There seemed some
radical, elemental choice presented to me--to what I used to call my
soul. My soul could take or leave it as it pleased.... I looked at Arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light. What had
come over me? How had our walk and talk and mood, our quite recent
everyday and ordinary view, our normal relationship with the things of
the world--how had it all slipped into this? So insensibly, so easily,
so naturally! "Was it worth while?" The question--_I_ didn't ask it--jumped up in me of its own accord. Was "what" worth while? Why, my present life of commonplace and
grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre,
unremunerative ambitions. Ah, it was this new Beauty calling me, this
shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures I have mentioned.... I
did not argue it, even to myself. But I understood. There was a radical
change in me. The buried poet, too long hidden, rushed into the air
like some great singing bird. I glanced again at Arthur moving along lightly by my side, half
dancing almost in his brimming happiness. "Wait till you see Them,"
I heard him singing. "Wait till you hear the call of Artemis and the
footsteps of her flying nymphs. Wait till Orion thunders overhead and
Selene, crowned with the crescent moon, drives up the zenith in her
white-horsed chariot. The choice will be beyond all question then...!" A great silent bird, with soft brown plumage, whirred across our path,
pausing an instant as though to peep, then disappearing with a muted
sound into an eddy of the wind it made. The big trees hid it. It was
an owl. The same moment I heard a rush of liquid song come pouring
through the forest with a gush of almost human notes, and a pair
of glossy wings flashed past us, swerving upwards to find the open
sky--blue-black, pointed wings. "His favourites!" exclaimed my companion with clear joy in his voice. "They all are here! Athene's bird, Procne and Philomela too! The
owl--the swallow--and the nightingale! Tereus and Itys are not far
away." And the entire forest, as he said it, stirred with movement,
as though that great bird's quiet wings had waked the sea of ancient
shadows. There were voices too--ringing, laughing voices, as though his
words woke echoes that had been listening for it. For I heard sweet
singing in the distance. The names he had used perplexed me. Yet even
I, stranger as I was to such refined delights, could not mistake the
passion of the nightingale and the dart of the eager swallow. That wild
burst of music, that curve of swift escape, were unmistakable. And I struck a stalwart tree-stem with my open hand, feeling the need
of hearing, touching, sensing it. My link with known, remembered things
was breaking. I craved the satisfaction of the commonplace. I got that
satisfaction; but I got something more as well. For the trunk was
round and smooth and comely. It was no dead thing I struck. Somehow it
brushed me into intercourse with inanimate Nature. And next the desire
came to hear my voice--my own familiar, high-pitched voice with the
twang and accent the New World climate brings, so-called American:

"Exchange Place, Noo York City. I'm in that business, buying and
selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one
of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all creation...!" It was an effort; but I made it firmly. It sounded odd, remote, unreal. "Sunlit woods and a wind among the branches", followed close and sweet
upon my words. But who, in the name of Wall Street, said it? "England's buying gold," I tried again. "We've had a private wire. Cut
in quick. First National is selling!" Great-faced Hephæstus, how ridiculous! It was like saying, "I'll take
your scalp unless you give me meat." It was barbaric, savage, centuries
ago. Again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it
into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose about me like a
cloud. "Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those
dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn. Daughter of Thanatos and
Hypnos...!" But again--who said the words? It surely was not Arthur, my nephew
Arthur, of To-day, learning French in a Swiss mountain village! I
felt--well, what did I feel? In the name of the Stock Exchange and Wall
Street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings? 3

And, turning to look at him, I made a discovery. I don't know how to
tell it quite; such shadowy marvels have never been my line of goods. He looked several things at once--taller, slighter, sweeter, but
chiefly--it sounds so crazy when I write it down--grander is the word,
I think. And all spread out with some power that flowed like Spring
when it pours upon a landscape. Eternally young and glorious--young,
I mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the Spring looks young;
and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset. Something big shone through him like a storm, something that would
go on for ever just as the Earth goes on, always renewing itself,
something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at
all--something the old gods had. But the figure, so far as there was
any figure at all, was that old family picture come to life. Our great
ancestor and Arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than
a million people. Yet it was Malahide I saw....

"They laid me in the earth I loved," he said in a strange, thrilling
voice like running wind and water, "and I found eternal life. I live
now for ever in Their divine existence. I share the life that changes
yet can never pass away." I felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. A roaring beauty
captured me completely. If I could tell it in honest newspaper
language--the common language used in flats and offices--why, I
guess I could patent a new meaning in ordinary words, a new power of
expression, the thing that all the churches and poets and thinkers have
been trying to say since the world began. I caught on to a fact so fine
and simple that it knocked me silly to think I'd never realised it
before. I had read it, yes; but now I _knew_ it. The Earth, the whole
bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of
eternal, living Powers--spiritual powers, mind you--that just happened
to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called
mankind. And these Powers, as seen in Nature, were the gods. It was our
refusal of their grand appeal, so wild and sweet and beautiful, that
caused "evil." It was this barrier between ourselves and the rest of ...

My thoughts and feelings swept away upon the rising flood as the
"figure" came upon me like a shaft of moonlight, melting the last
remnant of opposition that was in me. I took my brain, my reason,
chucking them aside for the futile little mechanism I suddenly saw
them to be.