The mystic looked sharply at me. "In the last resort," he said, "everything is spirit. There is no other thing than spirit. But some actualities embody the universal spirit more completely and significantly than others. Art, of course, is a relatively developed spiritual activity. But it can become a diabolic snare, when it holds the individual back from loftier, more deeply spiritual behaviour. And nine times out often, that is what it does. Only those who have outgrown the snare of art can see it in true perspective. The sheer artist can never do so, just because he is enthralled to the sensory. All art, when it is more than a means of self-display or of self-indulgence, is at bottom a childish play activity, a sophisticated doodling with coloured shapes, or tones, or the intricacies of verbal association, or the silly undirected dream stuff of the unconscious. Fundamentally, all art lacks seriousness." I glanced at his Tibetan picture, which though it praised the spirit, revelled also in charming intricacies of colour and form. The mystic added, "Religious art alone is serious, using the sensory strictly for a spiritual end."

  I protested that Shakespeare, Bach and Michelangelo did not seem to lack seriousness. He answered, "They play with seriousness, they play with the spirit. For all of them, it's the game that counts. Of course they fulfil a useful function on the highest of the lower levels of experience. They help the weaker brethren to rise beyond the quagmire of mere sensuality and mere utilitarian praxis. But so long as the artists remain mere artists, their whole attitude is at bottom (from the more lucidly spiritual point of view) frivolous."

  This arrogant condemnation so bewildered me that for some while I remained silent. But even while I condemned it as insensitive and complacent, I was teased by a suspicion that, in the light of some experience withheld from me, there might nevertheless be a truth in it. Indeed, even I had some disturbing glimmer of that light.

  However, I could not help being outraged by the mystic's calm rejection of the existing world of men. Or was the secret source of my exasperation no more than resentment at his assurance, and at the disturbing possibility that he had indeed seen the glory that I should never see? Churlishly I remarked, "So you intend to wash your hands of us all and let us stew in our own juice while you save yourself." "Yes," he answered, firmly but with a most unexpected twinkle in his frosty eyes. Then he voiced a thought that I had refrained from expressing. "I shall be a rat with the sense to leave the sinking ship." I asked how he intended to escape, and how he would disinfect himself of all taint of us.

  "You feel indignant," he answered, smiling with one of his odd gleams of friendliness, "but believe me I am not seeking mere personal salvation. I am simply loyal to the dictates of the spirit. I shall withdraw, hoping to return, strengthened for helping. What I shall do, along with others, is the only possible way to save mankind. You probably know that groups of the dedicated have already been founded. I am not satisfied with any of them, so I am planning to found (along with others who feel as I do) a minute community dedicated to the spirit, and far out of reach of the modern world's infection."

  I could not resist saying, "It sounds like Shangri-la." He answered rather wearily, "It does, of course. But this is the real thing, and no mere fantasy."

  I asked him how his community would maintain itself alive. "Some of us," he said, "are farmers, some craftsmen. All of us can work. We are buying land in a remote but temperate country. A few of us are experienced writers. We shall not hesitate to use our art for the twofold purpose of spreading the truth and eking out our slender livelihood."

  Surprised, I ejaculated that to do this must surely involve continued commerce with the wicked world. He answered, "The printed word and royalties are the modern equivalent of the mendicant friar's preaching and receipt of alms."

  Cynical thoughts occurred to me, but I said only, "How on earth did you catch your farmers and craftsmen?" Still amiably, he answered, "Countrymen, you know, are often nearer to the spirit than townspeople. We have found among the many who are blind a few who at least are groping. As to status, our new friends will of course be equal to us in brotherhood. In practical matters they will be our masters, but in spiritual matters leadership will be ours, since we shall be the recognized interpreters of the spirit."

  A laugh escaped me; but he said, "You are cynical, because you have not access to the experience that unites us all in spiritual brotherhood."

  The mystic told me a good deal more about his projected community, but I did not attend very carefully, for I was anxiously and vainly debating with myself as to whether he was authentic. So much in his character and his attitude seemed unlovely; but a new and deeper awareness seemed striving to transform him.

