September 15
I have existed these weeks of early autumn in a kind of dream. I wander the streets and sit with Alexandra in the cafés of the Rive Gauche, and I try to plan for a future that seems no more real to me now than our wanderings in the Beyond.
In spite of all that has happened, Alexandra seems in excellent spirits. She has made up her mind to use her inheritance for travel in the Orient — first Ceylon, then India and the Himalayas. To that end she is working hard to improve her knowledge of Sanskrit and Tibetan. There are more than enough mysteries in our own world to be explored, she says.
But my own thoughts weigh heavily upon me. I realize now that in some corner of my mind I had clung to the possibility that George was still alive. But even that faint hope is shattered now.
And what havoc have I wrought, in the worlds above and beyond our own? Have I forever destroyed M. Verlaine’s city of dreams?
Alexandra says no, and I try to take some comfort in her words. “This is what I think, chère Jeanne — that with every poem, every painting, a city of dreams is created, and so there are as many Elsewheres as there are artists who have dreamt of them.”
I would like to think that M. Verlaine will someday find his magical city, but Alexandra says that a poet has only the courage of paper and pen, and that to travel in the Beyond you must be prepared to risk everything, perhaps even your life.
One smaller mystery puzzles us. What has become of the expected visit from Madame Blavatsky? By now we had thought to entertain that large and glowering presence. Secretly, I hoped to confess to her our adventures in the Otherworld. Though I knew she would call us something much worse than flapdoodles, I knew she would neither judge nor disbelieve us.
September 22
How suddenly life can change! Sometimes as I know to my cost it is disaster that unexpectedly descends, and alters everything for the worse. But sometimes, too, there can come an unlooked for, unimagined joy.
Our visitor has arrived.