was brimming over with talk, and told me some stories about my friends in the land of delight, interspersing them with imitation of their manner and gesture, which made me giggle—Amroth was an admirable mimic. "I had hopes of Charmides," he said; "your stay there aroused his curiosity. But he has gone back to his absurd tones and half-tones, and is nearly insupportable. Cynthia is much more sensible, but Lucius is a nuisance, and Charmides, by the way, has become absurdly jealous of him. They really are very silly; but I have a pleasant plot, which I will unfold to you."

As we went down the interminable stairs, I said to Amroth, "There is a question I want to ask you. Why do we have to go and come, up and down, backwards and forwards, in this absurd way, as if we were still in the body? Why not just slip off the leads, and fly down over the crags like a pair of pigeons? It all seems to me so terribly material."

Amroth looked at me with a smile. "I don't advise you to try," he said. "Why, little brother, of course we are just as limited here in these ways. The material laws of earth are only a type of the laws here. They all have a meaning which remains true."

"But," I said, "we can visit the earth with incredible rapidity?"

"How can I explain?" said Amroth. "Of course we can do that, because the material universe is so extremely small in comparison. All the stars in the world are here but as a heap of sand, like the motes which dance in a sunbeam. There is no question of size, of course! But there is such a thing as spiritual nearness and spiritual distance for all that. The souls who do not return to earth are very far off, as you will sometime see. But we messengers have our short cuts, and I shall take advantage of them to-day."

We went out of the great door of the fortress, and I felt a sense of relief. It was good to put it all behind one. For a long time I talked to Amroth about all my doings. "Come," he said at last, "this will never do! You are becoming something of a bore! Do you know that your talk is very provincial? You seem to have forgotten about every one and everything except your Philips and Annas—very worthy creatures, no doubt—and the Master, who is a very able man, but not the little demigod you believe. You are hypnotised! It is indeed time for you to have a holiday. Why, I believe you have half forgotten about me, and yet you made a great fuss when I quitted you."

I smiled, frowned, blushed. It was indeed true. Now that he was with me I loved him as well, indeed better than ever; but I had not been thinking very much about him.

We went over the moorlands in the keen air, Amroth striding cleanly and lightly over the heather. Then we began to descend into the valley, through a fine forest country, somewhat like the chestnut-woods of the Apennines. The view was of incomparable beauty and width. I could see a great city far out in the plain, with a river entering it and leaving it, like a ribbon of silver. There were rolling ridges beyond. On the left rose huge, shadowy, snow-clad hills, rising to one tremendous dome of snow.

"Where are you going to take me?" I said to Amroth.

"Never mind," said he; "it's my day and my plan for once. You shall see what you shall see, and it will amuse me to hear your ingenuous conjectures."

We were soon on the outskirts of the city we had seen, which seemed a different kind of place from any I had yet visited. It was built, I perceived, upon an exactly conceived plan, of a stately, classical kind of architecture, with great gateways and colonnades. There were people about, rather silent and serious-looking, soberly clad, who saluted us as we passed, but made no attempt to talk to us. "This is rather a tiresome place, I always think," said Amroth; "but you ought to see it."

We went along the great street and reached a square. I was surprised at the elderly air of all we met. We found ourselves opposite a great building with a dome, like a church. People were going in under the portico, and we went in with them. They treated us as strangers, and made courteous way for us to pass.

Inside, the footfalls fell dumbly upon a great carpeted floor. It was very like a great church, except that there was no altar or sign of worship. At the far end, under an alcove, was a statue of white marble gleaming white, with head and hand uplifted. The whole place had a solemn and noble air. Out of the central nave there opened a series of great vaulted chapels; and I could now see that in each chapel there was a dark figure, in a sort of pulpit, addressing a standing audience. There were names on scrolls over the doors of the light iron-work screens which separated the chapels from the nave, but they were in a language I did not understand.

Amroth stopped at the third of the chapels, and said, "Here, this will do." We came in, and as before there was a courteous notice taken of us. A man in black came forward, and led us to a high seat, like a pew, near the preacher, from which we could survey the crowd. I was struck with their look of weariness combined with intentness.

The lecturer, a young man, had made a pause, but upon our taking our places, he resumed his speech. It was a discourse, as far as I could make out, on the development of poetry; he was speaking of lyrical poetry. I will not here reproduce it. I will only say that anything more acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change of thought in a well-known poet, and he showed that it had been brought about by his making the acquaintance of a certain friend who had introduced him to a new range of subjects, and by his study of certain books. These facts are unrecorded in his published biography, but the analysis of the lecturer, done in a few pointed sentences, not only carried conviction to the mind, but just, so to speak, laid the truth bare. And yet it was all to me incredibly sterile and arid. Not the slightest interest was taken in the emotional or psychological side; it was all purely and exactly scientific. We waited until the end of the address, which was greeted with decorous applause, and the hall was emptied in a moment.

We visited other chapels where the same sort of thing was going on in other subjects. It all produced in me a sort of stupefaction, both at the amazing knowledge involved, and in the essential futility of it all.

Before we left the building we went up to the statue, which represented a female figure, looking upwards, with a pure and delicate beauty of form and gesture that was inexpressibly and coldly lovely.

We went out in silence, which seemed to be the rule of the place.

When we came away from the building we were accosted by a very grave and courteous person, who said that he perceived that we were strangers, and asked if he could be of any service to us, and whether we proposed to make a stay of any duration. Amroth thanked him, and said smilingly that we were only passing through. The gentleman said that it was a pity, because there was much of interest to hear. "In this place," he said with a deprecating gesture, "we grudge every hour that is not devoted to thought." He went on to inquire if we were following any particular line of study, and as our answers were unsatisfactory, he said that we could not do better than begin by attending the school of literature. "I observed," he said, "that you were listening to our Professor, Sylvanus, with attention. He is devoting himself to the development of poetical form. It is a rich subject. It has generally been believed that poets work by a sort of native inspiration, and that the poetic gift is a sort of heightening of temperament. But Sylvanus has proved—I think I may go so far as to say this—that this is all pure fancy, and what is worse, unsound fancy. It is all merely a matter of heredity, and the apparent accidents on which poetical expression depends can be analysed exactly and precisely into the most commonplace and simple elements. It is only a question of proportion. Now we who value clearness of mind above everything, find this a very refreshing thought. The real crown and sum of human achievement, in the intellectual domain, is to see things clearly and exactly, and upon that clearness all progress depends. We have disposed by this time of most illusions; and the same scientific method is being strenuously applied to all other processes of human endeavour. It is even hinted that Sylvanus has practically proved that the imaginative element in literature is purely a taint of barbarism, though he has not yet announced the fact. But many of his class are looking forward to his final lecture on the subject as to a profoundly sensational event, which is likely to set a deep mark upon all our conceptions of literary endeavour. So that," he said with a tolerant smile, gently rubbing his hands together, "our life here is not by any means destitute of the elements of excitement, though we most of us, of course, aim at the acquisition of a serene and philosophic temper. But I must not delay you," he added; "there is much to see and to hear, and you will be welcomed everywhere: and indeed I am myself somewhat closely engaged, though in a subject which is not fraught with such polite emollience. I attend the school of metaphysics, from which we have at last, I hope, eliminated the last traces of that debasing element of psychology, which has so long vitiated the exact study of the subject."

