Part 25 (1/2)

”Do you want to go?”

”No.”

”Then stay. Others stay.”

”But--”

”Are you better than the others? Think.”

”No,” he thought. ”Of course not. Worse perhaps. I know better.”

”You are nearly as honest as I am,” she laughed. She put her hand out in a great frank gesture.

”If I can smile, surely you can.” Her fingers beckoned. ”Come, don't be silly.”

He caught her hands and laughed with her. He had been acting like a boy in his twenties, and he a man of forty-two....

-- 6

He had thought somehow that in this affair of Hedda he would find--oh, something: that once more the moon would take on its rippling smile and the sun its sweet low laughter, and the winds be no longer a matter of physics, but strong ent.i.ties. Quickly, unconsciously, the thought had come to him.... With the wife of his young days had come the magic of romance, and with Claire-Anne of Ma.r.s.eilles had come a sublime storm of pa.s.sion, and with the Arab lady had come the scheme of an ordered life, good composition and rich color.... They had lasted but little and gone as a rainbow goes.... With Hedda there was nothing.... It was just abominably wrong....

Here he was, young--for his forty-two he was young,--supple, successful in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great n.o.ble frame, her surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners, conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling ... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of him.... They both knew better, yet there you were ... G.o.d! Even animals had the excuse of nature's indomitable will!

Yes, this made him face things he had been trying to pa.s.s casually by.

Forty-two, a touch of gray at the temples, a body like a boy's, hooded eyes like a hawk's, and a feeling in him somehow that an organ--his heart maybe--was dead: not ailing--just unalive. Once he had zest, and he didn't even have despair now. If he could only have despair....

Despair was healthy. It meant revolt. A man might sob, gnash his teeth, batter walls with his bare fists, but that only meant he was alive in every fiber. He might curse the stars, but he was aware of their brilliance. He might curse the earth that would one day take his lifeless body, but he must know its immense fecundity. A man in revolt, in despair, was a healthy man.

But despair was so futile. Ah, there it was! Life's futility. It was the sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility, spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him of his youth was a belief in G.o.d. At sea he was too close to the immense mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to believe, not to accept him as an incontrovertible fact.

But the G.o.d of degenerate peoples, the antagonistic, furious, implacable G.o.d--that was a ridiculous conception. A cheap, a vain one. ”As flies to wanton boys, are we to the G.o.ds.” Wasn't that how Shakspere's blind king had uttered it? ”They kill us for their sport.” How strangely flattering--to believe that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, his poor natural functions!

And as to the G.o.d of the optimists, how ridiculous, too. ”The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” So pathetic! They never saw that they did want. That for every well-filled body, there were a hundred haggard men.

They thought of him as benevolent, firm but benevolent, like Mr.

Gladstone. To them he was an infinitely superior vestryman with a tremendous power for dispensing coal and food to the poor. And the poor devils were so patient, so loyal. And so stupid; they thought that much flattery, much fear, would move Him. Their conception never even rose to considering G.o.d as a gentleman, despising flattery and loathing fear.

Poor, poor devils!

To Shane He existed, though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will.

Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. He had so much brains....

It seemed to Shane that this optimism, this despair were strange mental drugs, going through the mental system as a depressant or a stimulant would go through the physical, creating illusions ... illusions ... and the sane man was one who had no illusions, not the meaning a man uses of the phrase when he has been jilted by a woman or wronged out of money by a friend, but actually, finitely, no illusions.... He was sane, a few other men in the world must be sane, but the rest were drugged for their h.e.l.l or their Fiddlers' Green....

Fiddlers' Green! Good G.o.d! Fiddlers' Green!

His mind flashed back a moment to the s.h.i.+ning isle, the green sward, the singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself.

Symbols were barren algebraic formulae. Not enchanters' words. No light.

No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers--no more!

It wasn't his past that was dead. The past lived. It was he was dead, he, his present, his future.