第87章

"It's terrible all this that's going on.You know about it, of course--Warlock's visions I mean and the trouble it's making.I'm outside it and you're outside it, but we're being brought into it all the same--how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It's so easy to say that it's nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it's hysteria, even insanity--I know all that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it--it ought to end it, but it doesn't.There's more in some people's madness than in other people's sanity, and anyway, even if it's all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place.And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase of humbug in the world and the discouragement of all the honest adventurers.Icall myself an adventurer, you know, Miss Maggie, although I'm a poor specimen--but I'm damned if it isn't better to be a poor adventurer than to be a fat, swollen, contented stay-at-home who can see just as far as his nose and his cheque-book and might be just as well dead as alive--I beg your pardon," he added suddenly, "for swearing--I'm not myself, I'm not really."She could see indeed that he was in great agitation of mind, and some of this agitation communicated itself to her.Had she not been selfish in forgetting all this through her own happiness? He was right, she was part of it all, whether she wished or no.

"What do you think," she asked, dropping her voice a little, "is the real truth about it?""The real truth"--he looked at her suddenly with a tender, most charming smile that took away his ugliness."Ah, that's a tremendous question.Part of the truth is that Warlock's been praying so much and eating so little that it would be odd indeed if he didn't see visions of some sort.And part of the truth is that there are a lot of women in the world who'll believe simply anything that you tell them.It's part of the truth, too, that there are scoundrels in the world who will take advantage of anybody's simple trust to fill their pockets.But that's not all," he went on, shaking his head, "no, that's not all.It's part of the truth that there is a mystery, and that human beings will go on searching whatever all the materialists and merchants in the world can try to do to stop them.

I remember years ago an old man, a little off his dot, telling my father that he, the old man, was a treasure hunter.He told my father that the world was divided into two halves, the treasure hunters and the Town Councillors, and that the two halves would never join and never even meet.My father, who was a practical man, said that the old idiot should be shut up in an asylum, and eventually I believe he was.'We'll have him going off one day,' my father said, 'in a cargo boat with a map in his pocket, looking for gold pieces.' But it wasn't gold pieces he was after."To Maggie it was always irritating the way that Mr.Magnus would wander away from the subject.She brought him back now with a jerk.

"No, but what do you think is going to happen?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he answered."I can't tell, but I know all my happiness here is coming to an end, and I don't know what I shall do.If I were a strong man I would go out and find all the other treasure hunters, all the vicious ones, and the diseased, and the drunkards and the perverted, and I would try to found some kind of a society so that they should recognise one another all the world over and shouldn't feel so lonely and deserted and hopelessly done for.Idon't mean a society for improving them, mind you, or warning them or telling them they'll go to prison if they don't do better, that's none of my business.But it seems to be a solemn fact that you aren't a treasure hunter until there's something wrong with you, until you've got a sin that's stronger than you are, or until you've done something that's disgraceful in the eyes of the world--not that I believe in weakness or in giving way to things.No one admires the strong and the brave more than I do.I think a man's a fool if he doesn't fight as hard as he can.But there's a brotherhood of the dissatisfied and the uneasy and the anxious-hearted, and I believe it's they who will discover the Grail in the end if it's ever going to be discovered at all."He broke off, then said restlessly: "I think things out, you know, and at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that all the goody, goody books have said times without number.But all the same that doesn't prevent it from being my discovery.It's nothing to do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it's nothing to do with strength, and nothing to do with weakness; it simply is that there are some people who want what they can see and no more, and there are others, the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who'll be restless all their days with their queer little maps and their mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they'll never reach and never even get a ship for."He stopped and there was a long silence between them, Maggie was silent because she never knew what to say when he burst into parables and divided mankind, under strange names, into different camps.And yet this time she did know a little what he was after.

There was that house of Katharine Mark's the other day, with its comfort and quiet and kind smiling clergyman--and there was this strange place with all of them in an odd quiver of excitement waiting for something to happen.But she couldn't speak to him about that, she couldn't say anything to him at all.He cleared his throat as though he were embarrassed and were conscious that he had been making a fool of himself.Maggie felt that he was disappointed in her.She was sorry for that, but she was as she was.