  *****

  I had risen and gone over to the great window to look more closely at the unhappy world that he was renouncing. The crowded roofs were a sea of tumbled lava, or the puckered crust of some insect's teeming comb. They extended in all directions to the horizon, spiked here and there by spires and factory chimneys Beneath each covering of slate or tile the little personal creatures were probably everywhere scheming to snatch some particular joy. And everywhere the sick world either withheld the prize entirely or yielded it up infected with the universal plague. Across the river, giant posters blared of beer and whisky, lipstick and laxatives. In the nearby railway station a locomotive, starting, snored successive columns of steam unto the still air. Each mushroomed slowly. Below me, by the river, cars were bound on their thousand trivial or self-important errands. Idlers leaned over the river wall, watching the freighted barges, the pleasure steamers, the gulls, which from my lookout were mere grimy snowflakes. A public lawn was starred and crescented with flower beds. Voices of playing children pierced the snarl of the traffic with sparkles of sound. Lovers, minute as pairing chromosomes, lay full-length together. Prisoners of war, demolishing an old air-raid shelter, were ants, enslaved by an alien species. They bore witness to our world's disunity, and to our heartlessness. On a nearby building, the flag of island freedom, but also of imperial tyranny, mocked their slavery.

  Presently I noticed that many faces were turned upward. Following the direction of their gaze, I saw, high on the steel skeleton of a burnt-out building, a tall crane. And on its crest a man was straddled, air-surrounded, his feet dangling in the sky. Leaning forward and downward, like a horseman sabering foot soldiers, he was battering with a great hammer on stubborn metal almost beyond his reach. The bare muscles of his shoulders glistened with sweat. Below, the upturned faces waited, held by vicarious fear, or by admiration, or the unacknowledged lust to see him fall.

  This whole world of massed human individuals grappling with the physical, would soon be abandoned by my companion, and with little regret. Idlers, toilers, children, lovers and that sweating Thor riding on the machine were for him all damned, because all enthralled by the physical. And though he paid homage to love, he felt (or so I guessed) no warmth of compassion for this doomed city, this doomed world. How could it be otherwise? One does not pity a shadow. And all this was for him but a shadow, a veil of illusion drawn between him and the reality for which he yearned.

  I could not wholly doubt that the mystic had experienced some deep significant fact. Indeed, in my hesitant way I too had experienced something of it. But though logically his withdrawal might, I told myself, be justified by his supreme experience, I was repelled by his readiness to abandon the damned to their fate. Spirit, we had agreed, was for individuals in community. To withdraw from the concrete community which gave one individual being, even to withdraw for the sake of a future and better community, or even for the sake of the pure spirit itself, smacked of desertion. My heart protested, if our world is damned, let us all be damned together! And yet I had to admit that if his vision was indeed authentic and rightly interpreted, his course was right. And yet, and yet…This yearning for the reality behind appearance, this readiness to sacrifice the actual to the ideal, smacks unpleasantly of the blind old cult of progress, and faith in a far off millennium. That the heaven is to be had here and now, and eternally, makes no difference. Cosmical piety dictates that I, a finite and ephemeral being, shall not lust even for union with God or the universal spirit. If at heart, though unwittingly, I have that, unity all the while, well, it is so. But to lust for it is surely an addiction, a greed, and the subtlest betrayal of the spirit. Rather, "my station and its duties."

  But the mystic would reply, and not without reason, that this craving for union with God or the Whole was not a mere individual's craving; it was the urge of God in him to wake wholly to his god-head.

  Well, let each of us be true to his own light. But for me there must be no withdrawal. Let me live somehow in the two world at once. Immersed in the temporal, let me nonetheless look with a far-seeing or an inner gaze on the eternal. Let me indeed see the eternal; but I must find it within the temporal, not beyond. The grit and hardness of the rock under the climber's fingers are not phantom. If he thinks them so, he is lost. Yes, and his goal is no cosmical panorama from a summit perhaps inaccessible; his goal is the climbing; to adapt himself, body and mind to objective reality, and thereby to express the spirit in him. This; but also (in sidelong glances only) to be as aware as may be of the depth below and the sky above, and the whole horizon of mountains. This, surely, is the truth that you and I together have conceived, each contributing. Is it not so?

