The Child of the Dawn - Benson Arthur Christopher

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and dies, just when it is the darling of the home; and at the other end of the scale, the helpless, fractious invalid, or the old man who lives in weariness, wakeful and tortured, and who is glad just to sit in the sun, indifferent to every one and everything, past feeling and hoping and thinking—or, worst of all, the people with diseased minds, whose pain makes them suspicious and malignant. What is the meaning of all this pain, which seems to do people nothing but harm, and makes them a burden to themselves and others too?"

      "Oh," said he, "it is difficult enough; but you must remember that we are all bound up with the hearts and lives of others; the child that dies in its helplessness has a meaning for its parents; the child that lives long enough to be the light of its home, that has a significance deep enough; and all those who have to tend and care for the sick, to lighten the burden and the sorrow for them, that has a meaning surely for all concerned? The reason why we feel as we do about broken lives, why they seem so utterly purposeless, is because we have the proportion so wrong. We do not really, in fact, believe in immortality, when we are bound in the body—some few of us do, and many of us say that we do. But we do not realise that the little life is but one in a great chain of lives, that each spirit lives many times, over and over. There is no such thing as waste or sacrifice of life. The life is meant to do just what it does, no more and no less; bound in the body, it all seems so long or so short, so complete or so incomplete; but now and here we can see that the whole thing is so endless, so immense, that we think no more of entering life, say, for a few days, or entering it for ninety years, than we should think of counting one or ninety water-drops in the river that pours in a cataract over the lip of the rocks. Where we do lose, in life, is in not taking the particular experience, be it small or great, to heart. We try to forget things, to put them out of our minds, to banish them. Of course it is very hard to do otherwise, in a body so finite, tossed and whirled in a stream so infinite; and thus we are happiest if we can live very simply and quietly, not straining to multiply our uneasy activities, but just getting the most and the best out of the elements of life as they come to us. As we get older in spirit, we do that naturally; the things that men call ambitions and schemes are the signs of immaturity; and when we grow older, those slip off us and concern us no more; while the real vitality of feeling and emotion runs ever more clear and strong."

      "But," I said, "can one revive the old lives at will? Can one look back into the long range of previous lives? Is that permitted?"

      "Yes, of course it is permitted," said Amroth, smiling; "there are no rules here; but one does not care to do it overmuch. One is just glad it is all done, and that one has learnt the lesson. Look back if you like—there are all the lives behind you."

      I had a curious sensation—I saw myself suddenly a stalwart savage, strangely attired for war, near a hut in a forest clearing. I was going away somewhere; there were other huts at hand; there was a fire, in the side of a mound, where some women seemed to be cooking something and wrangling over it; the smoke went up into the still air. A child came out of the hut, and ran to me. I bent down and kissed it, and it clung to me. I was sorry, in a dim way, to be going out—for I saw other figures armed too, standing about the clearing. There was to be fighting that day, and though I wished to fight, I thought I might not return. But the mind of myself, as I discerned it, was full of hurtful, cruel, rapacious thoughts, and I was sad to think that this could ever have been I.

      "It is not very nice," said Amroth with a smile; "one does not care to revive that! You were young then, and had much before you."

      Another picture flashed into the mind. Was it true? I was a woman, it seemed, looking out of a window on the street in a town with high, dark houses, strongly built of stone: there was a towered gate at a little distance, with some figures drawing up sacks with a pulley to a door in the gate. A man came up behind me, pulled me roughly back, and spoke angrily; I answered him fiercely and shrilly. The room I was in seemed to be a shop or store; there were barrels of wine, and bags of corn. I felt that I was busy and anxious—it was not a pleasant retrospect.

      "Yet you were better then," said Amroth "you thought little of your drudgery, and much of your children."

      Yes, I had had children, I saw. Their names and appearance floated before me. I had loved them tenderly. Had they passed out of my life? I felt bewildered.

      Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again. "No, you came near to some of them again. Do you not remember another life in which you loved a friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness? He had been your child long before; and one never quite loses that."

      I saw in a flash the other life he spoke of. I was a student, it seemed, at some university, where there was a boy of my own age, a curious, wilful, perverse, tactless creature, always saying and doing the wrong thing, for whom I had felt a curious and unreasonable responsibility. I had always tried to explain him to other people, to justify him; and he had turned to me fop help and companionship in a singular way. I saw myself walking with him in the country, expostulating, gesticulating; and I saw him angry and perplexed. … The vision vanished.

      "But what becomes of all those whom we have loved?" I said; "it cannot be as if we had never loved them."

      "No, indeed," said Amroth, "they are all there or here; but there lies one of the great mysteries which we cannot yet attain to. We shall be all brought together some time, closely and perfectly; but even now, in the world of matter, the spirit half remembers; and when one is strangely and lovingly drawn to another soul, when that love is not of the body, and has nothing of passion in it, then it is some close ancient tie reasserting itself. Do you not know how old and remote some of our friendships seemed—so much older and larger than could be accounted for by the brief days of companionship? That strange hunger for the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what has been. Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you will move farther afield, and you will come near to spirits you have loved. You cannot bear it yet, though they are all about you; but one regains the spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours."

      "Can I revisit," I said, "the scene of my last life—see and know what those I loved are doing and feeling?"

      "Not yet," said Amroth; "that would not profit either you or them. The sorrow of earth would not be sorrow, it would have no cleansing power, if the parted spirit could return at once. You do not guess, either, how much of time has passed already since you came here—it seems to you like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet loss and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the finest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave behind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that its virtue lies."

      "Yes," I said, "I do not desire to return. This is all too wonderful. It is the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me. I do not desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think of it, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body was faint and weary. The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and loved and exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because one was content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were. It was the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was the shame."

      VI

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      One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no religion here!"

      "I know what you mean," he said. "I think it is one of the things that one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to be so."

      "Yes," I said, "as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game played by a few players, a game with a great many rules."

      "Yes," he said, "it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be something else—to contain the secret of life and all knowledge."

      "I used to think," I said, "that religion was like a noble and generous boy with the lyrical heart of

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