FIVE

Littleton - Percival

        LITTLETON

            After so long a time, Percival, we meet. It is strange that our ways, upon earth associated and parallel, should in this other world be so entirely divergent.

PERCIVAL

Why is it strange to you, Littleton ? The world in which we find ourselves, is made, as we have both discovered, of the stuff of our earthly dreams and the texture of our mortal character. Physically, our ways on earth were parallel. We walked together over Cumberland mountains or watched the whole sea leap and thunder titanically against the Cornwall cliffs. You were stroke and I was cox in the same boat on the Isis. We bracketed always for College honours and took the same class in the same subject in the Tripos. Afterwards too, we entered Parliament side by side in the same party and by an august and noble silence helped to administer the affairs of our country. But what greater difference could divide men than that which existed between our bodily frames and moral constitutions? You, the tall, fair, robust descendant of the Vikings; I, dark, spare and short from the Welsh mountains. You, the hard-headed, practical, successful lawyer; I, the dilettante and connoisseur who knew something about everything except my own affairs and could deal successfully with every business that did not concern me.

LITTLETON

Yet we clung together; our tastes often lay in the same direction; our affections were similar, and even our sins connected us.

PERCIVAL

We completed each other, I think. Our tastes were very dissimilarly similar. We read the same book; but you tore the essence

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out of it, briefly, masterfully, and then flung it aside, satisfied that you had made even the dead useful to you; I wound my way into the heart of its meaning like a serpent and lay there coiled till I had become one with it, then wound myself out again replete and affectionately reminiscent of the soul that had given me harbourage. As for our sins, let us not talk of them. We have been too tediously familiar with them after death to cherish their memory. But even there we differed. You sinned voraciously, robustly, with gusto but with very little of feeling; I stumbled in out of excess of emotion and could not recover myself because of the vibrant intensity of my memories.

LITTLETON

Let me know what world harboured you since we parted.

PERCIVAL

Let me rather hear your experiences.

LITTLETON

The details fade in the retrospect and will not bear telling. Certain periods of mortal agony there were, each with its own physical surroundings, that I long to forget but cannot. Some of them recalled strangely, not in detail but in kind, Greek Tartarus and Catholic Inferno. I was the prey of Harpies, I was hunted and torn and devoured, I experienced the agonies of the men I had sent to the deliberate and brutal torture of our jails or beggared of their honour or their property. I renewed the successes of my life and sickened of their selfishness, boldness, hardness. Money became as red-hot metal in my hands and luxury was a gnawing fire that embraced my body. I lingered in regions where Love was not known and the souls of the inhabitants were hard and strong as bronze, dry and delightless as the Sahara. O Percival, Percival, when I go again upon earth, I shall know love and execute mercy.

PERCIVAL

Had you no hours of respite, entered no regions of happiness ?

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LITTLETON

That, I believe, is yet before me.

PERCIVAL

I too have had experiences similar to yours, though different in their nature and quality. I have sickened of the repeated weakness and selfishness of my life, I have experienced in my soul the sufferings of those I had injured. I can understand why the Christians believed Hell to be eternal; it was a memory in the self of the moral endlessness of those torments. But I had my release. I have lived in Elysium, I have trod the fields of asphodel. And in those happy experiences I have deepened the strength and quality of my love, intensified the swiftness of my emotions, refined and purified my taste and intellect.

LITTLETON

What is this world in which we meet ?

PERCIVAL

The heaven of comrades.

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