"'At last, O long sought. At last upon the earth.' … 'Not in dreams.' … 'Follow, follow.' … 'Far away you will find and remember.' … 'Yes, there the gates will be opened, the gates of the past and the future.'
"At this point the vision, or whatever you like to call it, came to a prosaic end, for a policeman arrived, eyed me suspiciously, and said:
"'Move on, young gentleman. This ain't no place for the likes of you on a cold night. Go home and sleep it off.'
"I remember that I burst out laughing; the contrast was so ridiculous. Then because my heart was full of a strange joy, such as is described by the old mystics who think that they have been in communication with things Divine, I presented that policeman with half a sovereign, wished him good night, walked away quietly to my rooms in St. James's Place, and went to bed a changed man."
"What do you mean by 'a changed man'?" I asked.
"Oh, only that I seemed different in every way. It was as though something had been torn, or a veil had been lifted from my eyes, so that now I saw all sorts of new things; at least the old things took on new aspects. From that moment, for example, I hated the dissipations which had attracted me. I acquired different and higher objectives; I came to know, what doubtless is true, that here in the world we are but wanderers lost in a fog which shuts off glorious prospects, divine realities, so that we can see little except dank weeds hanging from the rocks by which we feel our way, and pebbles shining in the wet beneath our feet. We make crowns of the weeds and fight for the bright pebbles, but the weeds wither, and the pebbles when they are dry prove to be but common slate. The dream woman that I had seen in Trafalgar Square showed me all this, and a great deal more. I was changed! I who had been a greedy caterpillar, devouring all that I could find, in that half– hour in Trafalgar Square became a chrysalis, and then was transformed into a butterfly."
"Most interesting!" I exclaimed, and with sincerity, for notwithstanding Arkle's fine words and metaphors which I found rather difficult to follow, this story did interest me very much. I didn't believe in the Trafalgar Square vision, but, as an American would say, I did hitch on to that transformation which, in our degree, most of us have experienced at one time or another, however impermanent its results may have proved. In some private Trafalgar Square of their own, nearly all have met the Ideal, or the Divine, and in its unearthly light have seen things high and strange; have seen also how petty and how foul are the objects of their temporal desire.
Half an hour later it is probable that they will have forgotten the former, and be hunting the latter even more fiercely than before. Still, they have had the vision, and those to whom such visions came may always hope. They have learned that there are gates in the gross wall that is built about their souls….
"Most interesting," I repeated, "but how about the lady to whom you were engaged? Did you tell her what you had seen and heard in Trafalgar Square?"
"No, I didn't, at least not all of it. The only difference was that whereas I had merely disliked her before, afterwards I detested her, that is, as a prospective matrimonial partner. However, I may add at once that this engagement affair cleared itself up in a most satisfactory fashion. The lady's aversion to me was even more real than mine to her. Also she was rude enough to believe and to tell me she believed that I was mad."
"That was pretty straight, though if you talked to her—well, as you are doing now, not altogether surprising," I said.
"Quite straight, but I respected her for it. Lastly, as I have said, there was a gentleman in the case. Now can you guess what happened?"
"Of course. You broke it off, that's all."
"Not a bit. We didn't dare, for the row in both families would have been too terrific. No, my hated rival was impecunious like my beloved betrothed, whereas I had a good lump of cash at call, which my father had left me. So I lent him £5000—it's more polite to call it lent—and they bolted to Florida to start orange–farming. I need not say that I proclaimed myself broken–hearted and everyone sympathized with me to my face and laughed at me behind my back, almost as heartily as I laughed myself behind their backs. Meanwhile, I studied Arabic like anything, which amused me, as I am rather quick at languages, and took long midnight walks to develop my spiritual side."
"I say," I said doubtfully, "you are not making fun of me, are you, Mr. Arkle?"
"Certainly not. At least I think I am not, for those Abanda have killed my sense of humour. But you shall judge by the sequel. To cut it short, I did seem to come more and more in touch with that lady of the lake. Yes, in those starlit midnight hours she appeared to talk to me more and more as my Arabic improved, and to tell me all sorts of curious things about the past, the very distant past, I gathered, in which we had been intimately connected and taken part in various adventures, some of them tragic and all in their way striking and even beautiful. I will skip these, for what is the use of repeating a lot of old love–affairs that apparently took place in remote ages, only saying that in the last of them at some indefinite date she brought about my death and her own, that we might go to heaven together or rather to a certain star, a crime for which, according to the visions, she is most anxious to make amends. That is why, still according to the visions, she must live in the distant spot where it happened, for as I understand, the experiment did not succeed—I mean that we never got to that star."
"Look here," I said, "all this sounds rather like a nightmare, doesn't it?"
Yet as the words passed my lips, I remembered Kaneke's yarn about his goddess in the lake who was supposed to have descended from heaven and fallen in love with a man. Surely he said that she had killed this man to take him back to heaven with her, which was not allowed. Therefore she waited in the lake until he appeared again, after which I did not gather what was to happen. The legend was of a sort that is not unknown in Central and West Africa, but really it was odd to hear another version of it from Arkle's lips.
"Very much like a nightmare," he assented cheerfully. "Being a doctor I came to the same conclusion, as did some of the most eminent of my profession whom I consulted. One of them asked me if I had spotted the locale of these strange happenings. I replied, yes, somewhere near some mountains in the central parts of Africa that were called Ruga, where, as I believed, no white man had ever been, though I had found them marked on an old map. 'Well,' he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, 'if I were you I should go and look for the lady there. At the worst you will get some good big– game shooting, and I have noticed that people with hallucinations never come to any harm.'
"I thought this an excellent idea, and shortly afterwards I began to work upon my uncle to send me out to Africa to advance the trade interests of the firm. In the end he and the other partners agreed; you see they sympathized with me very much on my matrimonial fiasco and thought that a change would do me good.
"'In such a case,' said my uncle, who has a gift for platitude, 'new countries, new customs, and new faces are most helpful.' I sighed and shook my head, but said that I hoped so."
"How long have you been here?" I asked.
"Oh, I landed on the West Coast about three years ago. It took me a long while to find those confounded Ruga Mountains, and I met with many adventures on the way. However, at last I fetched up all right with about half a dozen coast servants, good men all of them, for the rest of the crowd had bolted at one time or another. And now I come to the interesting part of the story, if you care to hear it."