"That I do know the difference between the better and the worse, and want the better all the time."
"In other words—God?"
"I think God comes before a gland," he replied.
Quite apart from his extraordinary interview with his doctor, the past few weeks had been a series of the commonest everyday incidents mixed up with sheer impossibilities in the most bewildering fashion. As I stoutly refused to see his diagrams and the details of his diary (though I saw them later), I could only touch the fringe of his experience at that time. I gathered, however, that in those slowed-down pictures he had found a certain relief, as also in some music, particularly organ-music; and he had other alleviations of a similar nature. But I noticed that obstinately (as it seemed to me) he chose to regard the interval of time since I had last seen him, not as the three weeks it really was, but as the fortnight he had spent in that loft over the garage. Of the first of the three weeks he spoke not one single word. I need hardly mention the reason. He was looking farther back still. As he had been at thirty-five, so he had been in the twenties. Those "A" memories, so recent, were "B" memories too.... But that was a long way off yet.
Yet among so much vagueness and fluctuation one thing was abundantly clear. He had left behind him the last vestige of the man who had written An Ape in Hell. At the very least he was now the man who had written The Vicarage of Bray, and not impossibly he was an earlier man still. And here I had better say a word or two about the Vicarage, not as describing the book itself, but as isolating the stage he had reached and differentiating between his former and his present experiences of it.
It was, of course, the "Tite Barnacle" portions of the book that had pleased the public, supposing the public to have been pleased at all. Yet, witty as these were, they were the least essential parts of the work. The book had to be classed as Political, Social, Economic, or some welding of all three descriptions; and Rose was never the man to approach a subject of this kind with his mind already made up. He recognised frankly (for example) that the mere mechanism of a Ministry or a Department is a gigantic thing, the men with the habit of running it necessarily few, and that to give control to an unpractised hand would be fatal. Thus his book was no mere slap at what it was the fashion some little time ago to call The Old Gang. He refrained from the common gibe that the surest qualification for success in one department is to have failed in another. Instead, he examined, first the machine, and then the man in charge of it. Between these two an accommodation has always to be found. No system of government will prove altogether a failure if it is in the hands of the right men, and equally none will work if it is in the hands of the wrong ones. So he sought the equilibrium between the two.
Not one reader in a million, laughing over that merciless and iridescent book that Julia Oliphant said he had written in little more than three months, had the faintest idea of the sheer burden of merely intellectual work that lay behind it. Piece by piece he had dissected the whole of our national economy before setting pen to paper at all. Bear with me for a moment if I take one little piece only—Shipping. It will give an idea of the scale, not so much of the Vicarage only as of that far vaster thing—the book he now projected and for the sake of which he clung so desperately to his "false middle" of thirty-three.
Men (he argued) need ships; but, over and above those who actually handle them, ships need men no less. From one standpoint ships exist in order that men may be carried from one place to another; but from the opposite standpoint a ship is merely a hungry belly that must be constantly fed with its human food—passengers. Without its meal of passengers it cannot live for a week. Thus, the Thing must move the Man from one place to another whether he wishes it or not, whether in itself it is desirable that he should be moved or not. The ships of one nation snarl at those of another for this sustenance. Where then is the balance? Where does blind force get the upper hand, and where wise control? What happens if the power is usurped by a "Vicar" who can by no means be dislodged?... I need say no more. You see the yawning immensities of it.