“It is almost barbaric to want a landscape to remain the same always,” I agreed. “One runs up villa residences everywhere now, of course, and the place looks different; but the old earth is the same underneath, if people would only have the sense to understand.”
“Do you think I run up lots of villa residences?” Polly asked wistfully.
“I was trying to help you, dear, not to criticize,” I replied.
“You see,” Polly explained, “if you are making anything, no matter what, the pieces you are making it with don’t all stay in the same place. When the world was being made it would have been dreadful if all the mountains and countries had been made in succession and just stuck down one in front of the other, and if each tree and each animal had stayed where it was——”
“My dearest Polly,” I begged, “stop just one minute. You don’t see trees as men, walking, do you?”
“If you are going to be like the serious raconteur’s comic brother in the pantomime, I’ll stop,” she answered. “You must either follow me or stay at home. I see, in my mind’s eye, the Almighty evolving a perpetually changing order out of the chaos that occurs every day. You don’t make a world out of a hill, and then a tree, and then an ocean, stuck down like salt-cellars on the table. The sea is being made into rain to wash the ground into different shapes: the trees settle down into coal, or we cut them up to build things with, and we clear the ground for villa residences to hold the new people whom Providence sends. Sometimes there is an earthquake which throws up the dead whom we have forgotten and swallows up the living. It is all like a kaleidoscope making different patterns of the same bits.”
The door opened and Reginald looked in, decided that the moment was not for him, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.
“You can’t play a game with every one staying in the same place,” resumed Polly. “You can’t embroider if you don’t use first one thread and then another; you can’t paint a picture without adding new colours to the old ones; you can’t make music with one note; you can’t——”
“I’ve got that point, dear,” I said. “You can go on. You can’t make a hotel a lively place with only one guest. Yes?”
“I am not talking of enjoyment,” said Polly, “but of any work of construction. I am constructing my life, and even though I were a hermit (so you may dispose of your vulgarities about hotels and villas) I could still add new experiences to the old without being accused of infidelity.”