“Ha, these philosophers,” said the professor, expanding in discourse a little later—“these dreamy people who talk of the spirit, they tell you that spirit is abstract!” He waved his great hand in a sweeping semicircle which carried it out of our orange candle-light and freckled it with the cold moonshine which sieved through the loosened screen of honeysuckle. “Ha, the folly!”
“What do YOU say it is?” I asked, moving so that the smoke of my cigar should not drift toward Oliver, who sat looking out into the garden.
“I, my friend? I do not say that it IS! But all such things, they are only a question of names, and when I use the word ‘spirit’ I mean identity—universal identity, if you like. It is what we all are, yes—and those flowers, too. But the spirit of the flowers is not what you smell, nor what you see, that look so pretty: it is the flowers themself! Yet all spirit is only one spirit and one spirit is all spirit—and if you tell me this is Pant’eism I will tell you that you do not understand!”
“I don’t tell you that,” said I, “neither do I understand.”
“Nor that big Keredec either!” Whereupon he loosed the rolling thunder of his laughter. “Nor any brain born of the monkey people! But this world is full of proof that everything that exist is all one thing, and it is the instinct of that, when it draws us together, which makes what we call ‘love.’ Even those wicked devils of egoism in our inside is only love which grows too long the wrong way, like the finger nails of the Chinese empress. Young love is a little sprout of universal unity. When the young people begin to feel it, THEY are not abstract, ha? And the young man, when he selects, he chooses one being from all the others to mean—just for him—all that great universe of which he is a part.”
This was wandering whimsically far afield, but as I caught the good-humoured flicker of the professor’s glance at our companion I thought I saw a purpose in his deviation. Saffren turned toward him wonderingly, his unconscious, eager look remarkably emphasised and brightened.
“All such things are most strange—great mysteries,” continued the professor. “For when a man has made the selection, THAT being DOES become all the universe, and for him there is nothing else at all—nothing else anywhere!”
Saffren’s cheeks and temples were flushed as they had been when I saw him returning that afternoon; and his eyes were wide, fixed upon Keredec in a stare of utter amazement.
“Yes, that is true,” he said slowly. “How did you know?”
Keredec returned his look with an attentive scrutiny, and made some exclamation under his breath, which I did not catch, but there was no mistaking his high good humour.