A Danse-Macabre

by Bernard Capes

 

A DANSE-MACABRE

BY BERNARD CAPES

WE had been talking fitfully, as the train sped on, of things suggested, perhaps, by that sense of volant instability with which a rapid journey in a third-class brake-van is wont to possess one—the mysteries of Life and Death, and the greater mystery of Life-in-Death, to wit. I had lately been reading Myers’s Human Personality, and my mind was full of Individualism, and Hypnotic Suggestion, and those fathomless strata of Subconsciousness which lie under a man as the forty mattresses lay under the True Princess, without obliterating the sensation of the single pea which, placed at the bottom, made its irritation felt through all. That was the rather frivolous vein in which I was disposed to discuss a weighty matter; but any mood that evokes antagonism, earns, if it can dissipate the monotony of a long railway journey, its own justification.

Carleon took it all much more seriously than I. He believed faithfully in the indestructibility of the Ego, and in its conscious continuance after Death. The something which ceased in one, he said, on the withdrawal of the vitalising principle, was that thing which, in life, not only directed our actions, functions and moods, but was our actions, functions and moods, so that for a body to die was merely for a body to become as meaningless as a steam-engine deprived of its steam. The essential influence had simply detached itself, like a crab from its shell, and gone elsewhere.

“When you come to work it out,” he said, “is not that steam pistons, boilers, cranks and all? The machinery is merely the inevitable expression of a force which is itself. Its parts are all made of steam, so to speak, and, when the steam goes, the parts constitute no more a steam-engine than they do a mouse-trap.”

“Rather a nullum simile, that, isn’t it?” I said. “It doesn’t seem quite to run on all fours.”

“Size is purely relative,” he answered. “Never forget that.”

“Are not you forgetting,” I said, “the fire that causes the steam?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I don’t undertake for a moment to define the living principle. Naturally, in all mundane philosophy we have to start from a given point. Who or what arbitrarily set that point it is idle to surmise. We know only that it was set this side of Chaos, by something that inhabited the other side.”

“Well, you say that the something in us is our functions. What happens to those? Must I continue to cough, sneeze, and the rest of it, in my disembodied state?”

“I see no reason to deny it. Yet other environments might very well induce other necessities.”

“But it is an external influence affecting certain bodily tissues that makes me sneeze?”

“Of course. Only the something is your bodily tissues. A dead man can’t sneeze.”

“How about people’s hair continuing to grow after death? Deprived of its Ego, you know, it cannot grow. It even ceases, according to your theory, to be hair at all.”

“I might challenge you to produce a single authentic instance of its having so grown. But grant that, on occasion, it does; is it not possible to conceive certain cells charged, not continuously but periodically, with the vital principle, and capable of surviving for an independent period on their last-acquired store.”

“M—well—yes, I suppose,” I said.

“Why, look here,” said Carleon. “You can charge a storage battery, can’t you, and detach it and work it until the charge is exhausted? Substitute hair-cells for the battery and the vital spark for the dynamo, and there you are. I don’t pretend to speak in terms of science, but only as an inquiring layman.”

“Very well,” I said. “Let’s touch upon another point—evolution.”

“Perfectly simple,” he answered. “The changes which occur in organic structure occur in obedience to the needs of the Ego. They are just as much the Ego after as before the change. Are you other than yourself because, being short-sighted, you stick an eyeglass in your eye?”

“I may stick it,” I said; “but no amount of pertinacity on my part will endow my myopic progeny with abnormal vision.”

I thought, honestly, that he talked a good deal of nonsense; yet I could find no better nonsense with which to floor him. Carleon was an odd, mystic creature, a little exotic, but magnetic. He perpetually attracted me, and only rarely repelled. Yet, as to that last, which of us has not a negative pole to his mind best left unturned towards his friends?

“Abnormal vision!” he repeated, somewhat abstractedly. “No. That is purely an accident of subconsciousness, not by any means a question of evolution.”

“You take me seriously,” I said. “Well, seriously, how do you dispose of your disembodied Ego? What becomes of him?”

“Ah!” Carleon shrugged his shoulders with a little deprecating smile. “He may be all around us in multitudes. It needs, as I say, the rare subconscious accident, the chance contact of subconscious affinities, to perceive him. Among all the æons, and all the once-living billions populating them, such meetings cannot be frequent. But they occur, when some part of you impinges upon some part of an ancient impression, inhabiting an Ego or Egos, which was once common to you both or all. If you do see what is called a ghost, you may be sure that some remote sympathy was shared between you and that apparition in a former existence.”

We had entered into a long, deep-sunk valley. It was nearing sunset time, and the ridges were all crested with a running fire of rays, as in some Titanic battle. One could have read in the hanging mists the drifting smoke from their guns. Carleon swept his hand through the sunbeam which came in at the window, thereby setting its motes gyrating as if they boiled.

“Accepting size as immaterial,” he said, “how do you not know that every one of these prismatic atoms is an Ego?”

I did not answer. Something in the twilight peace of the valley was beginning to hypnotise me. The slope of it on which I looked went up in a luminous haze, through which the purple swell of trees, the dim gold of quarries, the milky greenness of the grass showed all distinct but subdued to a phantasmal loveliness. Somehow there stole into my spirit a strange sense, born of that dreamy mental detachment, of its all being antiquely familiar to me—not in the local meaning alone. I might or might not have travelled that way before; the impression was borrowed from infinitely remoter distances. Absorbed by it, absorbed into it, I passed beyond my surroundings—forgot myself, forgot Carleon. I was roused by feeling the quick touch of his hand on my knee.

“Look!” he said.

He was gazing fixedly from his window; I turned to gaze from mine. We were running at the moment past a scattered line of trees—slender birches inter-thronged with darker thorns—which stood on the hillside; and, wreathing themselves around and about the congregated trunks in a glimmering fantastic dance, were a number of pallid forms. Mystic, infinitely graceful, but at first indeterminate, they took shape to my enthralled imagination as I stared—and were spirit-girls, beckoning, alluring, with white arms raised, and white robes shot with dim iridescences, clinging and floating.

I tried to murmur, “School-feast!” or some such monstrous explanation; the words stuck in my throat like a blasphemy.

And still, as we passed, the white shapes wove their paces, in and out, in and out, in silent loveliness. Like roses seen through mist, I began, I thought, to distinguish the unearthly sweetness of their faces—a gleam of smiling teeth, a flush of faint pink, the phantom blue of eyes that laughed and faded. But as they came they went, witcheries proffered only to be withdrawn. I seemed to hear old music sounding in my brain; somehow I was approaching a bourne of hills and mists long foundered in the deeps of memory; there was wonder in my heart and a great ecstasy of expectation—the train ran beyond the trees, and in an instant the dancers were gone.

Ceased; snatched out of being. I sat as if stunned for a moment; and then, as before, Carleon’s voice awakened me: “Look there!”

I flung myself beside him, and stared back the way we had come. A little darkling church stood on the hillside and all between it and the lower belt of trees was a crowded graveyard. The stones stood up or leaned awry in every fantastic pose—erect and sharp white, or tumbled and moss-grown—hundreds of them, and each stiffened to ‘attention,’ after that danse-macabre, at the ghostly word of command. It was the tree-trunks and those innumerable memento-moris which had woven between them, as we sped past, that fantastic optical illusion.

At least, so we were bound to suppose.

Or one may suppose, if one prefers it, that Imagination is the source of all being, and the true secret of the vitalising principle.

B. C.