LAMARA sat on a bench in the island garden, her hands folded in her lap. The bench was carved out of a piece of chalcedony, with soft orange-veins running through it, and bearing figures in high relief of little children tossing balls from one to another. The color was so adapted as to give the figures the hues of life; and if glanced at sidelong, one could fancy they had the movement and diversity of living beings. The bench was overshadowed by the level boughs of a tree, amid the dark, whispering leaves of which appeared globes of fruit that glowed and brightened as if by some innate quality; they were hidden intermittently as the breeze passed among them, and reappeared as buds, which blossomed and became fruit again. Wherever Lamara was, the fire of life seemed to be stimulated by the combined intensity and calm of her own being.
Up and down in the short pathway before her, Jack paced to and fro, restless as a high-strung horse galled by his tether. Lamara observed him with sympathy tinged with grave amusement.
He stooped before her at length, and resumed the conversation in which they had been engaged. “If it concerned only myself, it would be easy to be patient,” he expostulated. “But when a man loves a woman, and she is in danger, you might as well expect him to be dead and alive at the same moment! If I could only so much as see her—but how can I tell what may be happening to her at this moment, and me good for nothing here! There can be no possible use for me in the world except to protect her. You have the means, and you won’t give them to me! Why, even on my own earth I could use wings and weapons—and I ask nothing better! Argon is ready to help me if you give the word! But I don’t want to interfere with your laws or customs; let me go alone, as I am, and meet this robber with my bare hands. I’m not a Saturnian, and you wouldn’t be discredited by what I did. You got me out of that cave. Why should you stop there? Men where I come from have their own way of settling their quarrels, and I know no other! You’ve been kind to me, and I know how good and great you are; but it’s cruelty to keep me here! If you would speak the word, I know I could be on Tor in a moment! What right have you to refuse it?”
“My poor boy, it is you, not I, that prevents all you wish,” said Lamara gently.
“That’s hardest of all to hear!” he exclaimed. “I’d die to save her! Could I do more? And you tell me I prevent myself!”
“You can do more than die—you can live and be yourself,” she answered. “Sit beside me here for a little, Jack, and try to hear me.”
He fetched a deep breath, took his place on the bench, folded his arms, and compressed his lips. She patted his broad shoulder in a sisterly fashion and went on:
“There is a sort of rite here, come down to us from old times. We didn’t make it—it was given to us. When one of us has won the great victory, a halo appears over his head. It is the sign that he has entered into himself, and nothing can harm him afterward; and all nature is open to him and serves him.”
“The great victory? Over what? Let me try! I ask no better!”
“No evil can prevail over one who has overcome the ally of evil in himself,” said Lamara. “Dear Jack, no one, of himself, can really do anything. We see paradise before us, but we are kept from it by a wall, and we say we are shut out by some higher power. But the wall is ourselves, and we built it and placed it there. And not even the Spirit Himself, but only we ourselves, who raised it, can level it again and enter the divine garden.”
“But you said we, of ourselves, can do nothing.”
“Yes, and that is the truth! And yet it is the truth that we can do this, and when it is done we need do no more. All else is given to us freely.”
Jack gazed perplexedly at her.
“If you look at the sun, you will see darkness; but it is light,” she continued.
He shook his head despondently. “It’s too deep for me!”
“There is nothing else deeper,” she answered. “You know there is one God, and that He is life; and yet you see what you call life all round us—in these flowers and birds and the very earth, and in yourself; but if life be God, how can these things be alive, unless they are God? And you know they are not!”
“Can you tell me how?” he asked.
“I can tell you only that these things, you and I, are creatures which live and move by a life which is in them, and yet is not their own. And to be free to enter paradise, we must think life is our own, and act as if it were, and yet know that it is not. It is that knowing that is the great secret. For by that knowing, what is ourself is conquered and disappears, and the infinite self enters and fills its place. There are no more barriers or failures after that!”
“But that would mean that we are mere puppets, without freedom!”
“That is what wise men say,” said Lamara, with a friendly smile; “but children know it is otherwise. They know the difference between puppets and creatures.”
“I’m neither a child nor a wise man,” said Jack unhappily.
“Perhaps you are nearer a child than you suspect,” she rejoined. “You stand before the Third Gate, which is high and strong; but it opens at the right touch! If you were given power to overcome Torpeon, and to have Miriam for your own all your lives, but were told you must pay for it by seeing her a little less high and pure and happy than before, would you still take the power that was offered?”
