Again I put the question to Kahikatea—a question which in after years I have often pondered as being one which was asked more wisely than I knew—“Will you not come with me and search for Crystal Grey?” and again he answered me with the madness of the poet who, in setting his mind on visionary things, forgets that flesh and blood is the working basis of all.
“Warnock,” he said, “I have hitched my waggon to a star and I’m not going to unhitch it now. I have made up my mind to look into the face of Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, and you would have me turn aside to help you search for Crystal Grey, the daughter of a mortal woman. No, my friend, the daughters of mortal women are not for madmen like me. Warnock!”—he smiled good humouredly at me—“the mother who freed Hinauri from her age-long prison must be the mother of a beautiful daughter. I prophesy that, when you have found the maiden, you will marry her and live happily ever afterwards.”
“And you?” I asked, smiling back, “you will wed an abstraction and beget great poems. Now look here, Kahikatea, face the thing squarely. Suppose, according to the tradition, which was probably hoary long before Pygmalion and Galatea were thought of—suppose that Hinauri should become a living, breathing woman, what would you do?”
He did not answer for some little time, but remained looking straight before him. At length he gave a sigh and said, “Granting for the moment that such a thing were possible, Hinauri would be more to me than she is now. I should love her with my whole self.”
“That is to say, from your present standpoint of the impersonal, she would be less to you.”
“No, no; the greater includes the less as a part of its greatness.”
“That is to say,” I persisted, pressing him hard, but not against his will, for two in a solitude speak as brothers; “if she came to life you would still retain your ideal love for her, but would also give her the love that a man gives to a woman.”
“Yes, I cannot imagine that it should be otherwise.”
“Well now; I begin to think that you are not in love with an abstraction after all, but that your feelings stand on a basis essentially human—founded on the life-likeness of the image—on that, and on the further romantic tradition that she will return.”
Again he was silent. Then he said slowly, half to himself and half to me, “The yearning desire upon the face was human, it was living; the tenderness, the compassion, and that something more—a kind of sorrow-joy which I could not fathom, filled me with the strange thought that the stone could feel. I thought—I believe I said it aloud—‘if brightness would only leap into those eyes, if the raven gloss would only come upon those tresses, if the laced bosom would only move with the wonderful emotion of the face, what a glorious woman would be there.’ As I saw her she seemed to be waiting for a breath or a touch. One sandalled foot, showing beneath the robe, had been advanced with the outstretched arms and the other seemed to be in the act of following, while as yet a little breath of wind had pressed her robe gently against her. Ah! Warnock, you are right; it was not the cold stone I saw, but the living woman.”