As the greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the parings of your nails.
Having once escaped, you have the world before you. Though the words may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.'
"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains, where the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke out of the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.
"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia. You are right.
I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'
"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.
"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy eye, `why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his wife.'
"`And why is it dangerous?' I inquired.
"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd person, `and we all want to be found.'
"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked, `Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we want most is to be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented things: to break with the past and belong to the future.'
"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene--the dark purple plains, the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents.
`I shall not find the house here,' he said. `It is still eastward-- further and further eastward.'
"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot of his pole upon the frozen earth.
"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out;
I am a revolutionist. But don't you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden-- to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of?
Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get HOME?'
"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I should accept that.'
"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have explained a second thing to me.'
"`What do you mean?' I asked; `what thing?'
"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking across quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at last.
And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the darkening flats.
"I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should like to find out if he has produced any literary works.--Yours, etc., "Paul Nickolaiovitch."
There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and it was again without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile.
"The Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is ceremonious enough in its own way:--
"The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.--I am Wong-Hi, and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest of Fu. The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it must be very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought.
I am indeed in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy, and in this I shall doubtless die.
But if a man remain in one place he shall see that the place changes.
The pagoda of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is always ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look as over a sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning.
And yet when he came, it was as if an elephant had strayed from the armies of the great kings of India. For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came forth in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the sons of men.
"Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke our speech brokenly.
"He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.'
And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
"`I have not seen your house nor any houses,' I answered.
`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'
"`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in his eyes, like the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to ask, for what should a man do except what men have done?
"`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up their hands even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all.
