“I have been haunted by a circle and a whirling and a wheel,” he began, looking downward, his head slightly bowed, as if in confusion. “I meant to draw a lesson from the life of water. But when I had followed a drop only half its course, a great machine, all wheels and whirling, caught me up and tore my thoughts to fragments.
“I remembered having read somewhere that men and women are but the separated parts of wheelshapes, or circles which had been their united form in a more perfect state of being. Then I saw the Hindu walking seven times around the object of his sacred love, as the Mohammedan at the Cordovan Ceca, till his footsteps wear a pathway in the stone. I remembered Plutarch’s story of the siege of Alesia. When the city had to capitulate, the general came out on his finest charger and dressed in his finest armor, to surrender it. He rode round and round the tribune on which sat Cæsar with his officers, circled round and round them, then dismounted, disarmed himself, and sat down silently at Cæsar’s feet. That revolution had some meaning. I remembered the whirling dervish, a clod with a planetary instinct, and the Persian hell peopled with beings which whirl forever in a ceaseless circle, whirling and circling, the right hand of each pressed to his burning heart. That naturally recalls to mind the strange idea that the planets are sentient beings, whirling forever with their hearts on fire, like those accursed ones in the Hall of Eblis.
“The planetary idea is in all this circling and whirling.
“All the old nations have a legend of some great supernatural battle in the past, where rebel and loyal angels, gods and Titans, good and evil spirits fought with each other. Those legends must all be the reflection of a real event. I have wondered if Chaos may not have been the crash and ruin of such a combat, and Creation, as we have read its story, a restoration only, instead of being the original establishment of order. Is not all this whirl the search of scattered fragments for their supplementary parts?
“It might be, then, that there is no absolute evil, but only an evil of wrong associations. There are substances, as chemists know, which are deadly in some combinations and wholesome in others. There is the brute creation, which, perhaps, is but a false humanity unmasked. Look at the trees. Cut down an oak-tree and a pine-tree grows in its place. Why not say, cut down a cruel man and a wolf is born? And from that wolf downward through fierce and gnawing generations, each losing some fang and fire, what wore the shape of man may become mud again. What if the real grandeur of Christ’s mission may have been to release all men of good-will from this primeval expiation. First comes the figure, then the substance. Let there be Light! said the Creator. And said Christ, I am the Light of the world. Shone upon by the sun, the foul and hateful may produce the exquisite. From mud and dung we have the lily and the rose. From this divine sun shining on men of good will, we have the perfect man released from a long captivity. The hell we hear of, the outer darkness, of which the King’s Majesty spoke, might be this going downward in the scale of being of creatures which had arrived at humanity, but were unworthy of it.
“Here, then, would begin another movement, the Divine way of heaven.
“It is all a whirl! Master, it makes me dizzy!”
Half laughing, the boy pressed his hands to his temples.
“Ion,” said the master quietly, “it is well to observe natural phenomena with the hope of drawing some guidance from them in the supernatural. Nature is like our sweet-toned bell in C. The material stroke at the base brings out the keynote; but if you listen higher up where the band of lilies runs, you will hear the dominant whispering. This is our limit. If the universe should propound its riddle to me, I would lay my hand on my mouth and my mouth in the dust.”
“I would die guessing, or knowing!” cried the boy. Then, with a quick change of expression, he bowed lowly, and said in a quiet tone:—