"Possibly," she said. "Perhaps I don't mean quite all I say. But that I feel here, opposing me, opposing all my western notions, a force which is antagonistic to me ... that is certain. I am sometimes frightened. I always feel ... that I am on the point of being conquered, I don't know what by: by something out of the ground, by a force of nature, by a secret in the soul of these black people, whom I don't know.... I feel particularly afraid at night." "You're overwrought," he said, tenderly. "Possibly," she replied, wearily, seeing that he did not understand and too tired to go on explaining. "Let's talk about something else. That table-turning's very curious." "Very," he said. "The other day, the three of us: Ida, you and I...." "It was certainly very curious." "Do you remember the first time? Addie de Luce: it seems to be true about him and Mrs. van Oudijck.... And the insurrection ... the table foretold it." "May we not have suggested it unconsciously?" "I don't know. But to think that we should all be playing fair and that that table should go tapping and talking to us by means of an alphabet!" "I shouldn't do it often, Eva, if I were you." "No, I think it inexplicable, and yet it's already beginning to bore me. One grows so accustomed to the incomprehensible." "Everything's incomprehensible." "Yes ... and everything's a bore." "Eva!" he said, with a soft, reproachful laugh. "I give up the fight. I shall just sit in my rocking-chair ... and look at the rain." "There was a time when you used to see the beautiful side of my country." "Your country? Which you would be glad to leave to-morrow to go to the Paris Exhibition!" "I've never seen anything." "How humble you are to-day!" "I am sad, because of you." "Oh, please don't be that!" "Play something more." "Well, then, have your gin-and-bitters. Help yourself. I shall play on my out-of-tune piano; it will sound as melodious as my soul, which is also all of a tangle...." She went back to the middle gallery and played something from Parsifal. He remained sitting outside and listened. The rain was pouring furiously. The garden stood clean and empty. A violent thunder-clap seemed to split the world asunder. Nature was supreme; and in her gigantic manifestation the two people in that damp house were diminished, his love was nothing, her melancholy was nothing and the mystic music of the Grail was as a child's ditty to the echoing mystery of that thunder-clap, whereat fate itself seemed to sail with heavenly cymbals over these doomed creatures in the Deluge. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE