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Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed
in the same even tones of careful statement. "I wasn't
disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly
sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a
life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself,
I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization
that what you and I have been calling the bright little
personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over
and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot.
And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and
nothing particular to do with them."
"That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.
"It didn't seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of
something or go to pieces. I couldn't turn to religion. I had
no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I
had a kind of revelation one night. 'Either I find out what
all this world is about, I said, or I perish.' I have lost
myself and I must forget myself by getting hold of something
bigger than myself. And becoming that. That's why I have been
making a sort of historical pilgrimage. . . . That's my
story, Sir Richmond. That's my education. . . . Somehow
though your troubles are different, it seems to me that my
little muddle makes me understand how it is with you. What
you've got, this idea of a scientific ordering of the world,
is what I, in my younger, less experienced way, have been
feeling my way towards. I want to join on. I want to got hold
of this idea of a great fuel control in the world and of a
still greater economic and educational control of which it is
a part. I want to make that idea a part of myself. Rather I
want to make myself a part of it. When you talk of it I
believe in it altogether."
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