"I have been asked to write a sketch of the last twenty years," I said, "for a boy who's been born into the new world. Already I find it difficult to recollect the old. The future—the 'unborn to-morrow'—what's it going to be, sir?"
"We shall be dazed and bruised before an end is made, laddie, staggering like drunken men. Peradventure, if ye speak of the Promised Land, men will arise and stone you with stones, crying, 'Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the fleshpots and when we did eat bread to the full.' I am an old man, laddie, and old men and weary men, broken with the cares of this life, are fain to go back to the things they know."
O'Rane had seated himself on the floor, with his hands clasped in characteristic fashion round his knees, and his head thrown back and resting on Sonia's knees. Burgess turned to him.
"David O'Rane holds his peace," he said.
Raney shook his head despondently. "Sometimes I see it like that, sir," he said. "The country slipping back into its old ways—all the more eagerly for its moment of asceticism. I see the old politics and the old sport and the old butterfly society of London, and the waste and the cruelty. I see the factions going back to their interrupted quarrel—capital spending its thousand on a ball and engineering a lock-out so as to sell off its bad stocks at famine prices; labour not content with money to burn on league championships and picture palaces, striking because it hasn't had a share in the last advance of profits. Two-and-seventy jarring sects preaching to us from their two-and-seventy pulpits, and still men rotten with disease, still children without enough to eat, still women walking up and down the London streets. And then I wonder if it's worth winning the war."
He jumped up suddenly, walked to his writing-table and began rummaging in one of the drawers.
"Is it anything I can do?" Sonia asked.
"I've found it, thanks." He handed me a bundle of manuscript and resumed his place at Sonia's feet.
"It's fairly legible," he said. "I typed it, but of course I can't check my typing. D'you remember my telling you in April that I was coming down here to think? I've been thinking on paper, and you have the result there. It may interest you if you have time to spare on it."