We watched the cook who came into the room and lit the fire. When the first crackling filled the room and the pine had caught, she left, observing that we were to eat in an hour.
“You want to wash up?” asked Cave mechanically, his eyes on the fire, his hands clasped in his lap like those dingy marble replicas of hands which decorate medieval tombs: that night there was an unhuman look to Cave: pale, withdrawn, inert ... his lips barely moving when he spoke, as though another’s voice spoke through senseless flesh.
“No thanks,” I said, a little chilled by his tone, by his remoteness. I got him off the subject of the accident as quickly as possible and we talked until dinner of the introduction I was to write. It was most enlightening. As I suspected, Cave had read only the Bible and that superficially, just enough to be able, at crucial moments, to affect the seventeenth-century prose of the translators and to confound thereby simple listeners with the familiar authority of his manner. His knowledge of philosophy did not even encompass the names of the principals. Plato and Aristotle rang faint, unrelated bells and with them the meager carillon ended.
“I don’t know why you want to drag in those people,” he said, after I had suggested Zoroaster as a possible point of beginning. “Most people have never heard of them either. And what I have to say is all my own. It doesn’t tie in with any of them or, if it does, it’s a coincidence because I never picked it up anywhere.”
“I think, though, that it would help matters if we did provide a sort of family tree for you, to show....”
“I don’t.” He gestured with his effigy-hands. “Let them argue about it later. For now, act like this is a new beginning, which it is. I have only one thing to give people and that is the way to die without fear, gladly ... to accept nothing for what it is, a long and dreamless sleep.”
I had to fight against that voice, those eyes which as always, when he chose, could dominate any listener. Despite my close association with him, despite the thousands of times I heard him speak, I was never, even in moments of lucid disenchantment, quite able to resist his power. He was a magician in the great line of Simon Magus and the Faust of legend. That much, even now, I will acknowledge ... his divinity, however, was and is the work of others, shaped and directed by the race’s recurrent need.
I surrendered in the name of philosophy with a certain relief, and he spoke in specific terms of what he believed and what I should write in his name.
It was not until after dinner that we got around, all three of us, to a problem which was soon to absorb us all, with near-disastrous results.
We had been talking amiably of neutral things and Cave had emerged somewhat from his earlier despondency. He got on to the subject of the farm where we were, of its attractiveness and remoteness, of its owner who lived in Spokane.