Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump;

“Naturally,” cried Boon, “after a great achievement there must be a pause. The Mind of the Race must have its digestive interludes.”

“But this is indigestion! First comes Herbert Spencer, with his misconception of the life process as a struggle of individuals to survive. His word ‘Evolution’ is the quintessence of the misunderstanding; his image of a steadfast, mechanical unfolding through selfishness, masked plausibly and disastrously the intricate, perplexing vision of the truth. From that sort of thing we go at a stride to the inevitable Super Man, the megatherium individual of futurity, the large egoist, and all that nonsense. Then comes a swarm of shallow, incontinent thinkers, anxious to find a simple driving force with a simple name for the whole process; the ‘Life Force’ and ‘Will,’ and so on. These things, my dear Boon, are just the appalling bubbles of gas that show how completely the Mind of the Race has failed to assimilate…”

“It is remarkable,” said Boon, “how a metaphor may run away with the clearest of thinkers. The Mind of the Race is not so consistently gastric as all that.”

“You started the metaphor,” said Wilkins.

“And you mounted it and it bolted with you. To these unpleasant consequences… Well, I hold, on the contrary, that after the superficialities of the sixties and seventies and eighties people’s minds have been getting a firmer and firmer grip upon the reality of specific instability. The new body of intellectual experiment, which isn’t indigestion at all but only a preliminary attack, is all that mass of trial thinking that one lumps together in one’s mind when one speaks of Pragmatism. With the breakdown of specific boundaries the validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant experiment. The boundaries of our universe recede not only in time and space but thought. The hard-and-fast line between the scientific and the poetic method disappears…”

“And you get Bergson,” said Wilkins triumphantly.

“Bergson is of that class and type that exploits the affairs of thought. But I refuse to have Pragmatism judged by Bergson. He takes hold of the unfinished inquiries that constitute the movement of Pragmatism and he makes a soft scepticism for delicate minds with easy ways back to any old-established orthodoxy they may regret.”

“But here is my case again,” said Wilkins. “It is only through Bergson that the Mind of the Race, the great operating mass mind out there, can take hold of this new system of ideas…”

§ 3

But now Boon and Wilkins were fairly launched upon a vital and entirely inconclusive controversy. Was the thought process of the world growing, spreading, progressing, or was it going to pieces? The one produced a hundred instances of the enlarging and quickening of men’s minds, the other replied by instancing vulgarities, distortions, wide acceptance of nonsense. Did public advertisements make a more intelligent or less intelligent appeal now than they used to do? For half an afternoon they fought over the alleged degeneration of the Times, multiplying instances, comparing the “Parnellism and Crime” pamphlet with Lord Northcliffe’s war indiscretions, and discussing the comparative merits of Mr. Moberly Bell’s campaign to sell the twenty-year-old “Encyclopædia Britannica” and found a “Book Club” that should abolish booksellers, with the displayed and illustrated advertisements of the new period.

The talk, you see, went high and low and came to no conclusion; but I think that on the whole Wilkins did succeed in shaking Boon’s half-mystical confidence in the inevitableness of human wisdom. The honours, I think, lay with Wilkins. Boon did seem to establish that in physical science there had been, and was still, a great and growing process; but he was not able to prove, he could only express his faith, that the empire of sanity was spreading to greater and more human issues. He had to fall back upon prophecy. Presently there would be another big lunge forward, and so forth. But Wilkins, on his side, was able to make a case for a steady rotting in political life, an increase in loudness, emptiness, and violence in the last twenty years: he instanced Carsonism, the methods of Tariff Reform, the vehement Feminist movement, the malignant silliness of the “rebel” Labour Press, the rankness of German “patriotism.”…

“But there are young people thinking,” said Boon at last. “It isn’t just these matured showings. Where one youth thought thirty years ago, fifty are thinking now. These wild, loud things are just an irruption. Just an irruption…”

The mocker was distressed.

