He was taken aback, he let her fingers drop. From his parched throat
came the words, "But thou art--no Christian."
"I know--but nevertheless--oh, I never dreamed of anything of this
with thee--'twas all of the brain, the soul."
"Soul and body are but one fact."
"Women are not philosophers. I--" She stopped. Her fingers played
nervously with the pearl necklace that rose and fell on her bosom. He
found himself noting its details, wondering that she had developed
such extravagant tastes. Then, awaking to her distress, he said
quietly, "Then there is no hope for me?"
Her face retained its look of pain.
"Not ever? You could never--?" His cough shook him.
"If there had been no other," she murmured, and her eyes drooped
half-apologetically towards the necklace.
The bitterness of death was in his soul. He had a sudden ironic sense
of a gap in his mathematical philosophy. He had fathomed the secret of
Being, had analyzed and unified all things from everlasting to
everlasting, yet here was an isolated force--a woman's will--that
stood obstinately between him and happiness. He seemed to visualize
it, behind her serious face, perversely mocking.
The handle of the door turned, and a young man came in. He was in the
pink of fashion--a mantle of Venetian silk disposed in graceful folds
about his handsome person, his neckcloth of Flanders lace, his
knee-breeches of satin, his shoes gold-buckled, his dagger jewelled.
Energy flashed from his eye, vigor radiated from his every movement.
"Ah, Diedrich!" she cried, as her face lit up with more than relief.
"Here is Heer Spinoza at last. This is Heer Kerkkrinck!"
"Spinoza!" A thrill of awe was in the young man's voice, the reverence
of the consciously stupid for the great brains of the earth. He did
not take Spinoza's outstretched hand in his but put it to his lips.
The lonely thinker and the happy lover stood thus for an instant,
envying and admiring each other. Then Spinoza said cordially, "And now
that I have had the pleasure of meeting Heer Kerkkrinck I must hurry
back to town ere the road grows too dark."
"But father expects thee to sup with us," murmured Klaartje.
"'Tis a moonless night, and footpads may mistake me for a Jew." He
smiled. "Make my apologies to the doctor."
It was indeed a moonless night, but he did not make for the highroad.
Instinctively he turned seawards.
A slight mist brooded over the face of all things, adding to the
night, blurring the village to a few gleams of fire. On the broad
sandy beach he could just see the outlines of the boats and the
fishing-nets. He leaned against the gunwale of a _pink_, inhaling the
scents of tar and brine, and watching the apparent movement seawards
of some dark sailing-vessel which, despite the great red anchor at his
feet, seemed to sail outwards as each wave came in.
The sea stretched away, soundless, moveless, and dark, save where it
broke in white foam at his feet; near the horizon a pitch-black wall
of cloud seemed to rise sheer from the water and join the gray sky
that arched over the great flat spaces. And in the absence of stars,
the earth itself seemed to gain in vastness and mystery, its own
awfulness, as it sped round, unlessened by those endless perspectives
of vaster planets. And from the soundless night and sea and sky, and
from those austere and solemn stretches of sand and forest, wherein
forms and colors were lost in a brooding unity, there came to Spinoza
a fresh uplifting sense of the infinite, timeless Substance, to love
and worship which was exaltation and ecstasy. The lonely thinker
communed with the lonely Being.
"Though He slay me," his heart whispered, "yet will I trust in Him."
Yea, though the wheels of things had passed over his body, it was
still his to rejoice in the eternal movement that brought happiness to
others.
Others! How full the world was of existences, each perfect after its
kind, the laws of God's nature freely producing every conception of
His infinite intellect. In man alone how many genera, species,
individuals--from saints to criminals, from old philosophers to
gallant young livers, all to be understood, none to be hated. And man
but a fraction of the life of one little globe, that turned not on
man's axis, nor moved wholly to man's ends. This sea that stretched
away unheaving was not sublimely dead--even to the vulgar
apprehension--but penetrated with quivering sensibility, the exquisite
fresh feeling of fishes darting and gliding, tingling with life in fin
and tail, chasing and chased, zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in
the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of
animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and
creeping populations, the soil riddled with the sluggish
voluptuousness of worms; each tiniest creature a perfect expression of
the idea of its essence, individualized by its conatus, its effort to
persist in existence on its own lines, though in man alone the
potentiality of entering through selfless Reason into the intellectual
ecstasy of the love with which God loves Himself--to be glad of the
strength of the lion and the grace of the gazelle and the beauty of
the woman who belongs to another. Blessings on the happy lovers,
blessings on all the wonderful creation, praise, praise to the Eternal
Being whose modes body forth the everlasting pageant.
Beginningless æons before his birth It had been--the great pageant to
whose essence Being belonged--endless æons after his ephemeral passing
It would still throb and glow, still offer to the surrendered human
soul the supreme uplift. He had but a moment to contemplate It, yet to
understand Its essence, to know the great laws of Its workings, to see
It _sub specie aeternitatis_, was to partake of Its eternity. There
was no need to journey either in space or time to discover Its
movement, everywhere the same, as perfect in the remotest past as in
the farthest future, by no means working--as the vulgar imagined--to a
prospective perfection; everywhere educed from the same enduring
necessities of the divine freedom. Progress! As illusory as the
movement of yon little vessel that, anchored stably, seemed always
sailing out towards the horizon.
And so in that trance of adoration, in that sacred Glory, in that
rapturous consciousness that he had fought his last fight with the
enslaving affects, there formed themselves in his soul--white heat at
one with white light--the last sentences of his great work:--
"We see, then, what is the strength of the wise man, and by how much
he surpasses the ignorant who is driven forward by lust alone. For the
ignorant man is not only agitated by eternal causes in many ways, and
never enjoys true peace of soul, but lives also ignorant, as it were,
both of God and of things, and as soon as he ceases to suffer, ceases
also to be. On the other hand, the wise man is scarcely ever moved in
his mind, but being conscious by a certain eternal necessity of
himself, of God, and of things, never ceases to be, and always enjoys
true peace of soul. If the way which leads hither seem very difficult,
it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is
so seldom discovered: for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be
discovered without great labor, how could it be possible that it
should be neglected almost by everybody? But all noble things are as
difficult as they are rare."
So ran the words that were not to die.
Suddenly a halo on the upper edge of the black cloud heralded the
struggling through of the moon: she shot out a crescent, reddish in
the mist, then labored into her full orb, wellnigh golden as the sun.
Spinoza started from his reverie: his doublet was wet with dew, he
felt the mist in his throat. He coughed: then it was as if the salt of
the air had got into his mouth, and as he spat out the blood, he knew
he would not remain long sundered from the Eternal Unity.
But there is nothing on which a free man will meditate less than on
death. Desirous to write down what was in his mind, Spinoza turned
from the sea and pursued his peaceful path homewards.