He took himself off with a bow, and I gazed blankly at Amroth. "The conversation of that very polite person," I said, "is like a bad dream! What is this extraordinarily depressing place? Shall I have to undergo a course here?"

"No, my dear boy," said Amroth. "This is rather out of your depth. But I am somewhat disappointed at your view of the situation. Surely these are all very important matters? Your disposition is, I am afraid, incurably frivolous! How could people be more worthily employed than in getting rid of the last traces of intellectual error, and in referring everything to its actual origin? Did not your heart burn within you at his luminous exposition? I had always thought you a boy of intellectual promise."

"Amroth," I said, "I will not be made fun of. This is the most dreadful place I have ever seen or conceived of! It frightens me. The dryness of pure science is terrifying enough, but after all that has a kind of strange beauty, because it deals either with transcendental ideas of mathematical relation, or with the deducing of principle from accumulated facts. But here the object appears to be to eliminate the human element from humanity. I insist upon knowing where you have brought me, and what is going on here."

"Well, then," said Amroth, "I will conceal it from you no longer. This is the paradise of thought, where meagre and spurious philosophers, and all who have submerged life in intellect, have their reward. It is, as you say, a very dreary place for children of nature like you and me. But I do not suppose that there is a happier or a busier place in all our dominions. The worst of it is that it is so terribly hard to get out of. It is a blind alley and leads nowhere. Every step has to be retraced. These people have to get a very severe dose of homely life to do them any good; and the worst of it is that they are so entirely virtuous. They have never had the time or the inclination to be anything else. And they are among the most troublesome and undisciplined of all our people. But I see you have had enough; and unless you wish to wait for Professor Sylvanus's sensational pronouncement, we will go elsewhere, and have some other sort of fun. But you must not be so much upset by these things."

"It would kill me," I said, "to hear any more of these lectures, and if I had to listen to much of our polite friend's conversation, I should go out of my mind. I would rather fall into the hands of the cragmen! I would rather have a stand-up fight than be slowly stifled with interesting information. But where do these unhappy people come from?"

"A few come from universities," said Amroth, "but they are not as a rule really learned men. They are more the sort of people who subscribe to libraries, and belong to local literary societies, and go into a good many subjects on their own account. But really learned men are almost always more aware of their ignorance than of their knowledge, and recognise the vitality of life, even if they do not always exhibit it. But come, we are losing time, and we must go further afield."



XXII

We went some considerable distance, after leaving our intellectual friends, through very beautiful wooded country, and as we went we talked with much animation about the intellectual life and its dangers. It had always, I confess, appeared to me a harmless life enough; not very effective, perhaps, and possibly liable to encourage a man in a trivial sort of self-conceit; but I had always looked upon that as an instinctive kind of self-respect, which kept an intellectual person from dwelling too sorely upon the sense of ineffectiveness; as an addiction not more serious in its effects upon character than the practice of playing golf, a thing in which a leisurely person might immerse himself, and cultivate a decent sense of self-importance. But Amroth showed me that the danger of it lay in the tendency to consider the intellect to be the basis of all life and progress. "The intellectual man," he said, "is inclined to confuse his own acute perception of the movement of thought with the originating impulse of that movement. But of course thought is a thing which ebbs and flows, like public opinion, according to its own laws, and is not originated but only perceived by men of intellectual ability. The danger of it is a particularly arid sort of self-conceit. It is as if the Lady of Shalott were to suppose that she created life by observing and rendering it in her magic web, whereas her devotion to her task simply isolates her from the contact with other minds and hearts, which is the one thing worth having. That is, of course, the danger of the artist as well as of the philosopher. They both stand aside from the throng, and are so much absorbed in the aspect of thought and emotion that they do not realise that they are separated from it. They are consequently spared, when they come here, the punishment which falls upon those who have mixed greedily, selfishly, and cruelly with life, of which you will have a sight before long. But that place of punishment is not nearly so sad or depressing a place as the paradise of delight, and the paradise of intellect, because the sufferers have no desire to stay there, can repent and feel ashamed, and therefore can suffer, which is always hopeful. But the artistic and intellectual have really starved their capacity for suffering, the one by treating all emotion as spectacular, and the other by treating it as a puerile interruption to serious things. It takes people a long time to work their way out of self-satisfaction! But there is another curious place I wish you to visit. It is a dreadful place in a way, but by no means consciously unhappy," and Amroth pointed to a great building which stood on a slope of the hill above the forest, with a wide and beautiful view from it. Before very long we came to a high stone wall with a gate carefully guarded. Here Amroth said a few words to a porter, and we went up through a beautiful terraced park. In the park we saw little knots of people walking aimlessly about, and a few more solitary figures. But in each case they were accompanied by people whom I saw to be warders. We passed indeed close to an elderly man, rather fantastically dressed, who looked possessed with a kind of flighty cheerfulness. He was talking to himself with odd, emphatic gestures, as if he were ticking off the points of a speech. He came up to us and made us an effusive greeting, praising the situation and convenience of the place, and wishing us a pleasant sojourn. He then was silent for a moment, and added, "Now there is a matter of some importance on which I should like your opinion." At this the warder who was with him, a strong, stolid-looking man, with an expression at once slightly contemptuous and obviously kind, held up his hand and said, "You will, no doubt, sir, remember that you have undertaken—" "Not a word, not a word," said our friend; "of course you are right! I have really nothing to say to these gentlemen."

We went up to the building, which now became visible, with its long and stately front of stone. Here again we were admitted with some precaution, and after a few minutes there came a tall and benevolent-looking man, to whom Amroth spoke at some length. The man then came up to me, said that he was very glad to welcome me, and that he would be delighted to show us the place.

We went through fine and airy corridors, into which many doors, as of cells, opened. Occasionally a man or a woman, attended by a male or a female warder, passed us. The inmates had all the same kind of air—a sort of amused dignity, which was very marked. Presently our companion opened a door with his key and we went in. It was a small, pleasantly-furnished room. Some books, apparently of devotion, lay on the table. There was a little kneeling-desk near the window, and the room had a half-monastic air about it. When we entered, an elderly man, with a very serene face, was looking earnestly into the door of a cupboard in the wall, which he was holding open; there was, so far as I could see, nothing in the cupboard; but the inmate seemed to be struggling with an access of rather overpowering mirth. He bowed to us. Our conductor greeted him respectfully, and then said, "There is a stranger here who would like a little conversation with you, if you can spare the time."

"By all means," said the inmate, with a very ingratiating smile. "It is very kind of him to call upon me, and my time is entirely at his disposal."

Our conductor said to me that he and Amroth had some brief business to transact, and that they would call for me again in a moment. The inmate bowed, and seemed almost impatient for them to depart. He motioned me to a chair, and the moment they left us he began to talk with great animation. He asked me if I was a new inmate, and when I said no, only a visitor, he looked at me compassionately, saying that he hoped I might some day attain to the privilege. "This," he said, "is the abode of final and lasting peace. No one is admitted here unless his convictions are of the firmest and most ardent character; it is a reward for faithful service. But as our time is short, I must tell you," he said, "of a very curious experience I have had this very morning—a spiritual experience of the most reassuring character. You must know that I held a high official position in the religious world—I will mention no details—and I found at an early age, I am glad to say, the imperative necessity of forming absolutely impregnable convictions. I went to work in the most business-like way. I devoted some years to hard reading and solid thought, and I found that the sect to which I belonged was lacking in certain definite notes of divine truth, while the weight of evidence pointed in the clearest possible manner to the fact that one particular section of the Church had preserved absolutely intact the primitive faith of the Saints, and was without any shadow of doubt the perfectly logical development of the principles of the Gospel. Mine is not a nature that can admit of compromise; and at considerable sacrifice of worldly prospects I transferred my allegiance, and was instantly rewarded by a perfect serenity of conviction which has never faltered.