  I found that the mystic had left his chair and was standing beside me, considering my face, and smiling. "My way," he said, "is not yours; and yours, not mine. Be true to your own light, as I shall be to mine. There is a place for both our kinds."

  Gently, he took my arm and led me to the door.

  Fourth Encounter:

  A REVOLUTIONARY

  I have met a formidable young man, a revolutionary, and I must tell you about him.

  I had left the car in the ditch with its bent front axle. (How machinery can fetter us, not only by its promise of ease and power but also by its helpless- ness when broken!) A passing lorry brought me to the town. The first garage refused the salvage, being shorthanded. The second offered to bring the car in at once and to repair it next week. And there was I with my engagement next morning and my journey scarcely begun! The third also refused; but in the end the boss, a genial creature, clumsily acting the part of a go-getter, agreed to spare me one man on condition that I myself, since I claimed to be not entirely without experience, should work as his (unskilled) assistant.

  A pale young mechanic was summoned. He had a slight limp and the face of a nun; or perhaps rather an abbess, for it combined purity and authority. His challenging eye surprised me with an occasional sharp twitch of the eyelid, which at first I mistook for a wink. His hair, plastered but unruly, had broken rank. A heavy lock drooped over his brow. I thought of the trailed wing of a damaged bird. Raven, I wondered, or jackdaw? And was the hurt actual, I foolishly wondered, or feigned to distract strangers from some secret treasure? He regarded me as though passing a private and unfavourable judgment on me, glancing at my hands. My smile won no response.

  *****

  Presently we were in the breakdown lorry, with its crane, a megatherian but jaunty tail cocked up behind. A sparrow perched for a moment on its crest, but took wing when we started. To make conversation, I told about the accident, explaining that apparently the steering gear had broken. The mechanic said only, "We shall see." And without shifting his eyes from the road he winked, or so it seemed. Perplexed and disconcerted by his taciturnity, I apologized for fetching him out in filthy weather. He answered, "I'm paid for it."

  When we had reached the crippled car, he expertly examined the trouble, while I put on my overalls. Presently he said, "Steering seized up and broken. Steering-arm bolt sheered. The joint has been parched for oil." His raised eyebrows censured me.

  When the crane had been manoeuvred into position, my companion crouched on the wet grass to fix the chain for lifting the front of the car. I stood by, willing but unhelpful; gloomily studying the scurf in the young man's hair, and a gnat that had lost itself in that black jungle. After a good deal of manipulation and removal of obstacles, he succeeded in looping the chain round the axle; then he invited me to turn the windlass of the crane while he kept an eye on the car's hoisted head. The wheels were soon free of the ground, and we swung the crippled vehicle round into line for towing. The mechanic mounted the lorry's driving seat. I took up my position beside him, producing cigarettes.

  On the slow journey to the garage I attempted several gambits of conversation, from the weather to politics, from the flicks to the economic crisis. His responses were perfunctory and brief. At last I challenged him on more intimate ground. "Do you like your job? It must be tiring, but it's good skilled work, and socially useful." He laughed sourly. Then after a pause he said, "It's all right." I did not pursue the matter. It was as though I had been vainly knocking at a shut door in a shabby street; suspecting, moreover, that I had caught sight of someone watching through curtains.

  *****

  In the garage, with its hum of machinery, clatter of metal, smell of exhaust gases, and an occasional splutter of curses from a mechanic at work under a nearby car, we set about dismantling the axle.

  I must tell you about the work in some detail, even if it wearies you, because I cannot give the man without his environment; and the main feature of his environment was the all-pervading and exacting presence of mechanism; of sick machines, which imposed trains of meticulous activity upon their human doctors and nurses.

  Our task, for instance, was quite a complicated one; and I soon found that in the twenty-five years since I had tackled this sort of thing techniques had changed. We had to take off the two front wheels, disconnect the track rod, remove the damaged bolt from the steering arm, and substitute a new one. Then came the operation of relieving the axle of its two stub axles, those great hinges on which the wheels turn sideways for steering. Finally, we had to unscrew the four stirrup bolts that hold the axle to the two front springs. Then at last we should be able to undertake the job of straightening the axle. There was also a damaged wing to be roughly repaired.

