No More Learning

He was standing against the cross,
his feet upon two stone rests a little above the ground, and his arms
spread out. He seemed to stand there all day, but when night came he
went to a little cell, that was beside two other cells. I think they
were like the cells I have seen in the Aran Islands, but I cannot be
certain. Many days seemed to pass, and all day every day he stood upon
the cross, and we never saw anybody there but him and the two monks.
Many years seemed to pass, making the vision flutter like a drift of
leaves before our eyes, and he grew old and white-haired, and we saw
the two monks, old and white-haired, holding him upon the cross. I
asked the evoker of spirits why the man stood there, and before he had
time to answer I saw two people, a man and a woman, rising like a dream
within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross. The evoker
of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his arms and
they were without hands. I thought of the two grave-stones the man in
chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying
that it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed
its circle, vanished.

It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the
other vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I
alone seemed to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it
were but a story? I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker
of spirits did not and could not. It arose in three minds, for I
cannot remember my acquaintance taking any part, and it rose without
confusion, and without labour, except the labour of keeping the mind's
eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen could have written it out.
It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems, that the author was in
eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of many such visions,
and though I was not to be convinced, though half convinced once or
twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of the word
life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite definite
relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They are,
perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described was
not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods and
events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.
At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can
remember my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of
imagination, of the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one
another by spoken words and by unspoken thought till they have become a
single intense, unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master,
I thought, but all the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a
moment what I must call a supernatural artist.


IV

Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had
got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why,
the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
over maybe'--or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
with what had appeared to be more than the mind's eye.

One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh.