“ ‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ ” he quoted suddenly. “Who wrote that—do you remember?”
“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering, hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man, it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in dying of green fields.
“ ‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ ” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell. The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach. … The flesh and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world! … But if there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write. Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness. …”
“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.
“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer. … When I think of what I wrote—the little, little things that seemed important! … I spent a year once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere. … And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits. … Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”
He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.
“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility—to realize your sin, to confess it and repent. … We—we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive? … We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities. … We thought our habits—we called them virtues—were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this. … And today it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts … and the primitive passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving. … ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred and hunger and lust.”
“Yes,” said Theodore—and he, too, stared at the fire. … What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s right. … We can only hate.”
“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment. … God pity us!”
He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”
“There’s Law,” said the other. “Is that God? … We have got to see into our own souls and to pay for everything we take. That’s all I know, so far—except that what we think we own—owns us. That’s what the wise men meant by renunciation. … It’s what we made and thought we owned that has turned on us—the creatures that were born for our pleasure and power, to increase our comfort and our riches. As we made them they fastened on us—set their claws in us—and they have taken our minds from us as well as our bodies. As we made them, they followed the law of their life. We created life without a soul; but it was life and it went its own way.”
Crouched to the fire, and between his bouts of coughing, he played with the idea and insisted on it. Everything that we made, that we thought dead and dumb, had a life that we could not control. In the case of books and art
