his first battle. He saw again the long low line of the Egyptian coast,
and the batteries of Alexandria and Ramleh spitting fire and the
_Condor_ standing in. He recalled the tense excitement of that morning,
the boats rowing to land, but strangely enough the incident that had won
him the Victoria Cross had been blotted completely from his mind by his
injury. He could not recover even the facts, much less the feel of that
act.... Why had he done what he had done? Did he himself really do
it?... Then very vividly came the memory of his first sight of his
smashed, disfigured face. That had been horrible at the time—in a way it
was horrible still—but after that it seemed as though for the first time
he had ceased then to be an egotism, a vanity. After that the memories
of impersonal interests began. He thought of his attendance at Huxley’s
lectures at South Kensington and the wonder of making his first
dissections. About that time he met Dolly, but here again was a queer
gap; he could not remember anything very distinctly about his early
meetings with Dolly except that she wore white and that they happened in
a garden.
Yet, in a little while, all his being had been hungry for Dolly!
With his first journey into Africa all his memories became brighter and
clearer and as if a hotter sun shone upon them. Everything before that
time was part of the story of a young man long vanished from the world,
young Oswald, a personality at least as remote as Peter—very like Peter.
But with the change of scene to Africa Oswald became himself. The man in
the story was the man who sat musing in the study chair, moved by the
same motives and altogether understandable. Already in Nyasaland he was
working consciously for “civilization” even as he worked today.
Everything in that period lived still, with all its accompanying
feelings alive. He fought again in his first fight in Nyasaland, and
recalled with complete vividness how he had loaded and fired and
reloaded and fired time after time at the rushes of the Yao spearmen; he
had fought leaning against the stockade because he was too weary to
stand upright, and with his head and every limb aching. One man he had
hit had wriggled for a long time in the grass, and that memory still
distressed him. It trailed another memory of horror with it. In his
campaign about Lake Kioga, years later, in a fight amidst some ant hills
he had come upon a wounded Sudanese being eaten alive by swarms of ants.
The poor devil had died with the ants still upon him.... Oswald could
still recall the sick anguish with which he had tried in vain to save or
relieve this man.
The affair was in the exact quality of his present feelings; the picture
was painted from the same palette. He remembered that then, as now, he
felt the same helpless perplexity at apparently needless and
unprofitable human agony. And then, as now, he had not despaired. He had
been able to see no reason in this suffering and no excuse for it; he
could see none now, and yet he did not despair. Why did not that and a
hundred other horrors overwhelm him with despair? Why had he been able
to go on with life after that? And after another exquisite humiliation
and disappointment? He had loved Dolly intensely, and here again came a
third but less absolutely obliterated gap in his recollections. For
years he had been resolutely keeping his mind off the sufferings of that
time, and now they were indistinct. His memory was particularly blank
now about Arthur; he was registered merely as a blonde sort of ass with
a tenor voice who punched copper. That faint hostile caricature was all
his mind had tolerated. But still sharp and clear, as though it had been
photographed but yesterday upon his memory, was the afternoon when he
had realized that Dolly was dead. That scene was life-size and intense;
how in a shady place under great trees, he had leant forwards upon his
little folding table and wept aloud.
What had carried him through all those things? Why had he desired so
intensely? Why had he worked so industriously? Why did he possess this
passion for order that had inspired his administrative work? Why had he
given his best years to Uganda? Why had he been so concerned for the
welfare and wisdom of Joan and Peter? Why did he work now to the very
breaking-point, until sleeplessness and fever forced him to rest, for
this dream of a great federation in the world—a world state he would
certainly never live to see established? If he was indeed only a bubble,
then surely he was the most obstinately opinionated of bubbles. But he
was not merely a bubble. The essential self of him was not this thing
that spun about in life, that felt and reflected the world, that missed
so acutely the two dear other bubbles that had circled about him so long
and that had now left him to eddy in his backwater while they hurried
off into the midstream of life. His essential self, the self that mused
now, that had struggled up through the egotisms of youth to this present
predominance, was something deeper and tougher and more real than
desire, than excitement, than pleasure or pain. That was the lesson he
had been learning. There was something deeper in him to which he had
been getting down more and more as life had gone on, something to which
all the stuff of experience was incidental, something in which there was
endless fortitude and an undying resolution to do. There was something
in him profounder than the stream of accidents....
He sat now with his distresses allayed, his mind playing with fancies
and metaphors and analogies. Was this profounder contentment beneath his
pains and discontents the consciousness of the bubble giving way to the
underlying consciousness of the stream? That was ingenious, but it was
not true. Men are not bubbles carried blindly on a stream; they are
rather like bubbles, but that is all. They are wills and parts of a will
that is neither the slave of the stream of matter nor a thing
indifferent to it, that is paradoxically free and bound. They are parts
of a will, but what this great will was that had him in its grasp, that
compelled him to work, that saved him from drowning in his individual
sorrows and cares, he could not say. It was easy to draw the analogy
that a man is an atom in the life of the species as a cell is an atom in
the life of a man. But this again was not the complete truth. Where was
this alleged will of the species? If there was indeed such a will in the
species, why was there this war? And yet, whatever it might be,
assuredly there was _something_ greater than himself sustaining his
life.... To him it felt like a universal thing, but was it indeed a
universal thing? It was strangely bound up with preferences. Why did he
love and choose certain things passionately? Why was he indifferent to
others? Why were Dolly and Joan more beautiful to him than any other
women; why did he so love the sound of their voices, their movements,
and the subtle lines of their faces; why did he love Peter, standing
upright and when enthusiasm lit him; and why did he love the lights on
polished steel and the darknesses of deep waters, the movements of
flames, and of supple, feline animals, so intensely? Why did he love
these things more than the sheen on painted wood, or the graces of
blonde women, or the movements of horses? And why did he love justice
and the revelation of scientific laws, and the setting right of
disordered things? Why did this idea of a League of Nations come to him
with the effect of a personal and preferential call? All these lights
and matters and aspects and personal traits were somehow connected in
his mind, and had a compelling power over him. They could make him
forget his safety or comfort or happiness. They had something in common
among themselves, he felt, and he could not tell what it was they had in
common. But whatever it was, it was the intimation of the power that
sustained him. It was as if they were all reflections or resemblances of
some overruling spirit, some Genius, some great ruler of the values that
stood over his existence and his world. Yet that again was but a fancy—a
plagiarism from Socrates....
There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not
discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a
presence in the world about him that made all life worth while, and yet
it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. It was the Essence beyond Reality;
it was the Heart of All Things.... Metaphors! Words! Perhaps some men
have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved
because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love.
Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but
it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And
others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name
of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And
yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he
lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew,
though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in
the face....
§ 11
At last he sighed and rose. He lit his reading lamp by means of a
newspaper rolled up into one long spill—for there was a famine in
matches just then—and sat down to the work on his desk.
THE END
Printed in the United States of America.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
End of Project Gutenberg's Joan and Peter, by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells