ER XVI

Here, in the wakeful night, high up in the monstrous hills, with this
everlasting torrent raging in his ears, and the camp-fire out of doors
there flaring, flickering, glowing, dying down--here in the fog of the
forest fires and the solitude of the mountains, it is so easy to see
things as they truly were. A shrug, a smile, a word, a silence, the lift
of an eyebrow--things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago,
which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant--are alive
with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed 'It looks
incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle.

Paul read nothing.

And now, looking back from this smoky eyrie through all the intervening
years, it seems as if the tragedy of a life might have been averted, as
if a little weight, a little prescience, a little care, might have made
the sum of life work out to a far other total.

There has been no star visible in the heavens, nor any glimpse of a
moon for four nights. The sun is the dimmest red ball in the daytime,
a danger-signal lantern, seen through dirty glass. There is a yeast at
work in the Solitary's mind It is as if the material universe being
cut away from him--save just this solid remnant of it in which he
lounges--there were space found for something not belonging to it to
draw near him.

Over and over again the lonely man had read his father's last letter,
and now in the hot, oppressive midnight it repeated itself in his mind:

'At my father's death a change began to work in my opinions. I had
convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered,
but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first
faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father's spirit and my
own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he
had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed
greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the
grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The
creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there,
was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, God
rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest
estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these,
and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as gods to us, but
within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then Go