The Mahatma and the Hare | Page 5

happiness of sleep. Come and sleep."
Such were the arguments of that Voice of the river, the old, familiar
arguments of desolation and despair. I leant over the parapet; in another
moment I should have been gone, when I became aware that some one
was standing near to me. I did not see the person because it was too
dark. I did not hear him because of the raving of the wind. But I knew
that he was there. So I waited until the moon shone out for a while
between the edges of two ragged clouds, the shapes of which I can see
to this hour. It showed me Jorsen, looking just as he does to-day, for he
never seems to change--Jorsen, on whom, to my knowledge, I had not
set eyes before.
"Even a year ago," he said, in his strong, rough voice, "you would not
have allowed your mind to be convinced by such arguments as those
which you have just heard in the Voice of the river. That is one of the
worst sides of drink; it decays the reason as it does the body. You must
have noticed it yourself."
I replied that I had, for I was surprised into acquiescence. Then I grew
defiant and asked him what he knew of the arguments which were or
were not influencing me. To my surprise--no, that is not the word--to
my bewilderment, he repeated them to me one by one just as they had
arisen a few minutes before in my heart. Moreover, he told me what I
had been about to do, and why I was about to do it.
"You know me and my story," I muttered at last.
"No," he answered, "at least not more than I know that of many men
with whom I chance to be in touch. That is, I have not met you for
nearly eleven hundred years. A thousand and eighty-six, to be correct. I
was a blind priest then and you were the captain of Irene's guard."
At this news I burst out laughing and the laugh did me good.
"I did not know I was so old," I said.
"Do you call that old?" answered Jorsen. "Why, the first time that we
had anything to do with each other, so far as I can learn, that is, was
over eight thousand years ago, in Egypt before the beginning of
recorded history."
"I thought that I was mad, but you are madder," I said.

"Doubtless. Well, I am so mad that I managed to be here in time to save
you from suicide, as once in the past you saved me, for thus things
come round. But your rooms are near, are they not? Let us go there and
talk. This place is cold and the river is always calling."
That was how I came to know Jorsen, whom I believe to be one of the
greatest men alive. On this particular night that I have described he told
me many things, and since then he has taught me much, me and a few
others. But whether he is what is called a Mahatma I am sure I do not
know. He has never claimed such a rank in my hearing, or indeed to be
anything more than a man who has succeeded in winning a knowledge
of his own powers out of the depths of the dark that lies behind us. Of
course I mean out of his past in other incarnations long before he was
Jorsen. Moreover, by degrees, as I grew fit to bear the light, he showed
me something of my own, and of how the two were intertwined.
But all these things are secrets of which I have perhaps no right to
speak at present. It is enough to say that Jorsen changed the current of
my life on that night when he saved me from death.
For instance, from that day onwards to the present time I have never
touched the drink which so nearly ruined me. Also the darkness has
rolled away, and with it every doubt and fear; I know the truth, and for
that truth I live. Considered from certain aspects such knowledge, I
admit, is not altogether desirable. Thus it has deprived me of my
interest in earthly things. Ambition has left me altogether; for years I
have had no wish to succeed in the profession which I adopted in my
youth, or in any other. Indeed I doubt whether the elements of worldly
success still remain in me; whether they are not entirely burnt away by
that fire of wisdom in which I have bathed. How can we strive to win a
crown we have no longer any desire to wear? Now I desire other
crowns and