"I had a friend with whom I had often discussed the matter, who was much of my way of thinking. But though I showed him the illogical nature of his position, he hung back—whether from material motives or from mere emotional associations I will not now stop to inquire. But I could not palter with the truth. I expostulated with him, and pointed out to him in the sternest terms the eternal distinctions involved. I broke off all relations with him ultimately. And after a life spent in the most solemn and candid denunciation of the fluidity of religious belief, which is the curse of our age, though it involved me in many of the heart-rending suspensions of human intercourse with my nearest and dearest so plainly indicated in the Gospel, I passed at length, in complete tranquillity, to my final rest. The first duty of the sincere believer is inflexible intolerance. If a man will not recognise the truth when it is plainly presented to him, he must accept the eternal consequences of his act—separation from God, and absorption in guilty and awestruck regret, which admits of no repentance.

"One of the privileges of our sojourn here is that we have a strange and beautiful device—a window, I will call it—which admits one to a sight of the spiritual world. I was to-day contemplating, not without pain, but with absolute confidence in its justice, the sufferings of some of these lost souls, and I observed, I cannot say with satisfaction, but with complete submission, the form of my friend, whom my testimony might have saved, in eternal misery. I have the tenderest heart of any man alive. It has cost me a sore struggle to subdue it—it is more unruly even than the will—but you may imagine that it is a matter of deep and comforting assurance to reflect that on earth the door, the one door, to salvation is clearly and plainly indicated—though few there be that find it—and that this signal mercy has been vouchsafed to me. I have then the peace of knowing, not only that my choice was right, but that all those to whom the truth is revealed have the power to choose it. I am a firm believer in the uncovenanted mercies vouchsafed to those who have not had the advantages of clear presentment, but for the deliberately unfaithful, for all sinners against light, the sentence is inflexible."

He closed his eyes, and a smile played over his features.

I found it very difficult to say anything in answer to this monologue; but I asked my companion whether he did not think that some clearer revelation might be made, after the bodily death, to those who for some human frailty were unable to receive it.

"An intelligent question," said my companion, "but I am obliged to answer in the negative. Of course the case is different for those who have accepted the truth loyally, even if their record is stained by the foulest and most detestable of crimes. It is the moral and intellectual adhesion that matters; that once secured, conduct is comparatively unimportant, if the soul duly recurs to the medicine of penitence and contrition so mercifully provided. I have the utmost indulgence for every form of human frailty. I may say that I never shrank from contact with the grossest and vilest forms of continuous wrong-doing, so long as I was assured that the true doctrines were unhesitatingly and submissively accepted. A soul which admits the supremacy of authority can go astray like a sheep that is lost, but as long as it recognises its fold and the authority of the divine law, it can be sought and found.

"The little window of which I spoke has given me indubitable testimony of this. There was a man I knew in the flesh, who was regarded as a monster of cruelty and selfishness. He ill-treated his wife and misused his children; his life was spent in gross debauchery, and his conduct on several occasions outstepped the sanctions of legality. He was a forger and an embezzler. I do not attempt to palliate his faults, and there will be a heavy reckoning to pay. But he made his submission at the last, after a long and prostrating illness; and I have ocular demonstration of the fact that, after a mercifully brief period of suffering, he is numbered among the blest. That is a sustaining thought."

He then with much courtesy invited me to partake of some refreshment, which I gratefully declined. Once or twice he rose, and opening the little cupboard door, which revealed nothing but a white wall, he drank in encouragement from some hidden sight. He then invited me to kneel with him, and prayed fervently and with some emotion that light might be vouchsafed to souls on earth who were in darkness. Just as he concluded, Amroth appeared with our conductor. The latter made a courteous inquiry after my host's health and comfort. "I am perfectly happy here," he said, "perfectly happy. The attentions I receive are indeed more than I deserve; and I am specially grateful to my kind visitor, whose indulgence I must beg for my somewhat prolonged statement—but when one has a cause much at heart," he added with a smile, "some prolixity is easily excused."

As we re-entered the corridor, our conductor asked me if I would care to pay any more visits. "The case you have seen," he said, "is an extremely typical and interesting one."

"Have you any hope," said Amroth, "of recovery?"

"Of course, of course," said our conductor with a smile. "Nothing is hopeless here; our cures are complete and even rapid; but this is a particularly obstinate one!"

"Well," said Amroth, "would you like to see more?"

"No," I said, "I have seen enough. I cannot now bear any more."

Our conductor smiled indulgently.

"Yes," he said, "it is bewildering at first; but one sees wonderful things here! This is our library," he added, leading us to a great airy room, full of books and reading-desks, where a large number of inmates were sitting reading and writing. They glanced up at us with friendly and contented smiles. A little further on we came to another cell, before which our conductor stopped, and looked at me. "I should like," he said, "if you are not too tired, just to take you in here; there is a patient, who is very near recovery indeed, in here, and it would do him good to have a little talk with a stranger."

I bowed, and we went in. A man was sitting in a chair with his head in his hands. An attendant was sitting near the window reading a book. The patient, at our entry, removed his hands from his face and looked up, half impatiently, with an air of great suffering, and then slowly rose.

"How are you feeling, dear sir?" said our conductor quietly.

"Oh," said the man, looking at us, "I am better, much better. The light is breaking in, but it is a sore business, when I was so strong in my pride."

"Ah," said our guide, "it is indeed a slow process; but happiness and health must be purchased; and every day I see clearly that you are drawing nearer to the end of your troubles—you will soon be leaving us! But now I want you kindly to bestir yourself, and talk a little to this friend of ours, who has not been long with us, and finds the place somewhat, bewildering. You will be able to tell him something of what is passing in your mind; it will do you good to put it into words, and it will be a help to him."

"Very well," said the man gravely, "I will do my best." And the others withdrew, leaving me with the man. When they had gone, the man asked me to be seated, and leaning his head upon his hand he said, "I do not know how much you know and how little, so I will tell you that I left the world very confident in a particular form of faith, and very much disposed to despise and even to dislike those who did not agree with me. I had lived, I may say, uprightly and purely, and I will confess that I even welcomed all signs of laxity and sinfulness in my opponents, because it proved what I believed, that wrong conduct sprang naturally from wrong belief. I came here in great content, and thought that this place was the reward of faithful living. But I had a great shock. I was very tenderly attached to one whom I left on earth, and the severest grief of my life was that she did not think as I did, but used to plead with me for a wider outlook and a larger faith in the designs of God. She used to say to me that she felt that God had different ways of saving different people, and that people were saved by love and not by doctrine. And this I combated with all my might. I used to say, 'Doctrine first, and love afterwards,' to which she often said, 'No, love is first!'

