Had yau, on the other hand, really left me alone to go my whale free-wheeling way to disorder, to be drunk every day before lunch, to jump stark naked fram bed to bed, to have a fit every week or a major operation every other year, to forge checks or water the widow's stock, I might, after cauntless skids and punctures have come by the bumpy third-class road of guilt and remorse, smack into that very same truth which you were meanwhile admiring fram your distant camfortable veranda but would never point out to me. i
Such genuine escapades, thaugh, might have disturbed the master at his meditations and even involved him in trouble with the palice. The strains of oats, therefore, that you prudently permitted me to sow were each and all of an unmiti- | gatedly minor wildness: a quick cold clasp now and then in ) same louche hatel to calm me dawn while yau got on with the | so thorough documentation af your great unhappy lave for ane [ who by being bad ar dead or married pravided you with the " Gaod Right Subject that would never cease to bristle with im- ( portance; one bout af flu per winter, an occasional twinge of toathache, and enaugh tobacco to keep me in a good temper while you composed your melting eclogues of rustic piety ; licence to break my shoelaces, spill soup an my tie, burn cigarette holes in the tableclath, lase letters and borrowed baoks, 15 and generally keep myself busy while you polished to a per- fectian your lyric praises of the more candid, more luxurious warld to came.
Can you wonder then, when, as was bound to happen sooner or later, yaur charms, because they no longer amuse you, have cracked and your spirits, because you are tired of giving orders, have ceased to obey, and you are left alone with me, the dark thing you could never abide to be with, if I do not yield you kind answer or admire you for the achievements I was never allowed to profit from, if I resent hearing you speak of your neglect of me as your "exile," of the pains you never took with me as "all lost"?
But why continue? From now on we shall have, as we both know only too well, no company but each other's, and if I have had, as I consider, a good deal to put up with from you, I must own that, after all, I am not just" the person I would have chosen for a life companion myself; so the only chance, which in any case is slim enough, of my getting a tolerably new master and you a tolerably new man, lies in our both learning, if possible and as soon as possible, to forgive and forget the past, and to keep our respective hopes for the future within moderate, very moderate, limits.
And now at last it is you, assorted, consorted specimens of the general popular type, the major flock who have trotted trustingly hither but found, you reproachfully baah, no grazing, that I turn to and address on behalf of Ariel and myself. To your questions I shall attempt no direct reply, for the mere fact that you have been able so anxiously to put them is in itself sufficient proof that you possess their answers. All your clamour signifies is this: that your first big crisis, the breaking of the childish spell in which, so long as it enclosed you, there was, for you, no mirror, no magic, for everything that happened was a miracle—it was just as extraordinary for a chair to be a chair as for it to turn into a horse; it was no more absurd that the girding on of coal-scuttle and poker should transform you into noble Hector than that you should have a father and mother who called you Tommy—and it was therefore only necessary for you to presuppose one genius, one unrivalled I to wish these wonders in all their endless plenitude and novelty to be, is, in relation to your present, behind, that your singular transparent globes of enchantment have shattered one by one, and you have now all come together in
the larger colder emptier room on this side of the mirror which does force your eyes to recognise and reckon with the two of us, your ears to detect the irreconcilable difference between my reiterated affirmation of what your furnished circumstances categorically are, and His successive propositions as to every- !
thing else which they conditionally might be. You have, as I ;
say, taken your first step.
The Journey of life—the down-at-heels disillusioned figure can still put its characterisation across—is infinitely long and its possible destinations infinitely distant from one another, but the time spent in actual travel is infinitesimally small. The hours the traveller measures are those in which he is at rest between the three or four decisive instants of transportation which are all he needs and all he gets to carry him the whole of his way; the scenery he observes is the view, gorgeous or drab, he glimpses from platform and siding; the incidents he thrills or blushes to remember take place in waiting and washrooms, ticket queues and parcels offices: it is in those promiscuous places of random association, in that air of anticipatory fidget, that he makes friends and enemies, that he promises, confesses, kisses, and betrays until, either because it is the one he has been expecting, or because, losing his temper, he has vowed to take the first to come along, or because he has been given a free ticket, or simply by misdirection or mistake, a (
train arrives which he does get into: it whistles—at least he [
thinks afterwards he remembers it whistling—but before he ^
can blink, it has come to a standstill again and there he stands clutching his battered bags, surrounded by entirely strange smells and noises—yet in their smelliness and noisiness how familiar—one vast important stretch the nearer Nowhere, that still smashed terminus at which he will, in due course, be deposited, seedy and by himself.
Yes, you have made a definite start; you have left your homes way back in the farming provinces or way out in the suburban tundras, but whether you have been hanging around for years or have barely and breathlessly got here on one of 1
those locals which keep arriving minute after minute, this is I
still only the main depot, the Grandly Average Place from I
which at odd hours the expresses leave seriously and sombrely for Somewhere, and where it is still possible for me to posit the suggestion that you go no farther. You will never, after all, feel better than in your present shaved and breakfasted state which there are restaurants and barber shops here indefinitely to preserve; you will never feel more secure than you do now in your knowledge that you have your ticket, your passport is in order, you have not forgotten to pack your pyjamas and an extra clean shirt; you will never have the same opportunity of learning about all the holy delectable spots of current or historic interest—an insistence on reaching one will necessarily exclude the others—than you have in these be- postered halls; you will never meet a jollier, more various crowd than you see around you here, sharing with you the throbbing, suppressed excitement of those to whom the exciting thing is still, perhaps, to happen. But once you leave, no matter in which direction, your next stop will be far outside this land of habit that so democratically stands up for your right to stagestruck hope, and well inside one of those, all equally foreign, uncomfortable and despotic, certainties of failure or success. Here at least I, and Ariel too, are free to warn you not, should we meet again there, to speak to either of us, not to engage either of us as your guide, but there we shall no longer be able to refuse you; then, unfortunately for you, we shall be compelled to say nothing and obey your fatal foolish commands. Here, whether you listen to me or not, and it's highly improbable that you will, I can at least warn you what will happen if at our next meeting you should insist— and that is all too probable—on putting one of us in charge.
"Release us," you will beg, then, supposing it is I whom you make for,—oh how awfully uniform, once one translates them out of your private lingoes of expression, all your sorrows are and how awfully well I know them—"release us from our minor roles. Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butter-