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though her angers were all the sort that come from love.
But a minute later the wailing and shouting died utterly away. Every man (and many a woman too) in that crowd was kneeling. Her beauty, which most of them had never seen, worked on them as a terror might work.
The man was scared and new waked from sleep. He took a shadow for a monster.’ ‘That is the wisdom of the Greeks,’ said the Priest. ‘But Glome does not take counsel with slaves, not even if they are kings’ favourites. And if the Brute was a shadow, King, what then? Many say it is a shadow.
Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.
Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.
Was I not right to struggle against this fool-happy mood? Mere seemliness, if nothing else, called for it. I would not go laughing to Psyche’s burial. If I did, how should I ever again believe that I had loved her? Reason called for it. I knew the world too well to believe this sudden smiling.
The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.
But I held my own without that knowledge. I ruled myself. Did they think I was nothing but a pipe to be played on as their moment’s fancy chose?
By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.
‘not even I have seen him—yet. He comes to me only in the holy darkness. He says I mustn’t—not yet—see his face or know his name. I’m forbidden to bring any light into his—our—chamber.’
If I’d had my eyes shut, I would have believed her palace was as real as this.’ ‘But, your eyes being open, you saw no such thing.’ ‘You don’t think—not possibly—not as a mere hundredth chance—there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?’
‘You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture—I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.’
My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things.
I’d queen it as long as the gods let me. It was not pride—the glitter of the name—that moved me; or not much. I was taking to queenship as a stricken man takes to the wine-pot or as a stricken woman, if she had beauty, might take to lovers. It was an art that left you no time to mope. If Orual could vanish altogether into the Queen, the gods would almost be cheated.
The softness did not last. I have seen something like this happen in a battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped our cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face—friends for a moment—and then at once enemies again and forever.
And so take away from him his work, which was his life (for what’s any woman to a man and a soldier in the end?) and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?’
The craving for Bardia was ended. No one will believe this who has not lived long and looked hard, so that he knows how suddenly a passion which has for years been wrapped round the whole heart will dry up and wither.
Of the things that followed I cannot at all say whether they were what men call real or what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
