He flung out a hand that seemed to sweep away a world.
“Though I thought I was alone in the world,” she said, after a pause, “I have thought of these things. They have taught me always that strength was almost a sin, that it was better to be little than great, that all true religion was to shelter the weak and little, encourage the weak and little, help them to multiply and multiply until at last they crawled over one another, to sacrifice all our strength in their cause. But … always I have doubted the thing they taught.”
“This life,” he said, “these bodies of ours, are not for dying.”
“No.”
“Nor to live in futility. But if we would not do that, it is already plain to all our Brethren a conflict must come. I know not what bitterness of conflict must presently come, before the little folks will suffer us to live as we need to live. All the Brethren have thought of that. Cossar, of whom I told you: he too has thought of that.”
“They are very little and weak.”
“In their way. But you know all the means of death are in their hands, and made for their hands. For hundreds of thousands of years these little people, whose world we invade, have been learning how to kill one another. They are very able at that. They are able in many ways. And besides, they can deceive and change suddenly. … I do not know. … There comes a conflict. You—you perhaps are different from us. For us, assuredly, the conflict comes. … The thing they call war. We know it. In a way we prepare for it. But you know—those little people!—we do not know how to kill, at least we do not want to kill—”
“Look,” she interrupted, and he heard a yelping horn.
He turned at the direction of her eyes, and found a bright yellow motor car, with dark goggled driver and fur-clad passengers, whooping, throbbing, and buzzing resentfully at his heel. He moved his foot, and the mechanism, with three angry snorts, resumed its fussy way towards the town. “Filling up the roadway!” floated up to him.
Then someone said, “Look! Did you see? There is the monster Princess over beyond the trees!” and all their goggled faces came round to stare.
“I say,” said another. “That won’t do …”
“All this,” she said, “is more amazing than I can tell.”
“That they should not have told you,” he said, and left his sentence incomplete.
“Until you came upon me, I had lived in a world where I was great—alone. I had made myself a life—for that. I had thought I was the victim of some strange freak of nature. And now my world has crumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another world, other conditions, wider possibilities—fellowship—”
“Fellowship,” he answered.
“I want you to tell me more yet, and much more,” she said. “You know this passes through my mind like a tale that is told. You even … In a day perhaps, or after several days, I shall believe in you. Now—Now I am dreaming. … Listen!”
The first stroke of a clock above the palace offices far away had penetrated to them. Each counted mechanically “Seven.”
“This,” she said, “should be the hour of my return. They will be taking the bowl of my coffee into the hall where I sleep. The little officials and servants—you cannot dream how grave they are—will be stirring about their little duties.”
“They will wonder … But I want to talk to you.”
She thought. “But I want to think too. I want now to think alone, and think out this change in things, think away the old solitude, and think you and those others into my world. … I shall go. I shall go back today to my place in the castle, and tomorrow, as the dawn comes, I shall come again—here.”
“I shall be here waiting for you.”
“All day I shall dream and dream of this new world you have given me. Even now, I can scarcely believe—”
She took a step back and surveyed him from the feet to the face. Their eyes met and locked for a moment.
“Yes,” she said, with a little laugh that was half a sob. “You are real. But it is very wonderful! Do you think—indeed—? Suppose tomorrow I come and find you—a pygmy like the others … Yes, I must think. And so for today—as the little people do—”
She held out her hand, and for the first time they touched one another. Their hands clasped firmly and their eyes met again.
“Goodbye,” she said, “for today. Goodbye! Goodbye, Brother Giant!”
He hesitated with some unspoken thing, and at last he answered her simply, “Goodbye.”
For a space they held each other’s hands, studying each the other’s face. And many times after they had parted, she looked back half doubtfully at him, standing still in the place where they had met. …
She walked into her apartments across the great yard of the Palace like one who walks in a dream, with a vast branch of chestnut trailing from her hand.
III
These two met altogether fourteen times before the beginning of the end. They met in the Great Park or on the heights and among the gorges of the rusty-roaded, heathery moorland, set with dusky pine-woods, that stretched to the southwest. Twice they met in the great avenue of chestnuts, and five times near the broad ornamental water the king, her great-grandfather, had made. There was a place where a great trim lawn, set with tall conifers, sloped graciously to the water’s edge, and there she would sit, and he would lie at her knees and look up in her face and talk, telling of all the things that had been, and of the work his father had set before him, and of the great and spacious dream of what the giant people should one day be. Commonly they met in the early dawn, but once
