When God Laughs | Page 7

each to the other a candle-flame, and
revolving each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing
orbit-flight! It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more

potent than gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt
each into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were
called the wonderful lovers.
"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found
a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and
there I read:--
"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart, To know each other better, and to
keep The soft, delicious sense of two that touch . . .
O love, not yet! . . . Sweet, let us keep our love Wrapped round with
sacred mystery awhile, Waiting the secret of the coming years, That
come not yet, not yet . . . sometime . . . not yet . . .
Oh, yet a little while our love may grow! When it has blossomed it will
haply die. Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep, Bedded in dead denial
yet some while . . . Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'
"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without
moving for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the
verse had imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of
God's lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!
"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed aloud, ha,
ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were children.
They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and bedded
with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop the
cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the
gaming-table of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The
gods are behind the table. They make new rules for every system that is
devised. You have no chance to win.'
"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with

whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more
away.
"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they dull
it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on
self-denial, and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I
doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed
to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had
outwitted God. They had shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of
the good Earth Mother. They had played with her fire and not been
burned. They were immune. They were themselves gods, knowing
good from evil and tasting not. 'Was this the way gods came to be?' I
asked myself. 'I am a frog,' I said. 'But for my mud- lidded eyes I
should have been blinded by the brightness of this wonder I have
witnessed. I have puffed myself up with my wisdom and passed
judgment upon gods.'
"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot
through with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods
have not."
Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to
laugh harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a
devil, and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled
to our ears from the crashing outside world.
"I am a frog," he said apologetically. "How were they to understand?
They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but
they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But
this I will say--they played high. Never was there such a game before,
and I doubt me if there will ever be such a game again.
"Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with
kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove
him on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged
lute-player fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but

swooning. It was the very delirium of Love, and it continued
undiminished and increasing