There was something of invalid peevishness even in the handwriting of
Boon's last story, the Story of the Last Trump.
Of course, I see exactly what Boon is driving at in this fragment.
The distresses of the war had for a time broken down his faith in the
Mind of the Race, and so he mocked at the idea that under any sort of
threat or warning whatever men's minds can move out of the grooves in
which they run. And yet in happier moods that was his own idea, and my
belief in it came from him. That he should, in his illness, fall away
from that saving confidence which he could give to me, and that he
should die before his courage returned, seems just a part of the
inexplicable tragedy of life. Because clearly this end of the Story of
the Last Trump is forced and false, is unjust to life. I know how
feebly we apprehend things, I know how we forget, but because we
forget it does not follow that we never remember, because we fail to
apprehend perfectly it does not follow that we have no understanding.
And so I feel that the true course of the Story of the Last Trump
should have been far larger and much more wonderful and subtle than
Boon made it. That instant vision of God would not have been dismissed
altogether. People might have gone on, as Boon tells us they went on,
but they would have been haunted nevertheless by a new sense of deep,
tremendous things....
Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would have been far more
difficult to tell the story of how a multitude of commonplace people
were changed by a half-dubious perception that God was indeed close at
hand to them, a perception that they would sometimes struggle with and
deny, sometimes realize overwhelmingly; it would have been a
beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it may be if Boon had lived
he would have written it. He could have written it. But he was too ill
for that much of writing, and the tired pencil turned to the easier
course....
I can't believe after all I know of him, and particularly after the
intimate talk I have repeated, that he would have remained in this
mood. He would, I am certain, have altered the Story of the Last
Trump. He must have done so.
And so, too, about this war, this dreadful outbreak of brutish
violence which has darkened all our lives, I do not think he would
have remained despairful. As his health mended, as the braveries of
spring drew near, he would have risen again to the assurance he gave
me that the Mind is immortal and invincible.
Of course there is no denying the evil, the black evils of this war;
many of us are impoverished and ruined, many of us are wounded, almost
all of us have lost friends and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways.
And all that is going on yet. The black stream of consequence will
flow for centuries. But all this multitudinous individual unhappiness
is still compatible with a great progressive movement in the general
mind. Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing things
destroyed, is as much living and learning as anything else in the
world. The tremendous present disaster of Europe may not be, after
all, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be
realized, and they can be realized only by experience; complacencies,
fatuities have to be destroyed; we have to learn and relearn what Boon
once called "the bitter need for honesty." We must see these things
from the standpoint of the Race Life, whose days are hundreds of
years....
Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for me the fact that Boon is
dead and our little circle is scattered. I feel that no personal
comfort nor any further happiness of the mind remains in store for me.
My duties as his literary executor still give me access to the dear
old house and the garden of our security, and, in spite of a
considerable coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon--who would
willingly have all this material destroyed and his reputation rest
upon his better-known works--I make my duty my excuse to go there
nearly every day and think. I am really in doubt about many matters. I
cannot determine, for example, whether it may not be possible to make
another volume from the fragments still remaining over after this one.
There are great quantities of sketches, several long pieces of Vers
Libre, the story of "Jane in Heaven," the draft of a novel. And so I
go there and take out the papers and fall into fits of thinking. I
turn the untidy pages and think about Boon and of all the stream of
nonsense and fancy that was so much more serious to him and to me than
the serious business of life. I go there, I know, very much as a cat
hangs about its home after its people have departed--that is to say, a
little incredulously and with the gleam of a reasonless hope....
There must, I suppose, come a limit to these visitations, and I shall
have to go about my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon's eye that
she will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has
grown suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must go on with my work
under difficult and novel conditions (and now well into the routines
of middle age) as if there were no such things as loss and
disappointment. I am, I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant
man. And yet, I suppose, I do something; I count; it is better that I
should help than not in the great task of literature, the great task
of becoming the thought and the expressed intention of the race, the
task of taming violence, organizing the aimless, destroying error, the
task of waylaying the Wild Asses of the Devil and sending them back to
Hell. It does not matter how individually feeble we writers and
disseminators are; we have to hunt the Wild Asses. As the feeblest
puppy has to bark at cats and burglars. And we have to do it because
we know, in spite of the darkness, the wickedness, the haste and hate,
we know in our hearts, though no momentary trumpeting has shown it to
us, that judgement is all about us and God stands close at hand.
Yes, we go on.
But I wish that George Boon were still in the world with me, and I
wish that he could have written a different ending to the Story of the
Last Trump.