“You feel spiritual flesh, and you will understand me when I say it is of a different and more tenuous electrical wave-length than your grosser body, from which you were forcibly ejected only an hour ago, in your time. You will address me, hereafter, as Majesty. Tell me, Man, do you remember your death?”
“I am dreaming,” he said, to my weariness. “Yes, I remember I was in a hurry. I was crossing Massachusetts Avenue, in Washington, and I had matters on my mind—and then it happened. I found myself sailing through the air—”
“And then?”
He was smiling once more with that aloof amusement and calm. “Darkness. Majesty,” he added, and mockingly bent his knee in a parody of a genuflection. “Then, all at once, I saw a company about me, strange and silent, and I was lying in the street, still and bleeding. Of course, it is all a dream. The street, the white buildings in the sun, the traffic, appeared uncertain as if in a fog, and shifting, and unreal, but the company about me—similar to these I see here now, but smaller—could be seen with greater clarity. They lifted me up, though I was still shaken.” He paused. “I saw my body on the street, and the shadows of men gathering about me, and I was taken away against my will. I was brought here. Majesty.” He genuflected again.
“And you believe you dream?”
He was offended. “Of course I am dreaming! I am either in my bed or in a hospital. In Washington. Have they drugged me, so that I am having this nightmare? I must have been badly hurt.”
“Your body was killed. It was crushed. You died instantly. Your broken flesh lies in a hospital morgue, awaiting the arrival of your one remaining relative, a brother who despises you for what you were, and are. Your body will be cremated, your ashes interred among strangers. But you, yourself, will remain with me forever. I promise you many delights, such as the delicate ones you prefer, and eternal pleasure, if you desire it, or eternal pain, if you desire that. You did enjoy the pleasure of flagellations at the hands of young men like yourself, did you not? My demons will gratify that pleasure, through all the eons without end. You also enjoyed certain dishes and wines. They are yours, throughout eternity. You liked intellectual conversation, and the company of scientists. That, too, is yours. It will please you to encounter scientists of thousands of other worlds, of your own mind, but far more intelligent and intellectual. You will not be restrained by the limits of flesh or time or space, nor any encumbrances. Are you rejoicing?”
“I am dreaming, Majesty.” He laughed a little. “There are no other worlds but this. I have said so repeatedly. The earth is the only inhabited planet among a storm of suns and the flow and ebb of universes. I have written books on the matter, to the confusion and disappointment of sentimentalists who would like to believe in an omniscient God, which does not exist, a God of power and glory and endless worlds and galaxies. I admit the galaxies, but never the worlds. The probabilities against them—”
“Are endless. I know, Man. I gave you the words. I always give men the words with which to express their stupidity, their arrogance, their passions, and their desires. They are quite eloquent, as you were eloquent. What was that within you that insisted that your miserable little crumb of dust and mud was the only world inhabited by your race?”
He thought. He was deeply amused. “We are an accident, which could not happen again, unless the exact material conditions existed, and such a probability—”
“Is beyond reason. I am not very intelligent, myself, so I can follow your argument. However, you have not answered my question.”
For the first time he appeared uneasy. He glanced again at my silent ranks of courtiers, and a little shudder passed over him. But he is a man not without courage. He said, “It offended me, intellectually, to believe there were others like me on other worlds. I am unique. I stand alone. I am no duplicate, nor are there duplicates of me.”
“In short, you are proud. Ah, yes. We share that grand quality together. Let it pass. What did you hear of me on your wretched earth, Man, when you were a child?”
He was again embarrassed, and sought to draw me into his own light laughter. “I heard the myth that you were once the greatest archangel of them all, with powers and dominions, and that you—”
“Yes?”
He coughed. “I feel ridiculous. You—fell. The reason is not very clear.”
I said, “I fell for the reason that I objected to your ever existing. I was right. He was wrong.”
He was puzzled. “Who is ‘he’?”