"Well, some time ago I had a sight of her; she had died, and entered this world of ours. She was in a very different place from this, but she thought of me without ceasing, and her desire prevailed. I saw her, though I was hidden from her, and looked into her heart, and discerned that the one thing which spoiled her joy was that I was parted from her.

"And after that I had no more delight in my security. I began to suffer and to yearn. And then, little by little, I began to see that it is love after all which binds us together, and which draws us to God; but my difficulty is this, that I still believe that my faith is true; and if that is true, then other faiths cannot be true also, and then I fall into sad bewilderment and despair." He stopped and looked at me fixedly.

"But," I said, "if I may carry the thought further, might not all be true? Two men may be very unlike each other in form and face and thought—yet both are very man. It would be foolish arguing, if a man were to say, 'I am indeed a man, and because my friend is unlike me—taller, lighter-complexioned, swifter of thought—therefore he cannot be a man.' Or, again, two men may travel by the same road, and see many different things, yet it is the same road they have both travelled; and one need not say to the other, 'You cannot have travelled by the same road, because you did not see the violets on the bank under the wood, or the spire that peeped through the trees at the folding of the valleys—and therefore you are a liar and a deceiver!' If one believes firmly in one's own faith, one need not therefore say that all who do not hold it are perverse and wilful. There is no excuse, indeed, for not holding to what we believe to be true, but there is no excuse either for interfering with the sincere belief of another, unless one can persuade him he is wrong. Is not the mistake to think that one holds the truth in its entirety, and that one has no more to learn and to perceive? I myself should welcome differences of faith, because it shows me that faith is a larger thing even than I know. What another sees may be but a thought that is hidden from me, because the truth may be seen from a different angle. To complain that we cannot see it all is as foolish as when the child is vexed because it cannot see the back of the moon. And it seems to me that our duty is not to quarrel with others who see things that we do not see, but to rejoice with them, if they will allow us, and meanwhile to discern what is shown to us as faithfully as we can."

The man heard me with a strange smile. "Yes," he said, "you are certainly right, and I bless the goodness that sent you hither; but when you are gone, I doubt that I shall fall back into my old perplexities, and say to myself that though men may see different parts of the same thing, they cannot see the same thing differently."

"I think," I said, "that even that is possible, because on earth things are often mere symbols, and clothe themselves in material forms; and it is the form which deludes us. I do not myself doubt that grace flows into us by very different channels. We may not deny the claim of any one to derive grace from any source or symbol that he can. The only thing we may and must dare to dispute is the claim that only by one channel may grace flow. But I think that the words of the one whom you loved, of whom you spoke, are indeed true, and that the love of each other and of God is the force which draws us, by whatever rite or symbol or doctrine it may be interpreted. That, as I read it, is the message of Christ, who gave up all things for utter love."

As I said this, our guide and Amroth entered the cell. The man rose up quickly, and drawing me apart, thanked me very heartily and with tears in his eyes; and so we said farewell. When we were outside, I said to the guide, "May I ask you one question? Would it be of use if I remained here for a time to talk with that poor man? It seemed a relief to him to open his heart, and I would gladly be with him and try to comfort him."

The guide shook his head kindly. "No," he said, "I think not. I recognise your kindness very fully—but a soul like this must find the way alone; and there is one who is helping him faster than any of us can avail to do; and besides," he added, "he is very near indeed to his release."

So we went to the door, and said farewell; and Amroth and I went forward. Then I said to him as we went down through the terraced garden, and saw the inmates wandering about, lost in dreams, "This must be a sad place to live in, Amroth!"

"No, indeed," said he, "I do not think that there are any happier than those who have the charge here. When the patients are in the grip of this disease, they are themselves only too well content; and it is a blessed thing to see the approach of doubt and suffering, which means that health draws near. There is no place in all our realm where one sees so clearly and beautifully the instant and perfect mercy of God, and the joy of pain." And so we passed together out of the guarded gate.



XXIII

"Well," said Amroth, with a smile, as we went out into the forest, "I am afraid that the last two visits have been rather a strain. We must find something a little less serious; but I am going to fill up all your time. You had got too much taken up with your psychology, and we must not live too much on theory, and spin problems, like the spider, out of our own insides; but we will not spend too much time in trudging over this country, though it is well worth it. Did you ever see anything more beautiful than those pine-trees on the slope there, with the blue distance between their stems? But we must not make a business of landscape-gazing like our friend Charmides! We are men of affairs, you and I. Come, I will show you a thing. Shut your eyes for a minute and give me your hand. Now!"

A sudden breeze fanned my face, sweet and odorous, like the wind out of a wood. "Now," said Amroth, "we have arrived! Where do you think we are?"

The scene had changed in an instant. We were in a wide, level country, in green water-meadows, with a full stream brimming its grassy banks, in willowy loops. Not far away, on a gently rising ground, lay a long, straggling village, of gabled houses, among high trees. It was like the sort of village that you may find in the pleasant Wiltshire countryside, and the sight filled me with a rush of old and joyful memories.

"It is such a relief," I said, "to realise that if man is made in the image of God, heaven is made in the image of England!"

"That is only how you see it, child," said Amroth. "Some of my own happiest days were spent at Tooting: would you be surprised if I said that it reminded me of Tooting?"

"I am surprised at nothing," I said. "I only know that it is all very considerate!"

We entered the village, and found a large number of people, mostly young, going cheerfully about all sorts of simple work. Many of them were gardening, and the gardens were full of old-fashioned flowers, blooming in wonderful profusion. There was an air of settled peace about the place, the peace that on earth one often dreamed of finding, and indeed thought one had found on visiting some secluded place—only to discover, alas! on a nearer acquaintance, that life was as full of anxieties and cares there as elsewhere. There were one or two elderly people going about, giving directions or advice, or lending a helping hand. The workers nodded blithely to us, but did not suspend their work.

"What surprises me," I said to Amroth, "is to find every one so much occupied wherever we go. One heard so much on earth about craving for rest, that one grew to fancy that the other life was all going to be a sort of solemn meditation, with an occasional hymn."

"Yes, indeed," said Amroth, "it was the body that was tired—the soul is always fresh and strong—but rest is not idleness. There is no such thing as unemployment here, and there is hardly time, indeed, for all we have to do. Every one really loves work. The child plays at working, the man of leisure works at his play. The difference here is that work is always amusing—there is no such thing as drudgery here."

We walked all through the village, which stretched far away into the country. The whole place hummed like a beehive on a July morning. Many sang to themselves as they went about their business, and sometimes a couple of girls, meeting in the roadway, would entwine their arms and dance a few steps together, with a kiss at parting. There was a sense of high spirits everywhere. At one place we found a group of children sitting in the shade of some trees, while a woman of middle age told them a story. We stood awhile to listen, the woman giving us a pleasant nod as we approached. It was a story of some pleasant adventure, with nothing moral or sentimental about it, like an old folk-tale. The children were listening with unconcealed delight.

