§ 15

peter had no memory of coming to again from his faint. for a long time he must have continued to be purely automatic. his flaming wrist was the centre of his being. then for a time consciousness resumed, as abruptly as the thread of a story one finds upon the torn page of a novel.

he found himself in the midst of a friendly group of pale blue uniforms; he was standing up and being very lively in spite of the strong taste of blood in his mouth and a feeling that his wrist was burning as a match burns, and that the left upper half of his body had been changed into a lump of raw and bleeding meat. he was talking a sort of french. “c’est sacré bon stuff, cet eau-de-vie française,” he was saying gaily and rather loudly.

“haf some more,” said a friendly voice.

“not half, old chap,” said peter, and felt at the time that this was not really good french.

he tried to slap the man on the shoulder, but he couldn’t.

“bon!” he said, “as we say in england,” and felt that that remark also failed.

some one protested softly against his being given more brandy....

then this clear fragment ended again. there was a kind of dream of rather rough but efficient surgery upon a shoulder and arm that was quite probably his own, and some genially amiable conversation. there was a very nice 506frenchman with a black beard and soft eyes, who wore a long white overall, and seemed to be looking after him as tenderly as a woman could do.

but with these things mingled the matter of delirium. at one time the kaiser prevailed in peter’s mind, a large, foolish, pompous person with waxed moustaches and distraught eyes, who crawled up to peter over immense piles of white and grey and green rotting corpses, and began gnawing at his shoulder almost absent-mindedly. peter struggled and protested. what business had this beastly german to come interfering with peter’s life? he started a vast argument about that, in which all sorts of people, including the nice-looking frenchman in the white overall, took part.

peter was now making a formal complaint about the conduct of the universe. “no,” he insisted time after time, “i will not deal with subordinates. i insist on seeing the head,” and so at last he found himself in the presence of the lord god....

but peter’s vision of the lord god was the most delirious thing of all. he imagined him in an office, a little office in a vast building, and so out of the way that people had to ask each other which was the passage and which the staircase. old men stood and argued at corners with peter’s girl-guide whether it was this way or that. people were being shown over the building by girl-guides; it was very like the london war office, only more so; there were great numbers of visitors, and they all seemed to be in considerable hurry and distress, and most of them were looking for the lord god to lodge a complaint and demand an explanation, just as peter was. for a time all the visitors became wounded men, and nurses mixed up with the girl-guides, and peter was being carried through fresh air to an ambulance train. his shoulder and wrist were very painful and singing, as it were, a throbbing duet together.

for a time peter did seem to see the lord god; he was in his office, a little brown, rather tired-looking man in a kepi, and peter was on a stretcher, and the lord god or some one near him was saying: “quel numéro?” but that passed away, and peter was again conducting his exploration of the corridors with a girl-guide who was sometimes like joan and 507sometimes like hetty—and then there was a queer disposition to loiter in the passages.... for a time he sat in dishabille while hetty tried to explain god.... dreams cross the scent of dreams.

then it seemed to peter’s fevered brain that he was sitting, and had been sitting for a long time, in the little office of the lord god of heaven and earth. and the lord god had the likeness of a lean, tired, intelligent-looking oldish man, with an air of futile friendliness masking a fundamental indifference.

“my dear sir,” the lord god was saying, “do please put that cushion behind your poor shoulder. i can’t bear to see you so uncomfortable. and tell me everything. everything....”

the office was the dingiest and untidiest little office it was possible to imagine. the desk at which god sat was in a terrible litter. on a side table were some grubby test tubes and bottles at which the lord god had apparently been trying over a new element. the windows had not been cleaned for ages, they were dark with spiders’ webs, they crawled with a buzzing nightmare of horrible and unmeaning life. it was a most unbusinesslike office. there were no proper files, no card indexes; bundles of dusty papers were thrust into open fixtures, papers littered the floors, and there were brass-handled drawers—. peter looked again, and blood was oozing from these drawers and little cries came out of them. he glanced quickly at god, and god was looking at him. “but did you really make this world?” he asked.

“i thought i did,” said god.

“but why did you do it? why?”

“ah, there you have me!” said the lord god with bonhomie.

“but why don’t you exert yourself?” said peter, hammering at the desk with his sound hand. “why don’t you exert yourself?”

could delirium have ever invented a more monstrous conception than this of peter hammering on an untidy desk amidst old pen nibs, bits of sealing-wax, half-sheets of notepaper, returns of nature’s waste, sample bones of projected animals, mineral samples, dirty little test tubes, and the like, 508and lecturing the almighty upon the dreadful confusion into which the world had fallen? “here was i, sir, and millions like me, with a clear promise of life and freedom! and what are we now? bruises, red bones, dead bodies! this german kaiser fellow—an ass, sir, a perfect ass, gnawing a great hole in my shoulder! he and his son, stuffing themselves with a blut-wurst made out of all our lives and happiness! what does it mean, sir? has it gone entirely out of your control? and it isn’t as if the whole thing was ridiculous, sir. it isn’t. in some ways it’s an extraordinarily fine world—one has to admit that. that is why it is all so distressing, so unendurably distressing. i don’t in the least want to leave it.”

