She looked at me a full moment steadily, and in her eyes, no longer
green but sky-blue, I read the approach of that strange expression I
called another “face,” that in the end, however, did not fully come.
But the characteristic struck me, for Julius had it too.
“Oh, you find out all about yourself in a place like this,” she said
slowly, “a whole lot of things you didn’t know before. You’ll like it;
but it’s not for everybody. It’s very élite.” She turned to Julius.
“The Professor’ll love it, won’t he? And we must keep him,” she
repeated, “now we’ve got him.”
Something moved between the three of us as she said it. There was no
inclination in me to smile, even at the absurd choice of a word. An
upheaving sense of challenge came across the air at me, including
not only ourselves at the breakfast table, but the entire valley as
well. Against some subterranean door in me rose sudden pressure, and
the woman’s commonplace words had in them something incalculable that
caused the door to yield. Out rushed a pouring, bursting flood. A wild
delight of beauty ran suddenly in my civilised veins; I felt uplifted,
stimulated, carried off my feet.
It was but the flash and touch of a passing mood, of course, yet it
marked a change in me, another change. _She_ was aware of elemental
powers even as her husband was. First through him, but now through her,
I, too, was becoming similarly--aware.
I glanced at Julius, calmly devouring bread and milk beyond all reach
of comedy--Julius who recognised an “old soul” in a servant girl with
the same conviction that he invoked the deific Powers of a conscious
Nature; to whom nothing was trivial, nothing final, the future
magnificent as the past, and behind whose chair stood the Immensities
whispering messages of his tireless evolutionary scheme. And I saw him
“unclassable”--merely an eternal, travelling soul, working out with
myself and with this other “soul” some detail long neglected by the
three of us. Marriage, class, social status, education, culture--what
were they but temporary external details, whose sole value lay in their
providing conditions for acquiring certain definite experiences? Life’s
outer incidents were but episodic, after all.
And this flash of insight into his point of view came upon me thus
suddenly through _her_. The mutual sympathy and understanding between
the three of us that he so keenly watched for had advanced rapidly.
Another stage was reached. The foundations seemed already established
here among us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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