“You always used to be learning things,” remarked the other. “I remember you used to discover the secret of life about every other day.”
“I have unlearned a good many things, unfortunately.”
“It’s my turn to catechise. What have you unlearned?”
“I have unlearned my theory that I could do all I wanted. I have unlearned my conviction that one made one’s own limitations—that one could ever be certain about anything. In a way, I have all a reasonable man could want. I have May, I have three healthy children, I have fame—fame of a damnable kind, it is true—but there was a time when I shouldn’t have been satisfied with anything. I longed to stretch out my arms round the whole world, to take the whole world into my grasp. But now I know I cannot do it, and, what is worse, I do not want to do it. I acquiesce in my own limitations. What can be sadder than that?”
“If you are happy nothing matters.”
“I might once have been happier. I gave up what I believed I could do, and what I believed was supremely well worth doing. I am an apostate. Apostates may be very happy—they are rid of the thumbscrew and the boiling lead—but I wonder if they ever lose that little cankerworm of shame.”
“My dear Tom, what nonsense! You tried to fly, and before you had succeeded some one took your apparatus away. Of course it is only natural for you to think that you might have flown if you had been left with your apparatus, but you never could have. Besides, you are rich now; you have your apparatus again.”
Tom frowned.
“Cannot you understand?” he said, impatiently. “Good God, it is so simple! Stevenson says somewhere that three pot-boilers will destroy any talent. I must have made twenty pot-boilers at least. Don’t you see that what I am regretting is that I no longer want to fly? The chances are a thousand to one that I never could have. But that blessed illusion that I could fly has gone.”
“You took it too seriously.”