Ursus had carefully polished this interlude.  This bear’s cub was entitled “Chaos Vanquished.”  Here it was:—­A night scene.  When the curtain drew up, the crowd, massed around the Green Box, saw nothing but blackness.  In this blackness three confused forms moved in the reptile state—­wolf, a bear, and a man.  The wolf acted the wolf; Ursus, the bear; Gwynplaine, the man.  The wolf and the bear represented the ferocious forces of Nature—­unreasoning hunger and savage ignorance.  Both rushed on Gwynplaine.  It was chaos combating man.  No face could be distinguished.  Gwynplaine fought infolded, in a winding-sheet, and his face was covered by his thickly-falling locks.  All else was shadow.  The bear growled, the wolf gnashed his teeth, the man cried out.  The man was down; the beasts overwhelmed him.  He cried for aid and succour; he hurled to the unknown an agonized appeal.  He gave a death-rattle.  To witness this agony of the prostrate man, now scarcely distinguishable from the brutes, was appalling.  The crowd looked on breathless; in one minute more the wild beasts would triumph, and chaos reabsorb man.  A struggle—­cries—­howlings; then, all at once, silence.

A song in the shadows.  A breath had passed, and they heard a voice.  Mysterious music floated, accompanying this chant of the invisible; and suddenly, none knowing whence or how, a white apparition arose.  This apparition was a light; this light was a woman; this woman was a spirit.  Dea—­calm, fair, beautiful, formidable in her serenity and sweetness—­appeared in the centre of a luminous mist.  A profile of brightness in a dawn!  She was a voice—­a voice light, deep, indescribable.  She sang in the new-born light—­she, invisible, made visible.  They thought that they heard the hymn of an angel or the song of a bird.  At this apparition the man, starting up in his ecstasy, struck the beasts with his fists, and overthrew them.

Then the vision, gliding along in a manner difficult to understand, and therefore the more admired, sang these words in Spanish sufficiently pure for the English sailors who were present:—­

  “Ora! llora! 
  De palabra
  Nace razon. 
  De luz el son."[13]

Then looking down, as if she saw a gulf beneath, she went on,—­

  “Noche, quita te de alli! 
  El alba canta hallali."[14]

As she sang, the man raised himself by degrees; instead of lying he was now kneeling, his hands elevated towards the vision, his knees resting on the beasts, which lay motionless, and as if thunder-stricken.

She continued, turning towards him,—­

  “Es menester a cielos ir,
  Y tu que llorabas reir."[15]

And approaching him with the majesty of a star, she added,—­

  “Gebra barzon;
  Deja, monstruo,
  A tu negro
  Caparazon."[16]

And she put hot hand on his brow.  Then another voice arose, deeper, and consequently still sweeter—­a voice broken and enwrapt with a gravity both tender and wild.  It was the human chant responding to the chant of the stars.  Gwynplaine, still in obscurity, his head under Dea’s hand, and kneeling on the vanquished bear and wolf, sang,—­