"And then I went into the rubber market, and spent seven years of my life driving shares up and down and into a net!... Queer game indeed! Stupid ass Behrens was—at bottom....
"There's a flaw in it somewhere...."
He came back to that several times before he seemed able to go on from it.
"There is a collective mind," he said, "a growing general consciousness—growing clearer. Something put me away from that, but I know it. My work, my thinking, was a part of it. That's why I was so mad about Behrens."
"Behrens?"
"Of course. He'd got a twist, a wrong twist. It makes me angry now. It will take years, it will eat up some brilliant man to clean up after Behrens——"
"Yes, but the point is"—his voice became acute—"why did I go making money and let Behrens in? Why generally and in all sorts of things does Behrens come in?..."
He was silent for a long time, and then he began to answer himself. "Of course," he said, "I said it—or somebody said it—about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life—not the common stuff of life. An exhalation.... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve Salvation.... Salvation!...
"I wonder, is Salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man Salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit...."
There came a silence as though some difficulty baffled him, and he was feeling back to get his argument again.