Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/370

 the faith that animates me and projects me toward bridges I can't cross till I come to them is a faith that centres around a phantom Me; whatever knowledge I possess is derived from a phantom past; my hopes are fixed on a phantom future. Phantoms is all I can ever be sure of, for which and all Thy other blessings—

"It's like Alice's jam: poetry yesterday, poetry tomorrow, but only prose today. The thing to do, I suppose, is to take hold of life and make the damn thing scan, inexorable gods notwithstanding. Indeed I have a suspicion that the gods are a fairly exorable crew if you meet them on their own terms. Having been created by man in his image, they're rather worldly—that's all."

When he had finished the letter and reread it, in the solitude of his room, a wave, not of matrimony, but of remorse or grief or something in the same general category which eluded his powers of definition, a wave that simmered and hissed a little ominously, surged up in him, and he added a postscript in a calligraphy so hurried and inky he feared Geoffrey might not be able to decipher it—literally or figuratively.

"I've just caught my poor old subconscious at it again, chanting more plaintively than ever, Why did he die? Why did he die? And oh, Geoffrey, would you say it's because I killed him?"

Why did he die? It sounded like a title!