“you admit that it’s fine—in places,” said the lord god, as if he valued the admission.

“but the management, sir! the management! yours—ultimately. don’t you realize, sir——? i had the greatest trouble in finding you. half the messengers don’t know where this den of yours is. it’s forgotten. practically forgotten. the head office! and now i’m here i can tell you everything is going to rack and ruin, driving straight to an absolute and final smash and break-up.”

“as bad as that?” said the lord god.

“it’s the appalling waste,” peter continued. “the waste of material, the waste of us, the waste of everything. a sort of splendour in it, there is; touches of real genius about it, that i would be the last to deny; but that only increases the bitterness of the disorder. it’s a good enough world to lament. it’s a good enough life to resent having to lose it. there’s some lovely things in it, sir; courage, endurance, and oh! many beautiful things. but when one gets here, when one begins to ask for you and hunt about for you, and finds this, this muddle, sir, then one begins to understand. look at this room, consider it—as a general manager’s room. no decency. no order. everywhere the dust of ages, muck indescribable, bacteria! and that!”

that was a cobweb across the grimy window pane, in which a freshly entangled bluebottle fly was buzzing fussily. “that ought not to be here at all,” said peter. “it really ought not to exist at all. why does it? look at that beastly 509spider in the corner! why do you suffer all these cruel and unclean things?”

“you don’t like it?” said the lord god, without any sign either of apology or explanation.

“no,” said peter.

“then change it,” said the lord god, nodding his head as who should say “got you there.”

“but how are we to change it?”

“if you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it,” said the lord god, leaning back with the weariness of one who has had to argue with each generation from job onward, precisely the same objections and precisely the same arguments.

“after all,” said the lord god, giving peter no time to speak further; “after all, you are three-and-twenty, mr. peter stubland, and you’ve been pretty busy complaining of me and everything between me and you, your masters, pastors, teachers, and so forth, for the last half-dozen years. meanwhile, is your own record good? positive achievements, forgive me, are still to seek. you’ve been nearly drunk several times, you’ve soiled yourself with a lot of very cheap and greedy love-making—i gave you something beautiful there anyhow, and you knew that while you spoilt it—you’ve been a vigorous member of the consuming class, and really, you’ve got nothing clear and planned, nothing at all. you complain of my lack of order; where’s the order in your own mind? if i was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend i am, i should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt long ago. but i happen to have this democratic fad as badly as any one—free will is what they used to call it—and so i leave you to work out your own salvation. and if i leave you alone then i have to leave that other—that other mr. toad at potsdam alone. he tries me, i admit, almost to the miracle pitch at times with the tone of his everlasting prepaid telegrams—but one has to be fair. what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the kaiser. i’ve got to leave you all alone if i leave one alone. don’t you see that? in spite of the mess you are in. so don’t blame me. don’t blame me. there isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that man can’t control if only he chooses to 510control it. it’s arranged like that. there’s a lot more system here than you suspect, only it’s too ingenious for you to see. it’s yours to command. if you want a card index for the world—well, get a card index. i won’t prevent you. if you don’t like my spiders, kill my spiders. i’m not conceited about them. if you don’t like the kaiser, hang him, assassinate him. why don’t you abolish kings? you could. but it was your sort, with your cheap and quick efficiency schemes, who set up saul—in spite of my protests—ages ago.... humanity either makes or breeds or tolerates all its own afflictions, great and small. not my doing. take kings and courts. take dungheaps and flies. it’s astonishing you people haven’t killed off all the flies in the world long ago. they do no end of mischief, and it would be perfectly easy to do. they’re purely educational. purely. even as you lie in hospital, there they are buzzing within an inch of your nose and landing on your poor forehead to remind you of what a properly organized humanity could do for its own comfort. but there’s men in this world who want me to act as a fly-paper, simply because they are too lazy to get one for themselves. my dear mr. peter! if people haven’t taught you properly, teach yourself. if they don’t know enough, find out. it’s all here. all here.” he made a comprehensive gesture. “i’m not mocking you.”

“you’re not mocking me?” said peter keenly....

“it depends upon you,” said the lord god with an enigmatic smile. “you asked me why i didn’t exert myself. well—why don’t you exert yourself?

“why don’t you exert yourself?” the lord god repeated almost rudely, driving it home.

“that pillow under your shoulder still isn’t comfortable,” said the lord god, breaking off....

the buzzing of the entangled fly changed to the drone of a passing aeroplane, and the dingy office expanded into a hospital ward. some one was adjusting peter’s pillows....