Chapter 10 part 3

He walked to the door of his study and she followed him. He stared at the files of the abandoned opus and with her at his side went across the landing to the nursery,

He surveyed his sleeping son for a while and then let his eyes wander about the neat, bright room.

'That's a fine big rubbish basket,' he said abruptly.

She thought that a queer thing for him to say.

'It's a good basket to bundle things into when they get too much in the way,' she admitted. 'I bought it yesterday.'

'It's a great basket,' he agreed and seemed to forget about it.

He returned to his study and sat down there among the piled manuscripts. Mary after a thoughtful moment went downstairs. When she came upstairs again she went to look at him in his study but she found he had gone back to the nursery. There she discovered him seated in the nurse's armchair with that fine big rubbish basket he had admired before his knees. On a chair at his side was a large pile of manuscript and this he was taking twenty or thirty sheets at a time and tearing, tearing into little fragments. He was facing the cot. It was as if he was tearing the paper at the sleeping child,

'What are you doing?' she asked.

'Tearing it up. Tearing it all up.'

'The Pageant of Mankind?'

'Yes.'

'But there was such good writing in it.'

'No matter, nothing to the writing that will come.'

He pointed to his son. 'He will do better,' he said, 'He will do better. I'm tearing up the past to make way for him. Him and his kind—in their turn.'

'No one can tear up the past,' she said.

'You can tear up every lie that has ever been told about it. And mostly we have lied about it. Mythology, fantasy, elaborated misconceptions. Some of the truth is coming out now. But it is only beginning to be told. Let the new race begin clean.'

'The new race?' she questioned.

He went on tearing and thinking while he tore,

Should he tell her what he knew she was? Should he tell her what their child was? No. The creatures must find themselves out in their own time. They must realize in their own fashion the reason for their instinctive detachment from this old played-out world. Maybe she was on the verge of that awakening. But it must come by degrees.

He glanced up for a moment and then averted his eyes from her grave scrutiny. He took up another handful of sheets and began to tear them.

'Every generation,' he quibbled, 'is a new race. Every generation begins again.'

'But every one,' she said, 'is always beginning.'

'No. It has taken me half a lifetime to free even myself---even to begin to free myself---from religious falsehoods and from historical lies and from tradition and slavish carrying on with the patterns of past things. Even now am I sure that I am free?'

'But you have begun!'

'I doubt,' he said, 'whether I and my sort are made for fresh beginnings.'

'But what else are you made for?' she asked. 'You of all people! Look even at this that you are doing and saying now!'

And then she did a wonderful thing for him. She could have done nothing better. She came across the room to him and bent down over him and brought her face very close to his. 'If I could help you. . . .' she whispered.

'You see, dear,' she said, in a low, hurried voice, with both hands on his shoulders, 'I know you are terribly troubled in your mind---bothered with new ideas that crowd and crowd upon one another. I know you are worried---even about these Martians in the papers. I know that. I wish I understood better. I'm slow. I don't keep pace with you. If I could----! If only I could! I feel very often I don't get what you are driving at until it is too late, I make some flat reply. And then you are hurt. Darling, you are so easily hurt. That imagination of yours dances about like quicksilver. Sometimes I think---you seem hardly to belong to this world. . . .'

She had a freakish idea.

'Is it that?' she said.

She moved round to look him in the face. 'Joe! Joe, dear! Tell me. . . .'

Would the jest offend him? No. She stood away from him and put out a finger at him. 'Joe! You aren't by any chance a sort of fairy changeling? Not---not one of these Martians?'

He stopped tearing the scraps of paper in his hand. A sort of fairy changeling? Not one of these Martians? He stared at this new, this tremendous idea, for a time. 'Me!' he said at last. 'You think that of me!'

The miracle happened in an instant.

A great light seemed to irradiate and in a moment to tranquillize the troubled ocean of his disordered mind. The final phase of his mental pacification was very swift indeed. At a stroke everything became coherent and plain to him. Everything fell into place. He had, he realized, completed his great disclosure with this culminating discovery. His mind swung round full compass and clicked into place. He too was star-born! He too was one of these invaders and strangers and innovators to our fantastic planet, who were crowding into life and making it over anew! Throwing the torn scraps into a basket and beginning again in the nursery. Fantastic how long it had taken him to realize this!

'Of course!' he whispered.

His mind had gone all round the world indeed, but only to discover himself and his home again in a new orientation. He stood up abruptly, stared at Mary as though he had that moment realized her existence, and then slowly and silently took her in his arms and put his cheek to hers.

'You were star-begotten,' he said, 'and so was I.'

She nodded agreement. If he wished it, so be it.

'Starry changelings both,' he said presently. 'And not afraid---even of the uttermost change.'

'Why should one fear change?' she asked, trying hard to follow these flickering thoughts of his. 'Why should one be afraid of change? All life is change. Why should we fear it?'

The child lay on its side in its cot in a dreamless sleep. It scarcely seemed to breathe. The expression of that flushed little face with its closed eyes was one of veiled determination. One small clenched fist peeped over the coverlet. Afraid of change? Afraid of the renascence to come?

Never, he thought, had anything in the world looked so calmly and steadfastly resolved to assert its right to think and act in its own way in its own time.

THE END