Part 13

“And there’s another grand mistake, my lad—your thinking that I’m haunting you out of revenge, that I’m trying to frighten you.... My dear Steven, if I’d wanted to frighten you I’d have appeared in a very different shape. I needn’t remind you what shape I _might_ have appeared in.... What do you suppose I’ve come for?”

“I don’t know,” said Steven in a husky whisper. “Tell me.”

“I’ve come to forgive you. And to save you from the horror you _would_ have felt sooner or later. And to stop your going on with your crime.”

“You needn’t,” Steven said. “I’m not going on with it. I shall do no more murders.”

“There you are again. Can’t you understand that I’m not talking about your silly butcher’s work? I’m talking about your _real_ crime. Your real crime was hating me.

“And your very hate was a blunder, Steven. You hated me for something I hadn’t done.”

“Aye, what did you do? Tell me that.”

“You thought I came between you and your sweetheart. That night when Dorsy spoke to me, you thought I told her to throw you over, didn’t you?”

“Aye. And what did you tell her?”

“I told her to stick to you. It was you, Steven, who drove her away. You frightened the child. She said she was afraid for her life of you. Not because you half killed that poor boy, but because of the look on your face before you did it. The look of hate, Steven.

“I told her not to be afraid of you. I told her that if she threw you over you might go altogether to the devil; that she might even be responsible for some crime. I told her that if she married you and was faithful—_if she loved you_—I’d answer for it you’d never go wrong.

“She was too frightened to listen to me. Then I told her to think over what I’d said before she did anything. You heard me say that.”

“Aye. That’s what I heard you say. I didn’ knaw. I didn’ knaw. I thought you’d set her agen me.”

“If you don’t believe me, you can ask her, Steven.”

“That’s what she said t’ other night. That you navver coom between her and me. Navver.”

“Never,” the phantasm said. “And you don’t hate me now.”

“Naw. Naw. I should navver ’a hated ’ee. I should navver ’a laid a finger on thee, ef I’d knawn.”

“It’s not your laying fingers on me, it’s your hatred that matters. If that’s done with, the whole thing’s done with.”

“Is it? Is it? Ef it was knawn, I should have to hang for it. Maunna I gie mysen oop? Tell me, maun I gie mysen oop?”

“You want me to decide that for you?”

“Aye. Doan’t gaw,” he said. “Doan’t gaw.”

It seemed to him that Mr. Greathead’s phantasm was getting a little thin, as if it couldn’t last more than an instant. He had never so longed for it to go, as he longed now for it to stay and help him.

“Well, Steven, any flesh-and-blood man would tell you to go and get hanged to-morrow; that it was no more than your plain duty. And I daresay there are some mean, vindictive spirits even in my world who would say the same, not because _they_ think death important but because they know _you_ do, and want to get even with you that way.

“It isn’t _my_ way. I consider this little affair is strictly between ourselves. There isn’t a jury of flesh-and-blood men who would understand it. They all think death so important.”

“What do you want me to do, then? Tell me and I’ll do it! Tell me!”

He cried it out loud; for Mr. Greathead’s phantasm was getting thinner and thinner; it dwindled and fluttered, like a light going down. Its voice came from somewhere away outside, from the other end of the bridle-path.

“Go on living,” it said. “Marry Dorsy.”

“I darena’. She doan’ knaw I killed ’ee.”

“Oh, yes”—the eyes flickered up, gentle and ironic—“she does. She knew all the time.”

And with that the phantasm went out.

THE FINDING OF THE ABSOLUTE

I

Mr. Spalding had gone out into the garden to find peace, and had not found it. He sat there, with hunched shoulders and bowed head, dejected in the spring sunshine.

Jerry, the black cat, invited him to play; he stood on his hind legs and danced, and bowed sideways, and waved his forelegs in the air like wings. At any other time his behaviour would have enchanted Mr. Spalding, but now he couldn’t even look at him; he was too miserable.

He had gone to bed miserable; he had passed a night of misery, and he had waked up more miserable than ever. He had been like that for three days and three nights straight on end, and no wonder. It wasn’t only that his young wife Elizabeth had run away with Paul Jeffreson, the Imagist poet. Besides the frailty of Elizabeth, he had discovered a fatal flaw in his own system of metaphysics. His belief in Elizabeth was gone. So was his belief in the Absolute.

