"
"Listen!" some one broke in suddenly.
We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns. Yonder, the
growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant
violence breaks feebly on our buried ears. All around us, the waters
continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.
"It's beginning again."
Then one of us says, "Ah, look what we've got against us!"
Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of
their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are
roughly sketching. It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of
the moment, whose endless beginning they see again. It is the enmity
of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of
privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken
sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the
tangled lines.
And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in
which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and
stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.
* * * * * *
Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky,
above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world--a cavalcade
of warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and
plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with
weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll. The
antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the
painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.
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