No More Learning

' Somebody saw the sick man stoop
and sever the head of the image from its body, and then fall as if he
had given himself a mortal wound, for he had filled it with his own
life. And then the vision changed and fluttered, and he was lying sick
again in the room up-stairs. He seemed to lie there a long time with
the man in the conical cap watching beside him, and then, I cannot
remember how, the evoker of spirits discovered that though he would in
part recover, he would never be well, and that the story had got abroad
in the town and shattered his good name. His pupils had left him and
men avoided him. He was accursed. He was a magician.

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.