He lapsed
to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the
human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable
changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night,
seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks
in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on for
ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to
overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of
man's existence....
For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine
and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,
failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their
inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. 'I had a sense of all
this globe as that.'
His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time
in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting
idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer
from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural
excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the
fair surfaces of life.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52