II
Sir Edwin and Lady Peaslake were sitting in the temple of Juno Lacinia and leaning back on a Doric column—which is a form of architecture neither comfortable as a cushion nor adequate as a parasol. They were as cross as it was possible for good-tempered people to be. Their lunch at the dirty hotel had disagreed with them, and the wine that was included with it had made them heavy. The drive to the temples had joggled them up and one of the horses had fallen down. They had been worried to buy flowers, figs, shells, sulphur crystals, and new-laid antiquities, they had been pestered by the beggars and bitten by the fleas. Had they been Sicilian born they would have known what was the matter, and lying down on the grass, on the flowers, on the road, on the temple steps—on anything, would have sunk at once into that marvellous midday sleep which is fed by light and warmth and air. But being northern born they did not know—nor could they have slept if they had.
“Where on earth are Harold and Mildred?” asked Lady Peaslake. She did not want to know, but she was restless with fatigue.
“I can’t think why we couldn’t all keep together,” said Sir Edwin.
“You see, papa,” said Lilian, “Mildred wants to see the temples that have tumbled down as well as these, and Harold is taking her.”
“He’s a poor guide,” said Sir Edwin. “Really, Lilian, I begin to think that Harold is rather stupid. Of course I’m very fond of him, he’s a thoroughly nice fellow, honest as the day, and he’s good-looking and well made—I value all that extremely—but after all brains are something. He is so slow—so lamentably slow—at catching one’s meaning.”
“But, father dear,” replied Lilian, who was devoted to Harold, “he’s tired.”
“I am tired, too, but I can keep my wits about me. He seems in a dream; when the horse fell he never attempted to get down and sit on its head. It might have kicked us to pieces. He’s as helpless as a baby with beggars. He’s too idle to walk properly; three times he trod on my toes, and he fell up the temple steps and broke your camera. He’s blind, he’s deaf—I may say he’s dumb, too. Now this is pure stupidity, and I believe that stupidity can be cured just like anything else, if you make the effort.”
Lilian continued the defence, and repeated that he had hardly slept for three nights.
“Ridiculous. Why can’t he sleep? It’s stupidity again. An effort is needed—that is all. He can cure it if he chooses.”
“He does know how to cure it,” said Lilian, “but you thought—and so did he—that—”
She produced an explosion of ill-temper in her father, which was quite unprecedented.
“I’m very much annoyed with him. He has no right to play tricks with his brain. And what’s more I am annoyed with Mildred, too.”
“Oh, father!”
“She encourages him in his silliness—makes him think he’s clever. I’m extremely annoyed, and I shall speak to them both, as soon as I get the opportunity.”
Lilian was surprised and pained. Her father had never blamed anyone so strongly before. She did not know—indeed, he did not know himself—that neither the indigestion nor the heat, nor the beggars, nor the fleas were the real cause of his irritation. He was annoyed because he failed to understand.
Mildred he could pardon; she had merely been indiscreet, and as she had gone in for being clever when quite a child, such things were to be expected from her. Besides, he shrewdly guessed that, although she might sometimes indulge in fancies, yet when it came to action she could be trusted to behave in a thoroughly conventional manner. Thank heaven! she was seldom guilty of confusing books with life.
But Harold did not escape so easily, for Sir Edwin absolutely failed to understand him, for the first time. Hitherto he had believed that he understood him perfectly. Harold’s character was so simple; it consisted of little more than two things, the power to love and the desire for truth, and Sir Edwin, like many a wiser thinker, concluded that what was not complicated could not be mysterious. Similarly, because Harold’s intellect did not devote itself to the acquisition of facts or to the elaboration of emotions, he had concluded that he was stupid. But now, just because he could send himself to sleep by an unexplained device, he spied a mystery in him, and was aggrieved.
He was right. There was a mystery, and a great one. Yet it was trivial and unimportant in comparison with the power to love and the desire for truth—things which he saw daily, and, because he had seen daily, ignored.
