Such were Eddy’s broken and detached reflections in the course of this cheerful evening. The various pieces of counsel offered him by others were to the same effect. Blake Connolly, who, meeting him to-night for the first time, had taken a strong fancy to him, said confidentially and regretfully, “I hear the bride’s a Tory; that’s a pity, now. Don’t let her have you corrupted. You’ve some fine Liberal sentiments; I used to read them in that queer paper of yours.” (He ignored the fine Unionist sentiments he had also read in the queer paper.) “Don’t let them run to waste. You should go on writing; you’ve a gift. Go on writing for the right things, sticking up for the right side. Be practical; get something done. As they used to say in the old days:
‘Take a business tour through Munster,
Shoot a landlord; be of use.’ ”
“I will try,” said Eddy, modestly. “Though I don’t know that that is exactly in my line at present ... I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I want to get some newspaper work.”
“That’s right. Write, the way you’ll have public interest stirred up in the right things. I know you’re of good dispositions from what Eily’s told me of you. And why you want to go marrying a Tory passes me. But if you must you must, and I wouldn’t for the world have you upset about it now at the eleventh hour.”
Then came Traherne, wanting him to help in a boys’ camp in September and undertake a night a week with clubs in the winter; and the elegant C.I.C.C.U. young man wanted him to promise his assistance to a Prayer-and-Total-Abstinence mission in November; and Nevill Bellairs wanted to introduce him to-morrow morning before the wedding to the editor of the Conservative, who had vacancies on his staff. To all these people who offered him fields for his energies he gave, not the ready acceptance he would have given of old, but indefinite answers.
“I can’t tell you yet. I don’t know. I’m going to think about it.” For though he still knew that all of them were right, he knew also that he was going to make a choice, a series of choices, and he didn’t know yet what in each case he would choose.
The party broke up at midnight. When the rest had dispersed, Eddy went home with Billy to Chelsea. He had given up the rooms he had shared with Arnold in Soho, and was staying with Billy till his marriage. They walked to Chelsea by way of the Embankment. By the time they got to Battersea Bridge (Billy lived at the river end of Beaufort Street) the beginnings of the dawn were paling the river. They stood for a little and watched it; watched London sprawling east and west in murmuring sleep, vast and golden-eyed.
“One must,” speculated Eddy aloud, after a long silence, “be content, then, to shut one’s eyes to all of it—to all of everything—except one little piece. One has got to be deaf and blind—a bigot, seeing only one thing at once. That, it seems, is the only way to get to work in this extraordinary world. One’s got to turn one’s back on nearly all truth. One leaves it, I suppose, to the philosophers and artists and poets. Truth is for them. Truth, Billy, is perhaps for you. But it’s not for the common person like me. For us it is a choice between truth and life; they’re not compatible. Well, one’s got to live; that seems certain.... What do you think?”
“I’m not aware,” said Billy, drowsily watching the grey dream-city, “of the incompatibility you mention.”
“I didn’t suppose you were,” said Eddy. “Your business is to see and record. You can look at all life at once—all of it you can manage, that is. My job isn’t to see or talk, but (I am told) to ‘take a business tour through Munster, shoot a landlord, be of use.’ ... Well, I suppose truth can look after itself without my help; that’s one comfort. The synthesis is there all right, even if we all say it isn’t.... After to-night I am going to talk, not of Truth but of the Truth; my own particular brand of it.”