When we had walked a little further, Amroth said to me, "Come, I will give you three guesses. Who do you think, by the light of your psychology, are all these simple people?" I guessed in vain. "Well, I see I must tell you," he said. "Would it surprise you to learn that most of these people whom you see here passed upon earth for wicked and unsatisfactory characters? Yet it is true. Don't you know the kind of boys there were at school, who drifted into bad company and idle ways, mostly out of mere good-nature, went out into the world with a black mark against them, having been bullied in vain by virtuous masters, the despair of their parents, always losing their employments, and often coming what we used to call social croppers—untrustworthy, sensual, feckless, no one's enemy but their own, and yet preserving through it all a kind of simple good-nature, always ready to share things with others, never knowing how to take advantage of any one, trusting the most untrustworthy people; or if they were girls, getting into trouble, losing their good name, perhaps living lives of shame in big cities—yet, for all that, guileless, affectionate, never excusing themselves, believing they had deserved anything that befell them? These were the sort of people to whom Christ was so closely drawn. They have no respectability, no conventions; they act upon instinct, never by reason, often foolishly, but seldom unkindly or selfishly. They give all they have, they never take. They have the faults of children, and the trustful affection of children. They will do anything for any one who is kind to them and fond of them. Of course they are what is called hopeless, and they use their poor bodies very ill. In their last stages on earth they are often very deplorable objects, slinking into public-houses, plodding raggedly and dismally along highroads, suffering cruelly and complaining little, conscious that they are universally reprobated, and not exactly knowing why. They are the victims of society; they do its dirty work, and are cast away as offscourings. They are really youthful and often beautiful spirits, very void of offence, and needing to be treated as children. They live here in great happiness, and are conscious vaguely of the good and great intention of God towards them. They suffer in the world at the hands of cruel, selfish, and stupid people, because they are both humble and disinterested. But in all our realms I do not think there is a place of simpler and sweeter happiness than this, because they do not take their forgiveness as a right, but as a gracious and unexpected boon. And indeed the sights and sounds of this place are the best medicine for crabbed, worldly, conventional souls, who are often brought here when they are drawing near the truth."

"Yes," I said, "this is just what I wanted. Interesting as my work has lately been, it has wanted simplicity. I have grown to consider life too much as a series of cases, and to forget that it is life itself that one must seek, and not pathology. This is the best sight I have seen, for it is so far removed from all sense of judgment. The song of the saints may be sometimes of mercy too."



XXIV

"And now," said Amroth, "that we have been refreshed by the sight of this guileless place, and as our time is running short, I am going to show you something very serious indeed. In fact, before I show it you I must remind you carefully of one thing which I shall beg you to keep in mind. There is nothing either cruel or hopeless here; all is implacably just and entirely merciful. Whatever a soul needs, that it receives; and it receives nothing that is vindictive or harsh. The ideas of punishment on earth are hopelessly confused; we do not know whether we are revenging ourselves for wrongs done to us, or safeguarding society, or deterring would-be offenders, or trying to amend and uplift the criminal. We end, as a rule, by making every one concerned, whether punisher or punished, worse. We encourage each other in vindictiveness and hypocrisy, we cow and brutalise the transgressor. We rescue no one, we amend nothing. And yet we cannot read the clear signs of all this. The milder our methods of punishment become, the less crime is there to punish. But instead of being at once kind and severe, which is perfectly possible, we are both cruel and sentimental. Now, there is no such thing as sentiment here, just as there is no cruelty. There is emotion in full measure, and severity in full measure; no one is either pettishly frightened or mildly forgiven; and the joy that awaits us is all the more worth having, because it cannot be rashly enjoyed or reached by any short cuts; but do not forget, in what you now see, that the end is joy."

He spoke so solemnly that I was conscious of overmastering curiosity, not unmixed with awe. Again the way was abbreviated. Amroth took me by the hand and bade me close my eyes. The breeze beat upon my face for a moment. When I opened my eyes, we were on a bare hillside, full of stones, in a kind of grey and chilly haze which filled the air. Just ahead of us were some rough enclosures of stone, overlooked by a sort of tower. They were like the big sheepfolds which I have seen on northern wolds, into which the sheep of a whole hillside can be driven for shelter. We went round the wall, which was high and strong, and came to the entrance of the tower, the door of which stood open. There seemed to be no one about, no sign of life; the only sound a curious wailing note, which came at intervals from one of the enclosures, like the crying of a prisoned beast. We went up into the tower; the staircase ended in a bare room, with four apertures, one in each wall, each leading into a kind of balcony. Amroth led the way into one of the balconies, and pointed downwards. We were looking down into one of the enclosures which lay just at our feet, not very far below. The place was perfectly bare, and roughly flagged with stones. In the corner was a rough thatched shelter, in which was some straw. But what at once riveted my attention was the figure of a man, who half lay, half crouched upon the stones, his head in his hands, in an attitude of utter abandonment. He was dressed in a rough, weather-worn sort of cloak, and his whole appearance suggested the basest neglect; his hands were muscular and knotted; his ragged grey hair streamed over the collar of his cloak. While we looked at him, he drew himself up into a sitting posture, and turned his face blankly upon the sky. It was, or had been, a noble face enough, deeply lined, and with a look of command upon it; but anything like the hopeless and utter misery of the drawn cheeks and staring eyes I had never conceived. I involuntarily drew back, feeling that it was almost wrong to look at anything so fallen and so wretched. But Amroth detained me.

"He is not aware of us," he said, "and I desire you to look at him."

Presently the man rose wearily to his feet, and began to pace up and down round the walls, with the mechanical movements of a caged animal, avoiding the posts of the shelter without seeming to see them, and then cast himself down again upon the stones in a paroxysm of melancholy. He seemed to have no desire to escape, no energy, except to suffer. There was no hope about it all, no suggestion of prayer, nothing but blank and unadulterated suffering.

Amroth drew me back into the tower, and motioned me to the next balcony. Again I went out. The sight that I saw was almost more terrible than the first, because the prisoner here, penned in a similar enclosure, was more restless, and seemed to suffer more acutely. This was a younger man, who walked swiftly and vaguely about, casting glances up at the wall which enclosed him. Sometimes he stopped, and seemed to be pursuing some dreadful train of solitary thought; he gesticulated, and even broke out into mutterings and cries—the cries that I had heard from without. I could not bear to look at this sight, and coming back, besought Amroth to lead me away. Amroth, who was himself, I perceived, deeply moved, and stood with lips compressed, nodded in token of assent. We went quickly down the stairway, and took our way up the hill among the stones, in silence. The shapes of similar enclosures were to be seen everywhere, and the indescribable blankness and grimness of the scene struck a chill to my heart.

From the top of the ridge we could see the same bare valleys stretching in all directions, as far as the eye could see. The only other building in sight was a great circular tower of stone, far down in the valley, from which beat the pulse of some heavy machinery, which gave the sense, I do not know how, of a ghastly and watchful life at the centre of all.

"That is the Tower of Pain," said Amroth, "and I will spare you the inner sight of that. Only our very bravest and strongest can enter there and preserve any hope. But it is well for you to know it is there, and that souls have to enter it. It is thence that all the pain of countless worlds emanates and vibrates, and the governor of the place is the most tried and bravest of all the servants of God. Thither we must go, for you shall have sight of him, though you shall not enter."

We went down the hill with all the speed we might, and, I will confess it, with the darkest dismay I have ever experienced tugging at my heart. We were soon at the foot of the enormous structure. Amroth knocked at the gate, a low door, adorned with some vague and ghastly sculptures, things like worms and huddled forms drearily intertwined. The door opened, and revealed a fiery and smouldering light within. High up in the tower a great wheel whizzed and shivered, and moving shadows crossed and recrossed the firelit walls.