His meditations took shape, and he flung this challenge at the unknown: “I’ll have no queerness in a son-in-law!” He was sitting in a Doric temple with a sea of gold and purple flowers tossing over its ruins, and his eyes looked out to the moving, living sea of blue. But his ears caught neither the echo of the past nor the cry of the present, for he was suddenly paralysed with the fear that after all he had not done so well for his daughter as he hoped.
Meanwhile, Mildred, at the other end of the line of temples, was concentrated on the echoes of the past. Harold was even more inattentive to them than usual. He was very sleepy, and would only say that the flowers were rather jolly and that the sea looked in prime condition if only one could try it. To the magnificence and pathos of the ruined temple of Zeus he was quite dead. He only valued it as a chair.
“Suppose you go back and rest in the carriage?” said Mildred, with a shade of irritation in her voice.
He shook his head and sat yawning at the sea, thinking how wonderfully the water would fizz up over his body and how marvellously cold would be the pale blue pools among the rocks. Mildred endeavoured to recall him to higher pleasures by reading out of her Baedeker.
She turned round to explain something and he was gone.
At first she thought it was a mild practical joke, such as they did not disdain to play on each other; then that he had changed his mind and gone back to the carriage. But the custodian at the gate said that no one had gone out, and she returned to search the ruins.
The temple of Zeus—the third greatest temple of the Greek world—has been overthrown by an earthquake, and now resembles a ruined mountain rather than a ruined building. There is a well-made path, which makes a circuit over the mass, and is amply sufficient for all rational tourists. Those who wish to see more have to go mountaineering over gigantic columns and pilasters, and squeeze their way through passes of cut stone.
Harold was not on the path, and Mildred was naturally annoyed. Few things are more vexatious for a young lady than to go out with an escort and return without. It argues remissness on her own part quite as much as on that of her swain.
Having told the custodian to stop Harold if he tried to come out, she began a systematic hunt. She saw an enormous block of stone from which she would get a good view of the chaos, and wading through the gold and purple flowers that separated her from it, scrambled up.
On its further side were two fallen columns, lying close together, and the space that separated them had been silted up and was covered with flowers. On it, as on a bed, lay Harold, fast asleep, his cheek pressed against the hot stone of one of the columns, and his breath swaying a little blue iris that had rooted in one of its cracks.
The indignant Mildred was about to wake him, but seeing the dark line that still showed beneath his eyes, stayed her voice. Besides, he looked so picturesque, and she herself, sitting on the stone watching him, must look picturesque, too. She knew that there was no one to look at her, but from her mind the idea of a spectator was never absent for a moment. It was the price she had paid for becoming cultivated.
Sleep has little in common with death, to which men have compared it. Harold’s limbs lay in utter relaxation, but he was tingling with life, glorying in the bounty of the earth and the warmth of the sun, and the little blue flower bent and fluttered like a tree in a gale. The light beat upon his eyelids and the grass leaves tickled his hair, but he slept on, and the lines faded out of his face as he grasped the greatest gift that the animal life can offer. And Mildred watched him, thinking what a picture might be made of the scene.
Then her meditation changed. “What a wonderful thing is sleep! How I would like to know what is passing through his brain as he lies there. He looks so peaceful and happy. Poor boy! when he is awake he often looks worried. I think it is because he can’t follow the conversation, though I try to make it simple, don’t I? Yet some things he sees quite quickly. And I’m sure he has lots of imagination, if only he would let it come out. At all events I love him very much, and I believe I shall love him more, for it seems to me that there will be more in him than I expected.”
She suddenly remembered his “dodge” for going to sleep, and her interest and her agitation increased.
“Perhaps, even now, he imagines himself to be someone else. What a marvellous idea! What will he say if he wakes? How mysterious everything is if only one could realise it. Harold, of all people, who seemed so ordinary—though, of course, I love him. But I am going to love him more.”