The idea of active intellectual wrongness distressed him so much that he cast aside all his detachment from Hallery, and showed plainly that to this imaginary Hallery’s idea of a secular growth of wisdom in mankind he himself was quite passionately clinging…

§ 4

He was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for some time.

“Wilkins,” he said, “insists on Facts. It is difficult to argue with him on that basis. You see, I don’t intend Hallery’s view to be an induction from facts. It’s a conviction, an intuition. It is not the sort of thing one perceives after reading the newspaper placards or looking at the bookshelves in the British Museum. It’s something one knows for certain in the middle of the night. There is the Mind of the Race, I mean. It is something General; it is a refuge from the Particular and it is in the nature of God. That’s plain, isn’t it? And through it there is Communion. These phases, these irruptions are incidents. If all the world went frantic; if presently some horrible thing, some monstrous war smashed all books and thinking and civilization, still the mind would be there. It would immediately go on again and presently it would pick up all that had been done before – just as a philosopher would presently go on reading again after the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with the crockery… It keeps on anyhow…

“Oh! I don’t know how, my dear fellow. I can’t explain. I’m not telling you of something I’ve reasoned out and discovered; I’m telling you of something I know. It’s faith if you like. It keeps on and I know it keeps on – although I can’t for the life of me tell how…”

He stopped. He flushed.

“That, you see, is Hallery’s point of view,” he said awkwardly.

“But Wilkins perhaps wouldn’t contradict that. His point is merely that to be exact about words, that God-Mind, that General Mind of yours, isn’t exactly to be called the Mind of the Race.”

“But it is the Mind of the Race,” said Boon. “It is the Mind of the Race. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of the Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd. That does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. It matters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of minds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is illumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from isolations…”

“Might be,” I suggested.

“Must be,” he said. “Oh! I know I’ve lived behind Miss Bathwick… But I’m breaking out… One of these days I will begin to dictate to her – and not mind what she does… I’m a successful nobody – superficially – and it’s only through my private thoughts and private jeering that I’ve come to see these things…”

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

The Beginning of "The Wild Asses of the Devil"

§ 1

One day a little time after the argument with Wilkins, Boon told me he would read me a story. He read it from a pencilled manuscript. After some anxious seeking I have found most of it again and put it together. Only a few pages are missing. Here is the story. I am sorry to say it was never finished. But he gave me a very clear conception of the contemplated end. That I will indicate in its place. And I think you will see how its idea springs from the talk with Wilkins I have had to render in the previous chapter.

§ 2

There was once an Author who pursued fame and prosperity in a pleasant villa on the south coast of England. He wrote stories of an acceptable nature and rejoiced in a growing public esteem, carefully offending no one and seeking only to please. He had married under circumstances of qualified and tolerable romance a lady who wrote occasional but otherwise regular verse, he was the father of a little daughter, whose reported sayings added much to his popularity, and some of the very best people in the land asked him to dinner. He was a deputy-lieutenant and a friend of the Prime Minister, a literary knighthood was no remote possibility for him, and even the Nobel prize, given a sufficient longevity, was not altogether beyond his hopes. And this amount of prosperity had not betrayed him into any un-English pride. He remembered that manliness and simplicity which are expected from authors. He smoked pipes and not the excellent cigars he could have afforded. He kept his hair cut and never posed. He did not hold himself aloof from people of the inferior and less successful classes. He habitually travelled third class in order to study the characters he put into his delightful novels; he went for long walks and sat in inns, accosting people; he drew out his gardener. And though he worked steadily, he did not give up the care of his body, which threatened a certain plumpness and what is more to the point, a localized plumpness, not generally spread over the system but exaggerating the anterior equator. This expansion was his only care. He thought about fitness and played tennis, and every day, wet or fine, he went for at least an hour’s walk…

Yet this man, so representative of Edwardian literature – for it is in the reign of good King Edward the story begins – in spite of his enviable achievements and prospects, was doomed to the most exhausting and dubious adventures before his life came to its unhonoured end…

