Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/401

 Those large and human eyes smiled at him.

"Oh,—I don't know. My job is done, old man. And somehow—I did not feel like being messed about. I have been very lucky. Life is a fairly rotten business for most people. A good thing they don't realize how rotten it is,—what flies we are—buzzing against a window pane."

Roland sat all hunched up, looking grim.

"If I believed" he said.

Sorrell went on speaking, and in a way that left Roland imprisoned in silence.

"I don't believe in anything. I have just done a particular sort of job—and loved it. The whole business is beyond me. Sometimes I have felt that there is a plan, but then—there is so much against the idea of a plan. Just a warring of blind forces—pushing—like a lot of beasts. And yet—there is much that is wonderful, the struggle that plants—live things—have made against the devil of impersonal cussedness. Yes, and not even cussedness. That is the thing that has always got me, Roland, the fact that there is nothing that cares, the utter-impersonal callousness of the scheme, the soullessness of it. We don't matter. Man matters only to himself. He is fighting a lone fight against a vast indifference. A gardener learns that. His flowers are fighting the same sort of lone fight, and perhaps that is why he loves them and pities them. Man invents religion to hide the full horror of the universe's complete indifference, for it is horrible. He tries spiritism. Oh,—anything to escape, to colour the spectacles. I have always felt myself up against—not only the human scuffle—but against the crushing—impersonal foot of the heedless universal. It just treads on you, or it does not. They called Ajax mad for defying the lightning; he wasn't mad; there was something in Ajax that knew. So—I—have gone about with a savage grin on my face And now—I'm tired. I feel I have fooled the great indifference—just a little, got my job through in spite of it. I don't care much now that it has put its foot on me—at last. I have kept my pygmy back stiff; I have managed to buzz a bit before it pulped me on the window pane."

For a while Roland said nothing; he just stared. For the truthfulness of a doomed man can be rather terrible.