So he set about to rewin her, and she to rediscover him. But it was useless. Rooted together, they had grown apart. Her torn tendrils, though reaching for him, bled for the other. So in the end, to free her, he had left her. For he loved her, so he told himself, far more than he craved her.

But when he had wrenched himself from her, his bared roots dried, his leaves withered.

He described himself as one of those lonely souls who, exiled from Europe, had maintained contact with the European spirit by reading. He mentioned Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, but few more modern. He claimed, however, also to be "well read in modern thought." He knew his Wells, his Shaw, his Freud, his Russell. Even Karl Marx he had read out there among the temples and the rice fields. These great writers, he said, had opened his eyes to the world. But now, this desolate homecoming was a new and a disintegrating experience. It fitted nowhere. Those modern prophets, he declared, could not help him; since for all their clever analysis they were spiritually imperceiving (so he phrased it). They could not see, and he himself till now had never seen, that if love fails life is worthless; and if love is not God (so he put it) all existence is pointless.

Formerly, though not unaware of evil, he had never looked squarely at it. There had been no need. Yet he had seen men beaten to death, and women mutilated, and he had responded with the required indignation. He knew also that savagery might conquer the whole planet. (Those lethal fungi that had sprouted once might sprout again.) All this he knew, but only as though from a book; or as a bad dream remembered in daytime. For him, evil had remained a thing unreal, in the end to be abolished from the planet. "I had two anchors," he said, "my love, and my faith in man's triumphant future. So long as these held, evil could only sadden, not shatter me."

But now, the anchor of his love had failed, and under the added strain, the other too had parted. "Evil at last," he said, "had its claws in my own heart. And through my own desolation I realized at last the evil of the universe."

He was silent. And I felt a frost creep in on me. For you and I, we too are held by that anchor. And if it should fail? Though our very differences enrich us, toughening our union, how can we know that some secret poison in one or the other cannot ruin us?

When the Christian had finished, I murmured vaguely of sympathy, but he sharply checked me. "Do not pity me," he said. "Rather envy; for it was only through suffering that my tight-shut eyes could be opened for salvation." In his voice I seemed to hear exaltation uneasily triumph over misery. "But God," he said, "had not yet scourged me enough. I was not yet ready to be saved."

He continued his story.