“Peter, you drive my spirit back to the Victorians,” he said. “I want to begin quoting Longfellow to you. ’Life is real, life is earnest——’”
“No!” Peter countered. “But it ought to be.”
“Well, it becomes so. We have Science, and out of Science comes a light. We shall see the Will plainer and plainer.”
“The Will?” said Peter, turning it over in his mind.
“Our own will then,” said Oswald. “Yours, mine, and every right sort of man’s.”
Peter seemed to consider it.
“It won’t be a national will, anyhow,” he said, coming back to Moscow. “It won’t be one of these national ideas. No Holy Russia—or Old England for the matter of that. They’re just—human accumulations. No. I don’t know of this Will at all—any will, Nobby. I can’t see or feel this Will. I wish I could....”
He had said his say. Oswald turned again to the great spectacle of the city. Did all those heavenward crosses now sinking into the dusk amount to no more than a glittering emanation out of the fen of life, an unmeaning ignis fatuus, born of a morass of festering desires that had already forgotten it? Or were these crosses indeed an appeal and a promise? Out of these millions of men would Man at last arise?...
Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm....