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.