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He was flushed with drink, and in consequence more than a little resentful when she insisted upon spending another night in the modest little home. "Say! I'm not used to this kind of a place," he argued. "I'm not a cave-dweller.
"A cave-dweller, lord, whom I took to me because of the lonesomeness of the winter tide. He was an evil man, for though it is good to be Baresark from time to time, yet to dwell with one who is always Baresark is not good, and thou didst a needful deed in smiting his head from him and now let it go to find its trunk," and he rolled it over the edge of the great rift.
But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
And is it not interesting, also, to reflect that in the moral, as in the physical, battles of life man requires the longest time to deal with his smallest enemies? Morally we are still primitive savages. We are still combating murder, arson, theft like the cave-dweller fighting the physical mammoth, we are fighting the mammoths of moral deformity. Eventually they will disappear.
Certainly, in some subtle way, Constance had a standing with her parents which was more confidential than Sophia's. When Constance came to bed, half an hour later, Sophia was already in bed. The room was fairly spacious. It had been the girls' retreat and fortress since their earliest years. Its features seemed to them as natural and unalterable as the features of a cave to a cave-dweller.
I suppose that the size of my world is the measure of myself, and that in my schoolmastering I am simply trying to enlarge the world of my pupils. I saw a gang-plough the other day that is drawn by a motor, and that set me to thinking of ploughs in general and their evolution; and, by tracing the plough backward, I saw that the original one must have been the forefinger of some cave-dweller.
A prophet of revolt and emancipation; a cave-dweller, who would flee organized society and the refinements of civilization; the rabid individualist, to whom the community is the "herd," and common notions of right and wrong are absurdities to be visited with scorn and denunciation.
It gave him such a warm feeling in his heart that he naturally wanted to make the relation permanent. First Cave-dweller felt a little disappointed next day when Second Cave-dweller, instead of coming to him for another bone, preferred to take his pointed stick and go hunting on his own account.
He was a man; and here was his woman, who had been torn from him by a thief: she had come back to him, she had toiled back through the storm, she had fought back through cruel and imprisoning ties that had held her for nearly three years; should he not keep her, now that she had come? The cave-dweller in him cried out "Yes!"
In that rage Dave forgot his science as the Hon. Sam expected, and with a bellow he started at Hale like a cave-dweller to bite, tear, and throttle, but the lithe figure before him swayed this way and that like a shadow, and with every side-step a fist crushed on the mountaineer's nose, chin or jaw, until, blinded with blood and fury, Dave staggered aside toward the sergeant with the cry of a madman: "Gimme my gun!
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