And what was the Dick, the permanent Dick who would remain after a few more years had stripped him of the merely imitative coloring he caught from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing, he—but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth, age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always. There was Nan! But as to Dick, he was simply Dick, a good substratum of his father, Anthony Powell, in him, a man who had had long views on trade and commerce and could manage men. And a streak of Raven, not too much but enough to imagine the great things the Powell streak would show him how to put his hand to.
Dick had been staring at him, finding him a long way off, and now he spoke, shyly if still curiously:
"Would you say you'd found God?"
Raven came back; he considered.
"No," he said, at last, "I couldn't say anything of the sort: it sounds like such awful swank. But I rather stand in with Old Crow. The fact is, Dick"—it was almost impossible to get this clarified in his own mind to the point of passing it on—"Old Crow's made me feel somehow—warm. As if there's a continuity, you know. As if they keep a hand on us, the generations that have passed. If that's so, we needn't be so infernally lonesome, now need we?"
"Well," said Dick, "we are pretty much alone."
"But we needn't be," said Raven, painfully sticking to his text, "because there are the generations. The being loyal to what the generations tried to build up, what they demand of us. And behind the whole caboodle of 'em, there's something else, something bigger, something warmer still. Really, you know, if only as a matter of convenience, we might call it—God."
A silence came here and he rather forgot Dick in fantastically thinking how you might have to climb to the shoulders of a man (Old Crow's, for instance) to make your leap to God. You couldn't do it from the ground. Dick had taken off his glasses to wipe them and Raven, recalling himself and glancing up, found his eyes suffused and soft.
"Jackie," said Dick, "you're a great old sport."