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His consternation at seeing her had been comic. But he had asked no questions, and had given her breakfast in hospitable haste. In the cottage nothing was altered. It was as if she had been away overnight. And against this changelessness she knew herself changed. She was outside of it now. It could never prison her again. While she drank Li Ho's coffee, Dr. Farr had come in.
The medieval world idealized changelessness. Its very astronomy was the apotheosis of the unalterable.
She felt vaguely sorry for these girls; but she realized nothing of their life. Nor did she associate funerals and illness with herself. As the convolvulus stands in apparent changelessness in a silent rose-and-white eternity, so she seemed to herself a stationary being.
Instead of being dreaded, controlled change has become the chief desire of modern life. When, therefore, in this generation with its perception of growth as the universal law and with its dependence upon controlled change as the hope of man, Christianity endeavours to glorify changelessness and to maintain itself in unalterable formulations, it has outlawed itself from its own age.
We may presume that all civilization originally sprang from a soil in which custom was equally permanent. We know that in the great civilizations of the East an enduring fixity of form is normal. But in the general history of Europe, it has been otherwise. In this mobile surface of European history the Dark Ages form a sort of island of changelessness.
Because there is a Chinese word daidai signifying 'from generation unto generation. Wherefore the fruit called daidai has become a fruit of good omen. It signifies 'prosperous changelessness. Here the idea is decidedly curious. Even as the colour of charcoal cannot be changed, so may the fortunes of those we love remain for ever unchanged In all that gives happiness!
And does a woman ever change? Only that very night she herself had said to Craven, as they walked from Soho to Regent Street, that she had a theory of the changelessness of character. Or perhaps she had really meant of temperament.
She eyed with a little surprise the red spots of excitement which still remained on her cheeks. The changelessness of her elderly visage had been evident to her so long that she was startled to see anything else. "I look as if I had been pulled through a knot-hole," she muttered.
The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem.
It is really courting death when we refuse to accept death; when we wish to give the form of the self some fixed changelessness; when the self feels no impulse which urges it to grow out of itself; when it treats its limits as final and acts accordingly. Then comes our teacher's call to die to this death; not a call to annihilation but to eternal life.
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