Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (84 page)

Yet
behind
each
attempt,
and
despite
my
strongest
effort
to
deny
it, rose
always
the
ghost
of
an
expectant
dread—the
dread
that
before there
was
time
to
ask
a
single
one,
perhaps,
something
would
happen to
prevent,
something
to
render
replies
impossible,
something
rapid, sweet
and
terrible.
And
this
ghost
of
twenty-five
years
to
be
repaid
I could
not
lay,
it
waved
a
shroud,
as
it
were,
above
each
word
my
pencil traced.

Within
its
limitations,
none
the
less,
my
mind
worked
reasonably well,
though
the
difficulty
of
choosing
words
and
subject
were
too much
for
me.
The
subject
was
so
vast,
the
field
it
might
cover
so inexhaustible.
All
the
great
adventuring
Discoverers,
from
Buddha
to Christ,
I
remembered,
used
childish
local
parables
to
convey
something
they
themselves
knew
that
yet
lay
beyond
language,
beyond
any faculties
their
listeners
possessed.
How
might
I,
thus,
explain
to
a
dog, watching
me
turn
mere
pages,
that
I
am
deeply
immersed
in
the
soul-fortunes
of
a
dozen
living
characters?
And
how,
similarly,
could
I, the
dog
this
time,
ask
intelligently
about
a
superhuman
experience? I
fell
back,
at
last,
upon
questions
of
a
very
simple
kind.

I
would
ask
for
information
on
what
I
called
"man-in-the-street" matters,
questions
about
what
a
commonplace
mind
like
my
own would
like
to
know.
If
Mantravers
had
actually
changed
his
type
of consciousness
so
that
his
new
faculties
made
him
free
of
time
in
more than
our
one
dimension,
and
in
space
of
more
than
three,
what
could he
report
intelligibly
about
his
experiences?
Was
he
conscious,
for instance,
of
being
away
from
ordinary
London
life,
or
was
he
living both
lives
simultaneously,
one
life
parallal
to
the
other?
Was
there continuity
of
memory
and
personality,
was
the
duration
long
or
short and
what
did
he
do,
feel,
suffer
and
enjoy?
I
longed
to
know
whether his
experiences
and
reactions
in
this
state
of
"elsewhere
and
otherwise"
were
commensurable
with
our
three-dimensional
existence,
and while
I
knew
it
could
not
possibly
be
so,
I
had
this
burning
curiosity to
hear
what
he
might
say.
Did
he
look
forward
into
a
future
and back
into
a
past,
or
were
these
both
simultaneously
accessible
in
the sense
that
a
biography,
from
childhood
to
old
age,
lie
between
the covers
of
a
book,
for
the
reader
to
choose
any
period
he
will?
If,
too, the
future
was
accessible
to
him
now,
as
we
say,
could
he
thence
influence,
even
alter,
the
past?
Above
all,
I
longed
to
know
about
what, on
earth,
is
called
happiness.
Having
risen
above
the
world
of
effects which
is
human
knowledge,
into
the
world
of
causes,
which
is
reality, did
he
gain
satisfaction,
rest
for
the
spirit,
peace?