Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted—quite wantonly—never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all....
These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato’s octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of water.... But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho’s from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition; in an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the Mimes of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare’s dramas, which had never been printed.
And—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its felicities to be the object of human life—Kennaston could not, after all, detect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Æsthetic considerations could, in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment was precious.
III
By-Products of Rational Endeavor
THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two hurt fingers.
“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work,” he considered.
“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him.
“To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save this, Imaginis imago, created after God’s image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear man’s destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man’s demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be.”
“Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.”