“D’you remember your friend Mr. Farley telling us the other day that pain ennobles a man? I should like to conduct him through the wards of a hospital.”
“I have no doubt that when he has a tooth drawn Mr. Farley takes care that gas should be properly administered.”
“I suppose divines can only justify pain by ascribing to it elevation of character,” cried Frank savagely. “If they weren’t so ignorant they’d know it requires no justification. You might as well assert that a danger-signal elevates a train; for, after all, pain is nothing more than an indication by the nerves that the organism is in circumstances hurtful to it.”
“Don’t lecture me, Frank, there’s a dear!” murmured Miss Ley mildly.
“But if that man had seen as much pain as I have he’d know that it doesn’t refine; it brutalizes. It makes, people self-absorbed and selfish—you can’t imagine the frightful egoism of physical suffering—querulous, impatient, unjust, greedy. I could name a score of petty vices that it engenders, but not a single virtue. . . . Oh, Miss Ley, when I look at all the misery of the world I am so thankful I don’t believe in God.”
As though seeking to break through the iron bars of the flesh, like a wild beast unquietly he paced the room.
“For years I’ve toiled night and day to distinguish truth from falsehood; I want to be clear about my actions, I want to walk with sure feet; but I find myself in a labyrinth of quicksands. I can see no meaning in the world, and sometimes I despair; it seems as senseless as a madman’s dream. After all, what does it tend to, the effort and the struggle, hope, love, success, failure, birth, death? Man emerged from savagery merely because he was fiercer than the tiger and more cunning than the ape; and nothing seems to me less probable than that humanity advances to any ideal condition. We believe in progress, but progress is nothing but change!”
“I confess,” interrupted Miss Ley, “that I sometimes ask myself how it benefits the Japanese that they have assumed the tall-hat and the trousers of Western civilization. I wonder if the Malays in their forests or the Kanakas on their islands have cause vastly to envy the London slummer.”
“What does it all end in?” pursued Frank, too much absorbed in his own thoughts to listen, “Where is the use of it? For all my labour I haven’t the shadow of an answer. And even yet I don’t know what is good and what is evil, what is high and what is low; I don’t even know if the words have any sense in them. Sometimes men seem to me cripples ever seeking to hide their deformity, huddled in a stuffy room, lit by one smoky taper; and they crowd together to keep warm, and they tremble at every unexpected sound. And d’you think in the course of evolution it was the best and noblest who survived to propagate their species? It was merely the shrewd, the hard, and the strong.”
“It would bore me dreadfully to be so strenuous, dear Frank,” answered Miss Ley, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “It was a wise man who said that, with regard to the universe, few questions could be asked and none could be answered. In the end we all resign ourselves to the fact, and we find it possible to eat our dinner with no less satisfaction because at the back of our minds stands continually a discreet mark of interrogation. For my part, I think there is as little justification for ascribing an end to the existence of man as there was for the supposition of the Middle Ages, (pardon me if I seem erudite,) that the heavenly bodies moved in circles because that was the most perfect figure; but I assure you that my night’s rest is not in the least impaired. I, too, went through a stormy period in my youth, and if you’ll promise not to think me tedious I’ll tell you about it.”