She spoke of Death—how dreadful it was that love, like all lesser things, must die—that four hands, clinging at once, had no greater hold on life than two. But there I corrected her very confidently, when I came to answer. “Is not love the seed love the flower, and love the flower love the seed? What is death but the snake casting its skin? The old autumn cloak falls off, and there is spring underneath—not a new spring, Ira, but the same spring as always; you and I as we are at this moment; you and I as we shall be for ever. Our love shall ride on waves of day and night, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, till it reach the shores which are timeless, the shores which are unfruitful because all the ripe fruit of love is gathered there never to reproduce itself again, but to enjoy henceforth all the raptures of itself without the penalties.”
Those were love’s metaphysics. They might not satisfy philosophers; but they satisfied Ira, which was infinitely more to the point. Philosophy may endure the thought of death; it is a sweeter wisdom, I think, to delight in it.
So sounds the view-halloo, and I am off again, fresh from that little breathing space. But one thought now troubles me—troubles us all. What has occurred, if anything has occurred, to send our quarry into hiding?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
ON THE SCENT
Clank and fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners, as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury; ripping, periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up—so through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring southwards to our destiny.
A wild new experience to a woodland hermit—marvellous by day; weird beyond expression in the rushing dark. What islander, self-contained in his little sphere, might have guessed the wizard potency of that slender streak of water called the Channel? One takes it at a gulp, and, lo! there is a world about one continents removed, it seems, from the life of one’s knowledge. A seventy times seven leagued boot is the little steamer into which one puts one’s foot, to reach at a step from Dover to Calais. It is a longer stride by all the world than from Dan to Beersheba. The red trousers of the soldiers on the pier strike the first colour note of dissonance. They have walked with Napoleon in Egypt. The blood mystery of the Sphinx is in their hue.
And when night at last veils the scene from one’s aching eyes, and the shrieks, the eternal shrieks, are uttered in darkness, urging one on to what potential awakening in livid dawns—then is the time for dreams such as one has never dreamt before. When the throb of the engine claims one’s pulses to its beat, and its breath paints one with a sooty rime, and one feels oneself being slowly absorbed into the system of that crashing, hurtling monster—a small integral part of its mechanism—what hope seems left at last of any detachment from the chimera to which one has committed one’s destinies!
Such spaces may be covered in those long night hours. I had never realised the like before—had never been sped so far, by hundreds of miles, against my own will of volition. My helplessness affected me like a personal humiliation. We would catch up tempests, and tunnel a mad course through them, and leave them battling and booming in our rear. In ragged spaces of the clouds the moon would shine out, tossing like a lightship on tumultuous waters, and disappear, and be another beacon on another shoal when seen again. The shadow of a world rushed by our windows, phantom fabrics caught in starry glimpses, and always seeming stranger as we fled. But I slept at last, and was whirled a passionless straw upon the tide.
Very strange, in truth, was all this long journey to me. Yet it was taken in fullest possession of the antidote to its worst penalties. Johnny symbolised that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. I had already suspected the fact; now I was convinced of it. The subtle aroma of his godhead had flown abroad, and our way thenceforth was to be clouded with the incense of mammon-worship. It was not enough that his purse had secured us every luxury meet to the amelioration of our hard lot; obsequious officials, in a democratic land, clamoured for the privilege of making our primrose path primrosier and the down of our cushions downier. They were so downy themselves, that if they had plucked their breasts like swans for our nesting, we should have been suffocated long before they were denuded. However, the attention brought its advantages to all but poor Johnny himself, whose way was made rocks and briars to him.
On and on unceasing tears the mad comet, until striking, after æons of flight, it seems, a mountain rampart, with a mighty crash and scatteration of sparks it goes to earth, and is quenched and buried from the eyes of the world in the Mont Cenis tunnel.