'A dirty, draughty reach. No reason for it. Scuppers a man,' he said. 'And yet' - he shook his white locks- 'it isn't true, you know. I don't believe in draughts. I don't believe I'm cold. I don't believe in anything! ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I can't agree with you, for instance.'
His companion, a younger man, with long, hollow cheeks, cocked his head as though it were the breech of a gun. Then he raised his eyebrow as much as to say, 'Carry on...: but the old man remained silent. Then the young man raised his voice as though he were raising the dead, for it was a singularly flat and colourless affair...
'How do you mean, sir, that you can't agree?'
'I just can't,' said the old man, bending forward, his hands gripped before him, 'that's all.'
The young man righted his head and dropped his eyebrow.
'But I haven't 'said' anything yet: we've only just met, you know.'
'You may be right,' replied the old man, stroking his beard. 'You may very well be right; I can't say.'
'But I tell you I haven't 'spoken'!' The colourless voice was raised, and the young man's eyes made a tremendous effort to flash; but either the tinder was wet or the updraught insufficient, for they remained peculiarly sparkless.
'I haven't 'spoken',' he repeated.
'Oh, that!' said the old man. 'I don't need to depend on that.' He gave a low, horribly knowledgeable laugh. 'I can't agree, that's all. With your face, for instance. It's wrong -like everything else. Life is so simple when you see it that way - ha, ha, ha, ha!' The low, intestinal enjoyment which he got out of his attitude to life was frightful to the young man, who, ignoring his own nature, his melancholy, ineffectual face, his white voice, his lightless eyes, became angry.
'And 'I' don't agree with 'you'!' he shouted. 'I don't agree with the way you bend your ghastly old knacker's-yard of a body at such an absurd angle. I don't agree with the way' your white beard hangs from your chin like dirty seaweed... I don't agree with your broken teeth... I...'
The old man was delighted; his stomach laughter cackled on and on... 'But nor do I, young man,' he wheezed... 'nor do I. I don't agree with it, either. You see, I don't even agree that I'm here; and even if I did I wouldn't agree that I ought to be. The whole thing is ridiculously simple.'
'You're being cynical!' cried the young man; 'so you are!'
'Oh no,' said the old man with short legs, 'I don't believe in being anything. If only people would stop trying to 'be' things! What can they be, after all, beyond what they already are - or would be if I believed that they were anything?'
'Vile! vile! VILE!' shouted the young man with hollow cheeks. His thwarted passions had found vent after thirty years of indecision. 'Surely we have long enough in the grave, you old beast, in which to be 'nothing' - in which to be cold and finished with! Must life be like that, too? No, no! let us burn!' he cried. 'Let us burn our blood away in life's high bonfire!'
But the old philosopher replied: 'The grave, young man, is not what you imagine. You insult the dead, young man. With every reckless word, you smirch a tomb, deface a sepulchre, disturb with clumsy boots the humble death-mound. For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless. Have you not seen them coming over the hills at dusk, the angels of eternity? Have you not?'
'No, said the young man, 'I haven't!'
The bearded figure leaned even further forward and fixed the young man with his gaze.
'What! you have never seen the angels of eternity, with their wings as big as blankets?'
'No,' said the young man. 'And I don't want to.'
'To the ignorant nothing is profound,' said the bearded ancient. 'You called me a cynic. How can I be? I am nothing. The greater contains the less. But this I will tell you: though the Castle is a barren image - though green trees, bursting with life, are in reality bursting for lack of it - when the April lamb is realized to be nothing more nor less than a lamb in April- when these things are known and accepted, then, oh, it is then' - he was stroking his beard very fast by this time - 'that you are on the borderland of Death's amazing kingdom, where everything moves twice as fast, and the colours are twice as bright, and love is twice as gorgeous, and sin is twice as spicy. Who but the doubly purblind can fail to see that it is only on the Other Side that one can begin to Agree? But here, here...' he motioned with his hands as though to dismiss the terrestrial world - 'what is there to agree with? There is no sensation here, no sensation at all.'
'There is joy and pain,' said the young man.
'No, mo, no. Pure illusion,' said the ancient. 'But in Death's amazing kingdom Joy is unconfined. It will be nothing to dance for a month on end in the celestial pastures... nothing at all. Or to sing as one flies astride a burning eagle... to sing out of the gladness of one's breast.'
'And what of pain?' said the youth.
'We have invented the idea of pain in order to indulge ourselves in self-pity,' was the reply. 'But Real Pain, as we have it on the Other Side, that will be worth having. It 'will' be an experience to burn one's finger in the Kingdom.'
'What if 'I' set fire to your white beard, you old fraud!' shouted the young man, who had stubbed his toes during the day and knew the validity of the earthly discomforts.
'What if you did, my child?'
'It would sting your jaw, and you know it!' cried the youth.
The supercilious smile which played across the lips of the theorist was unbearable, and his companion had no strength to stop himself as he stretched out his arm for the nearest candle and lit the beard that hung there like a challenge. It flared up quickly and gave to the horrified and astonished expression of the old man an unreal and theatrical quality which belied the very real pain, terrestrial though it was, which he felt, first of all, against his jaw and then along the sides of his head.
A shrill and terrible scream from his old throat, and the corridor was at once filled with figures, as though they had been awaiting their entrance cues. Coats were thrown over his head and shoulders and the flames stifled, but not before the excited youth with the hollow cheeks had made his escape, never to be heard of again.
SPIREGRAIN, THROD AND SPLINT
The old man was carried to his room, a small dark-red box of a place, with no carpet on the floor, but a picture over the mantelpiece of a fairy sitting in a buttercup against a very blue sky. After three days he recovered consciousness only to die of shock a moment later when he remembered what had happened.
Among those present at the death-bed in the small red room were the three friends of the old fire-blackened pedagogue.
They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck against one another and were tilted indecorously.
And yet it was a moving moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their master lay dying below them. Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?
Under their black leather mortar-boards their heads dislodged the innocent air, remorselessly as though their brows, noses and jaws, like the features of a figurehead, were cleaving paths for them through viewless water. Only in their hanging gowns, their flat leather mortar-boards and the tassels that hung like the grizzly spilths that swing from turkeys' beaks, had they anything in common.