But the figure that came out to us—how shall I describe him? It was the most beautiful and gracious sight of all that I saw in my pilgrimage. He was a man of tall stature, with snow-white, silvery hair and beard, dressed in a dark cloak with a gleaming clasp of gold. But for all his age he had a look of immortal youth. His clear and piercing eye had a glance of infinite tenderness, such as I had never conceived. There were many lines upon his brow and round his eyes, but his complexion was as fresh as that of a child, and he stepped as briskly as a youth. We bowed low to him, and he reached out his hands, taking Amroth's hand and mine in each of his. His touch had a curious thrill, the hand that held mine being firm and smooth and wonderfully warm.

"Well, my children," he said in a clear, youthful voice, "I am glad to see you, because there are few who come hither willingly; and the old and weary are cheered by the sight of those that are young and strong. Amroth I know. But who are you, my child? You have not been among us long. Have you found your work and place here yet?" I told him my story in a few words, and he smiled indulgently. "There is nothing like being at work," he said. "Even my business here, which seems sad enough to most people, must be done; and I do it very willingly. Do not be frightened, my child," he said to me suddenly, drawing me nearer to him, and folding my arm beneath his own. "It is only on earth that we are frightened of pain; it spoils our poor plans, it makes us fretful and miserable, it brings us into the shadow of death. But for all that, as Amroth knows, it is the best and most fruitful of all the works that the Father does for man, and the thing dearest to His heart. We cannot prosper till we suffer, and suffering leads us very swiftly into joy and peace. Indeed this Tower of Pain, as it is called, is in fact nothing but the Tower of Love. Not until love is touched with pain does it become beautiful, and the joy that comes through pain is the only real thing in the world. Of course, when my great engine here sends a thrill into a careless life, it comes as a dark surprise; but then follow courage and patience and wonder, and all the dear tendance of Love. I have borne it all myself a hundred times, and I shall bear it again if the Father wills it. But when you leave me here, do not think of me as of one who works, grim and indifferent, wrecking lives and destroying homes. It is but the burning of the weeds of life; and it is as needful as the sunshine and the rain. Pain does not wander aimlessly, smiting down by mischance and by accident; it comes as the close and dear intention of the Father's heart, and is to a man as a trumpet-call from the land of life, not as a knell from the land of death. And now, dear children, you must leave me, for I have much to do. And I will give you," he added, turning to me, "a gift which shall be your comfort, and a token that you have been here, and seen the worst and the best that there is to see."

He drew from under his cloak a ring, a circlet of gold holding a red stone with a flaming heart, and put it on my finger. There pierced through me a pang intenser than any I had ever experienced, in which all the love and sorrow I had ever known seemed to be suddenly mingled, and which left behind it a perfect and intense sense of joy.

"There, that is my gift," he said, "and you shall have an old man's loving blessing too, for it is that, after all, that I live for." He drew me to him and kissed me on the brow, and in a moment he was gone.

We walked away in silence, and for my part with an elation of spirit which I could hardly control, a desire to love and suffer, and do and be all that the mind of man could conceive. But my heart was too full to speak.

"Come," said Amroth presently, "you are not as grateful as I had hoped—you are outgrowing me! Come down to my poor level for an instant, and beware of spiritual pride!" Then altering his tone he said, "Ah, yes, dear friend, I understand. There is nothing in the world like it, and you were most graciously and tenderly received—but the end is not yet."

"Amroth," I said, "I am like one intoxicated with joy. I feel that I could endure anything and never make question of anything again. How infinitely good he was to me—like a dear father!"

"Yes," said Amroth, "he is very like the Father "—and he smiled at me a mysterious smile.

"Amroth," I said, bewildered, "you cannot mean—?"

"No, I mean nothing," said Amroth, "but you have to-day looked very far into the truth, farther than is given to many so soon; but you are a child of fortune, and seem to please every one. I declare that a little more would make me jealous."

Presently, catching sight of one of the enclosures hard by, I said to Amroth, "But there are some questions I must ask. What has just happened had put it mostly out of my head. Those poor suffering souls that we saw just now—it is well, with them, I am sure, so near the Master of the Tower—he does not forget them, I am sure—but who are they, and what have they done to suffer so?"

"I will tell you," said Amroth, "for it is a dark business. Those two that you have seen—well, you will know one of them by name and fame, and of the other you may have heard. The first, that old shaggy-haired man, who lay upon the stones, that was ——"

He mentioned a name that was notorious in Europe at the time of my life on earth, though he was then long dead; a ruthless and ambitious conqueror, who poured a cataract of life away, in wars, for his own aggrandisement. Then he mentioned another name, a statesman who pursued a policy of terrorism and oppression, enriched himself by barbarous cruelty exercised in colonial possessions, and was famous for the calculated libertinism of his private life.

"They were great sinners," said Amroth, "and the sorrows they made and flung so carelessly about them, beat back upon them now in a surge of pain. These men were strangely affected, each of them, by the smallest sight or sound of suffering—a tortured animal, a crying child; and yet they were utterly ruthless of the pain that they did not see. It was a lack, no doubt, of the imagination of which I spoke, and which makes all the difference. And now they have to contemplate the pain which they could not imagine; and they have to learn submission and humility. It is a terrible business in a way—the loneliness of it! There used to be an old saying that the strongest man was the man that was most alone. But it was just because these men practised loneliness on earth that they have to suffer so. They used others as counters in a game, they had neither friend nor beloved, except for their own pleasure. They depended upon no one, needed no one, desired no one. But there are many others here who did the same on a small scale—selfish fathers and mothers who made homes miserable; boys who were bullies at school and tyrants in the world, in offices, and places of authority. This is the place of discipline for all base selfishness and vile authority, for all who have oppressed and victimised mankind."

"But," I said, "here is my difficulty. I understand the case of the oppressors well enough; but about the oppressed, what is the justice of that? Is there not a fortuitous element there, an interruption of the Divine plan? Take the case of the thousands of lives wasted by some brutal conqueror. Are souls sent into the world for that, to be driven in gangs, made to fight, let us say, for some abominable cause, and then recklessly dismissed from life?"

"Ah," said Amroth, "you make too much of the dignity of life! You do not know how small a thing a single life is, not as regards the life of mankind, but in the life of one individual. Of course if a man had but one single life on earth, it would be an intolerable injustice; and that is the factor which sets all straight, the factor which most of us, in our time of bodily self-importance, overlook. These oppressors have no power over other lives except what God allows, and bewildered humanity concedes. Not only is the great plan whole in the mind of God, but every single minutest life is considered as well. In the very case you spoke of, the little conscript, torn from his home to fight a tyrant's battles, hectored and ill-treated, and then shot down upon some crowded battle-field, that is precisely the discipline which at that point of time his soul needs, and the blessedness of which he afterwards perceives; sometimes discipline is swift and urgent, sometimes it is slow and lingering: but all experience is exactly apportioned to the quality of which each soul is in need. The only reason why there seems to be an element of chance in it, is that the whole thing is so inconceivably vast and prolonged; and our happiness and our progress alike depend upon our realising at every moment that the smallest joy and the most trifling pleasure, as well as the tiniest ailment or the most subtle sorrow, are just the pieces of experience which we are meant at that moment to use and make our own. No one, not even God, can force us to understand this; we have to perceive it for ourselves, and to live in the knowledge of it."

