I went home, and in the quiet of my own room I said that I would not let
this thing be true.
I, who had been walking with the Altruist on heights where the hidden
meanings of the world lay clear to view, fell into a horror of great
darkness. One utterly inexplicable event made all life incoherent.
The Lad was dead. He had perished in an accident that was the result of
his own reckless daring. For the mere physical delight of battling with
danger he had rushed to his destruction. A life guided steadily toward
great issues had ended in a swift caprice.
Now for the first time I knew what Janet had meant when she said that
there is no God, but only a mocking will that makes sport of our hope
and our endeavour.
Infinite irony could find no expression more cruel, I thought, as I
walked up and down my long floor, than in making us the instruments of
our own undoing, in causing us to tear down ourselves the work of our
own hands.
All that the Lad had thought of life was contradicted by his death. It
could be perfect in itself, he had said so often. Its completeness lay
in finished work. And now—
I turned, sick at heart, from this place so full of tragedy and of
baffling puzzles, and resolved to go back to the lanes and garden-plots
of my native village. There in peace and loneliness I would try to
forget all that I had known here, even this little story.
But oh, the pity of it! The Lad had walked with so firm a tread. I had
thought of him as one real, moving among the shows of things, where we
groped our way, uncertain of the path.
All through the winter, against the dark background of my new knowledge
of evil, I had seen him, strong in body and alert in mind, with a heart
like the heart of a little child. Often, in thinking of him, I had said:
“God now and then sends a man into the world who stands as a promise to
the race.”
I thought of Janet, and I cried out to know the meaning of the world’s
great waste of human pain.
The Altruist explained it all to me the next day.
He came to ask me to visit Janet. I had not dared to go. He was
surprised and grieved by my mood.
“The meaning of this sorrow is very clear,” he said gently, with the old
ecstatic gleam in his eyes.
“You explained everything very differently a few weeks ago,” I said
rebelliously, when he had finished. “You told me then, and I believed
you, that God was leading that girl out of her mental tangles into
simple human happiness.”
“Did I?” said the Altruist, dreamily. “It all looks different to me
now.”
“I can see that it does,” I retorted in anger.
“The shock will carry Janet out of her old, cheap pessimism into
conviction and into action of some kind. She will merge her individual
experience in the general life. She will lose herself in great ideas.
Now, at the crisis of so many great questions, she will find her work. I
can see a career for her infinitely more lofty than she could have had
if this sad event had not occurred.”
Here the Doctor entered, interrupting the words of prophecy.