Читать книгу Tom Clark and His Wife - Paschal Beverly Randolph - Страница 5

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He used to pace rapidly up and down the deck for a minute or two, and then, suddenly striking his forehead, as if a new thought were just pangfully coming into being at the major foci of his soul, he would throw himself prone upon one of the after seats of the old "Uncle Sam," the steamer in which we were going from San Francisco to Panama, and there he would lie, apparently musing, and evidently enjoying some sort of interior life, but whether that life was one of reverie, dream, or disembodiedness, was a mystery to us all, and would have remained so, but that on being asked, he very complaisantly satisfied our doubts, by informing us that on such occasion he, in spirit, visited a place not laid down in ordinary charts, and the name of which was the realm of "Wotchergifterno," which means in English, "Violinist's Meadow" (very like "Fiddler's Green"). When not pacing the deck, or reclining, or gazing at the glorious sunsets on the sea, or the still more gorgeous sun-risings on the mountains, he was in the habit of—catching flies; which flies he would forthwith proceed to dissect and examine by means of a microscope constructed of a drop of water in a bent broom wisp. Gradually the man became quite a favorite with both passengers and officers of the ship, and not a day passed but a crowd of ladies and gentlemen would gather around him to listen to the stories he would not merely recite, but compose as he went along, each one containing a moral of more than ordinary significance. It was apparent from the first that the man was some sort of a mystic, a dreamer, or some such out-of-the-ordinary style of person, because everything he said or did bore an unmistakable ghostly impress. He was sorrowful withal, at times, and yet no one on the ship had a greater or more humorous flow of spirits. In the midst, however, of his brightest sallies, he would suddenly stop short, as if at that moment his listening soul had caught the jubilant cry of angels when God had just pardoned some sinful, storm-tossed human soul.

One day, during the progress of a long and interesting conversation on the nature of that mysterious thing called the human soul, and in which our fellow passenger had, as usual, taken a leading part, with the endeavor to elicit, as well as impart, information, he suddenly changed color, turned almost deathly pale, and for full five minutes, perhaps more, looked straight into the sky, as if gazing upon the awful and ineffable mysteries of that weird Phantom-land which intuition demonstrates, but cold reason utterly rejects or challenges for tangible proof. Long and steadily gazed the man; and then he shuddered—shuddered as if he had just received some fearful solution of the problem near his heart. And I shuddered also—in pure sympathy with what I could not fairly understand. At length he spoke; but with bated breath, and in tones so low, so deep, so solemn, that it seemed as though a dead, and not a living man, gave utterance to the sounds: "Lara! Lara! Ah, Lovely! would that I had gone then—that I were with thee now!" and he relapsed into silence.

Surprised, both at his abruptness, change of manner and theme—for ten minutes before, and despite the solemnity of the conversational topic, he had been at a fever heat of fun and hilarity—I asked him what he meant. Accustomed, as we had been, to hear him break in upon the most grave and dolorous talk with a droll observation which instantly provoked the most unrestrainable, hilarious mirth; used, as we had been to hear him perpetrate a joke, and set us all in a roar in the very midst of some heart-moving tale of woe, whereat our eyes had moistened, and our pulses throbbed tumultuously, yet I was not, even by all this, prepared for the singular characteristic now presented. In reply to my question, he first wiped away an involuntary tear, as if ashamed of his weakness; then raised his head, and exclaimed:

"Lara! Lara! The Beautiful One!"

"What of her?" asked Colbert, who sat opposite him, and who was deeply moved at his evident distress, and whose curiosity, as that of us all, was deeply piqued.