Because I have not told you everything about him. Sometimes – in the morning sometimes – he would be irritable and have quarrels with his shaving things, and there were extraordinary moods when it would seem to him that living quite beautifully in a pleasant villa and being well-off and famous, and writing books that were always good-humoured and grammatical and a little distinguished in an inoffensive way, was about as boring and intolerable a life as any creature with a soul to be damned could possibly pursue. Which shows only that God in putting him together had not forgotten that viscus the liver which is usual on such occasions…

The winter at the seaside is less agreeable and more bracing than the summer, and there were days when this Author had almost to force himself through the wholesome, necessary routines of his life, when the south-west wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and slapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that Author thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and round his wrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door. And the grey waves he saw from his window came rolling inshore under the hurrying grey rain-bursts, line after line, to smash along the undercliff into vast, feathering fountains of foam and sud and send a salt-tasting spin-drift into his eyes. But manfully he would put on his puttees and his water-proof cape and his biggest brierwood pipe, and out he would go into the whurryballoo of it all, knowing that so he would be all the brighter for his nice story-writing after tea.

On such a day he went out. He went out very resolutely along the seaside gardens of gravel and tamarisk and privet, resolved to oblige himself to go right past the harbour and up to the top of the east cliff before ever he turned his face back to the comforts of fire and wife and tea and buttered toast…

And somewhere, perhaps half a mile away from home, he became aware of a queer character trying to keep abreast of him.

His impression was of a very miserable black man in the greasy, blue-black garments of a stoker, a lascar probably from a steamship in the harbour, and going with a sort of lame hobble.

As he passed this individual the Author had a transitory thought of how much Authors don’t know in the world, how much, for instance, this shivering, cringing body might be hiding within itself, of inestimable value as “local colour” if only one could get hold of it for “putting into” one’s large acceptable novels. Why doesn’t one sometimes tap these sources? Kipling, for example, used to do so, with most successful results… And then the Author became aware that this enigma was hurrying to overtake him. He slackened his pace…

The creature wasn’t asking for a light; it was begging for a box of matches. And, what was odd, in quite good English.

The Author surveyed the beggar and slapped his pockets. Never had he seen so miserable a face. It was by no means a prepossessing face, with its aquiline nose, its sloping brows, its dark, deep, bloodshot eyes much too close together, its V-shaped, dishonest mouth and drenched chin-tuft. And yet it was attractively animal and pitiful. The idea flashed suddenly into the Author’s head: “Why not, instead of going on, thinking emptily, through this beastly weather – why not take this man back home now, to the warm, dry study, and give him a hot drink and something to smoke, and draw him out?”

Get something technical and first-hand that would rather score off Kipling.

“Its damnably cold!” he shouted, in a sort of hearty, forecastle voice.

“It’s worse than that,” said the strange stoker.

“It’s a hell of a day!” said the Author, more forcible than ever.

“Don’t remind me of hell,” said the stoker, in a voice of inappeasable regret.

The Author slapped his pockets again. “You’ve got an infernal cold. Look here, my man – confound it! would you like a hot grog?..”

§ 3

The scene shifts to the Author’s study – a blazing coal fire, the stoker sitting dripping and steaming before it, with his feet inside the fender, while the Author fusses about the room, directing the preparation of hot drinks. The Author is acutely aware not only of the stoker but of himself. The stoker has probably never been in the home of an Author before; he is probably awe-stricken at the array of books, at the comfort, convenience, and efficiency of the home, at the pleasant personality entertaining him… Meanwhile the Author does not forget that the stoker is material, is “copy,” is being watched, observed. So he poses and watches, until presently he forgets to pose in his astonishment at the thing he is observing. Because this stoker is rummier than a stoker ought to be —

He does not simply accept a hot drink; he informs his host just how hot the drink must be to satisfy him.

“Isn’t there something you could put in it – something called red pepper? I’ve tasted that once or twice. It’s good. If you could put in a bit of red pepper.”

“If you can stand that sort of thing?”

“And if there isn’t much water, can’t you set light to the stuff? Or let me drink it boiling, out of a pannikin or something? Pepper and all.”

