The Rainbow

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in

a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the

horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range

of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the

ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the

meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the

perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his

soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless

ecstasy, consummated.

And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this

timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met the

thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of

ecstasy. This was all, this was everything. Till he came to

himself in the world below. Then again he gathered himself

together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped,

leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the

unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the

climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.

She too was overcome, but silenced rather than tuned to the

place. She loved it as a world not quite her own, she resented

his transports and ecstasies. His passion in the cathedral at

first awed her, then made her angry. After all, there was the

sky outside, and in here, in this mysterious half-night, when

his soul leapt with the pillars upwards, it was not to the stars

and the crystalline dark space, but to meet and clasp with the

answering impulse of leaping stone, there in the dusk and

secrecy of the roof. The far-off clinching and mating of the

arches, the leap and thrust of the stone, carrying a great roof

overhead, awed and silenced her.

But yet--yet she remembered that the open sky was no

blue vault, no dark dome hung with many twinkling lamps, but a

space where stars were wheeling in freedom, with freedom above

them always higher.

The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to

the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that

closed her in, and beyond which was nothing, nothing, it was the

ultimate confine. His soul would have liked it to be so: here,

here is all, complete, eternal: motion, meeting, ecstasy, and no

illusion of time, of night and day passing by, but only

perfectly proportioned space and movement clinching and

renewing, and passion surging its way into great waves to the

altar, recurrence of ecstasy.

Her soul too was carried forward to the altar, to the

threshold of Eternity, in reverence and fear and joy. But ever

she hung back in the transit, mistrusting the culmination of the

altar. She was not to be flung forward on the lift and lift of

passionate flights, to be cast at last upon the altar steps as

upon the shore of the unknown. There was a great joy and a

verity in it. But even in the dazed swoon of the cathedral, she

claimed another right. The altar was barren, its lights gone

out. God burned no more in that bush. It was dead matter lying

there. She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than

the roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in.