re the
horses; he shuddered at his unspoken memory of a horse stumbling from
the arena at Seville with a riven belly and hanging entrails that
gleamed like mother-o'-pearl. Oh, yes, he admitted, it was cruel; or,
rather, would be if it were committed by a people like ourselves. But it
wasn't. That was the point he wanted to make. When one travelled far
back in time. It was hard for us--"for you, especially," he amplified,
with a courteous, enthusiastic flinging out of his hand, "with your
unparalleled Scotch system of education"--to comprehend the mentality of
a people which had been prevented, by the economic insanity of its
governors and the determination of the Church to sit on its intelligence
till it stopped kicking, from growing up. Among the things it hadn't
attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our
civilisation.

Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the
experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his
magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and
yet was as substantial as any man of action.

Panic, he invited them to consider, was the habitual state of mind of
primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest
swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The
echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching
sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it
wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who
stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
and Ellen thrill