The two things had come at once, to crush him. And he had to own bitterly that they were not altogether unrelated. “If,” Mr. Spalding said to himself, “I had served my wife as faithfully as I have served my God, she would not now have deserted me for Paul Jeffreson.” He meant that if he had not been wrapped up in his system of metaphysics, Elizabeth might still have been wrapped up in him. He had nobody but himself to thank for her behaviour.

If she had run away with anybody else, since run she must, he might have forgiven her; he might have forgiven himself; but there could be nothing but misery in store for Elizabeth. Paul Jeffreson had genius, Mr. Spalding didn’t deny it; immortal genius; but he had no morals; he drank; he drugged; in Mr. Spalding’s decent phrase, he did everything he shouldn’t do.

You would have thought this overwhelming disaster would have completely outweighed the other trouble. But no; Mr. Spalding had a balanced mind; he mourned with equal sorrow the loss of his wife and the loss of his Absolute. A flaw in a metaphysical system may seem to you a small thing; but you must bear in mind that, ever since he could think at all, Mr. Spalding had been devoured by a hunger and thirst after metaphysical truth. He had flung over the God he had been taught to believe in because, besides being an outrage to Mr. Spalding’s moral sense, he wasn’t metaphysical enough. The poor man was always worrying about metaphysics; he wandered from system to system, seeking truth, seeking reality, seeking some supreme intellectual satisfaction that never came. He thought he had found it in his theory of Absolute Pantheism. But really, Spalding’s Pantheism, anybody’s Pantheism for that matter, couldn’t, when you brought it down to bed-rock thinking, hold water for a minute. And the more Absolute he made it, the leakier it was.

For, consider, on Mr. Spalding’s theory, there isn’t any reality except the Absolute. Things are only real because they exist in It; because It is Them. Mr. Spalding conceived that his consciousness and Elizabeth’s consciousness and Paul Jeffreson’s consciousness existed somehow in the Absolute unchanged. For, if that inside existence changed them you would have to say that the ground of their present appearance lay somewhere outside the Absolute, which to Mr. Spalding was rank blasphemy. And if Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson existed in the Absolute unchanged, then their adultery existed there unchanged. And an adultery within the Absolute outraged his moral sense as much as anything he had been told about God in his youth. The odd thing was that until Elizabeth had run away and committed it he had never thought of that. The metaphysics of Pantheism had interested him much more than its ethics. And now he could think of nothing else.

And it wasn’t only Elizabeth and her iniquity; there were all the intolerable people he had ever known. There was his Uncle Sims, a mean sneak if ever there was one; and his Aunt Emily, a silly fool; and his cousin, Tom Rumbold, an obscene idiot. And his uncle’s mean sneak-ishness, and his aunt’s silly folly, and his cousin’s obscene idiocy would have to exist in the Absolute, too; and unchanged, mind you.

And the things you see and hear—A blue sky, now, would it be blue in the Sight of God, or just something inconceivable? And noises, music? For example, I am listening to Grand Opera, and you to the jazz band in your restaurant; but the God of Pantheism is listening to both, to all the noises in the universe at once. As if He had sat down on the piano. This idea shocked Mr. Spalding even more than the thought of Elizabeth’s misconduct.

Time went on. Paul Jeffreson drank himself to death. Elizabeth, worn out with grief, died of pneumonia following influenza; and Mr. Spalding still went about worrying over his inadjustable metaphysics.

And at last he, too, found himself dying.

And then he began to worry about other things. Things that had, as he put it, “happened” in his youth, before he knew Elizabeth, and one thing that had happened after she left him. He thought of them as just happening; happening _to_ him rather than _through_ him, against his will. In calm, philosophic moments he couldn’t conceive how they had ever happened at all, how, for example, he could have endured Connie Larkins. The episodes had been brief, because in each case boredom and disgust had supervened to put asunder what Mr. Spalding owned should never have been joined. Brief, insignificant as they were, Mr. Spalding, in his dying state, was worried when he looked back on them. Supposing they were more significant than they had seemed? Supposing they had an eternal significance and entailed tremendous consequences in the after-life? Supposing you were not just wiped out, that there really _was_ an after-life? Supposing that in that other world there was a hell?