  I regarded the operations ahead of us with exasperation and gloom, for to me they were just an irrelevance. But my companion attacked the work with quiet relish, or so I inferred from his loving way of handling the tools, and a certain firm delicacy and rhythm in all his actions.

  While he worked on one side of the car, I hesitantly and clumsily attacked the corresponding member on the other side. He, of course, was always ahead of me. Sometimes, if he saw I was in difficulty, he would come round to help me. Once, when I felt him watching my awkward movements, I was flustered and let my spanner slip, barking my knuckles. To my surprise he said, consolingly, "Bad luck! The best of us do that sometimes." Then he added, with a new friendliness, which however was salted with sarcasm, "You don't handle the tools quite like a novice. Learned the tricks of the trade on your own car, I suppose?" I told him vaguely that I had spent most of the First War on cars, and a short spell in a workshop. He made no comment.

  Well, after a lot of struggling and sweating on my part we had the freed members all parked by the garage wall, and the mutilated front of the car looking rather like a skull with no lower jaw. We also removed the crumpled wing; and then we carried the axle to the forge and settled it snugly into the coals. I, unbidden, took charge of the bellows, while my colleague piled on more fuel and made ready the blacksmith's tools. Then he waited, and we both watched the rhythmically increasing glow. Producing from within his overalls a small green packet, he offered me a cigarette. I said, "I don't seem to have much wind to spare at the moment." But I accepted the fag, and put it behind my ear. I saw him smile to himself at this too consciously proletarian gesture. Then, taking a long pair of pincers, he picked out a bright coal and lit his own cigarette. For some time he watched me critically. Presently he said, "You have forgotten the trick. Don't work so hard at it. Let her keep her own rhythm." I slowed down; but my action remained awkward, for I was self-conscious under his scrutiny. Presently he relieved me at the bellows, and we both smoked.

  Anxious to seem thoroughly at ease, I remarked brightly that I was rather enjoying myself as a garage hand. He replied, "Just as well, since you're not paid for the job." Uncertainly, I said something to the effect that it was good practical skilled work, and that watching him I couldn't help feeling he enjoyed it himself. To this he answered rather violently, "If you had to stick to it all day and every day, you'd soon get fed up with the whole bloody life."

  I was disconcerted by the note of anger in his voice. To my clumsy reminder that he had said his work was "all right," he answered, "At bottom it's all right, and it might be grand, but--" He eyed me as though debating whether to be frank or not, but remained silent. I queried, "Conditions bad?" "Good enough," he said, "but, well, society makes the whole thing all wrong." To my silly grunt of sympathy he replied hastily, "Oh, I'm well enough fixed up myself, really. The boss is all right, as they go. Might be a real good sort if it weren't for his false position, as employer. The pay gives me all I need, for the present. But, hell, what's it all for, the work, I mean? You said it was socially useful work, and so it might be. But the actual aim, naturally, is just to put money in his pocket, and to--" When I goaded him to go on, he said with sudden rage, "To help people like you with plenty of money to waste society's petrol on amusing themselves."

  He looked at me with the cold gaze of a duellist who has drawn blood and is ready to parry the counterstroke. But I merely laughed off my small wound and said, "I see." He continued to oppose me with his rapier glance, and presently he said, quietly, "You might get me sacked for that." "That way," I said, "I should earn the contempt of a man I respect. Even if we are on opposite sides of the class war, which we're not really, we can treat each other with the respect due from person to person." He threw the butt of his fag into the forge. "Persons!" he snorted. "Cells in a sick society, nothing more! We are determined through and through by our social conditioning, and mainly by the thought forms imposed on us by the economic circumstances of the particular class to which each of us belongs." Once more the wink. He added, "Of course it's not really your fault you're a cell in the cancer lump; nor any credit to me that I am a humble muscle cell, and relatively sound." Again the wink.

 

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