I looked into my mirror the next morning. With scared cry I
again looked into my mirror. With brutish, trembling fingers
I tried to cleanse the mist from my eyes, and once more I
looked into my mirror, scraped its surface tenderly, but it
availed not. There was no reflection of my features in its
polished depths; naught but vacancy, steely and profound.
There is no God, I had proclaimed; no God in high heaven, no
God with the world, no spirit ever moved upon the vasty
waters, no spirit ever travailed in the womb of time and
conceived the cosmos. There is no God and man is not made in
his image; eternity is an eyeless socket--a socket that
never beheld the burning splendors of the Deity. There is no
God, O my God! And my cries are futile, for have I not gazed
into my mirror, gazed with clear ironic frantic gaze and
missed my own image! There is no God; yet has my denial been
heard in blackest Eblis, and has it not reverberated unto
the very edges of Time? There is no God, and from that
moment my face was blotted out. I may never see it in the
moving waters, in mirrors, in the burnished hearts of
things, or in the liquid eyes of woman. I denied God. I
mocked His omnipotence. I dared him to mortal combat, and my
mirror tells me there is no Me, no image of the man called
by my name. I denied God and God denies me!
"If I were in such a mental condition," Hodson eagerly commented, "I'd
call a doctor or join the Salvation Army." "Why haven't you written
more short stories?" inquired Merville. "Because I've never had the
time," Cintras sadly answered. "Once I tried to condense what novelists
usually spread over hundreds of pages, and say it in a couple of
paragraphs. Every word must illuminate the past, in every sentence may
be found the sequel."
"Cintras, I vow your case is hopeless. You are a regular cherry-stone
carver. Here you've shown us the skeletons of two stories and yet given
none of them flesh enough to live upon." "Berkeley you belong to a past
full of novelistic monsters. You are the three volume man with the happy
ending tacked on willy-nilly. It is the tact of omission--" "Hang your
art-for-art theories. I'll make more money than Cintras ever did when I
publish my "Art of Anonymous Letter Writing!" cut in Hodson. Cintras
calmly continued, "Here is my title and see if you can follow me."