The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences

I accepted this flattery I know not why, for I soon became aware that I was no more than others, and that the same words were said to every new-comer. Yet my heart was elated, and I threw myself into all that was set before me. But there was always in my mind an expectation that presently the music and the dancing would cease, and the tables be withdrawn, and a pause come. At one of the feasts I was placed by the side of a lady very fair and richly dressed, but with a look of great weariness in her eyes. She turned her beautiful face to me, not with any show of pleasure, and there was something like compassion in her look. She said, 'You are very tired,' as she made room for me by her side.

'Yes,' I said, though with surprise, for I had not yet acknowledged that even to myself. 'There is so much to enjoy. We have need of a little rest.'

'Of rest!' said she, shaking her head, 'this is not the place for rest.'

'Yet pleasure requires it,' I said, 'as much as—' I was about to say pain; but why should one speak of pain in a place given up to pleasure? She smiled faintly and shook her head again. All her movements were languid and faint; her eyelids drooped over her eyes. Yet when I turned to her, she made an effort to smile. 'I think you are also tired,' I said.

At this she roused herself a little. 'We must not say so; nor do I say so. Pleasure is very exacting. It demands more of you than anything else. One must be always ready—'

'For what?'

'To give enjoyment and to receive it.' There was an effort in her voice to rise to this sentiment, but it fell back into weariness again.

'I hope you receive as well as give,' I said.

The lady turned her eyes to me with a look which I cannot forget, and life seemed once more to be roused within her, but not the life of pleasure; her eyes were full of loathing and fatigue and disgust and despair. 'Are you so new to this place,' she said, 'and have not learned even yet what is the height of all misery and all weariness; what is worse than pain and trouble, more dreadful than the lawless streets and the burning mines, and the torture of the great hall and the misery of the lazar-house—'

'Oh, lady,' I said, 'have you been there?'

She answered me with her eyes alone; there was no need of more. 'But pleasure is more terrible than all,' she said; and I knew in my heart that what she said was true.

There is no record of time in that place. I could not count it by days or nights; but soon after this it happened to me that the dances and the music became no more than a dizzy maze of sound and sight which made my brain whirl round and round, and I too loathed what was spread on the table, and the soft couches, and the garlands, and the fluttering flags and ornaments. To sit forever at a feast, to see forever the merrymakers turn round and round, to hear in your ears forever the whirl of the music, the laughter, the cries of pleasure! There were some who went on and on, and never seemed to tire; but to me the endless round came at last to be a torture from which I could not escape. Finally, I could distinguish nothing,—neither what I heard nor what I saw; and only a consciousness of something intolerable buzzed and echoed in my brain. I longed for the quiet of the place I had left; I longed for the noise in the streets, and the hubbub and tumult of my first experiences. Anything, anything rather than this! I said to myself; and still the dancers turned, the music sounded, the bystanders smiled, and everything went on and on. My eyes grew weary with seeing, and my ears with hearing. To watch the new-comers rush in, all pleased and eager, to see the eyes of the others glaze with weariness, wrought upon my strained nerves. I could not think, I could not rest, I could not endure. Music forever and ever,—a whirl, a rush of music, always going on and on; and ever that maze of movement, till the eyes were feverish and the mouth parched; ever that mist of faces, now one gleaming out of the chaos, now another, some like the faces of angels, some miserable, weary, strained with smiling, with the monotony, and the endless, aimless, never-changing round. I heard myself calling to them to be still—to be still! to pause a moment. I felt myself stumble and turn round in the giddiness and horror of that movement without repose. And finally, I fell under the feet of the crowd, and felt the whirl go over and over me, and beat upon my brain, until I was pushed and thrust out of the way lest I should stop the measure. There I lay, sick, satiate, for I know not how long,—loathing everything around me, ready to give all I had (but what had I to give?) for one moment of silence. But always the music went on, and the dancers danced, and the people feasted, and the songs and the voices echoed up to the skies.

How at last I stumbled forth I cannot tell. Desperation must have moved me, and that impatience which after every hope and disappointment comes back and back,—the one sensation that never fails. I dragged myself at last by intervals, like a sick dog, outside the revels, still hearing them, which was torture to me, even when at last I got beyond the crowd. It was something to lie still upon the ground, though without power to move, and sick beyond all thought, loathing myself and all that I had been and seen. For I had not even the sense that I had been wronged to keep me up, but only a nausea and horror of movement, a giddiness and whirl of every sense. I lay like a log upon the ground.

When I recovered my faculties a little, it was to find myself once more in the great vacant plain which surrounded that accursed home of pleasure,—a great and desolate waste upon which I could see no track, which my heart fainted to look at, which no longer roused any hope in me, as if it might lead to another beginning, or any place in which yet at the last it might be possible to live. As I lay in that horrible giddiness and faintness, I loathed life and this continuance which brought me through one misery after another, and forbade me to die. Oh that death would come,—death, which is silent and still, which makes no movement and hears no sound! that I might end and be no more! Oh that I could go back even to the stillness of that chamber which I had not been able to endure! Oh that I could return,—return! to what? To other miseries and other pain, which looked less because they were past. But I knew now that return was impossible until I had circled all the dreadful round; and already I felt again the burning of that desire that pricked and drove me on,—not back, for that was impossible. Little by little I had learned to understand, each step printed upon my brain as with red-hot irons: not back, but on, and on—to greater anguish, yes; but on, to fuller despair, to experiences more terrible,—but on, and on, and on. I arose again, for this was my fate. I could not pause even for all the teachings of despair.

The waste stretched far as eyes could see. It was wild and terrible, with neither vegetation nor sign of life. Here and there were heaps of ruin, which had been villages and cities; but nothing was in them save reptiles and crawling poisonous life and traps for the unwary wanderer. How often I stumbled and fell among these ashes and dust-heaps of the past! Through what dread moments I lay, with cold and slimy things leaving their trace upon my flesh! The horrors which seized me, so that I beat my head against a stone,—why should I tell? These were nought; they touched not the soul. They were but accidents of the way.

At length, when body and soul were low and worn out with misery and weariness, I came to another place, where all was so different from the last that the sight gave me a momentary solace. It was full of furnaces and clanking machinery and endless work. The whole air round was aglow with the fury of the fires; and men went and came like demons in the flames, with red-hot melting metal, pouring it into moulds and beating it on anvils. In the huge workshops in the background there was a perpetual whir of machinery, of wheels turning and turning, and pistons beating, and all the din of labor, which for a time renewed the anguish of my brain, yet also soothed it,—for there was meaning in the beatings and the whirlings. And a hope rose within me that with all the forces that were here, some revolution might be possible,—something that would change the features of this place and overturn the worlds. I went from workshop to workshop, and examined all that was being done, and understood,—for I had known a little upon the earth, and my old knowledge came back, and to learn so much more filled me with new life. The master of all was one who never rested, nor seemed to feel weariness nor pain nor pleasure. He had everything in his hand. All who were there were his workmen or his assistants or his servants. No one shared with him in his councils. He was more than a prince among them; he was as a god. And the things he planned and made, and at which in armies and legions his workmen toiled and labored, were like living things. They were made of steel and iron, but they moved like the brains and nerves of men. They went where he directed them, and did what he commanded, and moved at a touch. And though he talked little, when he saw how I followed all that he did, he was a little moved towards me, and spoke and explained to me the conceptions that were in his mind, one rising out of another, like the leaf out of the stem and the flower out of the bud. For nothing pleased him that he did, and necessity was upon him to go on and on.

'They are like living things,' I said; 'they do your bidding, whatever you command them. They are like another and a stronger race of men.'

'Men!' he said, 'what are men? The most contemptible of all things that are made,—creatures who will undo in a moment what it has taken millions of years, and all the skill and all the strength of generations to do. These are better than men. They cannot think or feel. They cannot stop but at my bidding, or begin unless I will. Had men been made so, we should be masters of the world.'

'Had men been made so, you would never have been,—for what could genius have done or thought?—you would have been a machine like all the rest.'

'And better so!' he said, and turned away; for at that moment, watching keenly as he spoke the action of a delicate combination of movements, all made and balanced to a hair's breadth, there had come to him suddenly the idea of something which made it a hundredfold more strong and terrible. For they were terrible, these things that lived yet did not live, which were his slaves and moved at his will. When he had done this, he looked at me, and a smile came upon his mouth; but his eyes smiled not, nor ever changed from the set look they wore. And the words he spoke were familiar words, not his, but out of the old life. 'What a piece of work is a man!' he said; 'how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?' His mind had followed another strain of thought, which to me was bewildering, so that I did not know how to reply. I answered like a child, upon his last word.

