difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the

Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would

interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that,

and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and

Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place

of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay

under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon

the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast

splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild

rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a

wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease…

Section 7

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet,

talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal

love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity

had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It

had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued,

that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of

those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now,

lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for

realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of Love…

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these

things. Against that continued silence Kahn's voice presently

seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but

presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his

appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin and very

deliberately avoided Kahn's eyes.

'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this

sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of

love-making in the world. This great wave of decoration and

elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,

has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that

the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world

is set free for love-making. Down there,-under the clouds, the

lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical

songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into

a luminous haze of love-sexual love… I don't think you are

right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you

see life-ardently-with the eyes of youth. But the power that

has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled

blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense

and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater

than any such emotions…

'All through my life-it has been a necessary part of my work-I

have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles

that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the

soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful

ecstasy of waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and

wonderful."… The orgy is only beginning, Kahn… It was

inevitable-but it is not the end of mankind…

'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of

time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it

forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,

its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and

hungered and grew weary and died. Incalculable successions of

vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,

eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror

flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life

was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And

then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and

hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies

not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,

a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to

the stars… Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of,

this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have

arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided

for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left

behind.'

'But Love,' said Kahn.

'I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And

that is what you mean, Kahn.'

Karenin shook his head. 'You cannot stay at the roots and climb

the tree,' he said…

'No,' he said after a pause, 'this sexual excitement, this love

story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far

literature and art and sentiment and all our emotionalforms have

been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights

and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of

the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of