Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of
truth. Things that really happened have been mentioned, such as meeting
President Kruger or being thrown out of a cab. What I have now to relate
really happened; yet there was no element in it of practical politics or
of personal danger. It was simply a quiet conversation which I had with
another man. But that quiet conversation was by far the most terrible
thing that has ever happened to me in my life. It happened so long ago
that I cannot be certain of the exact words of the dialogue, only of its
main questions and answers; but there is one sentence in it for which I
can answer absolutely and word for word. It was a sentence so awful that
I could not forget it if I would. It was the last sentence spoken; and
it was not spoken to me.
The thing befell me in the days when I was at an art school. An art
school is different from almost all other schools or colleges in this
respect: that, being of new and crude creation and of lax discipline,
it presents a specially strong contrast between the industrious and the
idle. People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or
do no work at all. I belonged, along with other charming people, to the
latter class; and this threw me often into the society of men who were
very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different
from mine. I was idle because I was very much occupied; I was
engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting
astonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at
loose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I think
with needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.
I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards. In this connection there are two
very curious things which the critic of human life may observe. The
first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and
women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in
threes. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three young
cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every
day you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for
some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In these small
groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one
man who seems to have condescended to his company; one man who, while he
can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics with
a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.
It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger
still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would
talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the night
he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He
was a man with a long, ironical face, and close and red hair; he was
by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some
reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort
of Super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall
never forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real things
for the first and the last time.
.....
Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part ran
a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to
St. Paul’s Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wandering
on these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the
stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and
blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in the
grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like
a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Above us also it was gloom;
but if one stared long enough at that upper darkness, one saw vertical
stripes of grey in the black and then became conscious of the colossal
façade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if
Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.
.....
The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it,
I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knew
it to be literally true. And the process had been so long and full that
I answered him at once out of existing stores of explanation.
“I am becoming orthodox,” I said, “because I have come, rightly or
wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief
that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than
a crime, for an error begets crimes. An Imperialist is worse than a
pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracy
disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worse
than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his
shortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even in
his longest devotion. I hate modern doubt because it is dangerous.”
“You mean dangerous to morality,” he said in a voice of wonderful
gentleness. “I expect you are right. But why do you care about
morality?”
I glanced at his face quickly. He had thrust out his neck as he had a
trick of doing; and so brought his face abruptly into the light of the
bonfire from below, like a face in the footlights. His long chin and
high cheek-bones were lit up infernally from underneath; so that
he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit. I had an
unmeaning sense of being tempted in a wilderness; and even as I paused a
burst of red sparks broke past.
“Aren’t those sparks splendid?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied.
“That is all that I ask you to admit,” said I. “Give me those few red
specks and I will deduce Christian morality. Once I thought like you,
that one’s pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come and
go with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the
fire. Once I thought that red star we see was alone in space. But now
I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of
virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits,
which you cannot see. Only because your mother made you say ‘Thank you’
for a bun are you now able to thank Nature or chaos for those red stars
of an instant or for the white stars of all time. Only because you were
humble before fireworks on the fifth of November do you now enjoy any
fireworks that you chance to see. You only like them being red because
you were told about the blood of the martyrs; you only like them
being bright because brightness is a glory. That flame flowered out of
virtues, and it will fade with virtues. Seduce a woman, and that spark
will be less bright. Shed blood, and that spark will be less red. Be
really bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper.”
He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of
his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion
produced humility or humility a simple joy: but he admitted both. He
only said, “But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that
for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out: will not the
expanding pleasure of ruin...”
“Do you see that fire?” I asked. “If we had a real fighting democracy,
some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are.”
“Perhaps,” he said, in his tired, fair way. “Only what you call evil I
call good.”
He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps
swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the
low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but
the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled: then I heard the voice of
one of the vilest of his associates saying, “Nobody can possibly know.”
And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every
syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, “I tell you I
have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference
between right and wrong.” I rushed out without daring to pause; and as
I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love
of God.
I have since heard that he died: it may be said, I think, that he
committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with
tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have never
known, or even dared to think, what was that place at which he stopped
and refrained.