Life is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences: too small to
be worth mentioning except for a special purpose, often too trifling
even to be noticed, any more than we notice one snowflake falling on
another. It is this that lends a frightful plausibility to all false
doctrines and evil fads. There are always such crowds of accidental
arguments for anything. If I said suddenly that historical truth is
generally told by red-haired men, I have no doubt that ten minutes'
reflection (in which I decline to indulge) would provide me with a
handsome list of instances in support of it. I remember a riotous
argument about Bacon and Shakespeare in which I offered quite at random
to show that Lord Rosebery had written the works of Mr. W. B. Yeats. No
sooner had I said the words than a torrent of coincidences rushed upon
my mind. I pointed out, for instance, that Mr. Yeats's chief work was
“The Secret Rose.” This may easily be paraphrased as “The Quiet or
Modest Rose”; and so, of course, as the Primrose. A second after I saw
the same suggestion in the combination of “rose” and “bury.” If I had
pursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a raving maniac by
this time.
We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn,
only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williams
did walk into a strange house and murder a man named Williamson; it
sounds like a sort of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance
did move quite unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a place
called Overroads. When he had made this escape he was very properly
pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which a political agent
named Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named Burns. And
when he did so another coincidence happened to him: rather a spiritual
than a material coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a magic
number.
For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote in
Battersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the train
slid through swampy woods and sullen skies there came into his empty
mind those idle and yet awful questions which come when the mind is
empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them; knaves make profane poems
out of them; men try to crush them like an ugly lust. Religion is
only the responsible reinforcement of common courage and common sense.
Religion only sets up the normal mood of health against the hundred
moods of disease.
But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they always
have an answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason.
Suppose a man's children have gone swimming; suppose he is suddenly
throttled by the senseless--fear that they are drowned. The obvious
answer is, “Only one man in a thousand has his children drowned.” But
a deeper voice (deeper, being as deep as hell) answers, “And why should
not you--be the thousandth man?” What is true of tragic doubt is true
also of trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said to him, “If you
don't vote to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly
do some good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please a
maddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting? You
don't think your man will get in by one vote, do you?” To this he knew
the answer of common sense, “But if everybody said that, nobody would
get in at all.” And then there came that deeper voice from Hades, “But
you are not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person on one
occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way about more solid
things, how would it matter and who would ever know?” Yet somehow the
voter drove on blindly through the blackening London roads, and found
somewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote.
The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by five hundred and
fifty-five votes. The voter read this next morning at breakfast,
being in a more cheery and expansive mood, and found something very
fascinating not merely in the fact of the majority, but even in the form
of it. There was something symbolic about the three exact figures; one
felt it might be a sort of motto or cipher. In the great book of seals
and cloudy symbols there is just such a thundering repetition. Six
hundred and sixty-six was the Mark of the Beast. Five hundred and
fifty-five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant tribune and citizen. A
number so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of science
into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg-and-dart ornament
or the Greek key. One might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe with
a recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light
exactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost
leapt to his feet. “Why, good heavens!” he cried. “I won that
election; and it was won by one vote! But for me it would have been the
despicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inharmonious figure five hundred
and fifty-four. The whole artistic point would have vanished. The Mark
of the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with a
masterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph--complete and
perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of Destiny when it was about to
make a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five.
Why, but for me the Cosmos would have lost a coincidence!” After this
outburst the voter sat down and finished his breakfast.