FullReads

“I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to ‘Love’s Waiting Time.’ The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and there I read:–

“‘So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
To know each other better, and to keep
The soft, delicious sense of two that touch…

O love, not yet!… Sweet, let us keep our love
Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
Waiting the secret of the coming years,
That come not yet, not yet… sometime…
not yet…

Oh, yet a little while our love may grow!
When it has blossomed it will haply die.
Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
Bedded in dead denial yet some while…
Oh, yet a little while, a little while.’

“I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God’s lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the forerunner of young life–young life that is imperative to be born!

“I conned the lines over in my mind–‘Not yet, sometime’–‘O Love, not yet’–‘Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.’ And I laughed aloud, ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were children. They did not understand. They played with Nature’s fire and bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop the cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the gaming-table of life, and expected to win out. ‘Beware!’ I cried. ‘The gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is devised. You have no chance to win.’

“But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.

“I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they dull it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth Mother. They had played with her fire and not been burned. They were immune. They were themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting not. ‘Was this the way gods came to be?’ I asked myself. ‘I am a frog,’ I said. ‘But for my mud-lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the brightness of this wonder I have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with my wisdom and passed judgment upon gods.’

“Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods. They were man and woman–soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot through with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have not.”

Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to laugh harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a devil, and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled to our ears from the crashing outside world.

“I am a frog,” he said apologetically. “How were they to understand? They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this I will say–they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I doubt me if there will ever be such a game again.