“For a mighty end. And if we don’t? Don’t you see the prospect before us clear as day? Everywhere the giants will increase and multiply; everywhere they will make and scatter the Food. The grass will grow gigantic in our fields, the weeds in our hedges, the vermin in the thickets, the rats in the drains. More and more and more. This is only a beginning. The insect world will rise on us, the plant world, the very fishes in the sea, will swamp and drown our ships. Tremendous growths will obscure and hide our houses, smother our churches, smash and destroy all the order of our cities, and we shall become no more than a feeble vermin under the heels of the new race. Mankind will be swamped and drowned in things of its own begetting! And all for nothing! Size! Mere size! Enlargement and da capo. Already we go picking our way among the first beginnings of the coming time. And all we do is to say How inconvenient!’ To grumble and do nothing. No!”
He raised his hand.
“Let them do the thing they have to do! So also will I. I am for Reaction—unstinted and fearless Reaction. Unless you mean to take this Food also, what else is there to do in all the world? We have trifled in the middle ways too long. You! Trifling in the middle ways is your habit, your circle of existence, your space and time. So, not I! I am against the Food, with all my strength and purpose against the Food.”
He turned on his companion’s grunt of dissent. “Where are you?”
“It’s a complicated business—-”
“Oh!—Driftwood!” said the young man from Oxford, very bitterly, with a fling of all his limbs. “The middle way is nothingness. It is one thing or the other. Eat or destroy. Eat or destroy! What else is there to do?”