When God Laughs | Page 5

with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They
played a hand with the gods--"
"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.
Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.
"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."
"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.
"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"
"Because she loved him so, and when he died . . ."
Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.
"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill.
The world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you,
she fled from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of
fatigue. And no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness
and tears.
"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I

know. They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love.
They knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him
so well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in
their hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him
depart.
"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love
denied was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you
follow me? They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it
has. To eat and still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat.
The problem of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp
famine-edge of appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem,
for they loved Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet
ardours brimming in their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks;
his voice playing in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo
in their throats, and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness
which he alone can utter.
"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering
voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that
flame-winged lute- player whom none sees but for a moment, in a
rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this
exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at
least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol
of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with
desire.'
"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.
"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of Love.
They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with
others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled
Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the

pit of satiety.
"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm
human. They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it
was sunset- red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the
French joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was
Gallic. It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the
English serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were
Americans, descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and
self-denying of the English spirit-groping were not theirs.
"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only
they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic,
and this was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had one
night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the maid?
She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no more.
Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with
repetition they would cloy. Satiety again! She tried to play without
stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the
gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the
table. Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.
"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss
once only?