Mr. Spalding could imagine no worse hell than the eternal repetition of such incidents; eternal repetition of boredom and disgust. Fancy going on with Connie Larkins for ever and ever, never being able to get away from her, doomed to repeat—And, if there _was_ an Absolute, if there was reality, truth, never knowing it; being cut off from it for ever—

“He that is filthy let him be filthy still.”

That was hell, the continuance of the filthy state.

He wondered whether goodness was not, after all, _the_ important thing; he wondered whether there really was a next world; with an extreme uneasiness he wondered what would happen to him in it.

He died wondering.

II

His first thought was: Well, here I am again. I’ve not been wiped out. His next, that he hadn’t died at all. He had gone to sleep and was now dreaming. He was not in the least agitated, nor even surprised.

He found himself alone in an immense grey space, in which there was no distinguishable object but himself. He was aware of his body as occupying a portion of this space. For he had a body; a curious, tenuous, whitish body. The odd thing was that this empty space had a sort of solidity under him. He was lying on it, stretched out on it, adrift. It supported him with the buoyancy of deep water. And yet his body was part of it, netted in.

He was now aware of two figures approaching. They came and stood, like figures treading water, one on each side of him, and he saw that they were Elizabeth and Paul Jeffreson.

Then he concluded that he was really dead; dead like Elizabeth and Jeffreson, and (since they were there) that he was in hell.

Elizabeth was speaking, and her voice sounded sweet and very kind. All the same he knew he was in hell.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s queer at first, but you’ll get used to it. You don’t mind our coming to meet you?”

Mr. Spalding said he’d no business to mind, no right to reproach her, since they were all in the same boat. They had, all three, deserved their punishment.

“Punishment?” (Jeffreson spoke). “Why, where does he think he is?”

“I’m in hell, aren’t I? If—”

“If _we’re_ here. Is that it?”

“Well, Jeffreson, I don’t want to rake up old unpleasantness, but after—after what happened, you’ll forgive my saying so, but what else _can_ I think?”

He heard Jeffreson laugh; a perfectly natural laugh.

“Will _you_ tell him, Elizabeth, or shall I?”

“You’d better. He always respected your intelligence.”

“Well, old chap, if you really want to know where you are, you’re in heaven.”

“You don’t mean to say so?”

“Fact. I daresay you’re wondering what we’re doing here?”

“Well, Elizabeth—perhaps. But, frankly, Jeffreson, _you_——”

“Yes. How about me?”

“With your record I should have thought you’d even less business here than I have.”

“Wouldn’t you? I lived on unpaid bills. I drank. I drugged. There was nothing I didn’t do. What do you suppose I got in on? You’ll never guess.”

“No. No. I give it up.”

“My love of beauty. You wouldn’t think it, but it seems that actually counts here, in the eternal world.”

“And Elizabeth, what did she get in on?”

“Her love of me.”

“Then all I can say is,” said Mr. Spalding, “Heaven must be a most immoral place.”

“Oh, no. Your parochial morality doesn’t hold good here, that’s all. Why should it? It’s entirely relative. Relative to a social system with limits in time and space. Relative to a certain biological configuration that ceased with our terrestrial organisms. Not absolute. Not eternal.

“But beauty—Beauty _is_ eternal, is absolute. And I—I loved beauty more than credit, more than drink or drugs or women, more even than Elizabeth.

“And love is eternal. And Elizabeth loved me more than you, more than respectability, more than peace and comfort, and a happy life.”

“That’s all very well, Jeffreson; and Elizabeth may be all right. Mary Magdalene, you know, _Quia multum amavit_, and so forth. But if a blackguard like you can slip into heaven as easily as all that, where _are_ our ethics?”

“Your ethics, my dear Spalding, are where they’ve always been, where you came from, not here. And if I _was_ what they call a bad man, that’s to say a bad terrestrial organism, I was a thundering good poet. You say I slipped in easily; do you suppose it’s easy to be a poet? My dear fellow, it requires an inflexibility, a purity, a discipline of mind—of _mind_, remember—that you haven’t any conception of. And surely _you_ should be the last person in the world to regard mind as an inferior secondary affair. Anyhow, the consequence is that I’ve not only got into heaven, I’ve got into one of the best heavens, a heaven reserved exclusively for the very finest spirits.”