“The God you have denied all your life, out of your childish sophistication and your idiot’s learning.”
For the first time a little disbelieving horror came to him. I had not horrified him, but the thought of the existence of God distracted him. Myself he could endure, dream or not. But he could not endure God. As you know, Michael, that is the greatest of hells to my damned: the final realization that Our Father is.
He even stammered. “Now I know of a certainty that I am dreaming, either in my bed in my apartment, or in a hospital! For, there is no God.”
Again the sullen clamoring rolled over us and he listened and quailed, for it was the thunderous and tortured voices of my demons, who had fallen with me. Even he could not bear it, for it is the most awful sound in all of hell. He put his hands over his ears until it had subsided. Then he said, “Why do they somberly howl like that?”
“Because you deny what they know is truth, and which agonizes them in the remembrance. Do not provoke my demons unduly. They can be very cruel.”
But he was pondering and shrinking. “I remember—in my dream. As your—before these dream-images seized me—my instinct was to rise and fly upwards—”
“Certainly. It was the instinct of your soul to fly to the Hands of Him Who created you. It is the deepest instinct of the soul. But you have forfeited your holy right, which was given you at your conception. You are only a man; I pity you. Had I created you I should have been more merciful. I should have granted your extinction on your fleshly death, and eternal sleep and darkness. Therefore, you have the right to curse God, for making your soul immortal. Do so, if you will.”
“Curse God?”
“If you will. You will not be the first, nor the last, in the flesh or in the spirit.”
“But, He does not—” He halted, for fear of the terrible clamor.
“It is still your privilege to deny. It will surprise you to meet the multitudes who still deny. But they do not deny me any longer.”
I rose and my courtiers bowed before me, and the man moved backwards, never taking his eyes from me. “Come,” I said. “Walk before me and you shall see.”
“I am afraid,” he whispered. “For the first time in my life I fear. It is only a dream, but I am terrified. In God’s Name, let me wake up!”
“He cannot help you now,” I said. “Do not use His Name here. If there is any mercy in you, which I doubt. You had no mercy on your world; it would be strange if you experienced it here.”
The thought of any of my souls feeling mercy or pity is my own secret dread. For they are divine emotions, and cannot be countenanced here. It is my haunting fear that they may open a path—but that is incredible.
He did not retreat before me. His eyes were wild. “If you exist—which is not tenable, of course—then He—”
“It does not follow,” I said, as I have said millions of times before; “Let us forget Him. You have much to see, and many marvels to discover, in my domain in which you will dwell forever.”
It gave me pleasure to conduct him personally through my hells. He blinked in the strong hot light of my beautiful city, and listened to the music and the voices of countless multitudes. He said once, “They do not laugh.”
“The only laughter in hell is mine, and my demons,” I said.
“Yet, here are all delights, and—I am still dreaming, of course—eternal youth.”
“All deliciousnesses. Immortal youth. Souls do not change, nor age, nor suffer disease, nor have bodily needs. You will obs
erve that though light beams here much more brilliantly than ever it beamed on your earth there is no sun, and you cast no shadow. I am the only one in hell who casts a shadow. Observe.”
He saw my black shadow on the snowy marble of my streets, and that seemed to affright him more than anything else, but why I do not know. He lifted his eyes to what he believed was the sky, but saw only a blazing whiteness. “There is no night, in Heaven or hell,” I said. “In Heaven, there are times of blessed restfulness and quiet and green withdrawals, and contemplations and still bliss. But in hell there is none of that. You were ever a restless creature, from birth, teeming with desires and thoughts and schemes and equations and formulae. I marked you in your cradle as my own. You were never at peace in your heart or your mind. You, like myself, hurried to and fro, ceaselessly. This is your preordained climate, for there is no rest here but only scurryings. You will enjoy it.”
He thought he still dreamt. He stood in the heart of my city and studied the sky. “There is no sun, yet it is brighter than noonday,” he said.
