“Over what?” says she.
“Over his heels,” said I.
“I do not complehend!”
“He killed him, then.”
“That I know. But how did Abel feel when he was killed? What is it to be killed?”
“Well,” said I, “you have seen bones all around you, and the bones of your mother, and you can feel the bones in your fingers. Your fingers will become mere bone after you are dead, as die you must. Those bones which you see around you, are, of course, the bones of the men of whom we often speak: and the same thing happened to them which happens to a fish or a butterfly when you catch them, and they lie all still.”
“And the men and the butterfly feel the same after they are dead?”
“Precisely the same. They lie in a deep drowse, and dream a nonsense-dream.”
“That is not dleadful. I thought that it was much more dleadful. I should not mind dying.”
“Ah! … so much the better: for it is possible that you may have to die a great deal sooner than you think.”
“I should not mind. Why were men so vely aflaid to die?”
“Because they were all such shocking cowards.”
“Oh, not all! not all!”
(This girl, I know not with what motive, has now definitely set herself up against me as the defender of the dead race. With every chance she is at it.)
“Nearly all,” said I: “tell me one who was not afraid—”
“There was Isaac,” says she: “when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.”
“Isaac was a great exception,” said I: “in the Bible and such books, you understand, you read of only the best sorts of people; but there were millions and millions of others—especially about the time of the poison-cloud—on a very much lower level—putrid wretches—covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes.”
This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it. Then, the little hairs at her lip-corners still wet, says she:
“Vices and climes, climes and vices. Always the same. What were these climes and vices?”
“Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred—”
“But what made them do them?”
“Their evil nature—their base souls.”
“But you are one of them, I am another: yet you and I live here together, and we do no vices and climes.”
Her astounding shrewdness! Right into the inmost heart of a matter does her simple wit seem to pierce!
“No,” I said, “we do no vices and crimes, because we lack motive. There is no danger that we should hate each other, for we have plenty to eat and drink, dates, wines, and thousands of things. (Our danger is rather the other way.) But they hated and schemed, because they were very numerous, and there arose a question among them of dates and wine.”
“Was there not, then, enough land to grow dates and wine for all?”
“There was—yes: much more than enough, I fancy. But some got hold of a vast lot of it, and as the rest felt the pinch of scarcity, there arose, naturally, a pretty state of things—including the vices and crimes.”
“Ah, but then,” says she, “it was not to their bad souls that the vices and climes were due, but only to this question of land. It is certain that if there had been no such question, there would have been no vices and climes, because you and I, who are just like them, do no vices and climes here, where there is no such question.”
The clear limelight of her intelligence! She wriggled on her seat in her effort of argument.
“I am not going to argue the matter,” I said. “There was that question of dates and wine, you see. And there always must be on an earth where millions of men, with varying degrees of cunning, reside.”
“Oh, not at all necessalily!” she cries with conviction: “not at all, at all: since there are much more dates and wine than are enough for all. If there should spling up more men now, having the whole wisdom, science, and expelience of the past at their hand, and they made an allangement among themselves that the first man who tlied to take more than he could work for should be killed, and sent to dleam a nonsense-dleam, the question could never again alise!”
“It arose before—it would arise again.”
“But no! I can guess clearly how it alose before: it alose thlough the sheer carelessness of the first men. The land was at first so vely, vely much more than enough for all, that the men did not take the tlouble to make an allangement among themselves; and afterwards the habit of carelessness was confirmed; till at last the vely oliginal carelessness must have got to have the look of an allangement; and so the stleam which began in a little long ended in a big long, the long glowing more and more fixed and fatal as the stleam lolled further flom the source. I see it clearly, can’t you? But now, if some more men would spling, they would be taught—”
“Ah, but no more men will spling, you see—!”
“There is no telling. I sometimes feel as if they must, and shall. The tlees blossom, the thunder lolls, the air makes me lun and leap, the glound is full of lichness, and I hear the voice of the Lord God walking all among the tlees of the folests.”
As she said this, I saw her underlip push out and
