No More Learning

The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white
and awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, 'All my life I
have seen myself in dreams making a man by some means like that. When
I was a child I was always thinking out contrivances for galvanizing
a corpse into life. ' Presently he said, 'Perhaps my bad health in
this life comes from that experiment. ' I asked if he had read
_Frankenstein_, and he answered that he had. He was the only one of us
who had, and he had taken no part in the vision.


III

Then I asked to have some past life of mine revealed, and a new
evocation was made before the tablet full of little squares. I cannot
remember so well who saw this or that detail, for now I was interested
in little but the vision itself. I had come to a conclusion about the
method. I knew that the vision may be in part common to several people.

A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms. There
was nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected.
The man came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of
it, where a ceremony was taking place. There were six girls dressed
in white, who took from the altar some yellow object--I thought it was
gold, for though, like my acquaintance, I was told not to see, I could
not help seeing.
Somebody else thought that it was yellow flowers, and
I think the girls, though I cannot remember clearly, laid it between
the man's hands. He went out after a time, and as he passed through
the great hall one of us, I forget whom, noticed that he passed over
two gravestones. Then the vision became broken, but presently he stood
in a monk's habit among men-at-arms in the middle of a village reading
from a parchment. He was calling villagers about him, and presently
he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for some long voyage. The
vision became broken again, and when we could see clearly they had
come to what seemed the Holy Land. They had begun some kind of sacred
labour among palm-trees. The common men among them stood idle, but the
gentlemen carried large stones, bringing them from certain directions,
from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious formality. The
evoker of spirits said they must be making some kind of masonic house.
His mind, like the minds of so many students of these hidden things,
was always running on masonry and discovering it in strange places.

We broke the vision that we might have supper, breaking it with some
form of words which I forget. When supper had ended the seeress cried
out that while we had been eating they had been building, and they
had built not a masonic house but a great stone cross. And now they
had all gone away but the man who had been in chain armour and two
monks we had not noticed before. 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.