§ 6
For a long time he sat on his bed, blank-minded and too tired to finish undressing. He got to bed at last. But not to sleep. He found that the talk in the club had disturbed his mind almost unendurably. It had pointed and endorsed everything that he had been trying not to think about the old country. Now, too weary and too excited to sleep, he turned over and over again, unprofitably and unprogressively, the tangled impressions of his return to England.
How many millions of such hours of restless questioning must have been spent by wakeful Englishmen in the dozen years between the Boer war and the Great war; how many nocturnally scheming brains must have explored the complicated maze of national dangers, national ambitions, and national ineptitude! If “Wake up, England,” sowed no great harvest of change in the daylight, it did at any rate produce large phantom crops at night. He argued with Walsall over and over again, sometimes wide awake and close to the point, sometimes drowsily with the discussion becoming vague and strangely misshapen and incoherent. Was Walsall right? Was it impossible to change the nature and quality of a people? Must we English always be laggards in peace and blunderers in war? Were our achievements accidents, and our failures essential? Was slackness in our blood? Surely a great effort might accomplish much, a great effort to reorganize political life, to improve national education, to make the press a better instrument of public thought and criticism. To which Walsall answered again with, “How can a democratic community take an intelligent interest in its destinies unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destinies?”
Oswald groaned and turned over in bed.
Thought passed by insensible degrees into dreaming and dreaming shallowed again to wakefulness. Always he seemed to be arguing with Walsall and the bishop for education and effort; nevertheless, now vaguely apprehended as an atmospheric background, now real and close, the black forest of his African nightmare was about him. Always he was struggling on and always he was hoping to see down some vista the warm gleam of daylight, the promise of the open. And Walsall, a vast forest owl with enormous spectacles, kept getting in the way, flapping hands that were really great wings at him and assuring him that there was no way out. None. “This forest is life. This forest will always be life. There is no other life. After all it isn’t such a very bad forest.” Other figures, too, came and went; a gigantic bishop sitting back in an easy chair blocked one hopeful vista, declaring that book-learning only made the lower classes discontented and mischievous, and then a stupidly contented fat man smoking a fat cigar drove in a gig athwart the line of march. He said nothing; he just drove his gig. Then somehow an automobile came in, a most hopeful means of escape, except that it had broken down; and Oswald was trying to repair it in spite of the jeering of an elderly gentleman in a white waistcoat. Suddenly the whole forest swarmed with children. There were countless children; there were just two children. Instead of a multitudinous expedition Oswald found himself alone in the black jungle with just two children, two white and stunted children who were dying for the air and light. No one had cared for them. One was ill, seriously ill. Unless the way out was found they could not live. They were Dolly’s children, his wards. But what was he to do for them?...
Then far ahead he saw that light of the great conflagration, that light that promised to be daylight and became a fire....
“Black coffee,” said Oswald during one of the wide-awake intervals. “Cigars. Talk. Over-excited.... I ought to be more careful.... I forget how flimsy I am still....
“I must get my mind off these things. I’ll talk to old Sycamore tomorrow and see about this little master Peter Stubland and his foster-sister. I’ll go into the matter thoroughly. I haven’t thought of them before.
“I wonder if the boy still takes after Dolly....
“After all,” he said, rolling over, “it’s true. Education is the big neglected duty of the time. It’s fundamental. And what am I doing? It’s just England—England all over—to let that boy be dragged up. I ought to see about him—now. I’ll go down there....
“I’ll go and stay with Aunt Charlotte for a day or so. I’ll send her a wire tomorrow.”