Chapter XX: Through the Centuries

As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg, so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last tower in 1880.

During the journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen, Nitocris, reclining comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them not only extraordinary, but also very curious. She had already learnt that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the border had been passed, was Will: but Will of a far more intense and exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to action on the lower plane. There was naturally something that seemed extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like “the airy fabric of a vision,” and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages, or the future from the womb of unborn things.

But to her, at least at first, the strangest part of the new revelation was this: When her will had carried her across the confines of the tri-dimensional world, and she saw the centuries marshalled and motionless before her, she felt not the slightest sense of wonder or awe. She was simply a being apart, moving along their ranks and passing them in review, herself unseen and unknown save by that other being who, in this state, was no longer her father or even her friend, but merely a companion endowed with power and intelligence equal to her own. Her human hopes and fears and loves and passions had, as it were, been left behind. The men and things she saw were absolutely real to her, as they had been to the men of other days, or would be in days to come; but she herself was a pure Intelligence which saw and acted and thought with perfect clearness, but with absolutely no feeling save that of intellectual interest.

She saw armies meet in the shock of battle without a thrill of fear or horror; towns and cities roared up to the unheeding heavens in flame and smoke, and left her standing unmoved amidst their ruins; she heard the screams of agony that rang through the torture chambers without a quiver, and watched the long, pale lines of the martyrs to what in the earth-life was called Religion pass to the stake without a quiver of pity or a thrill of disgust. She stood face to face with the great ones of the earth who have graven their names deep upon the tablets of Time without reverence or admiration; and she witnessed the most heroic deeds and the most atrocious crimes with neither respect for the one nor hatred for the other.

Human history was in her eyes merely a logical sequence of necessary events, neither good nor bad in themselves, but only as they were viewed from this standpoint or that, by the oppressor or the oppressed, the slayer or the slain, the robber or the robbed, the governor or the governed. She learned that human emotion is merely a matter of time and space. One century does not feel the loves and hates of another, and the sorrows of Here have no real sympathy with the sufferings of There. Beyond the Border all these were merely matters of intense intellectual interest.

But when she returned to the temporal life the memory of them was marvellous and terrible. Her heart throbbed with pity and burned with righteous anger. Horror seemed to take hold of her soul and shake it with earthquake shudders when she thought that what she had seen but a few time-moments ago had really come to pass; and she longed for the power to show all this to the men and women of her own passing day, and bid them have done with the poor, shadowy images of themselves, which, had they really been gods, would have made of human life something better and happier and nobler than the ghastly tragedy which, as she had seen with her own eyes, it had been. But she knew that such a power was not hers. She, like her father, had, through the toil and strife and stress of many lives of mingled good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, won her way to the Perfect Knowledge; and so she knew that all these poor kings and slaves, conquerors and conquered, torturers and tortured, were all doing the same thing, were all groping their way through the shadows and the night towards the dawn and the light, through the hell of ignorance to the heaven of knowledge.

And now, too, since the Wisdom of the Ages was hers, she saw that over all the vast, weltering swarm of struggling immortals, hung the inevitable decree of silent, impersonal destiny. “As ye live, so shall ye die; as ye end, so shall ye begin again--in knowledge or ignorance, in good or evil, life after life, death after death, world without end.”

It was clear to her now why “some are born to honour and some to dishonour”: some to happiness and some to misery, each in his or her degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high he might stand in his own or others’ sight, carried the canker of past misdeeds in his heart. Standing, as she now did, in the midway of the present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward in the life of to-day, and the dishonest rich and powerful sitting in the high places of to-day cast down into the gutterways of to-morrow. Life had ceased to be a riddle to her now.

What with their halts at Ostend, Cologne, and Hamburg, the thirty-three-hour journey lengthened itself out very pleasantly into a week; and so, when the famous city on the Sound was reached, they were as fresh and unfatigued as they were on the morning that they left “The Wilderness.” Of course, they put up at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and here they enjoyed themselves quietly for four days, for of all European capitals, Copenhagen is one of the pleasantest in which to idle a few fine summer days away.

On the evening of the fourth day they were just sitting down to their table by one of the windows overlooking the Oestergade when Nitocris happened to look up towards the door through which the diners were trickling in an irregular stream of well-dressed men and women. For a moment her eyes became fixed. Then she bent her head over the table, and said:

“Dad, there is Prince Oscarovitch. I wonder what he is doing here? He is alone: please go and ask him to join us. I will tell you why afterwards.”

They exchanged glances, and the Professor got up and went towards the door, while his daughter got through a considerable amount of hard thinking in a very short time. She was, of course, perfectly conversant with his share in the Zastrow affair, so far as her father had yet gone with it; but she determined that when Copenhagen had gone to sleep that night they would cross the Border and pay a visit to the Castle of Trelitz at the time of the tragedy, and follow it out as far as it had gone.

It has already been shown that on her first meeting with the Prince she conceived an aversion from him which was then inexplicable save by the ordinary theory of natural antipathy: but now she knew that she had been Nitocris, Queen of Egypt, when he was Menkau-Ra, the Lord of War, who would have forced her to wed him by the might and terror of the sword, and the will of a blind and blood-intoxicated populace. She had hated him then even to death, and now she hated him still in life; wherefore she desired to make his closer acquaintance on the earth-plane on which they had met once more after many lives.

As he had been in those far-off days, so he was now, a splendid specimen of aristocratic humanity. Many eyes had followed her as she had walked to her table, but there were more people in the room now, and as the Prince walked towards her beside the famous Professor who had puzzled all the mathematicians of Europe, the whole crowd of guests was looking at nothing but these three.

“This is indeed good fortune, Miss Marmion, and as good as it is unexpected--which, perhaps makes it all the better! Who would have thought of finding you in Copenhagen?” he said, as he bowed low over her hand.

“If there is any reason at all for it, Prince, it is that my father and I always like to take our holidays at irregular times and in unexpected places: by which, I mean places where we do not expect to meet all our acquaintances,” she replied, as she sat down. “I think we manage to bore each other quite enough in London, and we like each other all the better when we meet again.”

“Is not that rather an ungracious speech, Niti, seeing that one of the said acquaintances has only just chanced to join us?” said the Professor mildly.

“You mean as regards the Prince?” she laughed. “Certainly not. His Highness is hardly an acquaintance--yet. You know we have only had the pleasure of meeting him once: and then, of course, I said all our acquaintances. There might be exceptions.”