She longed to reach him in his sleep, to guide the course of his dreams, to tell him that she approved of him and loved him. She had read of such a thing. In accordance with the advice of the modern spiritualistic novel she pressed her hands on her temples and made a mental effort. At the end of five minutes she had a slight headache and had effected nothing. He had not moved, he had not even sighed in his sleep, and the little blue flower still bent and fluttered, bent and fluttered in the regular onslaught of his breath.
The awakening, when it did come, found her thoughts unprepared. They had wandered to earthly things, as thoughts will do at times. At the supreme moment, she was wondering whether her stockings would last till she got back to England. And Harold, all unobserved, had woken up, and the little blue flower had quivered and was still. He had woken up because he was no longer tired, woken up to find himself in the midst of beautiful flowers, beautiful columns, beautiful sunshine, with Mildred, whom he loved, sitting by him. Life at that moment was too delicious for him to speak.
Mildred saw all the romance melting away: he looked so natural and so happy: there was nothing mysterious about him after all. She waited for him to speak.
Ten minutes passed, and still he had not spoken. His eyes were fixed steadily upon her, and she became nervous and uncomfortable. Why would he not speak? She determined to break the silence herself, and at last, in a tremulous voice, called him by his name.
The result was overwhelming, for his answer surpassed all that her wildest flights of fancy had imagined, and fulfilled beyond all dreaming her cravings for the unimagined and the unseen.
He said, “I’ve lived here before.”
Mildred was choking. She could not reply.
He was quite calm. “I always knew it,” he said, “but it was too far down in me. Now that I’ve slept here it is at the top. I’ve lived here before.”
“Oh, Harold!” she gasped.
“Mildred!” he cried, in sudden agitation, “are you going to believe it—that I have lived before—lived such a wonderful life—I can’t remember it yet—lived it here? It’s no good answering to please me.”
Mildred did not hesitate a moment. She was carried away by the magnificence of the idea, the glory of the scene and the earnest beauty of his eyes, and in an ecstasy of rapture she cried, “I do believe.”
“Yes,” said Harold, “you do. If you hadn’t believed now you never would have. I wonder what would have happened to me.”
“More, more!” cried Mildred, who was beginning to find her words. “How could you smile! how could you be so calm! O marvellous idea! that your soul has lived before! I should run about, shriek, sing. Marvellous! overwhelming! How can you be so calm! The mystery! and the poetry, oh, the poetry! How can you support it? Oh, speak again!”
“I don’t see any poetry,” said Harold. “It just has happened, that’s all. I lived here before.”
“You are a Greek! You have been a Greek! Oh, why do you not die when you remember it.”
“Why should I? I might have died if you hadn’t believed me. It’s nothing to remember.”
“Aren’t you shattered, exhausted?”
“No: I’m awfully fit. I know that you must have believed me now or never. Remembering has made me so strong. I see myself to the bottom now.”
“Marvellous! marvellous!” she repeated.
He leapt up on to the stone beside her. “You’ve believed me. That’s the only thing that’s marvellous. The rest’s nothing.” He flung his arms round her, and embraced her—an embrace very different from the decorous peck by which he had marked the commencement of their engagement. Mildred, clinging to him, murmured “I do believe you,” and they gazed without flinching into each other’s eyes.
Harold broke the silence, saying, “How very happy life is going to be.”
But Mildred was still wrapped in the glamour of the past. “More! more!” she cried, “tell me more! What was the city like—and the people in it? Who were you?”
“I don’t remember yet—and it doesn’t matter.”
“Harold, keep nothing from me! I will not breathe a word. I will be silent as the grave.”
“I shall keep nothing. As soon as I remember things, I will tell them. And why should you tell no one? There’s nothing wrong.”
“They would not believe.”
“I shouldn’t mind. I only minded about you.”
“Still—I think it is best a secret. Will you agree?”
“Yes—for you may be right. It’s nothing to do with the others. And it wouldn’t interest them.”
“And think—think hard who you were.”
“I do just remember this—that I was a lot greater then than I am now. I’m greater now than I was this morning, I think—but then!”
