"The gods, the gods are stronger; time
Falls down before them, all men's knees
Bow, all men's prayers and sorrows climb
Like incense toward them; yea, for these
Are gods, Felise."

Carquinez had relaxed finally. He stole a glance at the rattling windows,
looked upward at the beamed roof, and listened for a moment to the savage
roar of the south-easter as it caught the bungalow in its bellowing jaws.
Then he held his glass between him and the fire and laughed for joy through
the golden wine.

"It is beautiful," he said. "It is sweetly sweet. It is a woman's wine,
and it was made for gray-robed saints to drink."

"We grow it on our own warm hills," I said, with pardonable California
pride. "You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made."

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up. Nor was he ever really
himself until he felt the mellow warmth of the vine singing in his blood.
He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the
high pitch and lilt went out of his thought-processes and he was prone to
be as deadly dull as a British Sunday--not dull as other men are dull, but
dull when measured by the sprightly wight that Monte Carquinez was when he
was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear friend
and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. He rarely erred. As I have
said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough, with him,
was equilibrium--the equilibrium that is yours and mine when we are sober.

His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek.
Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I have
heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and
ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and
primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows,
were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before
them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair through which
he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He invariably wore a soft
flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his necktie was red.
This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists
of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man. Also, he
had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather-banded
sombrero. It was even rumoured that he had been born with this particular
piece of headgear. And in my experience it was provocative of nothing
short of sheer delight to see that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in
Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the crush for the New York Elevated.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was made
quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of saying
it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I must add
that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest, and,
because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by those who
did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a screaming
savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as a Spaniard.
And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my
friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew
closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me,
and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew that
at last he was pitched in his proper key.

"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.

"Why the gods?"

"Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?" he cried.

"And whence the will in me to escape satiety?" I asked triumphantly.

"Again the gods," he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and
shuffle all the cards . . . and take the stakes. Think not that you have
escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills,
your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and simple round of
living!

"I've watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have
surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made confession
that you are tired. You have flown the white flag of fatigue. You have
nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in you. You have
run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick. You have
balked at the game. You refuse to play. You have thrown your cards under
the table and run away to hide, here amongst your hills."

He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes, and scarcely
interrupted to roll a long, brown, Mexican cigarette.

"But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man have
tried it . . . and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To
pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your
wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease.
Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped
satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility is
another name for satiety. It is satiety's masquerade. Bah!"

"But look at me!" I cried.

Carquinez was ever a demon for haling ones soul out and making rags and
tatters of it.

He looked me witheringly up and down.

"You see no signs," I challenged.

"Decay is insidious," he retorted. "You are rotten ripe."

I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be
forgiven.

"Do I not know?" he asked. "The gods always win. I have watched men play
for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost."

"Don't you ever make mistakes?" I asked.

He blew many meditative rings of smoke before replying.

"Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin Fiske.
You remember him? And his Dantesque face and poet's soul, singing his
chant of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was Ethel Baird,
whom also you must remember."

"A warm saint," I said.

"That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love; and
yet--how shall I say?--drenched through with holiness as your own air here
is with the perfume of flowers. Well, they married. They played a hand
with the gods--"

"And they won, they gloriously won!" I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.

"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."

"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.

"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"

"Because she loved him so, and when he died . . ."

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.

"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The
world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled
from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And
no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.

"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I know.
They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They knew to
the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so well that they
were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their hearts. They
welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.

"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love denied
was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me? They
saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat and
still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem of
satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming in
their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing in and
out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats, and again
shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone can utter.

"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering voice,
that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that flame-winged lute-
player whom none sees but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a
sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor,
comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips
that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought
by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent with desire.'

"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of Love.
They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before, with others,
in the days before they met; and in those days they had throttled Love with
caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him in the pit of satiety.

"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human.
They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it was sunset-
red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French joy in
the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic. It was not
tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English serves as
blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans, descended
out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of the English
spirit-groping were not theirs.

"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only they
achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic, and this
was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had one night. It
was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the maid? She kissed
once, and once only, and kisses she would have no more. Not that she found
kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with repetition they would cloy.
Satiety again! She tried to play without stakes against the gods. Now
this is contrary to a rule of the game the gods themselves have made. Only
the rules are not posted over the table. Mortals must play in order to
learn the rules.

"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once
only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?
Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at their
hearts.

"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy
concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus in
them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold, cold-
calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this I know:
it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent joy.

"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to her): 'To
hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To yearn for you, and never
to have you, and so always to have you.' And she: 'For you to be always
just beyond my reach. To be ever attaining you, and yet never attaining
you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new, and always with
the first flush upon us.

"That is not the way they said it. On my lips their love-philosophy is
mangled. And who am I to delve into their soul-stuff? I am a frog, on the
dank edge of a great darkness, gazing goggle-eyed at the mystery and wonder
of their flaming souls.

"And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good . . . as
long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses; they
run in span.

"'And time could only tutor us to eke
Our rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.'

"They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin's. It was called 'Love's
Wisdom.' It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?

"'Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle, or decline from strong to weak.'

