第31章

"I do not know," he answered her. "I don't seem to care.""He must be somewhere," she said: "the living God of love and hope: the God that Christ believed in.""They were His last words, too," he answered: "'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?'""No, not His last," said Joan: "'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.' Love was Christ's God. He will help us to find Him."Their arms were about one another. Joan felt that a new need had been born in her: the need of loving and of being loved. It was good to lay her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.

He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday.

"Do you still go to the chapel?" she asked him a little hesitatingly.

"Yes," he answered. "One lives by habit.""It is the only Temple I know," he continued after a moment.

"Perhaps God, one day, will find me there."He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.

"Have you heard from Arthur?" he asked, suddenly turning to her.

"No. Not since about a month," she answered. "Why?""He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him," he said with a smile, handing her the letter. "He will be here some time to-morrow."Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister.

Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them--when she did not forget to do so--in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.

"It only came an hour or two ago," her father explained. "If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived.""So long as he doesn't think that I came down specially to see him, I don't mind," said Joan.

They both laughed. "He's a good lad," said her father.

They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table. Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.

Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper. A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her; but was not surprised.

"I called at your diggings," he said. "I had to go through London.

They told me you had started. It is good of you.""No, it isn't," said Joan. "I came down to see Dad. I didn't know you were back." She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.

"How are you?" she added, holding out her hand. "You've grown quite good-looking. I like your moustache." And he flushed again with pleasure.

He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair. He looked lithe and agile rather than strong. He was shy at first, but once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.

His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks.

He described the life of the people, very little different from what it must have been in Noah's time. For months he had been the only white man there, and had lived among them. What had struck him was how little he had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over the first shock. He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum and hunted with them.

Provided one was a little hungry and tired with toil, a stew of goat's flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down with wine out of a sheep's skin, made a feast; and after, there was music and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather round him his rapt audience. Paris had only robbed women of their grace and dignity. He preferred the young girls in their costume of the fourteenth dynasty. Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate life and render it less enjoyable. All the essentials of happiness--love, courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse, and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.

Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man's happiness as more important to him than his self-development. It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain. Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us.

But the pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.

He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling his bread. When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia. But he stuck to his guns.

How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets?

They had sprung from a shepherd race. Yet surely there was genius, literature. Greece owed nothing to progress. She had preceded it.

Her thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from nature, not civilization. Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil. We had never surpassed it.

"But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would not so utterly have disappeared," suggested Mr. Allway.

"Unless you reject the law of the survival of the fittest."He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.