Children of men

by Eden Phillpotts

He was trying to appreciate this evasive vision and find some firm, mental rock for his own feet when he got home again. But as yet nothing clearly emerged, and as often as he clutched at a steadfast-seeming point from which to start thinking, the image broke up under the storm swell which still swept through his mind. He felt as one in the presence of death. He desired to know, now that this earthquake had fallen upon him and his, who were left alive. He felt himself to be first among the dead, and believed, until much later, that existence could only be a living death henceforward.

Then he tramped after noon through the lanes, carrying his bag and sweating under the black clothes he wore. He pursued the familiar way, walked, ridden, driven a thousand times from boyhood to manhood, and he found an empty, peaceful spot in his brain that could see the bluebells and mark the breaking riot of the green. This consciousness of spring served to revive an element which had persisted with him during the past destruction and denunciation of the Divorce Court. He had listened humbly to the appalling errors the Law declared him to have committed, and he had viewed without passion the naked picture of his mistaken suspicions—each displayed and each destroyed by truth in turn. He felt no rage at this juncture—only the gathering surprise that finally overwhelmed him for a time, to the exclusion of more vital emotion. But, as the judge spoke, he felt great, vital wounds inflicted one after the other on his soul, yet endured them without flinching. Still the shame and condemnation were less than the astonishment, that his convictions should be but a phantom dance of falsity coloured to look like truth by his own sick mind.

The farther view and deeper estimate had to come. He was not near reaching them yet, nor had he developed anything like the attitude that Amelia Winter prophesied; but his brain now began to tune for a new outlook. The answer that he must make to the destruction of all his intentions and decisions was not so far propounded. He still loitered in thought with himself, but as he approached the valley in which his life had been passed, its tenderness and joyful, vernal spirit unconsciously influenced him, distracting his mind away from himself—not to the unconscious phenomena around him—but to the supreme and solemn figure in the fantasy now at an end. He thought of his wife. Whereupon a new phase opened in his mental processes and he began to regard with naked eyes the edifice of the past. Dwelling now upon the trial, he asked himself whether he still persisted in his former convictions, or whether the united and independent judgment of his fellow-men had proved their falsehood. That he could even propose this question calmly was a fact sufficient to indicate the answer. No such possibility would have entered his mind, had he not been prepared to weigh it and ultimately accept it. Yet he hesitated for the present to tell himself that he was convinced; for that admission meant such stultification of self, such absolute abnegation and retraction, such penitence, contrition and atonement, that he doubted his power to attain to them. Only did it seem possible to do so by keeping Margery and her sufferings in the forefront of his mind; and that was not practicable until he decided whether he would accept the decisions uttered against him, admit the justice of the world's rebuke and proceed to create a new life on the ground blasted, but also cleansed, by these fires.

Before he reached William Marydrew's house he began to plan the future, as though he had the planning and need but indicate his purpose to see life fall in with it!

Abased indeed he must stand; but his particular sort of pride was not going to suffer eternally before a confession of error. So he told himself and already half believed that the opinion of his fellow-men would weigh little against the possibility of reconciliation. In that case all future life should be devoted on his part to atoning for the awful wrongs he had put upon her; and the censure of others, at worst, must be thistledown to the stinging hail of his own self-condemnation.

He saw all existence to be narrowed to this one ambition, and so swiftly and inconsequently was his broken intelligence now moving, that he had already swept the past away and pressed on to the future and the tasks that there awaited him. Through these immense changes his mind sped among the bluebells; then he walked in sight of the man and woman talking at William's cottage door, and Amelia hastily departed.

"There he cometh!" she said. "Pounding over the ground—boring along like a bull—the hateful creature. And now he can bore into the earth and bide there; for there won't be the face of a decent man, woman, or child to welcome him no more."

"Yes, there will," replied Billy. "A man there is, if I'm still worth to be called one, and a child there is, while his youngest remains. Soften your heart, Amelia, for surely the conquerors can afford to forgive."

She went off and in a few minutes Bullstone reached Mr. Marydrew. He was full of his own thoughts and present ambitions; but he felt the necessity to retrace the ground and, even in his present excitation, could remember that he had reached a point which William could not possibly understand until he had been informed of some of the stages that had served to lift Jacob from the depths to the situation he now occupied.

He came in, thankfully accepted the offer of a cup of tea and spoke while William prepared it.