The Pilgrim's Regress (17 page)

X

Wisdom—Esoteric

T
HAT DAY JOHN SPENT
as he had spent the other, wandering and often sleeping in the fields. In this valley the year came on with seven-leagued boots. To-day the riverside was thick with fritillaries, the kingfisher flew, the dragon-flies darted, and when he sat it was in the shade. A pleasing melancholy rested upon him, and a great indolence. He talked that day with many of the people of the house, and when he went that night to his cell his mind was full of their resigned voices, and of their faces, so quiet and yet so alert, as though they waited in hourly expectation of something that would never happen. When next he opened his eyes moonlight filled his cell; and as he lay waking heard a low whistle from without his window. He put out his head. A dark figure stood in the shadow of the house. ‘Come out and play,' said he. At the same time there came a sound of suppressed laughter from an angle of deeper shadow beyond the speaker.

‘This window is too high for me to jump from,' said John.

‘You forget that it is by moonlight,' said the other, and held up his hands.

‘Jump!' he said.

John cast some clothes about him and bounded from the window. To his surprise, he reached the ground with no hurt or shock, and a moment later he found himself progressing over the lawn in a series of great leaps amidst a laughing crowd of the sons and daughters of the house: so that the valley in the moonlight, if any had watched, would have looked like nothing so much as a great salver which had been made into the arena for a troupe of performing fleas. Their dance or race, led them to the dark border of a neighbouring wood and as John tumbled down breathless at the foot of a hawthorn, he heard with suprise all around him the sounds of silver and glass, of hampers opening, and bottles uncorking.

‘My father's ideas of feeding are a little strict,' explained his host, ‘and we younger ones have found it necessary to supplement the household meals a bit.'

‘Here is champagne, from Mr. Halfways,' said one.

‘Cold chicken and tongue from Mr. Mammon. What
should
we do without our friends?'

‘Hashish from the south. Nycteris sent it up herself.'

‘This claret,' said a girl beside him rather shyly, ‘is from Mother Kirk.'

‘I don't think we ought to drink that,' said another voice, ‘that is really going a bit too far.'

‘No further than your caviare from the Theosophists,' said the first girl, ‘and anyway, I need it. It is only this that keeps me alive.'

‘Try some of my brandy,' said another voice. ‘All made by Savage's dwarfs.'

‘I don't know how you can drink that stuff, Karl.
¹
Plain, honest food from Claptrap is what you need.'

‘So
you
say, Herbert,'
²
retorted a new speaker. ‘But some of us find it rather heavy. For me, a morsel of lamb from the Shepherd's Country and a little mint sauce—that is really all you need to add to our Father's table.'

‘We all know what you like, Benedict,'
³
said several.

‘I have finished,' announced Karl, ‘and now for a night with the dwarfs. Anyone come with me?'

‘Not there,' cried another. ‘I'm going South to-night to the magicians.'

‘You had much better not, Rudolph,'
⁴
said someone. ‘A few quiet hours in Puritania with me would be much better for you—much better.'

‘Chuck it, Immanuel,'
⁵
said another. ‘You might as well go to Mother Kirk straight away.'

‘Bernard
⁶
does,' said the girl, who had contributed the claret.

By this time the party was rapidly decreasing, for most of the young people, after trying in vain to win converts to their several schemes of pleasure, had bounded off alone, plunging from treetop to treetop, and soon even the thin silvery sound of their laughter had died away. Those who were left swarmed round John soliciting his attention now for this, now for that, amusement. Some sat down beyond the shadow of the wood to work out puzzles in the light of the moon: others settled to serious leap-frog: the more frivolous ran to and fro chasing the moths, wrestling with and tickling one another, giggling and making giggle, till the wood rang with their shrill squeals of glee. It seemed to go on for a long time and if there was any more in that dream John did not remember it when he woke.

XI

Mum's the Word

A
T BREAKFAST ON THE
following morning John stole many furtive glances at the sons and daughters of Wisdom, but he could see no sign that they were conscious of having met him in such different guise during the night. Indeed, neither then, nor at any other time during his stay in the valley, did he find evidence that they were aware of their nocturnal holidays: and a few tentative questions assured him that, unless they were liars, they all believed themselves to be living exclusively on the spare diet of the house. Immanuel indeed admitted, as a speculative truth, that there were such things as dreams, and that he conceivably dreamed himself: but then he had a complex proof (which John never quite grasped) that no one could possibly remember a dream: and though his appearance and constitution were those of a prize-fighter he attributed this all to the excellent quality of the local fruit. Herbert was a lumpish sort of man who never could muster any appetite for his meals: but John discovered that Herbert put this down to his liver and had no notion that he had been stuffing himself with Claptrapian steak and gravy all night as hard as he could. Another of the family, Bernard by name, was in radiant health. John had seen him drinking Mother Kirk's wine with great relish and refreshment by moonlight: but the waking Bernard maintained that Mother Kirk's wine was merely a bad, early attempt at the admirable barley-water which his father sometimes brought out on birthdays and great occasions; and ‘to this barley-water,' he said, ‘I owe my health. It has made me what I am.' Still less could John discover, by all the traps that he laid for them, whether the younger members of the household had any recollection of their nightly leap-frog and other gambols. He was forced at last to conclude that either the whole thing had been a private dream of his own or else the secret was very well kept. A little irritation which some displayed when he questioned them, seemed to favour the second hypothesis.

