§ 4
Mr. Huss seemed lost in meditation. His pale and sunken face and crumpled pose contrasted strongly with the bristling intellectual rectitude and mounting choler of Dr. Elihu Barrack.
“No, Sir Eliphaz,” said Mr. Huss, and sighed.
“No,” he repeated.
“What a poor phantom of a world these people conjure up! What a mockery of loss and love! The very mothers and lovers who mourn their dead will not believe their foolish stories. Restoration! It is a crowning indignity. It makes me think of nothing in the world but my dear boy’s body, broken and crumpled, and some creature, half fool and half impostor, sitting upon it, getting between it and me, and talking cheap rubbish over it about planes of being and astral bodies....
“After all, you teach me, Sir Eliphaz, that life, for all its grossness and pain and horror, is not so bad as it might be—if such things as this were true. But it needs no sifting of the evidence to know they are untrue. No sane man believes this stuff for ten minutes together. It is impossible to believe it....”
Dr. Elihu Barrack applauded. Sir Eliphaz acted a fine self-restraint.
“They are contrary to the texture of everything we know,” said Mr. Huss. “They are less convincing than the wildest dreams. By pain, by desire, by muscular effort, by the feeling of sunshine or of rain in the face, by their sense of justice and suchlike essential things do men test the reality of appearances before them. This certainly is no reality. It has none of the feel of reality. I will not even argue about it. It is thrust now upon a suffering world as comfort, and even as comfort for people stunned and uncritical with grief it fails. You and Lady Burrows may be pleased to think that somehow you two, with your teeth restored and your complexions rejuvenated, will meet again the sublimation of your faithful Fido. At any rate, thank God for that, I know clearly that so I shall never meet my son. Never! He has gone from me....”
For some moments mental and physical suffering gripped him, and he could not speak; but his purpose to continue was so manifested by sweating face and gripping hand that no one spoke until he spoke again.
“Now let me speak plainly about Immortality. For surely I stand nearest to that possibility of all of us here. Immortality, then, is no such dodging away as you imagine, from this strange world which is so desolating, so dreadful, so inexplicable—and at times so utterly lonely. There may be a God in the universe or there may not be.... God, if he exists, can be terribly silent.... But if there is a God, he is a coherent God. If there is a God above and in the scheme of things, then not only you and I and my dead son, but the crushed frog and the trampled anthill signify. On that the God in my heart insists. There has to be an answer, not only to the death of my son but to the dying penguin roasted alive for a farthing’s worth of oil. There must be an answer to the men who go in ships to do such things. There has to be a justification for all the filth and wretchedness of louse and fluke. I will not have you slipping by on the other side, chattering of planes of living and sublimated atoms, while there is a drunken mother or a man dying of cholera in this world. I will not hear of a God who is just a means for getting away. Whatever foulness and beastliness there is, you must square God with that. Or there is no universal God, but only a coldness, a vast cruel difference....