"'God'!" he cried; "why, what is all this?"
All this at that moment was a clearing in the woods, softly shimmering with a misty, transparent green, in whose sunbeams a thousand flies darted and zigzagged like motes of light, and the year's first butterflies fluttered and languished.
"But if I speak," I said, "listen, now, my voice is just swallowed up. Out of just a something it faints into a nothing—dies. No, no;" (I suppose I was arguing only to draw him out), "all this cares no more for me than—than a looking-glass. Yet it is mine. Can you see Jesus Christ in these woods? Do you believe we are sinners and that He came to save us? I do. But I can see Him only as a little boy, you know, smiling, crystal, intangible: and yet I do not like children much."
He paused and stared at me fixedly. "My size?" he coughed.
"Oh, size," I exclaimed, "how you harp on that!"—as if I never had. "Did you not say yourself that the smaller the body is, the happier the ghost in it? Bodies, indeed!"
He plunged on, hands in pockets, frowning, clumsy. And up there in the north-west a huge cloud poured its reflected lights on his strange face. Inwardly—with all my wits in a pleasant scatter—I laughed; and outwardly (all but) danced. Solemnly taking me at my word, and as if he were reading out of one of his dry old books, he began to tell me his views about religion, and about what we are, qualities, consciousness, ideas, and that kind of thing. As if you could be anything at any moment but just that moment's whole self. At least, so it seemed then: I was happy. But since in his earnestness his voice became almost as false to itself as was Mr Crimble's when he had conversed with me about Hell, my eyes stole my ears from him, and only a few scattered sentences reached my mind.
Nevertheless I enjoyed hearing him talk, and encouraged him with bits of questions and exclamations. Did he believe, perhaps, in the pagan Gods?—Mars and all that? Was there, even at this very moment, cramped up among the moss and the roots, a crazy, brutal Pan in the woods? And those delicious Nymphs and Naiads! What would he do if one beckoned to him?—or Pan's pipes began wheedling?
"Nymphs!" he grunted, "aren't you——"
"Oh," I cried, coming to a pause beside a holly-tree so marvellously sparkling with waterdrops on every curved spine of it that it took my breath away: "let's talk no more thoughts. They are only mice gnawing. I can hear them at night."
"You cannot sleep?" he inquired, with so grave a concern that I laughed outright.