Part 85

"O that I could connect myself in your mind with the shape I wore when I was last a living thing! No shape on earth, not either yours or Leah's or that of any child yet born to you both, is more beautiful to the eye that has learned how to see than the fashion of that lost face and body of mine.

"You wore the shape once, and so did your father and mother, for you were Martians. Leah was a Martian, and wore it too; there are many of them here--they are the best on earth, the very salt thereof. I mean to be the best of them all, and one of the happiest. Oh, help me to that!

"Barty, when I am a splendid son of yours or a sweet and lovely daughter, all remembrance of what I was before will have been wiped out of me until I die. But you will remember, and so will Leah, and both will love me with such a love as no earthly parents have ever felt for any child of theirs yet.

"Think of the poor loving soul, lone, wandering, but not lost, that will so trustfully look up at you out of those gleeful innocent eyes!

"How that soul has suffered both here and elsewhere you don't know, and never will, till the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed; and I am going to forget it myself for a few decades--sixty, seventy, eighty years perhaps; such happy years, I hope--with you for my father and Leah for my mother during some of them at least--and sweet grandchildren of yours, I hope, for my sons and daughters! Why, life to me now will be almost a holiday.

"Oh, train me up the way I should go! Bring me up to be healthy and chaste and strong and brave--never to know a mean ambition or think an ungenerous thought--never to yield to a base or unworthy temptation.

"If I'm a boy--and I want to be a boy very much (although, perhaps, a girl would be dearer to your heart)--don't let me be either a soldier or a sailor, however much I may wish it as a Josselin or a Rohan; don't bring me up to buy or sell like a Gibson, or deal in law like a Bletchley.

"Bring me up to invent, or make something useful, if it's only pickles or soap, but not to buy and sell them; bring me up to build or heal or paint or write or make music--to help or teach or please.

"If I'm a girl, bring me up to be as much like Leah as you can, and marry me to just such another as yourself, if you can find him. Whether I'm a girl or a boy, call me Marty, that my name may rhyme with yours.

"When my conscience re-embodies itself, I want it never to know another pang of self-reproach. And when I'm grown up, if you think it right to do so, tell me who and what I once was, that I may love you both the more; tell me how fondly I loved you when I was a bland and fleeting little animalcule, without a body, but making my home in yours--so that when you die I may know how irrevocably bound up together we must forever be, we three; and rejoice the more in your death and Leah's and my own. Teach me over again all I've ever taught you, Barty--over and over again!

"Alas! perhaps you don't believe all this! How can I give you a sign.

"There are many ways; but a law, of necessity inexorable, forbids it. Such little entity as I possess would cease to be; it was all but lost when I saved your life--and again when I told you that you were the beloved of Julia Royce. It would not do for us Martians to meddle with earthly things; the fat would soon be in the fire, I can tell you!

"Try and trust me, Barty, and give me the benefit of any doubt.

"You have work planned out for many years to come, and are now yourself so trained that you can do without me. You know what you have still to say to mankind; never write a line about which you are not sure.

"For another night or two you will be my host, and this splendid frame of yours my hostelry; on y est très bien. Be hospitable still for a little while--make the most of me; hug me tight, squeeze me warm!

"As soon as Leah is up and about and herself again you will know me no more, and no more feel the north.

"Ah! you will never realize what it is for me to bid you good-bye, my Barty, my Barty! All that is in your big heart and powerful brain to feel of grief belongs to me, now that you are fast asleep. And your genius for sorrow, which you have never really tested yet, is as great as any gift you possess.

"Happy Barty, who have got to forty years without sounding the great depths, and all through me! what will you do without your poor devoted unknown Martia to keep watch over you and ward--to fight for you like a wild-cat, if necessary?

"Leah must be your wild-cat now. She has it in her to be a tigress when you are concerned, or any of her children! Next to you, Leah is the darling of my heart; for it's your heart I make use of to love her with.

"I want you to tell the world all about your Martia some day. They may disbelieve, as you do; but good fruit will come of it in the future. Martians will have a freer hand with you all, and that will be a good thing for the earth; they were trained in a good hard school--they are the Spartans of our universe.

"Such things will come to pass, before many years are over, as are little dreamt of now, and all through your wanting to swallow that dose of cyanide at No. 36 Rue des Ursulines Blanches, and my having the gumption to prevent you!

"It's a good seed that we have sown, you and I. It was not right that this beautiful planet should go much longer drifting through space without a single hope that is not an illusion, without a single hint of what life should really be, without a goal.

"Why such darkness under so bright a sun! such blindness to what is so patent! such a deaf ear to the roaring of that thunderous harmony which you call the eternal silence!--you of the earth, earthy, who can hear the little trumpet of the mosquito so well that it makes you fidget and fret and fume all night, and robs you of your rest. Then the sun rises and frightens the mosquitoes away, and you think that's what the sun is for and are thankful; but why the deuce a mosquito should sting you, you can't make out!--mystery of mysteries!

"At the back of your brain is a little speck of perishable matter, Barty; it is no bigger than a needle's point, but it is bigger in you than in anybody else I know, except in Leah; and in your children it is bigger still--almost as big as the point of a pin!

"If they pair well, and it is in them to do so if they follow their inherited instinct, their children and their children's children will have that speck still bigger. When that speck becomes as big as a millet-seed in your remote posterity, then it will be as big as in a Martian, and the earth will be a very different place, and man of earth greater and even better than the Martian by all the greatness of his ampler, subtler, and more complex brain; his sense of the Deity will be as an eagle's sense of the sun at noon in a cloudless tropical sky; and he will know how to bear that effulgence without a blink, as he stands on his lonely summit, ringed by the azure world.

"Indeed, there will be no more Martians in Mars by that time; they are near the end of their lease; all good Martians will have gone to Venus, let us hope; if not, to the Sun itself!

"Man has many thousands of years before him yet ere his little ball of earth gets too cold for him; the little speck in his brain may grow to the size of a pea, a cherry, a walnut, an egg, an orange! He will have in him the magnetic consciousness of the entire solar system, and hold the keys of time and space as long and as far as the sun shines for us all--and then there will be the beginning of everything. And all through that little episode in the street of those White Ursulines! And the seed of Barty and Leah will overflow to the uttermost ends of the earth, and finally blossom and bear fruit for ever and ever beyond the stars.

"What a beginning for a new order of things! what a getting up-stairs! what an awakening! what an annunciation!