“Oh no, Doctor, I will not do that. Even Mosley’s essays are better than the sermons of the local ecclesiastics.”
“You are very impudent,” said Maddock, his face all beaming, “to call me a local ecclesiastic! I shall have to get you to write a pamphlet on my review of ‘Religionless Religion,’ so as to be able to denounce you ex cathedra!”
“Well, I should very much like to do so, only ... you know my cowardice: I cannot write——”
“Even letters to your best friends, to explain that you have only gone off to sea at an hour’s notice, and are not, as they anxiously expected, drowned, or murdered and secreted in some hole in the slums.”
“I prostrated myself in apology to Mrs. Maddock.”
“Yes, in over a week! As for Dr. Maddock, of course such a casual acquaintance as he could not expect.... Ah, you are a quite too eccentric young man, Sir Horace! I wish you were well married, with a definite aim in life. Someday one of your wild freaks will end you, and then, what, what will have been the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you?—Now,” proceeded the Doctor, “this is not an extract from the Daily Telegraph sermon corner, but only the expression of the affectionate anxiety of one who hopes you will allow him to call himself your true friend.”
Gildea kept silence for a moment. Talk of this sort only served to show him how completely his real inner view of things was unknown to his companion, and so the idea of making an answer did not occur to him: he felt how useless it would be. Then he genially thanked the Doctor for his friendship and its kind wishes, and added lightly:
“You ask what will be the result of, as you are pleased to say, those great abilities with which God has gifted me. The result (you perceive it) will be nothing; but, Doctor, what, let me ask you, in a hundred years will be the result of those great abilities with which God has gifted you? In the hundred and first year we shall start equal; and I, who have not a belief in a personal God and a personal immortality as you have, find the whole matter, I confess, rather absurd! This would not probably have been so always. If I had lived in the days when action indeed contained the highest stakes of life, I should have played for them; but, as it is, the highest stakes now belong to the thinker, the writer, and I—I cannot write ... even letters! I, like all my contemporaries, am more or less under the sad dominion of the perception of, what Leopardi calls, the ‘infinita vanità del tutto,’ but, unlike the best of them, I have no care for the only immortality we have left, the immortality of Art or Science. I think of the hundred, or thousand, or million and first year, and find myself smiling.”
Gildea was soliloquising, Maddock forgotten. He had, then, after all, drifted into making the answer, the idea of making which had, by reason of its clear uselessness, not occurred to him; and yet he had not made it to Maddock, but to himself. Maddock, indeed, did not altogether understand it, but the feeling of it, the belief that inspired it, he felt and hastened to reply to. He laid his hand gently on Gildea’s arm, bringing him to a pause, and said simply: