“But why did you do it? Why?”
“Ah, there you have me!” said the Lord God with bonhomie.
“But why don’t you exert yourself?” said Peter, hammering at the desk with his sound hand. “Why don’t you exert yourself?”
Could delirium have ever invented a more monstrous conception than this of Peter hammering on an untidy desk amidst old pen nibs, bits of sealing-wax, half-sheets of notepaper, returns of nature’s waste, sample bones of projected animals, mineral samples, dirty little test tubes, and the like, and lecturing the Almighty upon the dreadful confusion into which the world had fallen? “Here was I, sir, and millions like me, with a clear promise of life and freedom! And what are we now? Bruises, red bones, dead bodies! This German Kaiser fellow—an ass, sir, a perfect ass, gnawing a great hole in my shoulder! He and his son, stuffing themselves with a Blut-Wurst made out of all our lives and happiness! What does it mean, sir? Has it gone entirely out of your control? And it isn’t as if the whole thing was ridiculous, sir. It isn’t. In some ways it’s an extraordinarily fine world—one has to admit that. That is why it is all so distressing, so unendurably distressing. I don’t in the least want to leave it.”
“You admit that it’s fine—in places,” said the Lord God, as if he valued the admission.
“But the management, sir! the management! Yours—ultimately. Don’t you realize, sir——? I had the greatest trouble in finding you. Half the messengers don’t know where this den of yours is. It’s forgotten. Practically forgotten. The Head Office! And now I’m here I can tell you everything is going to rack and ruin, driving straight to an absolute and final smash and break-up.”
“As bad as that?” said the Lord God.
“It’s the appalling waste,” Peter continued. “The waste of material, the waste of us, the waste of everything. A sort of splendour in it, there is; touches of real genius about it, that I would be the last to deny; but that only increases the bitterness of the disorder. It’s a good enough world to lament. It’s a good enough life to resent having to lose it. There’s some lovely things in it, sir; courage, endurance, and oh! many beautiful things. But when one gets here, when one begins to ask for you and hunt about for you, and finds this, this muddle, sir, then one begins to understand. Look at this room, consider it—as a general manager’s room. No decency. No order. Everywhere the dust of ages, muck indescribable, bacteria! And that!”
That was a cobweb across the grimy window pane, in which a freshly entangled bluebottle fly was buzzing fussily. “That ought not to be here at all,” said Peter. “It really ought not to exist at all. Why does it? Look at that beastly spider in the corner! Why do you suffer all these cruel and unclean things?”
“You don’t like it?” said the Lord God, without any sign either of apology or explanation.