Wonderful fellows, these stokers! The Author went to the bell and asked for red pepper.

And then as he came back to the fire he saw something that he instantly dismissed as an optical illusion, as a mirage effect of the clouds of steam his guest was disengaging. The stoker was sitting, all crouched up, as close over the fire as he could contrive; and he was holding his black hands, not to the fire but in the fire, holding them pressed flat against two red, glowing masses of coal… He glanced over his shoulder at the Author with a guilty start, and then instantly the Author perceived that the hands were five or six inches away from the coal.

Then came smoking. The Author produced one of his big cigars – for although a conscientious pipe-smoker himself he gave people cigars; and then, again struck by something odd, he went off into a corner of the room where a little oval mirror gave him a means of watching the stoker undetected. And this is what he saw.

He saw the stoker, after a furtive glance at him, deliberately turn the cigar round, place the lighted end in his mouth, inhale strongly, and blow a torrent of sparks and smoke out of his nose. His firelit face as he did this expressed a diabolical relief. Then very hastily he reversed the cigar again, and turned round to look at the Author. The Author turned slowly towards him.

“You like that cigar?” he asked, after one of those mutual pauses that break down a pretence.

“It’s admirable.”

“Why do you smoke it the other way round?”

The stoker perceived he was caught. “It’s a stokehole trick,” he said. “Do you mind if I do it? I didn’t think you saw.”

“Pray smoke just as you like,” said the Author, and advanced to watch the operation.

It was exactly like the fire-eater at a village fair. The man stuck the burning cigar into his mouth and blew sparks out of his nostrils. “Ah!” he said, with a note of genuine satisfaction. And then, with the cigar still burning in the corner of his mouth, he turned to the fire and began to rearrange the burning coals with his hands so as to pile up a great glowing mass. He picked up flaming and white-hot lumps as one might pick up lumps of sugar. The Author watched him, dumbfounded.

“I say!” he cried. “You stokers get a bit tough.”

The stoker dropped the glowing piece of coal in his hand. “I forgot,” he said, and sat back a little.

“Isn’t that a bit —extra?” asked the Author, regarding him. “Isn’t that some sort of trick?”

“We get so tough down there,” said the stoker, and paused discreetly as the servant came in with the red pepper.

“Now you can drink,” said the Author, and set himself to mix a drink of a pungency that he would have considered murderous ten minutes before. When he had done the stoker reached over and added more red pepper.

“I don’t quite see how it is your hand doesn’t burn,” said the Author as the stoker drank. The stoker shook his head over the uptilted glass.

“Incombustible,” he said, putting it down. “Could I have just a tiny drop more? Just brandy and pepper, if you don’t mind. Set alight. I don’t care for water except when it’s super-heated steam.”

And as the Author poured out another stiff glass of this incandescent brew, the stoker put up his hand and scratched the matted black hair over his temple. Then instantly he desisted and sat looking wickedly at the Author, while the Author stared at him aghast. For at the corner of his square, high, narrow forehead, revealed for an instant by the thrusting back of the hair, a curious stumpy excrescence had been visible; and the top of his ear – he had a pointed top to his ear!

“A-a-a-a-h!” said the Author, with dilated eyes.

“A-a-a-a-h!” said the stoker, in hopeless distress.

“But you aren’t – !”

“I know – I know I’m not. I know… I’m a devil. A poor, lost, homeless devil.”

And suddenly, with a gesture of indescribable despair, the apparent stoker buried his face in his hands and burst into tears.

“Only man who’s ever been decently kind to me,” he sobbed. “And now – you’ll chuck me out again into the beastly wet and cold… Beautiful fire… Nice drink… Almost homelike… Just to torment me… Boo-ooh!”

And let it be recorded to the credit of our little Author, that he did overcome his momentary horror, that he did go quickly round the table, and that he patted that dirty stoker’s shoulder.

“There!” he said. “There! Don’t mind my rudeness. Have another nice drink. Have a hell of a drink. I won’t turn you out if you’re unhappy – on a day like this. Have just a mouthful of pepper, man, and pull yourself together.”

