Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/171

 credible dreariness of the English country. Its beauty vanished in slush and slime, and man would thank God for man-made London, or some such place as the Pelican where you could eat and drink and feel alive. These Northern countries! And those horrible northern towns, full of people who were becoming conscious of their own horrible ugliness, and who were beginning to utter savage and resentful cries. Winstonbury was still somewhat English, not Wellsian, or a snarling, love your brother sort of town, but love him, with reservations. Hate him if he happens to have five shillings in his pocket, or is a little more clever and energetic than his neighbours.

Sorrell philosophized. He thought of that other young life away over yonder, of his boy whose face was not a half-finished smudge. Kit was going to be a good-looking fellow, with his large and expressive mouth, and his rather silent but smiling frankness. Kit would be a complete person, not a plaster-cast of a man whom Life had got bored with and not troubled to finish.

When the grey chalk-hills showed, Sorrell would think of boundaries and of the finality of a man's experiences. Death, oblivion, extinction—perhaps, a melting into a soft greyness. And all man's passionate little tricks to escape it, his myths, his gods and his immortalities, his theosophies, and spiritisms. A yearning, a chilliness—after life's full meal. The soft dusk, the obliterating darkness, the unknown and the unknowable.

"Consciousness, is less," he thought, "than the planks of a boat between you and the deep waters. Some day you will sink, disappear, be forgotten. You will be less than some tree that once grew here.

"Accept. Do your job. Then, be ready to close your eyes and sleep."

He was a pragmatist. The satisfaction of life lay in accomplishment. He was content to gaze at the unknown as he looked at the distant chalk-hills, and he felt no urge to climb them. The whole world of the senses might be an illusion, but man's business was to behave as though it were real. The job mattered, the thing you had set out to accomplish, and not for yourself alone. Fighting mattered, striving, enduring, loving the few, disdaining the many. When struggle ceases men cease to be men.