"
After this Nombe became much more agreeable. That is to say she
was very polite, her smile was more fixed and her eyes more
unfathomable than ever. Evidently Zikali had spoken to her and
she had listened. Yet to tell the truth my distrust of this
handsome young woman grew deeper day by day. I recognized that
there was a great gulf between her and the normal, that she was a
creature fashioned by Zikali who had trained her as a gardener
trains a tree, nay, who had done more, who had grafted some
foreign growth of exotic and unnatural spiritualism on to her
primitive nature. The nature remained the same, but the graft or
grafts bore strange flowers and fruit, unholy flowers and
poisonous fruit. Therefore she was not to blame--sometimes I
wonder whether in this curious world, could one see their past
and their future, anybody is to blame for anything--but this did
not make her the less dangerous.
Some talks I had with her only increased my apprehensions, for I
found that in a way she had no conscience. Life, she told me,
was but a dream, and all its laws as evolved by man were but
illusions. The real life was elsewhere. There was the distant
lake on which the flower of our true existence floated. Without
this unseen lake of supernatural water the flower could not
float; indeed there would be no flower. Moreover, the flower did
not matter; sometimes it would have this shape and colour,
sometimes that. It was but a thing destined to grow and bloom
and rot, and during its day to be ugly or to be beautiful, to
smell sweet or ill, as it might chance, and ultimately to be
absorbed back into the general water of Life.
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