And the things you see and hear—A blue sky, now, would it be blue in the Sight of God, or just something inconceivable? And noises, music? For example, I am listening to Grand Opera, and you to the jazz band in your restaurant; but the God of Pantheism is listening to both, to all the noises in the universe at once. As if He had sat down on the piano. This idea shocked Mr. Spalding even more than the thought of Elizabeth’s misconduct.
Time went on. Paul Jeffreson drank himself to death. Elizabeth, worn out with grief, died of pneumonia following influenza; and Mr. Spalding still went about worrying over his inadjustable metaphysics.
And at last he, too, found himself dying.
And then he began to worry about other things. Things that had, as he put it, “happened” in his youth, before he knew Elizabeth, and one thing that had happened after she left him. He thought of them as just happening; happening to him rather than through him, against his will. In calm, philosophic moments he couldn’t conceive how they had ever happened at all, how, for example, he could have endured Connie Larkins. The episodes had been brief, because in each case boredom and disgust had supervened to put asunder what Mr. Spalding owned should never have been joined. Brief, insignificant as they were, Mr. Spalding, in his dying state, was worried when he looked back on them. Supposing they were more significant than they had seemed? Supposing they had an eternal significance and entailed tremendous consequences in the after-life? Supposing you were not just wiped out, that there really was an after-life? Supposing that in that other world there was a hell?
Mr. Spalding could imagine no worse hell than the eternal repetition of such incidents; eternal repetition of boredom and disgust. Fancy going on with Connie Larkins for ever and ever, never being able to get away from her, doomed to repeat—And, if there was an Absolute, if there was reality, truth, never knowing it; being cut off from it for ever—
“He that is filthy let him be filthy still.”
That was hell, the continuance of the filthy state.
He wondered whether goodness was not, after all, the important thing; he wondered whether there really was a next world; with an extreme uneasiness he wondered what would happen to him in it.
He died wondering.
II