“It is a light that never fails. It is the light of my spirit,” I replied. “Do you not feel it? It scorches, but it does not warm. It illuminates, but it does not enlighten. You will never be free of it, unless you choose my darker realms which men built out of the darkness of their souls.”
My multitudes bowed before me as we walked through the city and my heralds trumpeted my coming. The newly arrived soul stared and blinked and observed in utter silence. My damned thought he must be a prince, for it is rare for me to walk with any soul. They gazed at him, questioning, with their lifeless eyes. “They look alike; it is hard to discern any particular feature,” said Michel Edgor.
“You, too, have their countenance,” I said. “Evil is of one piece.”
“I do not know what you mean by evil,” he protested, shrinking from the throngs. “There is no good, nor no evil. They are relative terms, and subjective, fitted only to the immediate occasion, need or intention.”
“What do you consider evil?” I asked.
He thought. “Ignorance,” he said at last.
“But you were the most ignorant of all, Man. You denied the manifest. You looked on the glorious intricacies of nature, and the immutable laws, and you denied the Lawgiver, the Designer. You could have been blind, for all you truly saw of the stars. You could have been deaf, for all you heard of the eternal harmony of creation. The smallest child in his mother’s arms knows more about life than you ever did.”
“I have done nothing of intentional malice,” he said, halting before a vast market place of innumerable treasures, but not really seeing them.
“True. You were too fastidious to be crude. But your very existence was malicious. It was a poison of doubt and despair and cynicism to all who encountered you. You struck the warmth of human hearts cold. It was your intention. You despised all whom you saw, and considered yourself greater than any in intellectual endowments. You condescended. Delicate brutality was always in your voice. Did you ever love? No. The soul that never loves, not even once, is foredoomed. But then, you never inspired love. It is impossible to love an egotist.”
He protested. “I marveled, always, at the secrets of nature, which I believed could be, and would be, eventually understood in their entirety. I believed in the coming omniscience of man, and I revered his expanding intellect, his eventual rise to supraman. I worked to that end; I believed in mankind. Is that evil?”
“You will see,” I promised him.
“I believed in a secular paradise, which is attainable.”
“You will see,” I repeated.
He still protested. “You are wrong, Majesty. I did love; I loved mankind.”
“But never man. Love of an abstraction is not love. It is only absence of human emotion. Love is personal, not universal, save for One. Come.”
I lifted my hand and immediately we were within a city within a city—my very favorite spot, where live and work and dwell all those once famous in their worlds in the arts and sciences and philosophies. My captive looked upon the white and shining towers with amazement, the secluded streets and colonnades which resemble those of ancient Athens, the quiet groups of trees for conversation, the dusky groves of learning, the scentless beds of deadly flowers, the quiet river of Lethe wherein no life moves, but which shines as leaden silver in the noonless light. He saw the men and women walking over the grass and conversing in timbreless voices, their white robes folded meticulously, their faces still as stone. He said, “I understand. Here one can pursue knowledge without the necessity of trying to permeate empty minds, and without the tediousness of encountering obstinate resistance. This is the dream of all men like myself.”
“It is your dream,” I said. The wandering groups saw me and true emotion glimmered in their eyes and their expressionless faces were filled with despair. They bowed before me but did not approach me. “Why are they not happy?” asked Michel Edgor.
“You will see,” I said. I led him into a vast marble hall filled with exquisite white statues gleaming in the light. They are a forest of stillness, each one more lovely than the last, perfectly executed. Not even Phidias or Praxiteles ever created such. There was no sound but of the chisel and the hammer, where a multitude of sculptors worked. Michel Edgor looked upon these crowding statues with awe, and exclaimed over their perfection and marvelous detail. “What genius!” he exclaimed. “I could wander here forever!”
