Words, words, words, thought Cyprian, now as then. The ancient writers of all nations might philosophize and analyse and theorize through pages of intellectual war, but still Justice struggled to dwell upon this globe, and still the Frantic Master scourged men on to deeds which drove her out. With what object? The perpetual propagation of a mortal race, apparently doomed (while the chemical atoms of mud and water to which they clung, held together) to blind burrowings for some Philosopher's Stone upon which might be engraved the key to their existence.
Always that awareness, stifling their half-developed senses, of bodily decay and rotting death, mental and physical, till the spirit cried out like a terrified child in the imprisonment of a gradually enveloping Darkness.
Was it wonderful if the mind strove to drug realization of the conditions under which it existed by resorting to fruitless accumulation of metal and mummified matter, materially precious only because so far as Man knew, there was not enough of it to go round? Was it wonderful if, wearying of this empty labour, he passed from the opium dreams of wealth to the cocaine illusions of power over his fellows, or acted yet another part, inebriate with meditation upon a solitary mountain top, or grovelled in a secret cave, denying access to any who might wish to awaken him from dreams to cold reality once more?
Was not the ascetic, hugging and hoarding his visions, as useless a product as the miser hugging and hoarding his gold?—and the mystic, luxuriating in a religious mirage, as much a glutton for prayer as his Epicurean neighbour might prove himself a glutton for pleasure?
What did he, himself, desire of the gods that be, asked Cyprian. Ferlie? And of Ferlie, what? Her white limbs entwined in his, ever and anon, throughout the years, in the thirsting hope that much yielding to a fitful and passing emotion would so unite him with her Being that nothing could separate them again?...
"For sudden ... a peace out of pain...
Then a light, then thy breast,
Oh, thou, soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!"
Not this way lay the road to that satisfied unity. And she knew it. God, yes! How terribly well she must know it! He, in Thu Daw, she, in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all living creatures which crawled upon its face. They had added their quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible purpose should have been fulfilled.
Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one another? All life is by no means conceived in love. Did not that which was weigh more precious in the scales of Eternity than any conceived in duty to the natural law of a source called "God"? And yet ... out here, where one could almost listen to the pulses of Nature beating, unregulated and unquickened by the fevers which dull the senses of Earth's normal sons and daughters, how had these barriers melted which the crowded places interposed between his Self and Hers? What law but the natural one was good in the eyes of Nature's Creator?
And Nature bade him reach out to her his starving arms. He stirred among the shrivelling strands of fibre, strewing the turf, and sat up, clasping his hands about his knees.
Still she did not look at him, and savagely he tore in imagination at the filmy veil barring him out of her dreams.