“And I was in an open place in the cool of evening.  A grey-blue sky above, with the faintest glitter of first stars!  I was alone.  The past was a mystery; my future unexplored, full of the unimaginable; the ultimate future of course like my past.

“Such was my beginning—­the event of my life, in the shadow of which I live and by virtue of which, though I know every road and house of the world, I yet am homeless.  No happening in my being but I must view it in the light of that strange initial mystery.  With the problem of that past unsolved, I have never found anything in the ordinary matters of life proposed as all-absorbing occupations.  Because of that, I am upon the road.  I have made research, and have asked questions of all whom I have met, but I got no answer, and I tired most people with my problem.  They say to me lightly, ‘Your coach was a dream,’ and I answer, ’If so, then what before the dream? ’”

“We are all of us like you and your coach,” I said to my companion.  “Some of us know it and some do not, that is all.  Some forget the mystery and others remember it.”

“We remember it,” said the wanderer.  “Because of it we are irreconcilables, but ...” he added, looking with a smile at the beautiful world about our cave, “almost reconciled; inconsolable, yet seeing how lovely is this mysterious universe, almost consoled.  Most men forget, but many remember; yet whether they remember or no, they are all orphans nevertheless, lost children and homeless ones.  We who sing and write and who remember are the voices of humanity.  We speak for millions who are voiceless.”

III.  IRRECONCILABLES

One long sunny morning we talked of the life of the wanderer, and my companion continued his story and recounted how he had found a brotherhood of men like himself.

“When first I found myself thus upon the world, I was full of hope to find an answer to the mystery.  But the many fellow-beings I met upon my road were as profitless as my companions in the coach.  They could not explain me, they could not explain the world or themselves, and in the midst of teeming knowledges they were obliged to confess one ignorance; among the myriad objects which they could explain they had to acknowledge a whole universe of the inexplicable.  I said to them, ’What is all your knowing worth beside the terrible burden of your ignorance, and what are things that you can explain compared with those that are inexplicable?’

“But I found these people proud of their little knowledges, and of the matters they could explain.  They were not even startled when I called upon them to remember the great volcano of ignorance, on the slopes of which they were building their little palaces.

“First I despised them, and then I loved them.  But I shuddered at the thought that I, an unknown person, unknown to myself and unrecognised by a God, should love people equally unknown—­a shadow loved other shadows, and like a shadow I trembled.