“I am trying,” Traherne amended, “to marshal the life-saving against the death-dealing powers.”
“To marshal God’s right hand against his left, eh? or vice versa” the Raja demanded. “But I admit you have the better of the astronomers, in so far as you deal in life, not in dead mechanism.” He slapped a palm sharply down on the back of his other hand. “This mosquito that I have just killed—I am glad to see you smoke, Madam: it helps to keep them off—this mosquito, or any smallest thing that has life in it, is to me far more admirable than a whole lifeless universe. What do you say, Major?”
“I say, Raja,” Crespin replied lazily, and keeping his cigar alight, “that if you’ll tell that fellow to give me another glass of Kümmel, I’ll let you have your own way about the universe.”
He got his Kümmel.
“But what,” Mrs. Crespin asked, “if the mechanism, as you call it, isn’t dead? What if the stars are swarming with life?”
“Yes—” Traherne agreed, and pushed her argument on, “suppose there are planets, which of course we can’t see, circling round each of the great suns we do see? And suppose they are all inhabited?”
“I’d rather not suppose it,” Rukh asserted quickly. “Isn’t one inhabited world bad enough? Do we want it multiplied by millions?”
“But haven’t you just been telling us that a living gnat is more wonderful than a dead universe?” Lucilla check-mated, or thought that she had.
But the Raja slipped through. “Wonderful?” he said. “Yes, by all means—wonderful as a device for torturing and being tortured. Oh, I’m neither a saint nor an ascetic—I take life as I find it—I am tortured and I torture. But there’s one thing I’m really proud of—I’m proud to belong to the race of the Buddha, who first found out that life was a colossal blunder. ‘His word was our arrow, his breath was our sword,’” he quoted softly.
“Should you like the sky to be starless?” Lucilla Crespin asked him in a low voice. (How like deep blue stars her eyes were! both he and Traherne thought.) “That seems to me—forgive me, Raja—the last word of impiety.”