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We may be images in a world of images; our thoughts shadows of archetypal ideas, our acts a shadow-play upon the luminous screen of material existence, revealing there, however imperfectly, the moods and movements of a higher self in a higher space. The saying, "All the world's a stage," may be true in a sense Shakespeare never intended.
Anyone who has seen a clever Shadow-Play, and has compared what goes on behind the screen on which the shadows are cast with the movements of the shadows on the screen, may have a vivid idea of the illusory nature of the shadow-actions, and may draw therefrom several not misleading analogies.
He gazed keenly southward, the poodle growling on; that cloud so dim, so distant, caught his sight. Was it a moving herd, a shifting mist, a shadow-play between the night and dawn? For a moment longer he watched it; then, what it was he knew, or felt by such strong instinct as makes knowledge; and, like the blast of a clarion, his alarm rang over the unarmed and slumbering camp.
The wide asphalts reflected the horses and carriages and trains and pedestrians in forms grotesque, zigzagging, flitting, amusing, like a shadow-play upon a wrinkled, wind-blown curtain. The sixteenth of June.
The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, shutting out that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had been staring. As Lynette busied herself with the shining silver and delicate Japanese porcelain, there was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book of her face a locked book to Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp. Ah, what a face it was!
He laid his heavy hands round the stem. Beyond the blizzard and the shadow-play of the flame, there appeared to him the scene of his wife and daughters' flight. He had given up everything he possessed, had taken off his sheepskin, had himself loosened the cow from the post.
Then in the niches round the clear fountains, he had ranged the fine statues of a still admirable art; everywhere he had lavished marbles, rose and yellow and white, and under foot he had spread a mosaic floor, glistening beneath the shadow-play of leaf and water, in the rich reflected light from the garden and the Campagna outside; while at intervals, he had driven through the very crest of the hill long tunnelled passages, down which one might look from the garden and see the blue lake shining at their further end.
The birds' beaks, and hooked noses of the masks in the topeng, and of the puppets in the shadow-play, were made compulsory after the Arabic conquest, in order to reconcile the national pastime with the creed of Islam, which forbade the dramatic representation of the human form.
He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard. There was a third performer in the shadow-play now.
She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she had heard.... And if Saxham had known how two of the unconscious actors in his shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured into an open wound.
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