'We will fly west to one of the Somersetshire coal-mines, or to one of
the Cornwall tin-mines, and we will barricade ourselves against the
cloud, and provision ourselves for six months--for it is perfectly
feasible, and we have plenty of time, and no crowds to break down our
barricades--and there in the deep earth we will live sweetly together,
till the danger is overpast.'
And she smiled, and drew her hand across my face, and said:
'No, no: don't you tlust in my God? do you think He would leally let me
die?'
For she has appropriated the Almighty God to herself, naming Him '_my_
God'--the impudence: though she generally knows what she is saying, too.
And she would not fly the cloud.
And I am now writing three weeks later at a little place called
Château-les-Roses, and no poison-cloud, and no sign of any poison-cloud,
has come. And this I do not understand.
It may be that she divined that I was about to destroy myself ... she
may be quite capable.... But no, I do not understand, and shall never
ask her.
But _this_ I understand: that it is _the White_ who is Master here: that
though he wins but by a hair, yet he wins, he wins: and since he wins,
dance, dance, my heart.
I look for a race that shall resemble its Mother: nimble-witted,
light-minded, pious--like her; all-human, ambidextrous, ambicephalous,
two-eyed--like her; and if, like her, they talk the English language
with all the r's turned into l's, I shall not care.
They will be vegetable-eaters, I suppose, when all the meat now extant
is eaten up: but it is not certain that meat is good for men: and if it
is really good, then they will _invent_ a meat: for they will be _her_
sons, and she, to the furthest cycle in which the female human mind is
permitted to orbit, is, I swear, all-wise.
There was a preaching man--a Scotchman he was, named Macintosh, or
something like that--who said that the last end of Man shall be well,
and very well: and she says the same: and the agreement of these two
makes a Truth. And to that I now say: Amen, Amen.
For I, Adam Jeffson, second Parent of the world, hereby lay down,
ordain, and decree for all time, clearly perceiving it now: That the one
Motto and Watch-word essentially proper to each human individual, and to
the whole Race of Man, as distinct from other races in heaven or in
earth, was always, and remains, even this: 'Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him.'