§ 5
Bobby was recalled to the matter of the talk by a movement in the chair behind him.
Lambone’s smooth voice was explaining: “So that it does not matter so much what we achieve as what we contribute. That cherished personal life which men and women struggle to round off and make noble and perfect, disappears from the scheme of things. What matters more and more is the work one does. What matters less and less is our personal romance and our personal honour. Or rather our honour will go out of us into our work. Our love affairs, our devotions and private passions, for example, will fall more and more definitely into a subordination to our science or whatever our function is. Our romances and our fame and honour will join our vices among the things we suppress. There was a time when men lived for a noble tomb and in order to leave sweet and great memories behind them; soon it will matter nothing to a man and his work to know that he will probably die in a ditch—misunderstood. So long as he gets the work done.”
“With no last Judgment ever to vindicate him,” said Devizes.
“That will not matter in the least to him.”
“I agree. Some of us begin to feel like that even now.”
“Even if one has done nothing worth doing,” said Paul Lambone, and in his voice was that faint quality of the sigh of one who has crowned a rather difficult and uncertain card castle, “even if Sargon had died unrescued in his Asylum and all the world had thought him mad, all the same he would have escaped, his imagination would have touched the imagination of the greater life.”
Came a pause of edification and then a sigh of satisfaction from Miss Lambone. She never understood in the least what her brother was talking about, but she adored him when he talked. Nobody she thought had ever talked like him, or could possibly talk like him. His voice was so clear and bright, like the best sort of print. Only sometimes you wished you had spectacles.
But now Miss Lambone was to receive a shock. Christina Alberta suddenly came out of the silence in which she had been sitting.
“I don’t believe in this,” said Christina Alberta out of the depths of her chair.