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FIVE
Littleton - Percival
LITTLETON
After so long a time, Percival, we meet. It is strange that our
ways, upon earth associated and parallel, should in this other
world be so entirely divergent.
PERCIVAL
Why is it strange to you, Littleton ? The world in which we find
ourselves, is made, as we have both discovered, of the stuff of our
earthly dreams and the texture of our mortal character. Physically, our ways on earth were parallel. We walked together over
Cumberland mountains or watched the whole sea leap and
thunder titanically against the Cornwall cliffs. You were stroke
and I was cox in the same boat on the Isis. We bracketed always
for College honours and took the same class in the same subject
in the Tripos. Afterwards too, we entered Parliament side by side
in the same party and by an august and noble silence helped to
administer the affairs of our country. But what greater difference
could divide men than that which existed between our bodily frames and moral
constitutions? You, the tall, fair, robust descendant of the Vikings; I, dark, spare and short from the Welsh
mountains. You, the hard-headed, practical, successful lawyer;
I, the dilettante and connoisseur who knew something about
everything except my own affairs and could deal successfully with
every business that did not concern me.
LITTLETON
Yet we clung together; our tastes often lay in the same direction;
our affections were similar, and even our sins connected us.
PERCIVAL
We completed each other, I think. Our tastes were very dissimilarly similar. We read the same book; but you tore the essence
Page – 486
out of it, briefly, masterfully, and then flung it aside, satisfied that
you had made even the dead useful to you; I wound my way into
the heart of its meaning like a serpent and lay there coiled till I
had become one with it, then wound myself out again replete
and affectionately reminiscent of the soul that had given me
harbourage. As for our sins, let us not talk of them. We have
been too tediously familiar with them after death to cherish their
memory. But even there we differed. You sinned voraciously,
robustly, with gusto but with very little of feeling; I stumbled in
out of excess of emotion and could not recover myself because of
the vibrant intensity of my memories.
LITTLETON
Let me know what world harboured you since we parted.
PERCIVAL
Let me rather hear your experiences.
LITTLETON
The details fade in the retrospect and will not bear telling. Certain periods of mortal agony there were, each with its own
physical surroundings, that I long to forget but cannot. Some
of them recalled strangely, not in detail but in kind, Greek
Tartarus and Catholic Inferno. I was the prey of Harpies, I was
hunted and torn and devoured, I experienced the agonies of the
men I had sent to the deliberate and brutal torture of our jails or
beggared of their honour or their property. I renewed the successes of my life and sickened of their selfishness, boldness, hardness. Money became as red-hot metal in my hands and luxury
was a gnawing fire that embraced my body. I lingered in regions
where Love was not known and the souls of the inhabitants were
hard and strong as bronze, dry and delightless as the Sahara.
O Percival, Percival, when I go again upon earth, I shall know
love and execute mercy.
PERCIVAL
Had you no hours of respite, entered no regions of happiness ?
Page – 487
LITTLETON
That, I believe, is yet before me.
PERCIVAL
I too have had experiences similar to yours, though different in
their nature and quality. I have sickened of the repeated weakness and selfishness of my life, I have experienced in my soul the
sufferings of those I had injured. I can understand why the
Christians believed Hell to be eternal; it was a memory in the self
of the moral endlessness of those torments. But I had my release.
I have lived in Elysium, I have trod the fields of asphodel. And
in those happy experiences I have deepened the strength and
quality of my love, intensified the swiftness of my emotions,
refined and purified my taste and intellect.
LITTLETON
What is this world in which we meet ?
PERCIVAL
The heaven of comrades.
Page – 488
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