"Yes," I said, "it is true, all that. My heart tells me so; but it is very wonderful and mysterious, all the same. But, Amroth, I have seen and heard enough. My spirit desires with all its might to be at its own work, hastening on the mighty end. Now, I can hold no more of wonders. Let me return."

"Yes," said Amroth, "you are right! These wonders are so familiar to me that I forget, perhaps, the shock with which they come to minds unused to them. Yet there are other things which you must assuredly see, when the time comes; but I must not let you bite off a larger piece than you can swallow."

He took me by the hand; the breeze passed through my hair; and in an instant we were back at the fortress-gate, and I entered the beloved shelter, with a grateful sense that I was returning home.



XXV

I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to my work; but that serenity did not last long. What I had seen with Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness, and a yearning for I knew not what. I plunged into my studies with determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the most difficult problem of all—the exact limits of individual responsibility. I had many conversations on the point with one of my teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar emotional sympathy. He told me once that it was the best outfit for the scientific study of these problems, when the heart anticipated the slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional inferences.

I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question of responsibility, which I will here give.

"The mistake," I said to him, "of human moralists seems to me to be, that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral responsibility. How often," I added, "have I heard a school preacher tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of all. Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the power of surveying and judging one's own moral progress, and the power of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me faculties, like other faculties. Indeed, it appears to me," I said, "that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality at all."

"Yes," he said, "you are quite right. The moral sense is in reality a high artistic sense. It is a power of discerning and being attracted by the beauty of moral action, just as the artist is attracted by form and colour, and the musician by delicate combinations of harmonies and the exquisite balance of sound. You know," he said, "what a suspension is in music—it is a chord which in itself is a discord, but which depends for its beauty on some impending resolution. It is just so with moral choice. The imagination plays a great part in it. The man whose morality is high and profound sees instinctively the approaching contingency, and his act of self-denial or self-forgetfulness depends for its force upon the way in which it will ultimately combine with other issues involved, even though at the moment that act may seem to be unnecessary and even perverse."

"But," I said, "there are a good many people who attain to a sensible, well-balanced kind of temperance, after perhaps a few failures, from a purely prudential motive. What is the worth of that?"

"Very small indeed," said my teacher. "In fact, the prudential morality, based on motives of health and reputation and success, is a thing that has often to be deliberately unlearnt at a later stage. The strange catastrophes which one sees so often in human life, where a man by one act of rashness, or moral folly, upsets the tranquil tenor of his life—a desperate love-affair, a passion of unreasonable anger, a piece of quixotic generosity—are often a symptom of a great effort of the soul to free itself from prudential considerations. A good thing done for a low motive has often a singularly degrading and deforming influence on the soul. One has to remember how terribly the heavenly values are obscured upon earth by the body, its needs and its desires; and current morality of a cautious and sensible kind is often worse than worthless, because it produces a kind of self-satisfaction, which is the hardest thing to overcome."

"But," I said, "in the lives of some of the greatest moralists, one so often sees, or at all events hears it said, that their morality is useless because it is unpractical, too much out of the reach of the ordinary man, too contemptuous of simple human faculties. What is one to make of that?"

"It is a difficult matter," he replied; "one does indeed, in the lives of great moralists, see sometimes that their work is vitiated by perverse and fantastic preferences, which they exalt out of all proportion to their real value. But for all that, it is better to be on the side of the saints; for they are gifted with the sort of instinctive appreciation of the beauty of high morality of which I spoke. Unselfishness, purity, peacefulness seem to them so beautiful and desirable that they are constrained to practise them. While controversy, bitterness, cruelty, meanness, vice, seem so utterly ugly and repulsive that they cannot for an instant entertain even so much as a thought of them."

"But if a man sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic, so irresistible."

"If he discerns his lack," said my teacher with a smile, "he is probably not so very far from the truth. The germ of the sense of moral beauty is there, and it only wants patience and endeavour to make it grow. But it cannot be all done in any single life, of course; that is where the human faith fails, in its limitations of a man's possibilities to a single life."

"But what is the reason," I said, "why the morality, the high austerity of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so utterly discouraging and even repellent?"

"Ah," he said, "there you touch on a great truth. The reason of that is that these have but a sterile sort of connoisseur-ship in virtue. Virtue cannot be attained in solitude, nor can it be made a matter of private enjoyment. The point is, of course, that it is not enough for a man to be himself; he must also give himself; and if a man is moral because of the delicate pleasure it brings him—and the artistic pleasure of asceticism is a very high one—he is apt to find himself here in very strange and distasteful company. In this, as in everything, the only safe motive is the motive of love. The man who takes pleasure in using influence, or setting a lofty example, is just as arid a dilettante as the musician who plays, or the artist who paints, for the sake of the applause and the admiration he wins; he is only regarding others as so many instruments for registering his own level of complacency. Every one, even the least complicated of mankind, must know the exquisite pleasure that comes from doing the simplest and humblest service to one whom he loves; how such love converts the most menial office into a luxurious joy; and the higher that a man goes, the more does he discern in every single human being with whom he is brought into contact a soul whom he can love and serve. Of course it is but an elementary pleasure to enjoy pleasing those whom we regard with some passion of affection, wife or child or friend, because, after all, one gains something oneself by that. But the purest morality of all discerns the infinitely lovable quality which is in the depth of every human soul, and lavishes its tenderness and its grace upon it, with a compassion that grows and increases, the more unthankful and clumsy and brutish is the soul which it sets out to serve."

"But," I said, "beautiful as that thought is—and I see and recognise its beauty—it does limit the individual responsibility very greatly. Surely a prudential morality, the morality which is just because it fears reprisal, and is kind because it anticipates kindness, is better than none at all? The morality of which you speak can only belong to the noblest human creatures."

"Only to the noblest," he said; "and I must repeat what I said before, that the prudential morality is useless, because it begins at the wrong end, and is set upon self throughout. I must say deliberately that the soul which loves unreasonably and unwisely, which even yields itself to the passion of others for the pleasure it gives rather than for the pleasure it receives—the thriftless, lavish, good-natured, affectionate people, who are said to make such a mess of their lives—are far higher in the scale of hope than the cautiously respectable, the prudently kind, the selfishly pure. There must be no mistake about this. One must somehow or other give one's heart away, and it is better to do it in error and disaster than to treasure it for oneself. Of course there are many lives on earth—and an increasing number as the world develops—which are generous and noble and unselfish, without any sacrifice of purity or self-respect. But the essence of morality is giving, and not receiving, or even practising; the point is free choice, and not compulsion; and if one cannot give because one loves, one must give until one loves."



