HE argument applies with equal force to the past," declaimed Mallett, in his autocratic way. "If we have lived before, it is part of the essential scheme of things that we should have no recollection of past lives, the memory of them would be unendurable."
Someone had to counter Mallett's dogmatism, and I looked at Graves, who nobly responded.
"I don't agree," he said. "It has always seemed to me a final argument against reincarnation, this oblivion of the past. If we progress we must progress by the accumulation of knowledge. What good is it to me to have suffered for faults in the past, if I have no consciousness left of the penalty paid; or what good to punish me in this life for the long forgotten faults of the past? Do you wait till next week to punish a child or a dog for its misdemeanours?"
Mallett cocked his legs on to the mantelpiece.
"Yours is the common confusion, my dear Graves," he said, "the confusion between memory and consciousness The first we can define for ordinary purposes, the second we cannot; but it is surely clear that the two concepts are not interdependent. At least it is demonstrable that consciousness can survive loss of memory. Wherefore it seems to me quite possible that temperament may be moulded through consciousness. As to your second instance, I admit that the laws of are outside my scope, but as regards your first, I say it is conceivable to account by this moulding of temperament through suffering or pleasure, for the strange characteristics that are born with
He had much more to say, and Graves and I combined to oppose him. Birch, like the dear fellow he is, said nothing. One could see how he wavered to the side of the last speaker. There is "nothing in Birch," we all say, but everyone likes him. Mallett is cursedly clever, and we put up with him.
"Well, Tommy," Mallett said at last, turning to Birch. "You've been the silent listener. Let's hear your judgment."
"It's frightfully difficult, of course," was Tommy's characteristic answer, and we all laughed. Tommy laughed with us; he was content to be popular, he did not strive to emulate the cleverness of Mallett, or even of Graves and myself. …
I walked home with Birch and he asked me if I did not think that one ought to take more interest in the subject we had been discussing that evening. I thought he seemed strangely impressed by our superficial generalisations. But Birch is always asking advice and trying to act upon it, so I told him to join the Theosophical Society. I did not think he would take me literally, but he said at once:
"I suppose they know a lot about that sort of thing."
"Oh! yes," I replied. "They know everything about that sort of thing. I believe they can even give you some information as to your past incarnations."
I did not see Birch again for nearly a month, and then he came to my rooms one evening. He was looking perplexed and uncertain. I had never before seen him look anything but amiable or wistfully reverential, and I was surprised.
"What's up, Tommy?" I asked.
To my astonishment he sat down deliberately in my one decent arm-chair, and then blushed a little and edged forward on the seat as if to demonstrate that he did not intend to make himself too comfortable.
I sat down in the basket-chair which I hate, but which had always seemed to suit Tommy so admirably.
"What's up, Tommy?" I repeated.
"It's frightfully difficult," he said. I had heard that remark from him many times.
"What, in particular?" I asked.
"I've learnt who I was in my last incarnation," said Tommy solemnly. "It makes a big difference to one."
"Great snakes," I ejaculated.
He looked at me doubtfully. "It's serious," he said.
"Well, who were you, old chap?" I asked. One never took Birch seriously.
"Thomas Bilney," he said.
"So you stuck to the Tommy?" I interpolated.
"It's very wonderful," he went on, without noticing my facetiousness. "I didn't believe it quite, when the psychometrist first told me. I didn't think I could ever have been a martyr. But I got hold of Gairdner's History, and it began to come to me."
"How? Come to you?" I asked. He was so intensely earnest that I felt a little thrill of superstition run through me. The most practical man has something of the mystic in him.
"It explained things," said Birch. "You know how I have always dreaded fire."
"Have you?" I said. "But how is that explained?"
"Bilney was burnt," returned Tommy. He tried to say it impressively, but it was a bad sentence for oratorical effect.
"Oh! bad luck," I said. "How?"