“I knew it! I know it from the first! I have known it always. You have been a king—a king! You ruled here when Greece was free!”
“Oh! I don’t mean that—at least I don’t remember it. And was I a Greek?”
“A Greek!” she stammered indignantly. “Of course you were a Greek, a Greek of Acragas.”
“Oh, I daresay I was. Anyhow it doesn’t matter. To be believed! Just fancy! you’ve believed me. You needn’t have, but you did. How happy life is!”
He was in an ecstasy of happiness in which all time except the present had passed away. But Mildred had a tiny thrill of disappointment. She reverenced the past as well.
“What do you mean then, Harold, when you say you were greater?”
“I mean I was better, I saw better, heard better, thought better.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mildred fingering her watch. Harold, in his most prosaic manner, said they must not keep the carriage waiting, and they regained the path.
The tide of rapture had begun to ebb away from Mildred. His generalities bored her. She longed for detail, vivid detail, that should make the dead past live. It was of no interest to her that he had once been greater.
“Don’t you remember the temples?”
“No.”
“Nor the people?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t you at all recollect what century you lived in?”
“How on earth am I to know!” he laughed.
Mildred was silent. She had hoped he would have said the fifth BC—the period in which she was given to understand that the Greek race was at its prime. He could tell her nothing; he did not even seem interested, but began talking about Mrs. Popham’s present.
At last she thought of a question he might be able to answer. “Did you also love better?” she asked in a low voice.
“I loved very differently.” He was holding back the brambles to prevent them from tearing her dress as he spoke. One of the thorns scratched him on the hand. “Yes, I loved better too,” he continued, watching the little drops of blood swell out.
“What do you mean? Tell me more.”
“I keep saying I don’t know any more. It is fine to remember that you’ve been better than you are. You know, Mildred, I’m much more worth you than I’ve ever been before. I do believe I am fairly great.”
“Oh!” said Mildred, who was getting bored.
They had reached the temple of Concord, and he retrieved his tactlessness by saying, “After all I’m too happy to go back yet. I love you too much. Let’s rest again.”
They sat down on the temple steps, and at the end of ten minutes Mildred had forgotten all her little disappointments, and only remembered this mysterious sleep, and his marvellous awakening. Then, at the very height of her content, she felt, deep down within her, the growth of a new wonder.
“Harold, how is it you can remember?”
“The lid can’t have been put on tight last time I was sent out.”
“And that,” she murmured, “might happen to anyone.”
“I should think it has—to lots. They only want reminding.”
“It might happen to me.”
“Yes.”
“I too,” she said slowly, “have often not been able to sleep. Oh, Harold, is it possible?”
“What?”
“That I have lived before.”
“Of course it is.”
“Oh, Harold, I too may remember.”
“I hope you will. It’s wonderful to remember a life better than this one. I can’t explain how happy it makes you: there’s no need to try or to worry. It’ll come if it is coming.”
“Oh, Harold! I am remembering!”
He grasped her hands crying, “Remember only what is good. Remember that you were greater than you are now! I would give my life to help you.”
“You have helped me,” she cried, quivering with excitement. “All fits together. I remember all. It is not the first time I have known you. We have met before. Oh, how often have I dimly felt it. I felt it when I watched you sleeping—but then I didn’t understand. Our love is not new. Here in this very place when there was a great city full of gorgeous palaces and snow-white marble temples, full of poets and music, full of marvellous pictures, full of sculptures of which we can hardly dream, full of noble men and noble thoughts, bounded by the sapphire sea, covered by the azure sky, here in the wonderful youth of Greece did I speak to you and know you and love you. We walked through the marble streets, we led solemn sacrifices, I armed you for the battle, I welcomed you from the victory. The centuries have parted us, but not forever. Harold, I too have lived at Acragas!”
Round the corner swept the Peaslakes’ carriage, full of excited occupants. He had only time to whisper in her ear, “No Mildred darling, you have not.”