“My promise,” I said quietly, “holds good. Also”--I blushed and half-stammered over the conventional words--“I will do nothing that can cause possible offence--to anyone.”
The hand that rested on my arm tightened its grasp a little. He made no other sign. It was remarkable how the topic that must have separated two other men--any two other men in the world, I suppose--had been subtracted from our relationship, laid aside as dealt with and admitted, calling for no further mention even. It all seemed, in some strange way, impersonal almost--another attitude to life--a faint sign, it may well have been, of that older mode of consciousness he spoke about.
I hardly recognised myself, so complete was the change in me, and so swiftly going forward. This dragnet from the Past drew ever closer. If the mind in me resisted still, it seemed rather from some natural momentum acquired by habit, than from any spontaneous activity due to the present. The modern, upper self surrendered.
“How soon?” was the question that seemed to come of its own accord; it was certainly not my confused and shaken mind that asked it. “When do you propose to----”
He answered without a sign of hesitation. “The Autumnal Equinox. You’ve forgotten _that_,” he added as though he justified my lack of memory here, “for all the world has forgotten it too--the science of Times and Seasons--the oldest known to man. It was true cosmic knowledge, but so long ago that it has left our modern consciousness as though it never had existed even.”
He stopped abruptly. I think he desired me to discover for myself, unguided, unhampered by explanation. And, at the words, something remote and beautiful did stir, indeed, within me. A curtain drew aside....
Some remnant of ghostly knowledge quickened. Behind the mind and brain, in that region, perhaps, where thought ceases and intuition offers her amazing pageant, there stirred--reality. Times and seasons, I seemed to realise, have spiritual importance; there is a meaning in months and hours; if noon is different from six o’clock, what happens at noon varies in import from what happens at six o’clock, although the happening itself at both moments be identical. An event holds its minimum or its maximum of meaning according to the moment when it happens. Its effectiveness varies with the context.