every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters’ have nothing left to utter in private but the stale clichés of political and social snobbery. It shocks one that they should do so with such flat conviction. But what shocks one still more is the recognition that after all they are merely acting another part, an innate and compulsory part which has no connection whatever with Antony or Hamlet or Othello, with Christ or Paul. The conversation of Brand seemed to belong to a part such as this, a part which did not suit him, which was false and even badly played, and yet had been imposed upon him so imperatively that he would have to act it all his life. But his words had also the sonorous emptiness that is so often found in the conversation of men who spend their lives advertising commodities which they have not made and will never use, but who nevertheless become mechanically rapturous upon the virtues of those commodities whenever a prospective buyer comes in sight. It had that false and portentously edifying conviction; but also, somewhat incongruously, a touch of the flat assurance of a school-teacher imparting to his class information that means hardly anything to him; securely supported in a sense of right when he asserts that Milton is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare (although Milton bores him), or that man’s chief end is to glorify God (although he has never in his life felt the slightest impulse to glorify God). And Brand was a school-teacher.
So it was only in their form that Brand’s opinions differed from those of a gentlemanly actor or an unctuous business man. He had been brought up in a Socialist family; his father was an atheistic Marxian; and only when he was twenty-five did David discover Christianity. The discovery was so novel that the ideas he encountered seemed novel too, not unlike those of Ibsen and Shaw, and in his mind Christ was enthroned between those two contemporary idols as a great advanced thinker; a position which, Brand was really convinced in his heart, conferred fresh glory on the New Comer, though he was fond of saying – to impress people with his brilliance – that Jesus was the most advanced and revolutionary of them all. Yet he felt that he had done Jesus a favour in promoting Him to such company, and so he spoke of Him with involuntary condescension; but then he spoke of everything with involuntary condescension – it may have been because he spent so much of his time in teaching. And besides, the people he had to teach now were Christians, and they simply did not know the rudiments of their own subject! So he had to make the matter as simple as possible.
Yet it may be that he could not help making it simple; for a man who has to simplify knowledge for several hours a day to suit minds of twelve or thirteen often ends by simplifying everything; he may acquire such a love for simplification that only simplified ideas give him pleasure. And in fact the more elementary a truth was the more pleasure Brand found in uttering it; and if he could impart to it a sort of flashing triteness he himself was dazzled, as though he had achieved an epigram. So when he came across the axiom, ‘God is love,’ it was not the statement itself that thrilled him, but the tellingly terse form in which it was couched; and he did not see anything blasphemous in this treatment of a saying which all the wisdom of the world is insufficient to comprehend. For a school-teacher of the conventional kind may not only admire simplified statements; he is capable of falling in love with them simply as statements. He falls in love with them as the commercial traveller falls in love with gypsum, clinkers, or asbestos jointing; for though he can make no more personal use of them than the commercial traveller of those wares, yet they are the things that give meaning to his deliberate and rational activity as a human being. But his love is less humble and passionate than the love of a commercial traveller for asbestos jointing; for he has a monopoly of his goods and the commercial traveller has not, and he can pass them on to the recipient without being obliged to exercise the arts of persuasion, whereas his commercial brother has to summon all his eloquence, has to plead, to propitiate, to dazzle. So when Brand made any simple assertion which his interlocutor refused to accept on the spot, he had a habit of saying: ‘I’m telling you.’ After asserting that Jesus was a Socialist or that the Kingdom of Heaven was within you – if you voted intelligently – he would add, ‘I’m telling you,’ and it may be that, yielding to habit, he once or twice capped even the sublime axiom, ‘God is love,’ with this unseemly addition. For he could not utter even that saying without seeming to clinch something, without appearing to be making a point.
All this, however, is only the outside of Brand, and what lay behind it would be hard to say. It is questionable indeed, whether anything lay behind, for the thing one was most vividly aware of was a want. And in that want there must of necessity have been some deficiency of sex. Nothing else could have made him such a glittering and vacant fool; for even a hardened libertine, if his attention were seriously drawn to the sentence, ‘God is love,’ would see at least that it was a very extraordinary statement, even if he did not understand it. But to Brand it was not in any way extraordinary; it was an obvious truth contained in a simple sentence of three words. So his lanky body with its unselfconscious and yet ungainly movements was that of one unaware of life; his bones beneath the clothes of a tall man were the shameless, raw bones of a boy of twelve or thirteen. He had also the shy affectionateness of a boy; but he had no charity, for charity is an adult virtue. And catching sight of his inarticulate limbs stretched out like a cry for help as he half lay in a chair, one saw all at once that his words were not after all those of an actor or a teacher, but those of a bright boy of twelve, and one forgave him and felt sorry for him, no matter how intolerable his arrogance may have been a moment before.
It was probably his sexlessness that attracted Jean. Had she known it was sexlessness, it is true, she would have been repelled. But being herself passionate and yet self-repressed, she saw in Brand’s demeanour only a scornful superiority to the fatuity of desire. She hated sentiment, she hated the disorder and disingenuousness of love, she hated, above all, women who got left with illegitimate children; she hated them with the naïve hatred of one who passionately disliked ambiguity. So Brand’s logical advocacy of women’s suffrage and common-sense exposition of religion appealed equally to her; they seemed to exclude all sentimentality. She began to go to women’s suffrage meetings with Brand, then to plays, then to Socialist demonstrations. He never touched her or treated her like a woman, and she felt that she had come at last to know a rational being. Nobody else in the house liked Brand, and perhaps that made her go about more constantly with him than she would otherwise have done. It also made her oblivious of the strange state Tom was in.
SEVEN
A MAN WHO has desperately fought for the possession of an unattainable object finds himself in a very strange position when he realises that it is worthless and that his desire for it has suddenly vanished. Then it may appear to him that he should be perfectly happy again; for the cause of his suffering is removed, and the things that once gave him pleasure are still to be had; he has only to stretch out his hand for them. The sun still shines; friends, music-halls, saw-dusted pubs, the lights and crowds of the city, the excitements of football and wrestling – all these exist unaffected by the experience he has passed through. Everything seems to be as it was before; yet something has changed: a hole has yawned in his world, and through it all the warmth that used to be in things has drained away, leaving them cold and empty. He feels the heat of the sun on his face and the backs of his hands, but it is stopped there as by an icy casing; it does not warm his limbs. He breathes the sharp autumnal air, but it is thin and bodiless, an invisible empty something that he draws into his lungs; and although there is no danger of its failing him and he inhales it automatically, yet he finds that breathing requires a slight effort, an effort that tires him, for it is meaningless. His friends too have become curiously external and objective, have receded into a different dimension like figures in a painting, and for the first time he notices lines in their faces that he had never noticed before, lines which, if he were not outside the picture himself, might make him dislike those people. Nor do the jokes of music-hall comedians give him pleasure, for all that he can see in them is a mechanism for producing the automatic spasm of laughter; he sees this clearly, although he is far less capable of analysing his impressions than many of the people who laugh. Sometimes in the midst of wrestling he suddenly surrenders to his opponent’s grip where he could have jerked himself free; for the knowledge that the stronger must inevitably overcome the weaker makes all resistance meaningless, and his mind refuses to strike out the sudden inspiration that would extricate him, for that too seems irrelevant. And the feeling that nothing