And suddenly the poor devil caught hold of his arm. “Nobody good to me,” he sobbed. “Nobody good to me.” And his tears ran down over the Author’s plump little hand – scalding tears.

§ 4

All really wonderful things happen rather suddenly and without any great emphasis upon their wonderfulness, and this was no exception to the general rule. This Author went on comforting his devil as though this was nothing more than a chance encounter with an unhappy child, and the devil let his grief and discomfort have vent in a manner that seemed at the time as natural as anything could be. He was clearly a devil of feeble character and uncertain purpose, much broken down by harshness and cruelty, and it throws a curious light upon the general state of misconception with regard to matters diabolical that it came as a quite pitiful discovery to our Author that a devil could be unhappy and heart-broken. For a long time his most earnest and persistent questioning could gather nothing except that his guest was an exile from a land of great warmth and considerable entertainment, and it was only after considerable further applications of brandy and pepper that the sobbing confidences of the poor creature grew into the form of a coherent and understandable narrative.

And then it became apparent that this person was one of the very lowest types of infernal denizen, and that his role in the dark realms of Dis had been that of watcher and minder of a herd of sinister beings hitherto unknown to our Author, the Devil’s Wild Asses, which pastured in a stretch of meadows near the Styx. They were, he gathered, unruly, dangerous, and enterprising beasts, amenable only to a certain formula of expletives, which instantly reduced them to obedience. These expletives the stoker-devil would not repeat; to do so except when actually addressing one of the Wild Asses would, he explained, involve torments of the most terrible description. The bare thought of them gave him a shivering fit. But he gave the Author to understand that to crack these curses as one drove the Wild Asses to and from their grazing on the Elysian fields was a by no means disagreeable amusement. The ass-herds would try who could crack the loudest until the welkin rang.

And speaking of these things, the poor creature gave a picture of diabolical life that impressed the Author as by no means unpleasant for any one with a suitable constitution. It was like the Idylls of Theocritus done in fire; the devils drove their charges along burning lanes and sat gossiping in hedges of flames, rejoicing in the warm, dry breezes (which it seems are rendered peculiarly bracing by the faint flavour of brimstone in the air), and watching the harpies and furies and witches circling in the perpetual afterglow of that inferior sky. And ever and again there would be holidays, and one would take one’s lunch and wander over the sulphur craters picking flowers of sulphur or fishing for the souls of usurers and publishers and house-agents and land-agents in the lakes of boiling pitch. It was good sport, for the usurers and publishers and house-agents and land-agents were always eager to be caught; they crowded round the hooks and fought violently for the bait, and protested vehemently and entertainingly against the Rules and Regulations that compelled their instant return to the lake of fire.

And sometimes when he was on holiday this particular devil would go through the saltpetre dunes, where the witches-brooms grow and the blasted heath is in flower, to the landing-place of the ferry whence the Great Road runs through the shops and banks of the Via Dolorosa to the New Judgement Hall, and watch the crowds of damned arriving by the steam ferry-boats of the Consolidated Charon Company. This steamboat-gazing seems about as popular down there as it is at Folkestone. Almost every day notable people arrive, and, as the devils are very well informed about terrestrial affairs – for of course all the earthly newspapers go straight to hell – whatever else could one expect? – they get ovations of an almost undergraduate intensity. At times you can hear their cheering or booing, as the case may be, right away on the pastures where the Wild Asses feed. And that had been this particular devil’s undoing.

He had always been interested in the career of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone…

He was minding the Wild Asses. He knew the risks. He knew the penalties. But when he heard the vast uproar, when he heard the eager voices in the lane of fire saying, “It’s Gladstone at last!” when he saw how quietly and unsuspiciously the Wild Asses cropped their pasture, the temptation was too much. He slipped away. He saw the great Englishman landed after a slight struggle. He joined in the outcry of “Speech! Speech!” He heard the first delicious promise of a Home Rule movement which should break the last feeble links of Celestial Control…