‘We are together--always,’ she said, her voice rich with the knowledge of some unfathomable experience, ‘for separation is temporary merely, forging new links in the ancient chain of lives that binds our hearts eternally together.’ She looked like one who has conquered the adversity Time brings, by accepting it. ‘You speak of the Present as though our souls were already fitted now to bid it stay, needing no further fashioning. Looking only to the Future, you forget our ample Past that has made us what we are. Yet our Past is here and now, beside us at this very moment. Into the hollow cups of weeks and months, of years and centuries, Time pours its flood beneath our eyes. Time is our schoolroom.... Are you so soon afraid? Does not separation achieve that which companionship never could accomplish? And how shall we dare eternity together if we cannot be strong in separation first?’
I listened while a flood of memories broke up through film upon film and layer upon layer that had long covered them.
‘This Present that we seem to hold between our hands,’ she went on in that earnest, distant voice, ‘_is_ our moment of sweet remembrance that you speak of, of renewal, perhaps, too, of reconciliation--a fleeting instant when we may kiss again and say good-bye, but with strengthened hope and courage revived. But we may not stay together finally--we _cannot_--until long discipline and pain shall have perfected sympathy and schooled our love by searching, difficult tests, that it may last for ever.’
I stretched my arms out dumbly to take her in. Her face shone down upon me, bathed in an older, fiercer sunlight. The change in her seemed in an instant then complete. Some big, soft wind blew both of us ten thousand miles away. The centuries gathered us back together.
‘Look, rather, to the Past,’ she whispered grandly, ‘where first we knew the sweet opening of our love. Remember, if you can, how the pain and separation have made it so worth while to continue. And be braver thence.’
She turned her eyes more fully upon my own, so that their light persuaded me utterly away with her. An immense new happiness broke over me. I listened, and with the stirrings of an ampler courage. It seemed I followed her down an interminable vista of remembrance till I was happy with her among the flowers and fields of our earliest pre-existence.