“Then,” said Mr. Spalding, “if we’re in heaven, who’s in hell?”

“Couldn’t say for certain. But we shouldn’t put it that way. We should say: Who’s gone back to earth?”

“Well—am I likely to meet Uncle Sims, or Aunt Emily, or Tom Rumbold here? You remember them, Elizabeth?”

“Oh, yes, I remember. They’d be almost certain to be sent back. They couldn’t stand eternal things. There’s nothing eternal about meanness and stupidity and nastiness.”

“What’ll happen to them, do you suppose?”

“What should you say, Paul?”

“I should say they’d suffer damnably till they’d got some bigness and intelligence and decency knocked into them.”

“It’ll be a sell for Aunt Emily. She was brought up to believe that stupidity was no drawback to getting into heaven.”

“Lots of people,” said Jeffreson, “will be sold. Like my father, the Dean of Eastminster; he was cocksure he’d get in; but they won’t let him. And why, do you suppose? Because the poor old boy couldn’t see that my poems were beautiful.

“But even that wouldn’t have dished him, if he’d had a passion for anybody; or if he’d cared two straws about metaphysical truth. Your truth, Spalding.”

“Bless me, all our preconceived ideas seem to have been wrong.”

“Yes. Even I wasn’t prepared for that. By the way, that’s what you got in on, your passion for truth. It’s like my passion for beauty.”

“But—aren’t you distressed about your father, Jeffreson?”

“Oh, no. He’ll get into some heaven or other some day. He’ll find out that he cares for somebody, perhaps. Then he’ll be all right— But don’t you want to look about a bit?”

“I don’t see very much to look at. It strikes me as a bit bare, your heaven.”

“Oh, that’s because you’re only at the landing-state.”

“The landing _what_?”

“State. What we used to call landing place. Times and spaces here, you know, are states. States of mind.”

Mr. Spalding sat up, excited. “But—but that’s what I always said they were. I and Kant.”

“Well, you’d better talk to him about it.”

“Talk to _him_? Shall I see Kant?”

“Look at him, Elizabeth. _Now_ he’s coming alive— Of course you’ll see him when you get into your own place—state, I mean. You’d better get up and come along with me and Elizabeth. We’ll show you round.”

He rose, they steadied him, and he made his way between them through the grey immensity, over a half-seen yet perfectly solid tract of something that he thought of, absurdly, as condensed space. As yet there were no objects in sight but the figures of Elizabeth and Jeffreson; the half-seen, yet tangible floor he went on seemed to create itself out of nothing, under his feet, as the desire to walk arose in him. And as yet he had felt no interest or curiosity; but as he went on he was aware of a desire to see things that became more and more urgent. He would see. He must see. He felt that before him and around him there were endless things to be seen. His mind strained forwards towards vision.

And then, suddenly, he saw.

He saw a landscape more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. It was, Jeffreson informed him, very like the umbrella pine country between Florence and Siena. As they came out of it on a great, curving road they had their faces towards the celestial west. To the south the land fell away in great red cliffs to a shining, blue sea. Like, Jeffreson said, the Riviera, the Estérel. West and north the landscape rolled in green hill after green hill, pine-tufted, to a sweeping rampart of deep blue; such a rampart, such blue as Mr. Spalding had seen from the heights above Sidmouth, looking towards Dartmoor. Only this country had a grace, a harmony of line and colour that gave it an absolute beauty; and over it there lay a serene, unearthly radiance.

Before them, on a hill, was an exquisite little white, golden and rose-red town.

“You may or may not believe me,” said Jeffreson, “but the beauty of all this is that I made it. I mean Elizabeth and I made it between us.”

“You made it?”

“Made it.”

“How?”

“By thinking of it. By wanting it. By imagining it.”

“But—out of what?”

“I don’t know and I don’t much care. Our scientists here will tell you we made it out of the ultimate constituents of matter. Matter, unformed, only exists for us in its ultimate constituents. Something like electrons of electrons of electrons. Here we are all suspended in a web, immersed, if you like, in a sea, an air of this matter. It is utterly plastic to our imagination and our will. Imperceptible in its unformed state, it becomes visible and tangible as our minds get to work on it, and we can make out of it anything we want, including our own bodies. Only, so far as our imaginations are still under the dominion of our memories, so far will the things they create resemble the things we knew on earth. Thus you will notice that while Elizabeth and I are much more beautiful than we were on earth” (he _had_ noticed it), “because we desired to be more beautiful, we are still recognizable as Paul and Elizabeth because our imaginations are controlled by our memories. You are as you always were, only younger than when we knew you, because your imagination had nothing but memory to go on. Everything you create here will probably be a replica of something on earth you remember.”