After a pause: “No!” he said.
“Violence is evil, and evil in ourselves is the enemy’s hold upon us,” she rejoined.
“But Miriam has no thought of violence!”
“Have you not said that you and she were one? But come with me!” She rose, and he followed her along the winding path to the pavilion, which they entered by a side door. It was the first time he had seen the interior. Nothing, however, was changed except for the fountain, which, instead of presenting a succession of figures, as before, now fell in a wide sheet of pure water, with a smooth and even surface. A slab of black marble, behind it, gave a deep tone to the water, like that of a dark, still pool. A white effervescence of foam, creating a pleasant murmur, was formed by the impact of the fall in the basin. Lamara motioned to her companion to take his place beside her on the seat in front of the fall.
“I come here to hold communication with our people,” she remarked, “and sometimes with what lies beyond our own borders. Our planet is large, and has many inhabitants of many kinds, though all agree together; but they are divided, not into nations, as with you, but into societies, small or large, each composed of persons specially suited to one another. The societies, too, have their positions relative to one another, according to their functions and enlightenment, so that they can cooperate at need, as do the parts of our individual bodies. At such times they become mutually self-conscious; but in general, they are secluded in their proper boundaries or protected—even smaller groups or separate persons, if desired—by the veil of invisibility, which is our common heritage.”
Jack had observed the apparent scantiness of population on this vast globe, which was now explained. “I wouldn’t like to trust our people with such a faculty,” he said frankly. “Nobody would feel safe!”
“Your people are traveling another route than ours,” replied Lamara. “But they will reach and perhaps pass the degree in which we are. Among all the myriad myriads of worlds, no two are alike. You bear the burdens of many!”
“What an irresistible army you could raise!” he muttered. “You could conquer all the earths that surround the sun!”
Lamara laughed. “It would make me happier to help one man of another earth to conquer himself!” she answered. “But you may see an event which will show you, better than any words of mine, the fruit of such attempts and ambitions. But I didn’t bring you here for that!”
She was silent, and Jack was obscurely conscious of a tension in the atmosphere, more subtle than that of electricity, which strung his mental faculties to a high pitch. His attention was involuntarily drawn to the fountain.
“You have been deceived by a false mirror,” said Lamara; “now you shall be instructed by a true one. There is no magic here; the bending of the rays obeys a natural law. You will see the reflection of a reality which is taking place at this moment. But do not speak while it passes.”
As she ceased, the darkness of the mirror became light, and there was painted upon it a fleeting stream of strange sights which Jack’s eyes could not clearly interpret; the effect was as if they had leaped into space, and were passing through it with the speed of light. In a moment there had flashed across the surface the vision of an unimagined and formidable earth, ruddy and sinister; it was gone, and now appeared the interior of a room of severe but pleasing proportions, fitted with the tables and shelves of a laboratory. A woman sat at the table, with an instrument before her. She was in an attitude of deep meditation. Her face, as she sat thus, was fully revealed; but Jack had known her at the first glance. He made a sudden movement; but Lamara’s hand on his arm reminded him of the injunction, and he was mute.
Through the silent mediumship of Lamara, however, he was able to read the thoughts that were passing through Miriam’s mind as easily as he could discern her figure. He realized the potency of the machine, and followed the successive movements of her brain until her sudden resolve to reverse the magnet and precipitate the catastrophe. Her appeal to him at the supreme moment seemed to ring in his ears. He forgot everything except the overpowering impulse to arrest her hand, and he leaped to his feet with a passionate cry:
“No, no, beloved! Not that! Oh, God, protect her!”
The water mirror quivered, and was dissolved into broken strands of glittering spray. He staggered as he stood, staring wildly about him.
“The prayer was heard,” spoke Lamara’s tranquil voice. “But let her peril keep you mindful of your own! It is better for you as well as for her to trust in God than to the impious suggestion of your own heart!”
“A moment more and the whole globe on which she stood would have been shattered to atoms!” he groaned. “Oh, Miriam—Miriam!”
“Love is the greatest thing in the world,” said Lamara; “but if, for the sake of that supreme good, you work evil against another fellow creature—if you summon the demon to save the angel—the demon triumphs and the angel is withdrawn.”
“But to stand here helpless!” he groaned again, clenching his fists.
“No one is alone in the world; it may happen that a pygmy may succor a giant,” she replied. But she did not interpret the apolog.