Jones," she said, turning from the dusty pages and clasping her young, milk-warm hands over mine and leaning towards me until her blushing cheek was near to my shoulder and the incense of her breath upon me. "Oh! Gulliver Jones,"she said. "Make me read no more; my soul revolts from the task, the crazy brown letters swim before my eyes. Is there no learning near at hand that would be pleasanter reading than this silly book of yours? What, after all," she said, growing bolder at the sound of her own voice, "what, after all, is the musty reticence of gods to the whispered secret of a maid? Jones, splendid stranger for whom all men stand aside and women look over shoulders, oh, let me be your book!" she whispered, slipping on to my knee and winding her arms round my neck till, through the white glimmer of her single vest, I could feel her heart beating against mine. "Newest and dearest of friends, put by this dreary learning and look in my eyes; is there nothing to be spelt out there?"And I was constrained to do as she bid me, for she was as fresh as an almond blossom touched by the sun, and looking down into two swimming blue lakes where shyness and passion were contending--books easy enough, in truth, to be read, I saw that she loved me, with the unconventional ardour of her nature.
It was a pleasant discovery, if its abruptness was em-barrassing, for she was a maid in a thousand; and half ashamed and half laughing I let her escalade me, throwing now and then a rueful look at the Secret of the Gods, and all that priceless knowledge treated so unworthily.
What else could I do? Besides, I loved her myself! And if there was a momentary chagrin at having yonder golden knowledge put off by this lovely interruption, yet I was flesh and blood, the gods could wait--they had to wait long and often before, and when this sweet interpreter was comforted we would have another try. So it happened I took her into my heart and gave her the answer she asked for.
For a long time we sat in the dusky grandeur of the royal library, my mind revolving between wonder and ad-miration of the neglected knowledge all about, and the stir-rings of a new love, while Heru herself, lapsed again into Martian calm, lay half sleeping on my shoulder, but pre-sently, unwinding her arms, I put her down.
"There, sweetheart," I whispered, "enough of this for the moment; tonight, perhaps, some more, but while we are here amongst all this lordly litter, I can think of nothing else."Again I bid her turn the pages, noting as she did so how each chapter was headed by the coloured configuration of a world. Page by page we turned of crackling parchment, until by chance, at the top of one, my eye caught a coloured round I could not fail to recognise--'twas the spinning but-ton on the blue breast of the immeasurable that yesterday I inhabited. "Read here," I cried, clapping my finger upon the page midway down, where there were some signs looking like Egyptian writing. "Says this quaint dabbler in all knowledge anything of Isis, anything of Phra, of Am-mon, of Ammon Top?""And who was Isis? who Ammon Top?" asked the lady.
"Nay, read," I answered, and down the page her slender fingers went awandering till at a spot of knotted signs they stopped. "Why, here is something about thy Isis," ex-claimed Heru, as though amused at my perspicuity. "Here, halfway down this chapter of earth-history, it says," and putting one pink knee across the other to better prop the book she read:
"And the priests of Thebes were gone; the sand stood un-trampled on the temple steps a thousand years; the wild bees sang the song of desolation in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap of Ammon; ay, another thou-sand years went by, and earth was tilled of unseen hands and sown with yellow grain from Paradise, and the thin veil that separates the known from the unknown was rent, and men walked to and fro.""Go on," I said.
"Nay," laughed the other, "the little mice in their eager-ness have been before you--see, all this corner is gnawed away.""Read on again," I said, "where the page is whole; those sips of knowledge you have given make me thirsty for more.
There, begin where this blazonry of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread by the scribe for the feet of a sovereign truth--what says he here?" And she, half pouting to be set back once more to that task, half won-dering as she gazed on those magic letters, let her eyes run down the page, then began:
"And it was the Beginning, and in the centre void pres-ently there came a nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval morning and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that natal splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came hitherward; from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable, there issued presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of life into all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces of the illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen hills of the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without beginning: and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding nameless planets, were stirred, trembling into their depth. It crossed the il-limitable spaces where the herding aerolites swirl forever through space in the wake of careering world, and all their whistling wings answered to it. It reverberated through the grey wastes of vacuity, and crossed the dark oceans of the Outside, even to the black shores of the eternal night beyond.
"And hardly had echo of that breath died away in the hollow of the heavens and the empty wombs of a million barren worlds, when the light brightened again, and draw-ing in upon itself became definite and took form, and therefrom, at the moment of primitive conception, there came--"And just then, as she had read so far as that, when all my faculties were aching to know what came next--whether this were but the idle scribbling of a vacuous fool, or something else--there rose the sound of soft flutes and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals wandered pip-ing round the palace to call folk to meals, a smell of roast meat and grilling fish as that procession lifted the curtains between the halls, and--"Dinner!" shouted my sweet Martian, slapping the cov-ers of The Secret of the Gods together and pushing the stately tome headlong from the table. "Dinner! 'Tis worth a hundred thousand planets to the hungry!"Nothing I could say would keep her, and, scarcely know-ing whether to laugh or to be angry at so unseemly an interruption, but both being purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's invita-tion to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gos-samer food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant frame of mind.