“You will,” I said. I raised my hand and immediately the noise of work ceased, and the sculptors came obediently to me, their heads bent in misery, their hands hanging at their sides. Michel Edgor said to the nearest, “I have seen the greatest in the world, but none so lovely as these! What artists you are!”
The sculptor looked at him with contempt, and another said with disgust, “We can create nothing but what is absolutely faultless. We can commit no error which adds distinction.”
Michel Edgor said in bewilderment, “But that is a veritable heaven!”
“No,” said the sculptor, “it is veritable hell. Where everything is a masterpiece nothing is a masterpiece, Man of Terra.”
Michel Edgor did not comprehend as yet. He stared slowly at the immaculate beauty in stone, and shook his head slightly. Then he said, “You call me ‘Man of Terra,’ I assume you mean our earth.”
The sculptor laughed in derision. “Your earth! I never heard of it until I came to this damned region. I come of a planet far from your own galaxy, which you call the Milky Way, which is only a small and unfathomable and unimportant wisp in our evening skies. My planet, I have learned, is larger than your dim yellow sun, and of an immeasurable loveliness. I was a famous sculptor there.”
Michel Edgor was stupefied. Then he said, “You are jesting. There are no other worlds but ours. You speak as our pseudo-scientists, the writers of science-fiction.”
The others raised a raucous and mocking cry, save for but two who had come from Terra, themselves, and they looked ashamed of the new arrival, and hid their faces as if in apology to their fellows.
“You will learn,” said the sculptor. They bowed again before me like a white wind, murmured, “Majesty,” and left our erudite fool who gazed after them with his mouth open. He began to shiver. He pretended to be interested in nearby statues, then his face fell. “It is a wonderful dream,” he murmured. The noise of the chisels and hammers resumed like a taunt.
We entered my picture galleries where my painters work, and the walls are crowded with glowing treasures in golden and silver frames, and the artists plied their brushes and colors in absolute silence, not speaking to each other or aware of each other. Michel Edgor was enchanted. “Not even Raphael or Michelangelo or da Vinci or Rembrandt ever painted like this!” he cried. “What eternal colors, what eternal vistas!”
“They are indeed eternal,” I said. “Here, too, no error can be made. Each painting is perfect—and no man’s work can be distinguished from another’s in style or form or composition or depth of c
olor. No man can say, ‘This is my unique creation.’ All is as one. No man can excel another. Is this not a wonderful democracy—which you espoused so ardently on Terra?”
But he was studying the painting as if he had not heard me. He stood at many artists’ shoulders and watched in silence. There was no faltering in brush stroke, no hesitation. All worked in desperate fever.
“Do you wish to speak to them?” I asked.
He saw their intent and anguished faces, their efforts to make distinct errors or roughnesses. He saw the paint smooth itself out into perfection, as if it had a life of its own, or as if the artist’s own earthly desire for perfection prevented him from creating something which could be surpassed by another. He shook his head. “I do not wish to speak to them,” he said.
“You should learn nothing, for there is no frustration here,” I said. “Is this not truly Heaven?”
I led him to one of my vast concert halls, where musicians were composing and directing their own orchestras. “I hear the most unparalleled executions!” my captive said. “Beethoven was a tyro in comparison.”
“True,” I said. “You will hear not a single uncertain note, nor a wrong one. These, too, can commit nothing but perfection. All is pure phrasing, pure harmony. Listen. Though many symphonies and concertos are being played they blend into one, with no disruption or clashing. No man can tell his own work from another’s. It is as if they played but one composition. Perhaps you can tell me why it gives them no pleasure, and why their countenances are gloomy.”
“There is no individuality!” he said, after listening some moments.
“But, is that not what you prescribed, in your egotism, for your fellowmen? Did you not say over and over, in superb confidence to your brother scientists, ‘The masses hate and fear individuality, so let us give them sameness and security’? Man, who were you to judge, dismiss and despise other men’s souls as if they were not at least as important as your own?”
Dialogues With the Devil Page 11
