“Don’t you think,” asked Murrel, “that modern things are too complicated to be dealt with in such a simple way?”
“I think,” replied Herne, “that modern things are too complicated to be dealt with except in a simple way.”
He rose from his feet and strode to and fro on the road with all the dreamy energy of his prototype. He seemed trying to tear his real meaning out of himself.
“Don’t you see,” he cried, “that is the moral of the whole thing. All your machinery has become so inhuman that it has become natural. In becoming a second nature, it has become as remote and indifferent and cruel as nature. The Knight is once more riding in the forest. Only he is lost in the wheels instead of in the woods. You have made your dead system on so large a scale that you do not yourselves know how or where it will hit. That’s the paradox! Things have grown incalculable by being calculated. You have tied men to tools so gigantic that they do not know on whom the strokes descend. You have justified the nightmare of Don Quixote. The mills really are giants.”
“Is there any method in that case,” demanded the other.
“Yes; and you found it,” replied Herne. “You did not bother about systems, when you saw a mad doctor was madder than the madman. It is you who lead and I who follow. You are not Sancho Panza. You are the other.”
He stretched out his hand with something of the old gesture.
“What I said on the judgment-seat I say again by the roadside. You are the only one of them born again. You are the knight that has returned.”
Douglas Murrel was abruptly and horribly abashed.
That compliment was perhaps the only thing that could have stung him into speech upon certain matters; for under all this tomfoolery he had something more than the reticence of his breed. As it was, he looked uncomfortable and said: “Look here, you mustn’t give me credit like that. I’m not on as Galahad in this scene. I hope I’d have done my best for the old Honkey; but I did like that girl; I liked her rather a lot.”