XXVI

But all my speculations were cut short by a strange event which happened about this time. One day, without any warning, the thought of Cynthia darted urgently and irresistibly into my mind. Her image came between me and all my tasks; I saw her in innumerable positions and guises, but always with her eyes bent on me in a pitiful entreaty. After endeavouring to resist the thought for a little as some kind of fantasy, I became suddenly convinced that she was in need of me, and in urgent need. I asked for an interview with our Master, and told him the story; he heard me gravely, and then said that I might go in search of her; but I was not sure that he was wholly pleased, and he bent his eyes upon me with a very inquiring look. I hesitated whether or not to call Amroth to my aid, but decided that I had better not do so at first. The question was how to find her; the great crags lay between me and the land of delight; and when I hurried out of the college, the thought of the descent and its dangers fairly unmanned me. I knew, however, of no other way. But what was my surprise when, on arriving at the top, not far from the point where Amroth had greeted me after the ascent, I saw a little steep path, which wound itself down into the gulleys and chimneys of the black rocks. I took it without hesitation, and though again and again it seemed to come to an end in front of me, I found that it could be traced and followed without serious difficulty. The descent was accomplished with a singular rapidity, and I marvelled to find myself at the crag-base in so brief a time, considering the intolerable tedium of the ascent. I rapidly crossed the intervening valley, and was very soon at the gate of the careless land. To my intense joy, and not at all to my surprise, I found Cynthia at the gate itself, waiting for me with a look of expectancy. She came forwards, and threw herself passionately into my arms, murmuring words of delight and welcome, like a child.

"I knew you would come," she said. "I am frightened—all sorts of dreadful things have happened. I have found out where I am—and I seem to have lost all my friends. Charmides is gone, and Lucius is cruel to me—he tells me that I have lost my spirits and my good looks, and am tiresome company."

I looked at her—she was paler and frailer-looking than when I left her; and she was habited very differently, in simpler and graver dress. But she was to my eyes infinitely more beautiful and dearer, and I told her so. She smiled at that, but half tearfully; and we seated ourselves on a bench hard by, looking over the garden, which was strangely and luxuriantly beautiful.

"You must take me away with you at once," she said. "I cannot live here without you. I thought at first, when you went, that it was rather a relief not to have your grave face at my shoulder,"—here she took my face in her hands—"always reminding me of something I did not want, and ought to have wanted—but oh, how I began to miss you! and then I got so tired of this silly, lazy place, and all the music and jokes and compliments. But I am a worthless creature, and not good for anything. I cannot work, and I hate being idle. Take me anywhere, make me do something, beat me if you like, only force me to be different from what I am."

"Very well," I said. "I will give you a good beating presently, of course, but just let me consider what will hurt you most, silly child!"

"That is it," she said. "I want to be hurt and bruised, and shaken as my nurse used to shake me, when I was a naughty child. Oh dear, oh dear, how wretched I am!" and poor Cynthia laid her head on my shoulder and burst into tears.

"Come, come," I said, "you must not do that—I want my wits about me; but if you cry, you will simply make a fool of me—and this is no time for love-making."

"Then you do really care", said Cynthia in a quieter tone. "That is all I want to know! I want to be with you, and see you every hour and every minute. I can't help saying it, though it is really very undignified for me to be making love to you. I did many silly things on earth, but never anything quite so feeble as that!"

I felt myself fairly bewildered by the situation. My psychology did not seem to help me; and here at least was something to love and rescue. I will say frankly that, in my stupidity and superiority, I did not really think of loving Cynthia in the way in which she needed to be loved. She was to me, with all my grave concerns and problems, as a charming and intelligent child, with whom I could not even speak of half the thoughts which absorbed me. So I just held her in my arms, and comforted her as best I could; but what to do and where to bestow her I could not tell. I saw that her time to leave the place of desire had come, but what she could turn to I could not conceive.

Suddenly I looked up, and saw Lucius approaching, evidently in a very angry mood.

"So this is the end of all our amusement?" he said, as he came near. "You bring Cynthia here in your tiresome, condescending way, you live among us like an almighty prig, smiling gravely at our fun, and then you go off when it is convenient to yourself; and then, when you want a little recreation, you come and sit here in a corner and hug your darling, when you have never given her a thought of late. You know that is true," he added menacingly.

"Yes," I said, "it is true! I went of my own will, and I have come back of my own will; and you have all been out of my thoughts, because I have had much work to do. But what of that? Cynthia wants me and I have come back to her, and I will do whatever she desires. It is no good threatening me, Lucius—there is nothing you can do or say that will have the smallest effect on me."

"We will see about that," said Lucius. "None of your airs here! We are peaceful enough when we are respectfully and fairly treated, but we have our own laws, and no one shall break them with impunity. We will have no half-hearted fools here. If you come among us with your damned missionary airs, you shall have what I expect you call the crown of martyrdom."

He whistled loud and shrill. Half-a-dozen men sprang from the bushes and flung themselves upon me. I struggled, but was overpowered, and dragged away. The last sight I had was of Lucius standing with a disdainful smile, with Cynthia clinging to his arm; and to my horror and disgust she was smiling too.



XXVII

I had somehow never expected to be used with positive violence in the world of spirits, and least of all in that lazy and good-natured place. Considering, too, the errand on which I had come, not for my own convenience but for the sake of another, my treatment seemed to me very hard. What was still more humiliating was the fact that my spirit seemed just as powerless in the hands of these ruffians as my body would have been on earth. I was pushed, hustled, insulted, hurt. I could have summoned Amroth to my aid, but I felt too proud for that; yet the thought of the cragmen, and the possibility of the second death, did visit my mind with dismal iteration. I did not at all desire a further death; I felt very much alive, and full of interest and energy. Worst of all was my sense that Cynthia had gone over to the enemy. I had been so loftily kind with her, that I much resented having appeared in her sight as feeble and ridiculous. It is difficult to preserve any dignity of demeanour or thought, with a man's hand at one's neck and his knee in one's back: and I felt that Lucius had displayed a really Satanical malignity in using this particular means of degrading me in Cynthia's sight, and of regaining his own lost influence.

I was thrust and driven before my captors along an alley in the garden, and what added to my discomfiture was that a good many people ran together to see us pass, and watched me with decided amusement. I was taken finally to a little pavilion of stone, with heavily barred windows, and a flagged marble floor. The room was absolutely bare, and contained neither seat nor table. Into this I was thrust, with some obscene jesting, and the door was locked upon me.

The time passed very heavily. At intervals I heard music burst out among the alleys, and a good many people came to peep in upon me with an amused curiosity. I was entirely bewildered by my position, and did not see what I could have done to have incurred my punishment. But in the solitary hours that followed I began to have a suspicion of my fault. I had found myself hitherto the object of so much attention and praise, that I had developed a strong sense of complacency and self-satisfaction. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that there was even more behind, but I could not, by interrogating my mind and searching out my spirits, make out clearly what it was; yet I felt I was having a sharp lesson; and this made me resolve that I would ask for no kind of assistance from Amroth or any other power, but that I would try to meet whatever fell upon me with patience, and extract the full savour of my experience.

I do not know how long I spent in the dismal cell. I was in some discomfort from the handling I had received, and in still greater dejection of mind. Suddenly I heard footsteps approaching. Three of my captors appeared, and told me roughly to go with them. So, a pitiable figure, I limped along between two of them, the third following behind, and was conducted through the central piazza of the place, between two lines of people who gave way to the most undisguised merriment, and even shouted opprobrious remarks at me, calling me spy and traitor and other unpleasant names. I could not have believed that these kind-mannered and courteous persons could have exhibited, all of a sudden, such frank brutality, and I saw many of my own acquaintance among them, who regarded me with obvious derision.