That seemed to embarrass him. He assured me that he had never reckoned my attitude as 'lower' than his in any way; it was just 'different.'
"Yours is medieval," I said, laughingly. "You ought to have been a craftsman on a fourteenth century cathedral, putting your whole life and soul into the carving of a single gargoyle."
He said that gargoyles weren't much in his line. "But, anyhow, doing that would be a nobler way of spending a lifetime than lots of the things that are done to-day—selling rubbishy patent medicines, for instance, or writing rubbishy books...."
And so we argued, half-seriously, half jocularly, far into the night. One thing rather astonished me—the extent to which he had thought about things. He disliked the modern world, on the whole, and he had his reasons for it. He said that newspapers, modern advertising, and big cities, always afflicted him with a sort of terror. He felt he couldn't 'cope with them.' It was odd, really, his being a scientist, because science was supposed to be the key-note of the new age....
"Sometimes," I said, "I think you aren't a scientist at all, but a theologian gone astray."
Oh, no. He wouldn't admit that. He had no sympathy with dogmas. But he did feel that somehow you either had to accept the modern world with an easy cynical fatalism such as Severn's, or else hate it, as he did himself, and long for something warmer and simpler....
And then he made a curious confession—perhaps the most curious he ever made. "When I thought I had failed altogether at the work I liked most, I had to try to think what I would do in the future.... And I had half made up my mind that—if they'd have me—I'd join some sort of mission affair and get sent abroad."
"And how about the dogmas then?" I asked, and he answered puzzledly: "I don't know.... I really don't know.... They'd have been a great nuisance, I admit—but still...."
Some sort of mission affair! I think he had been engaged on that all his life.
The next morning he left for Hindhead, full of eagerness for whatever the future might bring. And a few days later Helen visited him there.