Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (76 page)

".
.
.
too
much
for
him,
but
I'm
here
again
.
.
.
he's
got
me out
.
.
.
damned
idiot
to
come
.
.
.
just
going
back
into
sleep once
more
.
.
.
de
Frasne
refused
.
.
.
enjoying
his
boyhood
too much.
.
.
."

The
words
roared
past
me
like
a
clap
of
thunder,
but
the
heavy thump
I
heard
was
evidently
my
own
body
as
it
reached
the
floor.

"Hold
on—for
God's
sake
don't
forget—grip
your
memory—hold

on
to
that—tell
us
all
you
can
----
"
I
just
caught
in
Vronski's
voice
as

I
sank
into
oblivion.

Memory,
apparently,
is
but
a
clumsy,
ineffective
process.
No
man can
recall
accurately
the
details
of
the
accident
that
knocked
him out.
People
who
claim
to
remember
past
lives
usually
have
blank minds
about
what
happened
a
month
ago.
At
any
rate,
to
remember in
a
calm
moment
what
occurred
in
a
time
of
violent
stress
seems quite
impossible.
The
chief
detail
I
recalled
clearly
of
this
amazing scene
was
that
Mantravers
looked
exactly
the
same
as
when
I
had
last seen
him
four
years
before,
but
that
his
face
had
a
brilliant
whiteness
and
that
he
was
thin
to
emaciation.
Against
the
surrounding darkness
of
the
landing
he
looked
radiant,
he
shone,
he
rushed
at me
like
a
stTeam
of
lightning.
And
hence,
of
course,
the
blaze already
mentioned.

His
words,
the
words
of
Vronski
too,
held
equally
clear
and
definite, audible
memories
being
perhaps
more
vividly
impressed
than
visual ones.
His
return
to
our
three-dimensional
conditions
he
regarded
thus as
a
limitation
of
life
and
an
idiotic
one,
for
it
was
"falling
into
sleep again."
The
glimpse
accorded
me,
moreover,
of
the
conditions
he had
left,
conditions
possible
to
an
extended
consciousness,
were
"too much"
for
me,
while
de
Frasne,
being
in
different
time,
could
choose his
period
at
will,
and
preferred
his
"boyhood"
years
to
anything to
be
found
in
our
world.
Yet
of
those
few
pregnant
words
I
caught, it
was
the
word
"here"
that
impressed
me
most.
My
cousin
said "here"
as
though
he
had
never
left
or
gone
away.

It
was
later
that
I
was
able
to
note
and
label
other
changes.
.
.
.

If
his
clothing
betrayed
no
passage
of
the
years,
there
were
alterations
in
his
appearance
that
impressed
me
profoundly.
These
testified to
something,
though
what
this
something
was
I
leave
to
others cleverer
than
myself.
He
looked
no
older,
I
can
swear
to
that.
He still
wore,
indeed,
that
air
of
mighty
resistance
to
the
years
already mentioned
before
he
vanished,
that
extraordinary
retention
of
youth, as
though
the
usual
decay
had
hardly
touched
him
for
a
generation, as
though
this
natural
process
had
been
arrested
in
his
physical being.
And
this
resistance
to
time,
even
with
these
four
years
added, was
what
struck
me
as
his
radiant
face
rushed
at
me
in
that
empty house.
I
have
thought
later,
if
a
good
deal
later,
that
in
earlier
experiments
with
Vronski,
he
had
so
outdistanced
his
companion,
left him
so
far
behind,
that
intelligible
communication
between
the
two had
blocked.
Myself,
ignorant,
untrained,
sympathetic
and
open-minded,
he
could
make
contact
with,
while
Vronski,
stopped
at
a certain
point,
lay
out
of
his
reach.
.
.
.