"Both babies well?" It would have been unlike him not to have remembered that he had seen children at her house. "Hammy and Berta made great friends with me the other day.... Tell them I haven't forgotten the promise to rummage up some odd native toys I picked up in Rhodesia—made of mud and feathers and bits of fur and queerly-shaped seed-pods—the most enchanting collection of birds and beasts that ever came out of the Ark. And the Makalaka have a legend about a big flood and a wise old man who built a house of reeds and skins that floated.... The North American Indians will tell you that it was a Big Medicine Canoe, and amongst the tribes of the Nilghiri Hills you find exactly the same story that the Chaldean scribes wrote on their tablets of clay. To-day in Eastern Kurdistan they'll point you out the peak on which the Ark grounded. The Armenians hold it was Ararat.... It's curious how the root-legend crops up everywhere...."
"But of course it must." Her good, calm eyes showed surprise, and her broad, white, matronly bosom was a little fluttered. "Doesn't the Bible teach us that the Deluge covered the whole earth? Even Hammy and Berta can tell you the whole story about Noah, and the raven—and the dove."
He smoothed his moustache with a palm that wiped the smile out.
"I must get them to tell it me one of these days." The twinkle in his eye was not to be repressed. "It would save such a deal of trouble to believe there was only one Noah, and only one Ark, don't you know?"
Her motherly bosom panted.
"My children shall never believe anything else!"
He was grave and sympathetic, though a muscle in his thin cheek twitched.
"I believe the toy Ark of our happy childish memories is built, if not of gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid down in Scripture. Has Hammy ever tried to get his to float? Mine invariably used to sink—straight to the bottom of the bath. Perhaps that continually-recurrent catastrophe had something to do with the sapping of my infant faith, or the establishment of a sinking-fund of doubt regarding the veracity of the Noachian reporter?"
She leaned towards him, her placid grey eyes dilating with pity for this man.
"You ought to come and sit under our minister Mr. Oddris, on Sundays. Pray do. He would convince you if anybody could. Such an eloquent, able, well-informed man, and so truly pious and brave!"