‘How delightful!’ pursued the insolent lady slowly. ‘Of course you’re a Mahommedan, and carry little fetishes about with you, and all that.’
Her eyes were directed vaguely at his shirt-studs. Looking down from above he saw only the lids of them, long-lashed and iris-edged, convexed by the eye-balls, like two delicate blue-veined eggs. She raised them at last, and he looked into them.
It was like looking out to sea.
She looked into his: and it was as if a broad sheet of water had passed swiftly through the forest of her mind, and all the withering thickets, touched by the magic flood, had reared their heads, put forth green leaves, blossomed, and filled with joy-drunk birds, singing full-throated contempt and hatred of mankind. The energy to hate, seared with the long drought of loneliness, was quickened and renewed by this vision of a kindred spirit.
For she too was a monster. Not a monster created, like Dwala, at one wave of the wand by Nature in the woods; but hewn from the living rock by a thousand hands of men, slowly chipped and chiselled and polished and refined till it reached perfection. Every meanness, every flattery that touched her had gone to her moulding; till now she was finished, blow-hardened, unmalleable; the multiplied strokes slid off without a trace.
Her position was known to all; there was no secret about it. The great blow that had severed the rough shape from the mass was struck, as it were, before the face of all the world. They might have taken her and tumbled her down the mountain side, to roll ingloriously into the engulfing sea. Instead of that they had set her on a pedestal, carved her with their infamous tools, fawned round her, swinging Lilliputian censers, seeking favour, and singing praise.
She was a monster, and no one knew it. And now at last she had met an equal mind: her eyes met other eyes that saw the world as she saw it—whole and naked at a glance. There was no question of love between them; they met in frozen altitudes far above the world where such things were. They were two comets laughing their way through space together.
All the Biologist saw was an augur-smile upon their lips.
‘Come along,’ said Lady Wyse, slipping her white glove through Prince Dwala’s arm. ‘Let’s get somewhere where we can talk.’
‘Then what becomes of me?’ grinned the insinuating savant.