'We are dust no more,' I cried, for pride was in my heart,—pride of him and his wonderful strength, and his thoughts which created strength, and all the marvels he did; 'those things which hindered are removed. Go on; go on! you want but another step. What is to prevent that you should not shake the universe, and overturn this doom, and break all our bonds? There is enough here to explode this gray fiction of a firmament, and to rend those precipices, and to dissolve that waste,—as at the time when the primeval seas dried up, and those infernal mountains rose.'

He laughed, and the echoes caught the sound and gave it back as if they mocked it. 'There is enough to rend us all into shreds,' he said, 'and shake, as you say, both heaven and earth, and these plains and those hills.'

'Then why,' I cried in my haste, with a dreadful hope piercing through my soul—'why do you create and perfect, but never employ? When we had armies on the earth, we used them. You have more than armies; you have force beyond the thoughts of man, but all without use as yet.'

'All,' he cried, 'for no use! All in vain!—in vain!'

'O master!' I said, 'great and more great in time to come, why?—why?'

He took me by the arm and drew me close.

'Have you strength,' he said, 'to bear it if I tell you why?'

I knew what he was about to say. I felt it in the quivering of my veins, and my heart that bounded as if it would escape from my breast; but I would not quail from what he did not shrink to utter. I could speak no word, but I looked him in the face and waited—for that which was more terrible than all.

He held me by the arm, as if he would hold me up when the shock of anguish came. 'They are in vain,' he said, 'in vain—because God rules over all.'

His arm was strong; but I fell at his feet like a dead man.

How miserable is that image, and how unfit to use! Death is still and cool and sweet. There is nothing in it that pierces like a sword, that burns like fire, that rends and tears like the turning wheels. O life, O pain, O terrible name of God in which is all succor and all torment! What are pangs and tortures to that, which ever increases in its awful power, and has no limit nor any alleviation, but whenever it is spoken penetrates through and through the miserable soul? O God, whom once I called my Father! O Thou who gavest me being, against whom I have fought, whom I fight to the end, shall there never be anything but anguish in the sound of Thy great name?

When I returned to such command of myself as one can have who has been transfixed by that sword of fire, the master stood by me still. He had not fallen like me, but his face was drawn with anguish and sorrow like the face of my friend who had been with me in the lazar-house, who had disappeared on the dark mountains. And as I looked at him, terror seized hold upon me, and a desire to flee and save myself, that I might not be drawn after him by the longing that was in his eyes.

The master gave me his hand to help me to rise, and it trembled, but not like mine.

'Sir,' I cried, 'have not we enough to bear? Is it for hatred, is it for vengeance, that you speak that name?'

'O friend,' he said, 'neither for hatred nor revenge. It is like a fire in my veins; if one could find Him again!'

'You, who are as a god, who can make and destroy,—you, who could shake

His throne!'

He put up his hand. 'I who am His creature, even here—and still His child, though I am so far, so far—' He caught my hand in his, and pointed with the other trembling. 'Look! your eyes are more clear than mine, for they are not anxious like mine. Can you see anything upon the way?'

The waste lay wild before us, dark with a faintly-rising cloud, for darkness and cloud and the gloom of death attended upon that name. I thought, in his great genius and splendor of intellect, he had gone mad, as sometimes may be. 'There is nothing,' I said, and scorn came into my soul; but even as I spoke I saw—I cannot tell what I saw—a moving spot of milky whiteness in that dark and miserable wilderness, no bigger than a man's hand, no bigger than a flower. 'There is something,' I said unwillingly; 'it has no shape nor form. It is a gossamer-web upon some bush, or a butterfly blown on the wind.'

'There are neither butterflies nor gossamers here.'

'Look for yourself, then!' I cried, flinging his hand from me. I was angry with a rage which had no cause. I turned from him, though I loved him, with a desire to kill him in my heart, and hurriedly took the other way. The waste was wild; but rather that than to see the man who might have shaken earth and hell thus turning, turning to madness and the awful journey. For I knew what in his heart he thought; and I knew that it was so. It was something from that other sphere; can I tell you what? A child perhaps—O thought that wrings the heart!—for do you know what manner of thing a child is? There are none in the land of darkness. I turned my back upon the place where that whiteness was. On, on, across the waste! On to the cities of the night! On, far away from maddening thought, from hope that is torment, and from the awful Name!

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The above narrative, though it is necessary to a full understanding of the experiences of the Little Pilgrim in the Unseen, does not belong to her personal story in any way, but is drawn from the Archives in the Heavenly City, where all the records of the human race are laid up.