But the gist of his speech was determined by the purpose of his journey to Labrador. At last he was reviewing his life and hers, and all that their life might signify, even as he determined to do. She began to perceive that whatever else drifted into his mind and talk, this recurred and grew, that he returned to the conclusion he had reached, and not to the beginning of the matter, and went on from that....
"You see," he said, "our lives are nothing—nothing in themselves. I know that; I've never had any doubts of that. We individuals just pick up a mixed lot of things out of the powers that begat us, and lay them down again presently a little altered, that's all—heredities, traditions, the finger nails of my grandfather, a great-aunt's lips, the faith of a sect, the ideas of one's time. We live and then we die, and the threads run, dispersing this way and that. To make other people again. Whatever's immortal isn't that, our looks or our habits, our thoughts or our memories—just the shapes, these are, of one immortal stuff.... One immortal stuff."...
The voice died away as if he was baffled. Then it resumed.
"But we ought to partake of immortality; that's my point. We ought to partake of immortality.
"I mean we're like the little elements in a magnet; ought not to lie higgledy-piggledy, ought to point the same way, be polarized——Something microcosmic, you know, ought to be found in a man.
"Analogies run away with one. Suppose the bar isn't magnetized yet! Suppose purpose has to come; suppose the immortal stuff isn't yet, isn't being but struggling to be. Struggling to be.... Gods! that morning! When the child was born! And afterwards she was there—with a smile on her lips, and a little flushed and proud—as if nothing had happened so very much out of the way. Nothing so wonderful. And we had another life besides our own!..."
Afterwards he came back to that. "That was a good image," he said, "something trying to exist, which isn't substance, doesn't belong to space or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through. Just confused birth cries, eyes that hardly see, deaf ears, poor little thrusting hands. A thing altogether blind at first, a twitching and thrusting of protoplasm under the waters, and then the plants creeping up the beaches, the insects and reptiles on the margins of the rivers, beasts with a flicker of light in their eyes answering the sun. And at last, out of the long interplay of desire and fear, an ape, an ape that stared and wondered, and scratched queer pictures on a bone...."
He lapsed into silent thought for a time, and Marjorie glanced at his dim face in the shadows.
"I say nothing of ultimates," he said at last.
He repeated that twice before his thoughts would flow again.