I now mean to be serious—it is time.         
          DON JUAN.

MEANWHILE Serge and old Lawrie became so interested in each other that they walked far into the night. It was Serge who opened the conversation:

“I gather that you will be charged with drunkenness and obscene language.”

“Aye. When I’m fou I’m mighty full o’ poetry. The exact words were ‘bloody symbol.’ The man probably thought I was referring to his vices. I told him he was a symbol of Society’s hypocritical endeavour to suppress the consequences of its own villainy. My drunkenness is one of those consequences. It is the direct outcome of the habit of loneliness. . . . Did I talk to you about that before? . . . No. It would be your father. Have you ever been to prison?”

Serge regretted that he had never had that experience.

“It was a dirty cell they put me in, but it was shining with the truth, the blackguardly truth of all humanity. Man, I found there what I’ve been seeking these thirty years. . . . I wonder now if ye’ll understand me. I would like to know what ye make of life, or if ye make anything of it at all.”

“It seems to me simple enough,” replied Serge. “A man is born. Two things lie before him, love and death.”

“That’s it. That’s it. Now mark what I’m going to tell you. On the walls of my cell were drawings and writings—horrible drawings of women, lewd verses, and hysterical outbursts in the name of Jesus Christ. They were conventional, I admit, but that only makes it all the worse. It means that men are imprisoned in their [Pg 261]own minds, debarred from woman on the one hand and from God on the other. You may tell me that my cell has been occupied only by lowest types, but if the Prince of Wales were to be incarcerated in it he would in time add to the collection of bawdy rhymes, and if he were followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury there would be one more such inscription as: ‘Christ died to save me and the magistrate.’ Some men are reduced to filthiness, some to hysteria, some to both. For the superficial and trivial purposes of existence such as the day’s work, marriage, family duties, the so-called pleasures of society, they contrive to cover up their deplorable condition. Within themselves they are reduced to the most devastating loneliness. In their day-to-day prison of Society they do not write their thoughts on the walls (except for an occasional jubilant outburst over the successful issue of an amorous adventure), and it has remained for me to find in an actual acknowledged prison the frank revelation of the state of the human mind. . . . It has always been so. . . . Britons never shall be slaves indeed! They never have been, never will be, anything else.”

Serge quoted:

“L’inconvénient du règne de l’opinion, c’est qu’elle se mêle à ce dont elle n’a que faire; par exemple, la vie privée. De là la tristesse de l’Amérique et de l’Angleterre.”

“Aye,” said the old man. “And what would the man that wrote that say if he could see our town and all the other towns, the rusty links in the world-wide thing the men of our time are so pleased to call industrialism? Men make everything in their own image. If you want to know what men are look at their towns, look at their houses, look at their books, their art. . . . At first, being human, ye’ll be dazzled and pleased by the conceit and egoism that have gone to the making of them, but soon beneath the conceit and the egoism ye’ll find nothing but fear—fear of death, fear of love; appeals to Jesus Christ from the one, abuse of women by way of escape from the other. Fools [Pg 262]and blind! There’s no escape. There’s no good life but in the honest meeting of the one and the other. . . .”

“And women?” asked Serge.

“Their minds reflect only the minds of men. I think now that all the trouble, all the distress, and all the muddle come from the arrogance of men, who have always preferred the reflection of life in the flattering mirror of their minds to life itself. They have dropped the bone for the shadow, when they might have had both. They could have admired the shadow and eaten the bone; but, in the folly of their arrogance, they have thrown both away. . . . They must be almost as great a trial to God as they are to themselves. God is very merciful, since, though they will not love, yet He allows them to die. The mistake is understandable. A man’s eyes, all his senses, assure him that he is the centre of the universe. Quite obviously his senses lie, but it is often difficult to see the obvious. There cannot be more than one centre of the universe, and, if a man will only reflect for a moment, he will see that all his neighbours, his dog, the tree in his garden—if he has a garden—every star in the sky, must be victims of the same delusion. Unhappily, though man has lived on this world for thousands of years, he has not yet made the small mental effort necessary for the slight correction of his senses. It has taken him thousands of years to discover that this earth on which he has his dwelling is not the centre of the solar system. That was a shock to his vanity, and his endeavour since then has been to prove his own all-importance in the scheme of things. He has turned to and pigeon-holed his knowledge and called it science. He has become increasingly adventurous and busy, simply because of the restlessness that has come over him on being confronted with his mistakes. He has discovered the whole habitable globe and proceeded to defile it. In my lifetime he has blundered in............