第146章 THE THIRD(5)

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree.Ihad worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war of individuals and classes.Hadn't I always known that science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.

Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies.In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our lives.To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.

That poor pretence had failed.That magnificent proposition shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.

I saw that there were to be no such compensations.So far as my real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised and unrewarded life.If I made successes it would be by the way.Our separation would alter nothing of that.My scandal would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit.I should follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; Ishould do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; Ishould produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or misinterpreted.In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy.I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self.Because I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think finely.I remember how I fell talking to God--I think I talked out loud."Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"I scolded."Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I had a gleam of you in Isabel,--and then you take her away.Do you really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?"Grotesque analogies arose in my mind.I discovered a strange parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought.Was it possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid.Iwent along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; Ihad a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did."He DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of His Christianity.Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy."He wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?""Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind will, with an obvious repartee....

I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage against the Baileys.In an instant and with no sense of absurdity Iwanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue.I can still feel that transition.In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of exhaustion.

"I will have her," I cried."By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me and cheats me.Nothing can be made good to me again....

Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without her...."I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediously asking my way home.I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland Park....