XII

More Wisdom

W
HEN THEY WERE SEATED
in the porch, Wisdom continued his discourse. ‘You have learned that there are these three things, the Island, the Roads, and the Rules: that they are certainly in some way real and that we have not made them; and further that it does not help us to invent a Landlord. Nor is it possible that there should really be a castle at one end of the world and an island at the other: for the world is round and we are everywhere at the end of the world, since the end of a sphere is its surface. The world is
all
end: but we can never pass beyond that end. And yet these things which our imagination impossibly places as a world beyond the world's end are, we have seen, in some sense real.

‘You have told me how Reason refuted the lies of the giant by asking what was the colour of things in dark places. You learned from her that there is no colour without seeing, no hardness without touching: no
body
to say all, save in the minds of those who perceive it. It follows, then, that all this choir of heaven and furniture of earth are imaginations: not your imaginations nor mine, for here we have met in the same world, which could not be if the world was shut up within my mind or yours. Without doubt, then, all this show of sky and earth floats within some mighty imagination. If you ask Whose, again the Landlord will not help you. He is man: make him as great as you will, he still is other than we and his imagining inaccessible to us, as yours would be to me. Rather we must say that the world is not in this mind, or in that, but in Mind itself, in that impersonal principle of consciousness which flows eternally through us, its perishable forms.

‘You see how this explains all the questions that have lain on our knees since we began. We find the roads, the reasonable skeleton in the countryside, the guiding-lines that enable us both to make maps and to use them when we have made, because our country is the off-spring of the rational. Consider also the Island. All that you know of it comes at last to this: that your first sight of it was yearning or wanting and that you have never ceased to want that first sight back, as though you wanted a wanting, as though the wanting were the having, and the having a wanting. What is the meaning of this hungry fruition and this emptiness which is the best filling? Surely, it becomes plain when you have learned that no man says “I” in an unambiguous sense. I am an old man who must soon go over the brook and be seen no more: I am eternal Mind in which time and place themselves are contained. I am the Imaginer: I am one of his imaginations. The Island is nothing else than that perfection and immortality which I possess as Spirit eternal, and vainly crave as mortal soul. Its voices sound at my very ear and are further than the stars; it is under my hand and will never be mine: I have it and lo! the very having is the losing: because at every moment I, as Spirit, am indeed abandoning my rich estate to become that perishing and imperfect creature in whose repeated deaths and births stands my eternity. And I as man in every moment still enjoy the perfection I have lost, since still, so far as I am at all, I am Spirit, and only by being Spirit maintain my short vitality as soul. See how life subsists by death and each becomes the other: for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we, and we also attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature and relapsing, as far as may be, into the impersonality of our source: for this is the final meaning of all moral precepts, and the goodness of temperance and justice and of love itself is that they plunge the red heat of our separate and individual passions back in the ice brook of the Spirit, there to take eternal temper, though not endless duration.

‘What I tell you is the
evangelium eternum.
This has been known always: ancients and moderns bear witness to it. The stories of the Landlord in our own time are but a picture-writing which show to the people as much of the truth as they can understand. Stewards must have told you—though it seems that you neither heeded nor understood them—the legend of the Landlord's Son. They say that after the eating of the mountain-apple and the earthquake, when things in our country had gone all awry, the Landlord's Son himself became one of his Father's tenants and lived among us, for no other purpose than that he should be killed. The Stewards themselves do not know clearly the meaning of their story: hence, if you ask them how the slaying of the Son should help us, they are driven to monstrous answers. But to us the meaning is clear and the story is beautiful. It is a picture of the life of Spirit itself. What the Son is in the legend, every man is in reality: for the whole world is nothing else than the Eternal thus giving itself to death that it may live—that we may live. Death is life's mode, and the increase of life is through repeated death.

‘And what of the rules? You have seen that it is idle to make them the arbitrary commands of a Landlord: yet those who do so were not altogether astray, for it is equally an error to think that they are each man's personal choice. Remember what we have said of the Island. Because I am and am not Spirit, therefore I have and have not my desire. The same double nature of the word “I,” explain the rules. I am the lawgiver: but I am also the subject. I, the Spirit, impose upon the soul which I become, the laws she must henceforth obey: and every conflict between the rules and our inclinations is but a conflict of the wishes of my mortal and apparent self against those of my real and eternal. “I ought but I do not wish”—how meaningless the words are, how close to saying, “I want and I do not want.” But once we have learned to say “I, and yet not I, want,” the mystery is plain.

‘And now your sick friend is almost whole, and it is nearly noon.'

BOOK
EIGHT

AT BAY

He that hath understanding in himself is best;

He that lays up his brother's wisdom in his breast

Is good. But he that neither knoweth, nor will be taught

By the instruction of the wise—this man is naught.

HESIOD

Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction—they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

HAZLITT

I

Two Kinds of Monist

T
HAT AFTERNOON AS
John was walking in the water meadow he saw a man coming towards him who walked blunderingly like one whose legs were not his own. And as the man came nearer he saw that it was Vertue, with his face very pale.

‘What,' cried John, ‘are you cured? Can you see? Can you speak?'

‘Yes,' said Vertue in a weak voice, ‘I suppose I can see.' And he leaned heavily on a stile and breathed hard.

‘You have walked too far,' said John, ‘Are you ill?'

‘I am still weak. It is nothing. I shall get my breath in a moment.'

‘Sit down by me,' said John. ‘And when you have rested we will go gently back to the house.'

‘I am not going back to the house.'

‘Not going back? You are not fit to travel—and where are you going?'