His analysis progressed more slowly even than his friendship — for Hogarth, that dealer in sensibility often found that his best way towards a cure was to turn a patient into a friend. Baird found him a fascinating character with his ponderous medical equipment backed up by an intuition which was completely female and amoral. Between them they worked towards Böcklin’s ghost through the muddled debris of a life which Baird himself had never stopped to examine properly. Hogarth’s analytical technique was an uncompromising one; it not only combed out the purely factual data of a life, but it made the liver of it realize his responsibilities in regard to it. “Why do you think you are here?” “What sort of purpose do you imagine you have in life?” “Do you feel that you have ever contributed towards the well-being of another person?” Such were some of the questions which managed to get sandwiched in between others as cogent. “Why did you forget your latch-key?” “What do you think of when you see a spilled ink-pot?” “Do you enjoy pain?”
Together they disinterred Böcklin from his unceremonious grave. They recovered, it seemed, every thought and action connected with the incident and with those hundred and one other incidents which appeared to be connected to it in his memory. They became great friends, and when the work became too painful to continue — when the big metal ash-trays were brimming with charred tobacco and cigarette-ends — they would put on their overcoats and walk for hours along the Embankment. Hogarth would explain his theories about the structure of the psyche and give him summaries of his own condition, which were not always comprehensible. And yet behind it all, Baird felt, there was design and purpose in what he said; he was a man trying to grapple with a philosophy not only of disease, but also of life.
“All right. You kill Böcklin. It is a senseless and beastly murder; but then you are pressed into the service of murder. In the abstract, murder is being committed in your name all over the world. But this actual act shakes you. Now though killing him may be the source of a moral guilt, I’d like to know whether it illustrates merely the guilt for that act, or a much more deep-seated guilt about your role in society. Böcklin may simply be an illustration. But in point of fact your life indicates another, and — may I say? — more fruitful disturbance. You were unhappy before the war too, you say. As a puritan living unpuritanly you would have been. You found an inability to enjoy because your education, with its gentlemanly prohibitions, had taught you merely how to endure. Sometimes—” here Hogarth affectionately put his arm round the shoulders of the younger man. “Sometimes, Baird, I think there is only politics left for you — the last refuge of the diseased ego. You notice how all the young men are burning to reform things? It’s to escape the terrible nullity and emptiness and guilt of the last six years. They are now going to nationalize everything, including joy, sex and sleep. There will be enough for everyone now because the Government will control it. Those who can’t sleep will be locked up.”
They walked in silence for a quarter of a mile along the deserted Embankment, their footsteps sounding hollow in the crisp night air.
“And yet,” pursued Hogarth, “I think I see also symptoms of a purely metaphysical disturbance going on too; you are not alone, you know, in anything except the fact that it has chosen a single incident from your own life to illustrate what is common to the whole of your generation. I tell you everywhere the young men are sleeping with the night-light burning. You ask me about Böcklin and I say this is less interesting than that other feeling which you have been telling me about — what the old Abbot called ‘pins and needles of the soul’ and Böcklin himself called ‘Gleichgultigkeit’. It seems to me that this sharpening of focus, this aridity of feeling, this sense of inner frustration, must be leading to a kind of inner growth at the end of which lies mystical experience. Now you are laughing at me again.” He placed his pork-pie hat firmly on his head and walked a few steps in silence. “It seems to me that when you have exhausted action (which is always destructive) and people and the material things, there comes a great empty gap. That is what you have reached — the great hurdle which stands on this side of the real joyous life of the inside self. Then comes illumination — dear, oh dear. I know it sounds nonsense, but it’s the poverty of language that is at fault. What do you think the medical term for William Blake would be? A euphoric? A hysterical pycnik? It’s too absurd. The next few years will be a crisis not only for you but your generation too. You are approaching spiritual puberty — the world is. It is hard going I know — but there is always worse ahead, I have found. Yet there is a merciful law by which nothing heavier than you can bear is ever put upon you. Remember it! It is not the burden which causes you pain — the burden of excessive sensibility — but the degree of your refusal to accept responsibility for it. That sets up a stress and conflict. It sounds balls, doesn’t it? Well, so does St. John of the Cross, I suppose.”
They stopped at an early coffee-stall and ordered the plate of sausage and mash that Hogarth so loved to eat before he caught his last tram back to Balham. They smiled at each other over a cup of steaming coffee and wrangled good-naturedly about who should pay.
“Admit it,” said Hogarth. “I’m talking about something that you don’t understand at all. Gibberish, eh?”
Baird shook his head. “It sounds like sense — with a fourth dimension added to it. It reminds me a good deal of the Californian prophets, Huxley, Maugham, et alia.”
“Ah,” said Hogarth, “the propaganda squad.”
“The sphere and navel group. New World Taoists.”
“Well, you are not very far wrong; for although I think some of them have the answer, it often represents little more than a retrenchment upon an original pragmatism. Dealing in revelation, they obviously lack the true illumination. Why? Because if they had the secret they could perfectly carry on with the Christian corpus — you would not need these humpty-dumpty Eastern religions to fall back on, with their athleticism. A mass attack on the Gita has the effect of merely getting sections of it printed in the Reader’s Digest. To what end? It is mere non-creative theorizing. If we could get the West to study the Karma Sutra it would be more to the point. If we could unfreeze the Dutch canal of the average man’s blood up here.… Hullo! My tram.”
Hogarth was always in an ecstasy of apprehension lest he miss the last tram. “No it isn’t,” he said, turning back. “And while I’m on the subject of pins and needles I might ask you to tell me just what you want to do with your life.”
Baird shrugged his shoulders. “I wanted to write once. I was born a yeoman, I think, and pressed too early into the science of arms. You are right about my being merely typical. The whole of my generation believes in nothing beyond the aimless death-activity. We were sold into slavery — action — while we were unformed. Now we don’t belong anywhere, don’t want to have homes and families and roots. We are a sort of Hitler Youth, used to armies, and battles and small adventures. I thought of enlisting in this civil war in China when my time is up. If it’s still on, I mean.”
“Nothing more appropriate,” said Hogarth ironically. “You evade your own civil war in order to stick your nose into someone else’s. Why don’t you commit suicide and have done with it?”
“I have thought of that. More than you imagine.”
“Here comes my tram,” said Hogarth for the tenth time, and launched himself into space like a goose, his neck thrust forward. It was not. He returned rather crestfallen, adjusting his crooked hat brim and dusting ash off his lapels with both hands. “I have an idea,” he said. “To what sort of merit on earth do you attach importance? Are you proud of your medals? Your prowess with women? Would you like to have children? Be a doctor and save people? At what point of your character do you flow out? No. Don’t tell me,” he added hurriedly, catching sight of his Balham tram at last, “I don’t give a hang. I’m trying to get you to draw your own portrait.”