But when Easu ground down his horse and shoved it after the sheep, it was the natural body fiendishly subjugating the spiritual body. For the horse too is a spiritual body and a natural body, and may be ridden as the one or as the other. And when Easu wanted Monica, it was the natural body malignantly degrading the spiritual body. Monica also half wanted it.
For Easu knew the spiritual body. And like a fallen angel, he hated it, he wanted always to overthrow it more, in this day when it is so abjectly overthrown. Monica too knew the spiritual body: the body of straight fire. And she too seemed to have a grudge against it. It thwarted her "natural" will; which "natural" will is the barren devil of to-day.
Gran, that old witch, she also knew the spiritual body. But she loved spiting it. And she was dying like clay.
Mary, who was so spiritual and so self-sacrificing, she didn't know the body of straight fire at all. Her spirit was all natural. She was so "good," and so heavily "natural," she would put out any fire of the glory of the burning Lord. She was more "natural" even than Easu.
And Jack's father was the same. So good! So nice! So kind! So absolutely well-meaning! And he would bank out the fire of the burning Lord with shovelfuls of kindness.
They would, none of them, none of them, let the fire bum straight. None of them. There were no people at all who dared have the fire of the Lord, and drink from the cup of the fierce glory of the Lord, the sun in one hand and the moon in the other.
Only this strange, wild, ash-coloured country with its undiminished sun and its unblemished moon, would allow it. There was a great death between the two hands of the Lord; between the sun and the moon. But let there be a great death. Jack gave himself to it.
He was almost asleep, in the half-trance of inner consciousness, when Dad came in. Jack opened his eyes and made to rise, but Dad waved him to sit still, while he took the chair on the other side of the fire, and sat down inert. He seemed queer. Dad seemed queer. The same dusky look over his face as over Gran's. And a queer, pinched, far-away look. Jack wondered over it. And he could see Dad didn't want to be spoken to. The clock tick-tocked. Jack went into a kind of sleep.