"But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not kiss
at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love's topmost peak. They
married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a
marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then.
Their rapture's warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing
brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the
months, the years, and ever the flame-winged lute-player grew more
resplendent.

"Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were
greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless; it
is the form the envy of such creatures takes.

"And I did not know their secret. I pondered and I marvelled. As first I
had expected, subconsciously I imagine, the passing of their love. Then I
became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then I
became curious. What was their secret? What were the magic fetters with
which they bound Love to them? How did they hold the graceless elf? What
elixir of eternal love had they drunk together as had Tristram and Iseult
of old time? And whose hand had brewed the fairy drink?

"As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They
lived in an unending revel of Love. They made a pomp and ceremonial of it.
They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they were not
neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists. But they
had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless desire.

"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I
puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's
Waiting Time'?"

I shook my head.

"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes, and
doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called me a
'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When he sang
I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost patronizing
and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit them and their
tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and singing
love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself, with a
ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know. Young
lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To see them,
all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance, lavishing
caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every silence--their
love driving them toward each other, and they withholding like fluttering
moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each about the other
in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight! It seemed, in obedience
to some great law of physics, more potent than gravitation and more subtle,
that they must corporeally melt each into each there before my very eyes.
Small wonder they were called the wonderful lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a
book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and there
I read:--

"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
To know each other better, and to keep
The soft, delicious sense of two that touch . . .

O love, not yet! . . . Sweet, let us keep our love
Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
Waiting the secret of the coming years,
That come not yet, not yet . . . sometime . . .
not yet . . .

Oh, yet a little while our love may grow!
When it has blossomed it will haply die.
Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep,
Bedded in dead denial yet some while . . .
Oh, yet a little while, a little while.'

"I folded the book on my thumb and sat there silent and without moving for
a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse had
imparted to me. It was illumination. It was like a bolt of God's
lightning in the Pit. They would keep Love, the fickle sprite, the
forerunner of young life--young life that is imperative to be born!

"I conned the lines over in my mind--'Not yet, sometime'--'O Love, not
yet'--'Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.' And I laughed aloud,
ha, ha! I saw with white vision their blameless souls. They were
children. They did not understand. They played with Nature's fire and
bedded with a naked sword. They laughed at the gods. They would stop the
cosmic sap. They had invented a system, and brought it to the gaming-table
of life, and expected to win out. 'Beware!' I cried. 'The gods are behind
the table. They make new rules for every system that is devised. You have
no chance to win.'

"But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their
system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with
whatever happiness the gods gave them and not strive to wrest more away.

"I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and
still the famine-edge of their love grew the sharper. Never did they dull
it with a permitted love-clasp. They ground and whetted it on self-denial,
and sharper and sharper it grew. This went on until even I doubted. Did
the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed to myself. The
man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted God. They had
shamed the flesh, and blackened the face of the good Earth Mother. They
had played with her fire and not been burned. They were immune. They were
themselves gods, knowing good from evil and tasting not. 'Was this the way
gods came to be?' I asked myself. 'I am a frog,' I said. 'But for my mud-
lidded eyes I should have been blinded by the brightness of this wonder I
have witnessed. I have puffed myself up with my wisdom and passed judgment
upon gods.'

"Yet even in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods.
They were man and woman--soft clay that sighed and thrilled, shot through
with desire, thumbed with strange weaknesses which the gods have not."

Carquinez broke from his narrative to roll another cigarette and to laugh
harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a devil,
and it rose over and rode the roar of the storm that came muffled to our
ears from the crashing outside world.

"I am a frog," he said apologetically. "How were they to understand? They
were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but they
did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. But this I will
say--they played high. Never was there such a game before, and I doubt me
if there will ever be such a game again.

"Never was lovers' ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with
kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him
on till he was all aburst with desire. And the flame-winged lute-player
fanned them with his warm wings till they were all but swooning. It was
the very delirium of Love, and it continued undiminished and increasing
through the weeks and months.

"They longed and yearned, with all the fond pangs and sweet delicious
agonies, with an intensity never felt by lovers before nor since.

"And then one day the drowsy gods ceased nodding. They aroused and looked
at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and woman
looked into each other's eyes one morning and knew that something was gone.
It was the flame-winged one. He had fled, silently, in the night, from
their anchorites' board.

"They looked into each other's eyes and knew that they did not care.
Desire was dead. Do you understand? Desire was dead. And they had never
kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never yearn
and burn again. For them there was nothing left--no more tremblings and
flutterings and delicious anguishes, no more throbbing and pulsing, and
sighing and song. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a couch
cold and unattended; nor had they witnessed its passing. They learned it
for the first time in each other's eyes.

"The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. They had twirled
the little ivory ball and swept the stakes from the table. All that
remained was the man and woman gazing into each other's cold eyes. And
then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was dead--
you remember the accident. And in her diary, written at this time, I long
afterward read Mitchell Kennerly's:--

"'There was not a single hour
We might have kissed and did not kiss.'"

"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.

And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.

"And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."

"But you," I demanded hotly; "you with your orgies of sound and sense, with
your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?"

He shook his head slowly. "Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think we
win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."