“But if I want something new, something beautiful that I haven’t seen before, can’t I have it?”

“Of course you can have it. Only, just at first, until your own imagination develops, you’ll have to come to me or Turner or Michael Angelo to make it for you.”

“And will these things that you and Turner and Michael Angelo make for me be permanent?”

“Absolutely, unless we unmade them. And I don’t think we should do that against your will. Anyhow, though we can destroy our own works we can’t destroy each other’s, that is to say, reduce them to their ultimate constituents. What’s more, we shouldn’t dream of trying.”

“Why not?”

“Because old motives don’t work here. Envy, greed, theft, robbery, murder, or any sort of destruction, are unknown. They can’t happen. Nothing alters matter here but mind, and I can’t will your body to come to pieces so long as you want it to keep together. You can’t destroy it yourself as you can other things you make, because your need of it is greater than your need of other things.

“We can’t thieve or rob for the same reason. Things that belong to us belong to our state of mind and can’t be torn away from it, so that we couldn’t remove anything from another person’s state into our own. And if we could we shouldn’t want to, because each of us can always have everything he wants. If I like your house or your landscape better than my own, I can make one for myself just like it. But we don’t do this, because we’re proud of our individualities here, and would rather have things different than the same— By the way, as you haven’t got a house yet, let alone a landscape, you’d better share ours.”

“That’s very good of you,” Mr. Spalding said. He was thinking of Oxford. Oxford. Quiet rooms in Balliol. He seemed to hesitate.

“If you’re still sitting on that old grievance of yours, I tell you, once for all, Spalding, I’m not going to express any regret. I’m _not_ sorry, I’m glad I took Elizabeth away from you. I made her more happy than unhappy even on earth. And please notice it’s I who got her into heaven, not you. If she’d stayed with you and hated you, as she would have done, she couldn’t have got in.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Mr. Spalding. “I was only wondering where I could put my landscape.”

“How do you mean—‘put’ it?”

“Place it—so as not to interfere with other people’s landscapes.”

“But how on earth could you interfere? You ‘place’ it, as you call it, in your own space and in your own time.” His own space, his own time—Mr. Spalding got more and more excited.

“But—how?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you how. It simply happens.”

“But I want to understand it. I—I _must_ understand.”

“You shouldn’t put him off like that, Paul,” Elizabeth said. “He always did want to understand things.”

“But when I don’t understand them myself—”

“You’d better take him to Kant, or Hegel.”

“I should prefer Kant,” said Mr. Spalding.

“Well, Kant then. You’ll have to get into his state first.”

“How do I do that?”

“It’s very simple. You just think him up and ask him if you can come in.”

Elizabeth explained. “Like ringing somebody up, you know, and asking if you can come and call.”

“Supposing he won’t let me.”

“Trust him to say so. Of course, we mayn’t get through. He may have _thought off_.”

“You can think off, can you?”

“Yes, that’s how you protect yourself. Otherwise life here would be unbearable. Just keep quiet for a second, will you?”

There was an intense silence. Presently Jeffreson said: “Now you’re through.”

And Mr. Spalding found himself in a white-washed room, scantily furnished with three rows of bookshelves, a writing-table, a table set with mysterious instruments, and two chairs. A shaded lamp on the writing-table gave light. Mr. Spalding had left the umbrella pine country blazing with sunlight, but it seemed that Kant’s time was somewhere about ten o’clock at night. The large window was bared to a dark-blue sky of stars.

A little, middle-aged man sat at the writing-table. He wore eighteenth-century clothes and a tie wig. The face that looked up at Mr. Spalding was lean and dried, the mouth tight, the eyes shining distantly with a deep, indrawn intelligence. Mr. Spalding understood that he was in the presence of Immanuel Kant.

“You thought me up?”

“Forgive me. I am James Spalding, a student of philosophy. I was told that you might, perhaps, be willing to explain to me the—the very extraordinary conditions in which I find myself.”