"Listen," said he, "and I will tell you;" and then, while we eagerly drank in his words, and strove to drink in their strange and wondrous meaning (first warning us that what he was about to say was but the text of something to be thereafter told), he leaned back upon the taffrail, and while the steamer gently plowed her way toward Acapulco and far-off Panama, said:

"Fleshless, yet living, I strode through the grand old hall of a mighty temple. I had been compelled to climb the hills to reach the wall that bars the Gates of Glory, and now within my heart strange pulses beat the while. I found myself upon the verge of a vast extended plain, stretching out to the Infinitudes, as it seemed, through the narrow spaces wherein the vision was not obstructed by certain dense, convolving vapor-clouds that ever and anon rose from off the murky breast of the waters of the river of Lethe, that rolled hard by and skirted the immense prairie on and over which I proposed to travel, on my way from Minus to Plus—from Nothing to Something, from Bad to Good, and from Better to Best—travelling toward my unknown, unimagined Destiny—travelling from the Now toward the Shall Be. And I stood and mutely gazed—gazed at the dense, dark shadows rolling murkily, massily over the plain and through the spaces—dim shadows of dead worlds. No sound, no footfall, not even mine own—not an echo broke the Stillness. I was alone!—alone upon the vast Solitude—the tremendous wastes of an unknown, mysterious, unimagined Eterne—unimagined in all its fearful stillitude! Within my bosom there was a heart, but no pulse went from it bounding through my veins; no throb beat back responsive life to my feeling, listening spirit. I and my Soul were there alone; we only—the Thinking self, and the Self that ever knows, but never thinks—were there. My heart was not cold, yet it was more: it was, I felt, changed to solid stone—changed all save one small point, distant, afar off, like unto the vague ghost of a long-forgotten fancy; and this seemed to have been the penalty inflicted for things done by me while on the earth; for it appeared that I was dead, and that my soul had begun an almost endless pilgrimage—to what?—to where? A penalty! And yet no black memory of red-handed crime haunted me, or lurked in the intricacies of the mystic wards of my death-defying soul; and I strode all alone adown the uncolumned vistas of the grand old temple—a temple whose walls were builded of flown Seconds, whose tesselated pavements were laid in sheeted Hours, whose windows on one side opened upon the Gone Ages, and on the other upon the Yet to Be; and its sublime turrets pierced the clouds, which roll over and mantle the hoary summits of the grey Mountains of Time! And so I and my Soul walked through this temple by ourselves—alone!

"With clear, keen gaze, I looked forth upon the Vastness, and my vision swept over the floors of all the dead years; yet in vain, for the things of my longing were not there. I beheld trees, but all their leaves were motionless, and no caroling bird sent its heart-notes forth to waken the dim solitudes into life and music—which are love. There were stately groves beneath the arching span of the temple's massy dome, but no amphian strains of melody fell on the ear, or filled the spaces, from their myriad moveless branches, or from out their fair theatres. All was still. It was a palace of frozen tones, and only the music of Silence (which is vocal, if we listen well) prevailed; and I, Paschal the Thinker, and my Thought—strange, uncouth, yet mighty but moveless thought—were the only living things beneath the expansive dome. Living, I had sacrificed all things—health, riches, honor, fame, ease, even Love itself, for Thought, and by Thought had overtopped many who had started on the race for glory long ere my soul had wakened to a consciousness of itself—which means Power. In life I had, so it seemed, builded stronger than I thought, and had reached a mental eminence—occupied a throne so lofty—that mankind wondered, stood aloof, and gazed at me from afar off; and by reason of my thought had gathered from me, and thus condemned the Thinker to an utter solitude, even in the most thronged and busy haunts of men; and I walked through earth's most crowded cities more lonely than the hermit of the desert, whose eyes are never gladdened by the sight of human form, and through the chambers of whose brain no human voice goes ringing. Thus was it on earth; and now that I had quitted it forever, with undaunted soul, strong purpose, and fearless tread, assured of an endless immortality, and had entered upon the life of Thinking, still was I alone. Had my life, my thinking, and my action on thought been failures? The contemplation of such a possibility was bitter, very bitter—even like unto painful death—and yet it seemed true that failure had been mine—failure, notwithstanding men by thousands spoke well of me and of my works—the children of my thought—and bought my books in thousands. Failure? My soul rejected the idea in utter loathing. For a moment the social spirit, the heartness of my nature over-shadowed Reason, and caused me to forget that, even though confined by dungeon walls, stricken with poverty, deformity, sin or disease—even though left out to freeze in the cold world's spite—yet the thinker is ever the world's true and only King. I had become, for a moment, oblivious of the fact that failure was an impossibility. Rosicrucians never fail!"

