He smiled at me a little in a far-off way, as if it were some one else he were smiling at. I could not bear to watch his face. The peculiarities that his isolated life had cultivated did not separate us so much now. He seemed pathetically human and, like all of us, needing sympathy, struggling forlornly against the obstacles that his own limitations had created. It no longer seemed strange that he was attempting divination and second sight, trying to wrest the undiscoverable from the mute unknown. After all, he might be the only one of us whose philosophy was right.
Materialism fell away from me in that sand-swept graveyard where only the gray sheep moved among the symbols of the dead. Objectivity lost its grip; the subjective was the only reality. I recalled what the Hindus believed: that this world was an unnecessary torment, valuable only for the acquiring of grace, which might as well be accomplished by sitting upon a pillar; that the only truth was the life of the spirit, which had begun with the spinning of the Wheel and would endure so long as it revolved. The ascetics of all religions had preached nearly the same thing, in terms understandable to their own generation and their own race. The impulse of the soul, confined in its body’s prison, to reach out to souls which had left theirs but which still hovered near, was the only pastime worth an adult’s serious attention.
Out on the daisy-covered downs where the rain-washed sunlight blinded one to the immediate vista, where the reluctant storm-clouds overhead moved in white masses through the brilliant sky and banked themselves upon the ocean’s rim, the strength of the judge’s spiritualism subdued my worldliness. In a new meekness and dependence of will I did not want to lose sight of him. And I had no impulse whatever to return to the House of the Five Pines.
As we came near the circus grounds the line of skinny horses and the tarnished animal-wagon, the weary clown and the dusty elephant, were already winding their way to the village. The judge began to hurry.
“What are you going to do this afternoon?” I asked.
He looked as uncomfortable as his Isabella.
“Why, to tell the truth, I—I’m busy,” he stumbled.
“Judge, are you going to the circus?”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Well, whatever it is, I’m going to do it, too.”