The train rushed along, and he began to think that perhaps the problem was being solved. When men had made it so easy to escape from their cities of captivity, would not their minds also be freed? Would there not be a gradual adjustment of mind to larger surroundings? Or were the minds of men so clothed with centuries of tyranny that swifter transportation also would be used as an instrument of slavery? . . .
“No,” he thought, “there is a deeper faith in men than they know. They endure heroically because they are sure that in the end their efforts will lead to deliverance.”
As an ironic comment upon his reflections the train ran into a real “old particular” London fog and was held up for half an hour outside the station. In that half-hour his thoughts ran swiftly. He had never been to London before, and he was moved by a boyish excitement at the prospect of entering it. That he found absurd. It would be hardly at all different from the place he had just left. That had held little for him: this could hold nothing at all. He had no ambition, and often ludicrously had learned the scorn a man can come by who prefers anything to his own advancement; often he had seen how profitable it was for a man to sacrifice his talent to his vanity, and how incredible to such a man that it could be possible to sacrifice vanity to talent. From all he had heard of London, the greatest city in the world, its subservience to ambitious men was as immense as its renown. In our town, Benskin and his school of little fishes had dubbed Serge “amateur” by way of killing him. He had liked the isolation that had followed, but now he thought that isolation could be of little use to a man, except he could spring from it to greater freedom and a purer joy in his work. “Amateur.” . . . Being interpreted, that means one who loves his work, as its contrary, “professional,” signifies one who works for gain. . . . These cities were professional. They rejected him, as they rejected all amateurs. . . . So be it. Serge felt no bitterness. He was a free man. He asked nothing: he had been given much, first of all the power to enjoy. . . . He chuckled to think that the only usefulness the suspicious world of professional men would allow him lay—apparently—in succouring females in distress. Knight-errantry, once the loftiest of professions, was descended into the hands of the contemned amateurs.
“At bottom,” said Serge, “the difference between them and me is that I take women seriously and they don’t.”
His stay in London was shorter even than he had thought it would be. He visited Basil first, and found him working desperately, paintings, charcoal drawings, black-and-white, Christmas cards, book illustrations, designs for menus, chocolate boxes—all slipshod, formal, but just neatly and obviously charming. Through his teeth he asked Serge what the hell he had come for and went on working. Serge turned over a pile of drawings on the table by the window.
“Benskin would dote on you now. . . . How you must hate art to be able to do them so well!”
Basil grunted. “I hate everything.”
“You always were extreme.”
Basil laid down his pen.