aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw
they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven. I
saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon
interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the
provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy
timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare
exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter
possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as
unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer
will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable
planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted
across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought
too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the
uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.
All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads
of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God
against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man,
scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate
pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his
box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of
flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realised for
the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith
of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little
strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished
from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great
abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.
There was no support that night in the things that had been. We
were alone together on the cliff for ever more!-that was very
pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me
now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no
sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,-to talk to me, to
touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky
gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.
We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman
into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and
characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how
satisfying it had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.
We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is
to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,
new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious
understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the
first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross
memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements…
I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life
for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That
infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse
thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of
inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the
vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis
of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his
emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was
overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all
possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;
you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and
aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine
thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a
balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a
justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as
Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out
decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast
pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists
"blaggards and scoundrels"-it justified his opposition-the Lords
were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all
Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails
and justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the
sombre joys of conflict and the pleasantthought of condign
punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I
perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was