‘I hate you, God, because of what you have done to mankind.’
He stopped and looked at Colin as if he were asking him, Am I a good preacher or not?
‘You have said,’ said Colin after a long time, ‘exactly what I would have said. I have no wish to . . . ’
‘Betray me? But you are an officer. It is your duty. What else can you do?’
He looked at Colin from the pulpit and for the first time his hands came out from beneath the gown. They were holding a gun.
In the moment before the gun was fired Colin was thinking: How funny all this is. How comical. Here I am in a church which is not like my own church with the golden cross and the effigy of the Virgin in front of me. Here I am, agreeing with everything he says. And it seemed to him for a moment as if the gold cross wavered slightly in the blast of the gun. But that might have been an illusion. In any case it was very strange to die in that way, so far from home, and not even on the battlefield. It was so strange that he almost died of the puzzle itself before the bullet hit him and spun him around in the wooden pew.
The Prophecy
I may say at the very beginning of this story that I am a very worried man for it had never occurred to me before that what is up there or somewhere around may very well be a joker. In fact to be perfectly honest I hadn’t believed that there was anything much around at all. Some years ago I came to live in this village in Scotland (I am by the way an Englishman and my name is Wells). I have no connection at all with the Highlands: I am not an alien exploiter either. I am just a man who like others was fed up of the rat race as it is called reasonably correctly. In fact I am (or perhaps was) a psychologist. I am not very much now. Brilliance in psychology as in everything else belongs to a youth of energy and fire and by leaving the rat race I suppose I was signalling those days were over for me even though I thought of myself somewhat in the manner of those Chinese exiles from court who used to drink wine and write little poems in the cold mountains while they gazed at the road they would never travel again. I am also unmarried.
I worked in a university and quite frankly I got tired. If you wish to know what I got tired of I will tell you. I became enraged, literally enraged, by the contradictions which I saw in people’s personalities every day and which they seemed implacably to be unaware of. Let me give you one or two instances. One man I knew was always talking of ‘professional behaviour’ and yet at the same time he was the worst, most consistently destructive and rabid gossip I have ever seen. Another, a hard drinker, lectured on alcoholism as the manifestation of ultimate weakness. Another, a so-called devotee of pure research, was leaping on to the barbaric bandwagon of the quick Penguin for the masses.
I became obsessed by this gap between the spoken word and the reality of the personality. I was losing my balance. I found that I was checking myself continually against my own standard of consistency and in doing so making myself more and more vulnerable. In other words I was coming to the conclusion that these contradictions are necessary to life and that he who sets out deliberately to erase them is in fact destroying himself. I found in other words that there is an enmity between consistency and life. This discovery was so shattering that for a long time I was incapable of working at all. For if this were true then an attempt to seek consistency and truth was in fact suicidal. Many nights I have sat staring at a book completely oblivious of my surroundings, and when I woke up from my daydream I found that I was still at the same page. The discovery I had made seemed to me utterly shattering. My mind roamed pitilessly in all directions. It seemed to me quite clear for instance that Christ was both violent and peaceful in his nature and that theologians in trying to eliminate the one in order to reinforce the other so as to create a perfectly consistent being without flaw were, in fact, being false to reality. Life is not reasonable, to live is to be inconsistent. To be consistent is to cease to live. That was the logical converse.
Now, however it happened, I thought that I should try and find a place where there would be a greater simplicity than I had been used to and that there I would be able to test this new theory. In fact what of course had happened was very simple. My energy and fire had run out and I was merely escaping. That was the truth I was disguising in terms of my research and my love of truth. I understand perfectly why my love of truth is so great. I was brought up by possessive parents who married late and each day I was trying to justify myself to their unlimited love and pride. Never would it be possible for any human being to do that – to fill that gap with the continual victories of the virtuoso – but this did not mean that it was possible for me to stop trying. It was this hunger for justification that destroyed me. For it is clear to me now that an excessive consciousness is bound to be at the mercy of the mediocre and the satisfied. An immense hunger for truth and consistency is rare and cannot by its
