Маргарет Олифант
The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences
'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!
* * * * *
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.
