The Way of the Spirit

This tale was written two years ago as the result of reflections

  which occurred to me among the Egyptian sands and the empty cells

  of long-departed anchorites.

  Perhaps in printing it I should ask forgiveness for my deviation

  from the familiar, trodden pathway of adventure, since in the

  course of a literary experience extending now, I regret to say,

  over more than a quarter of a century, often I have seen that he

  who attempts to step off the line chalked out for him by custom or

  opinion is apt to be driven back with stones and shoutings.

  Indeed, there are some who seem to think it very improper that an

  author should seek, however rarely, to address himself to a new

  line of thought or group of readers. As he began so he must go on,

  they say. Yet I have ventured on the history of Rupert Ullershaw's

  great, and to all appearance successful Platonic experiment,

  chiefly because this problem interested me: Under the conditions

  in which fortune placed him in the East, was he right or wrong in

  clinging to an iron interpretation of a vow of his youth and to

  the strict letter of his Western Law? And was he bound to return

  to the English wife who had treated him so ill, as, in the end,

  he made up his mind to do? In short, should or should not

  circumstances be allowed to alter moral cases?

  The question is solved in one way in this book, but although she

  herself was a party to that solution, looking at the matter with

  Mea's eyes it seems capable of a different reading. Still, given a

  sufficiency of faith, I believe that set down here to be the true

  answer. Also, whatever its exact cause and nature, there must be

  something satisfying and noble in utter Renunciation for

  Conscience' sake, even when surrounding and popular judgment

  demands no such sacrifice. At least this is one view of Life, its

  aspirations and possibilities; that which wearies of its native

  soil, that which lifts its face toward the Stars.

  Otherwise, why did those old anchorites wear the stone beds of

  their cells so thin? Why, in this fashion or in that, do their

  successors still wear them thin everywhere in the wide earth,

  especially in the wise and ancient East? I think the reply is

  Faith: that Faith which bore Rupert and Mea to what they held to

  be a glorious issue of their long probation--that Faith in

  personal survival and reunion, without the support of which in one

  form or another, faint and flickering as it may be, the happiness

  or even the continuance of our human world is so difficult to

  imagine.