"But now, as I slowly moved along, I felt my human nature was at war with the God-nature within, and that Heart for a while was holding the Head in duress. I longed for release from Solitude; my humanity yearned for association, and would have there, on the breast of the great Eterne, given worlds for the company of the lowliest soul I had ever beheld—and despised, as I walked the streets of the cities of the far-off earth. I yearned for human society and affection, and could even have found blissful solace with—a dog! just such a dog as, in times past, I had scornfully kicked in Cairo and Stamboul. Even a dog was denied me now—all affection withheld from me—and in the terrible presence of its absence I longed for death, forgetting again that Soul can never die. I longed for that deeper extinguishment which should sweep the soul from being, and crown it with limitless, eternal Night—forgetful, again, that the Memories of Soul must live, though the rememberer cease to be, and that hence Horrors would echo through the universe—children mourning for their suicidal parent, and that parent myself!

"And I lay me down beneath a tree in despair—a tree which stood out all alone from its fellows, in a grove hard by—a tree all ragged and lightning-scathed—an awful monument, mute, yet eloquently proclaiming to the wondering on-looker that God had passed that way, in fierce, deific wrath, once upon a time, in the dead ages, whose ashes now bestrewed the floors of the mighty temple of Eterne.

"It was dreadful, very dreadful, to be all alone. True, the pangs of hunger, the tortures of thirst, the fires of ambition, and the raging flames of earthly passion no longer marred my peace. Pain, such as mortals feel, was unknown; no disease racked my frame, or disturbed the serenity of my external being—for I was immortal, and could laugh all these and Death itself to scorn; and yet a keener anguish, a more fearful suffering, was mine. I wept, and my cries gave back no outer sound, but they rang in sombre echoes through the mighty arches, the bottomless caverns, the abyssmal deeps of Soul—my soul—racking it with torments such as only thinking things can feel. Such is the lot, such the discipline of the destined citizens of the Farther Empyrean—a region known only to the Brethren of the Temple of Peerless Rosicrucia!"

"Sleep came—sweet sleep—deep and strange; and in it I dreamed. Methought I still wandered gloomily beneath the vast arches of the grand old hall, until at last, after countless cycles of ripe years had been gathered back into the treasury of the Etre Supreme, I stood before a solid, massive door, which an inscription thereabove announced as being the entrance to the Garden of the Beatitudes. This door was secured by a thousand locks, besides one larger than all the rest combined. Every one of these locks might be opened, but the opener could not pass through unless he unfastened the master-lock having ten thousand bolts and wards.

"Once more despair seized on my soul, in this dream which was not all a dream; for to achieve an entrance through the gate without the master-key was a task, so said the inscription, that would defy the labors of human armies for periods of time utterly defying man's comprehension—so many were the difficulties, so vastly strong the bolts.

"Sadly, mournfully, I turned away, when, as if by chance—forgetting that there is no such thing as Chance—my eye encountered a rivetless space upon the solid brazen door—a circular space, around the periphery of which was an inscription running thus: 'Man only Fails through Feebleness of Will!' Within this smooth circle was the semblance of a golden triangle, embracing a crystalline globe, winged and beautiful, crowned with a Rosicrucian cypher, while beneath it stood out, in fiery characters, the single word, 'Try!' The very instant I caught the magic significance of these divine inscriptions, a new Hope was begotten in my soul; Despair fled from me, and I passed into