Cynicism is humour in ill-health. It would have been far more difficult to tell the story of how a mult.i.tude of commonplace people were changed by a half-dubious perception that G.o.d was indeed close at hand to them, a perception that they would sometimes struggle with and deny, sometimes realize overwhelmingly; it would have been a beautiful, pitiful, wonderful story, and it may be if Boon had lived he would have written it. He could have written it. But he was too ill for that much of writing, and the tired pencil turned to the easier course....
I can"t believe after all I know of him, and particularly after the intimate talk I have repeated, that he would have remained in this mood. He would, I am certain, have altered the Story of the Last Trump. He must have done so.
And so, too, about this war, this dreadful outbreak of brutish violence which has darkened all our lives, I do not think he would have remained despairful. As his health mended, as the braveries of spring drew near, he would have risen again to the a.s.surance he gave me that the Mind is immortal and invincible.
Of course there is no denying the evil, the black evils of this war; many of us are impoverished and ruined, many of us are wounded, almost all of us have lost friends and suffered indirectly in a hundred ways.
And all that is going on yet. The black stream of consequence will flow for centuries. But all this mult.i.tudinous individual unhappiness is still compatible with a great progressive movement in the general mind. Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing things destroyed, is as much living and learning as anything else in the world. The tremendous present disaster of Europe may not be, after all, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be realized, and they can be realized only by experience; complacencies, fatuities have to be destroyed; we have to learn and relearn what Boon once called "the bitter need for honesty." We must see these things from the standpoint of the Race Life, whose days are hundreds of years....
Nevertheless, such belief cannot alter for me the fact that Boon is dead and our little circle is scattered. I feel that no personal comfort nor any further happiness of the mind remains in store for me.
My duties as his literary executor still give me access to the dear old house and the garden of our security, and, in spite of a considerable coolness between myself and Mrs. Boon--who would willingly have all this material destroyed and his reputation rest upon his better-known works--I make my duty my excuse to go there nearly every day and think. I am really in doubt about many matters. I cannot determine, for example, whether it may not be possible to make another volume from the fragments still remaining over after this one.
There are great quant.i.ties of sketches, several long pieces of Vers Libre, the story of "Jane in Heaven," the draft of a novel. And so I go there and take out the papers and fall into fits of thinking. I turn the untidy pages and think about Boon and of all the stream of nonsense and fancy that was so much more serious to him and to me than the serious business of life. I go there, I know, very much as a cat hangs about its home after its people have departed--that is to say, a little incredulously and with the gleam of a reasonless hope....
There must, I suppose, come a limit to these visitations, and I shall have to go about my own business. I can see in Mrs. Boon"s eye that she will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has grown suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must go on with my work under difficult and novel conditions (and now well into the routines of middle age) as if there were no such things as loss and disappointment. I am, I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant man. And yet, I suppose, I do something; I count; it is better that I should help than not in the great task of literature, the great task of becoming the thought and the expressed intention of the race, the task of taming violence, organizing the aimless, destroying error, the task of waylaying the Wild a.s.ses of the Devil and sending them back to h.e.l.l. It does not matter how individually feeble we writers and disseminators are; we have to hunt the Wild a.s.ses. As the feeblest puppy has to bark at cats and burglars. And we have to do it because we know, in spite of the darkness, the wickedness, the haste and hate, we know in our hearts, though no momentary trumpeting has shown it to us, that judgement is all about us and G.o.d stands close at hand.
Yes, we go on.
But I wish that George Boon were still in the world with me, and I wish that he could have written a different ending to the Story of the Last Trump.
The Gresham Press
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON