“I’d rather know the truth.”
“You are young still,” said the pencil-seller. “If I believed I were young and strong, loved and honoured, I should believe a lie. But I should prefer to believe it.”
“It is probably just as true as your present beliefs about yourself, whatever they may be. Don’t you think so?”
He walked on. Now the cress lay on the table and withered; he sat by the window and listened to the lapping of the tide. For twenty years he believed he knew what he desired, if he had been free to seek it; now he knew otherwise. He did not know where Glamour-Land was, and yet—“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” he murmured, “may my right hand forget her cunning.”
Into the silence of his soul there broke many voices speaking as one voice and they spoke after this manner:
“When we who guard the Songs of the Glamour will that they shall be sung, they are sung. They ring through the world, though none know whence they sound, nor the manner of their sounding. Some say they come from here, and some from there. And it is nothing to us whether our singers be kings or slaves, saints or sinners, fools or sages, men or women, for it is we who sing through their lips, and it is the world that hears when the time is ripe. We have before this day caused those who were blind, and dumb, and deaf to sing the songs of the Glamour, and some of these never knew they sang. Moreover, you have sung them here in the city’s heart for twenty years and more, while you thought your lips were mute and your heart hungry with desire of Glamour-Land. And because you had nothing for which you longed, you learned to look for nothing your hands could grasp, but to hold all things readily and loose them easily at the appointed hour. Wherefore we, who know how it is with a man’s soul, drew from you the common desires of men as pith is drawn by a shepherd boy from a reed when he would pipe therewith; thereafter we fashioned these your body and soul into a pipe whereon we might pipe the Songs of the Glamour, and the world has heard them. You felt their notes ring through your soul, while your ears were deaf, strain them as you would.”
“And I?” he asked, “am I nothing?”
“Nothing,” they made answer, “nothing—or all that is.”
Whereat he fell to musing on their words, until the lapping water, the roaring city, and the beating of the heart within his body, seemed alike to be but the pulsing of a life that swept outward from the Unknown God of the Worlds.
