“You are magnificent,” gasped the young man glaring at the wall. “I mean you are simply magnificent.” He flashed unconscious eyes at her—he had no consciousness of the cold tide with its curious touch of evil; it was hand in hand with him and his simplicity that she had stepped down into the water—and hurried on. “An angel of dreams. Dreams … you know—I say,” he spluttered incoherently, “I must tell you.” His working preoccupied face turned to face hers with a jerk that brought part of the heavy sheaf of hair across one of his eyes. “I’ve been doing the best work this week I ever did in my life!” Red flooded the whole of his face and the faraway glare of his one visible eye became a blaze of light, near, and smiling a guilty delighted smile. He was demanding her approval, her sympathy, just on the strength of her being there. It was the moment of consenting to Alma that had brought this. However it had come she would have been unable to withstand it. He wanted approval and sympathy; someone here had some time or other shut him up; perhaps he was considered second-rate, perhaps he was second-rate; but he was innocent as no one else in the room was innocent. “Oh, I am glad,” she replied swiftly. Putting his cigarette on the edge of the piano he seized one of her hands and crushed it between his own. His face perspired and there were tears in his eye. “Do tell me about it,” she said with bold uneasy eagerness hoping he would drop her hand when he spoke. “It’s a play,” he shouted in a low whisper, a spray of saliva springing through his lips “a play—it’s the finest stuff I ever rout.” Were all these people either cockney or with that very bland anglican cultured way of speaking—like the husband and the man with the Tudor mantelpiece?
“I can of course admit that the growth of corn was, at first, accidental and unconscious, and that even after the succession of processes began to be grasped and the soil methodically cultivated the success of the crop was supposed to depend upon the propitiation of a god. I can see that the discovery of the possibility of growing food would enormously alter the savage’s conception of God, by introducing a new set of attributes into his consciousness of him; but in defining the God of the Christians as a corn deity you and Allen are putting the cart before the horse.”
That was it, that was it—that was right somehow; there was something in this big red-faced man that was not in Mr. Wilson; but why did his talk sound so lame and dull, even while he was saving God—and Mr. Wilson’s, while he made God from the beginning a nothing created by the fears and needs of man, so thrilling and convincing, so painting the world anew? He was wrong about everything and yet while he talked everything changed in spite of yourself.
The earlier part of the afternoon looked a bright happy world behind the desolation of this conflict; the husband and wife and the young men and Mrs. Binkley and the bright afternoon light, dear far-off friends … withstanding in their absence the chilly light of Mr. Wilson’s talk. Who was Mr. Wilson? But he was so certain that men had created God … life in that thought was a nightmare. Nothing that could happen could make it anything but a nightmare henceforth … it did not matter what happened, and yet he seemed pleased, amused about everything and eager to go on and “do” things and get things done. … His belief about life was worse than agnosticism. There was no doubt in it. “Mr. G” was an invention of man. There was nothing but man; man, coming from the ape, some men a little cleverer than others, men had discovered science, science was the only enlightenment, science would put everything right; scientific imagination, scientific invention. Man. Women were there, cleverly devised by nature to ensnare man for a moment and
