It was too sweet of you, Walter darling, to do the impossible—to come to Spain. I wish, for once, you hadn’t taken my momentary envie quite so seriously. Madrid’s off—for the present, at any rate. If it should come on again, I’ll let you know at once. Meanwhile, Paris.
XXVI
From Philip Quarles’s Notebook.
Found Rampion gloomy and exasperated, I don’t know what about, and consequently pessimistic—lyrically and violently so. “I give the present dispensation ten years,” he said, after cataloguing the horrors of the modern world. “After that the most appalling and sanguinary bust-up that’s ever been.” And he prophesied class wars, wars between the continents, and the final catastrophic crumbling of our already dreadfully unsteady society. “Not a pleasant lookout for our children,” I said. “We’ve at least had our thirty years or so. They’ll only grow up to see the Last Judgment.” “We oughtn’t to have brought them into the world,” he answered. I mentioned those Melanesians that Rivers wrote about, who simply refused to breed any more after the white people had robbed them of their religion and their traditional civilization. “The same thing’s been happening in the West,” I said, “but more slowly. No sudden race suicide, but gradual diminution of births. Gradual, because with us the poison of modern civilization has infected men so slowly. The thing has been going on for a long time; but we’re only just beginning to realize that we’re being poisoned. That’s why we’ve only just begun to stop begetting children. The Melanesians had their souls suddenly murdered, so they couldn’t help realizing what was being done to them. That’s why they decided, almost from one day to another, that they wouldn’t bother to keep the race alive any longer.” “The poison isn’t slow any more. It works faster and faster.” “Like arsenic—the effects are cumulative. After a certain moment you begin to gallop toward death.” “Breeding would have slowed down much more completely if people had realized. Well, well; our brats will have to look out for themselves now they’re here.” “And meanwhile,” I said, “one’s got to go on behaving as if our world were going on forever—teaching them good manners and Latin grammar and all the rest. What do you do about yours?” “If I could have my way, I wouldn’t teach them anything. Just turn them loose in the country, on a farm, and tell them to amuse themselves. And if they couldn’t amuse themselves, I’d give them rat poison.” “Rather Utopian as an educational programme, isn’t it?” “I know. They’ve got to be scholars and gentlemen, damn them! Twenty years ago, I’d have objected to the gentility. I’d have brought them up as peasants. But the working classes are just as bad as the others nowadays. Just rather bad imitations of the bourgeoisie, a little worse than the original in some ways. So it’s as gentlemen my boys are being brought up after all. And scholars. What an imbecility!” He complained to me that both his children have a passion for machinery—motor cars, trains, airplanes, radios. “It’s an infection, like smallpox. The love of death’s in the air. They breathe it and get infected. I try to persuade them to like something else. But they won’t have it. Machinery’s the only thing for them. They’re infected with the love of death. It’s as though the young were absolutely determined to bring the world to an end—mechanize it first into madness, then into sheer murder. Well, let them if they want to, the stupid little devils! But it’s humiliating, it’s horribly humiliating that human beings should have made such a devilish mess of things. Life could have been so beautiful, if they’d cared to make it so. Yes, and it was beautiful once, I believe. Now it’s just an insanity; it’s just death violently galvanized, twitching about and making a hellish hullaballoo to persuade itself
