Such was Mr Myame’s formal exit. But something of him hung about in dreamland to the very end of Edward Albert’s days.
Mr Myame had figured in a string of religious nightmares during a phase of dyspepsia and influenza following upon a revivalist sermon Edward Albert had been miraculously induced to hear by a sudden shower of rain. “Strait is the gate,” tenored the revivalist, “and narrow is the way!”—the very first words Edward Albert heard. How many times had he not called Mr Myame narrow? Narrow is the way. You cannot be too careful. Hell is on either side.
With these rapid confusions of identity natural in dreamland, Mr Myame would be at one moment himself and at another his own just and terrible God, who, according to the best Christian authorities, had created a world of sinners in order to hunt it remorselessly to a hell of everlasting torture. This amiable Divinity overhung him, pouring coals of Jupiter upon him out of a kind of cornucopia scuttle. Edward Albert screamed noiselessly in the dreamland way. He awoke rigid with horror and for days his soul was black with spiritual dismay.
He dreaded bedtime and those God-ridden hours.
There was nothing to be done about them, except live through them. You can’t give up going to bed. And gradually they were pushed out of his consciousness by returning health and the steady onset of that other dominant system of urgencies in the human metamorphosis, the convergent factors of the sexual drive. That too shall be told with the same disinterested integrity that we have observed hitherto, at any cost to the lingering illusions and natural modesty of reader and writer alike.
BOOK III.
The Marrying, Divorce and Early Middle Age of Edward Albert Tewler
I. Species Homo Tewler
I am telling the simple life story of one individual Londoner, and I am pledged not to stray from a plain objective narrative; nevertheless it has already been necessary to supplement this record of acts and deeds by statements of a more general nature, to place the story definitely” in its historical perspective. Just as if you are making a deposition about murder on the high seas you have, if possible, to indicate the latitude and longitude of the ship. It has been necessary, for instance, to indicate the rôle of the feudal and Christian traditions, if the story is to be read understandingly by an enlightened American or Russian or Chinese reader, or to have any value for that posterity to which, under the restrictions of the present paper shortage, it is mainly addressed. And now furthermore in one brief but concentrated section we must broaden our reference wider still and show not merely Tewler in terms of terrestrial latitude and longitude but Tewler in relation to the starry universe, to space and time and ideals...
We have already called attention to the general nature of the Metamorphosis through which Edward Albert passed out of his tadpole stage. We must expand a little more on that, because it explains why his love life, as we may call it, was widely different in its nature from the simple, concentrated, exciting and even beautiful romanticism, which the literature of our present social order is preserving for the inspiration of posterity.
In the plays and novels of that now rapidly vanishing past, from which, like people who have been salvaged from a severely bombed city, we are emerging stunned and uncertain; in that literature, I say, the characters are definitely described as being “in love with” so and so. This being “in love” is a specific concentration of desire and affection upon the “object”, who is always of the opposite sex, and it excludes all other interests. The character “falls” into it, It is presented as the common quality of all the humanity that is fit to print. A rake is a person in whom this state of mind is less enduring than usual, but when he is in it, he is in it as simply and entirely as a really good man. And most villains are made villains through scorned and unrequited love. The tragedies of life are when A is in love with B and B on the contrary loves G or anyhow does not return A’s love. The dark side of love comes up when B, for mercenary reasons, pretends to be in love with A. And further B may love C unknowingly when believing himself or herself to be in love with A. Moreover, there was a process, exactly parallel to religious conversion, when B “learnt to love” A, or gradually fell out of love with A and into love with C. Around this primary system of adult loves were grouped equally firm and invariable loves—of mothers, of sons and daughters.
Just as hardly anyone in that idealistic past, believed his religion, which was really far too complex and artificial for any human brain to understand and believe, but only liked to believe he .believed it, so the worthy generation into which Edward Albert was born liked to believe it had a simple, explicable, and generally acceptable “love life.” In each case there was a fundamental falsification of reality. The story our progenitors told was not how they were actually behaving. It was just how they wanted to believe they behaved. But why did they all, Edward Albert included, distort reality like that?
The normal human being, you may have observed, has a passion for autobiography. You have it yourself. If you deny it indignantly, that means merely that you have it in its more passive form. I have told you something that you resent because it does not tally with the story about yourself that you tell yourself. This passion becomes oppressively manifests for instance, in fellow-travellers on ships, whose minds have been relaxed by a flux of strangers at leisure, and it is particularly evident in general conversation in America. At bottom every American seems to be in a state of wonder at his own high and profound motivation, and as anxious to make himself believe it all as to convince you.
And this is natural enough, and was to be expected, because the riddles of human conduct are far more difficult than those of any other animal. The onrush of social life has come to this lonely-spirited ape, for that is what we still are fundamentally, at headlong speed, through a conspiracy of inventions and devices, in a few thousand generations, and he has found himself involved with an ever-expanding multitude of fellow-citizens, whom he is disposed to fear and to hate and to get the better of in almost equal measure.
This is no mere theorising, or it would be quite out of place here. This is simply a repetition in general terms of the case of Edward Albert Tewler as it has been put before you in the preceding two books, unobtrusively for the most part, but with an outbreak of explicitness in Book the Second, Chapter Three. It is the case of Homo Tewler > which includes all of us—Homo sapiens existing as yet only in the dreamlands of aspiration. This poor uncomfortable creature is continually doing its best to make a plausibly consistent story of its behaviour both to itself and the social world about it, and to be guided by that legend so as to escape an open breach with its environment. The urgency we are under to pull ourselves together and make an acceptable account of ourselves finds its outlet in these yarns about religious experience and consistent love that we force upon one another at every opportunity.
So it has been since the ancestral Tewler (Pithecanthropus Tewler) found himself coming down from his nice safe tree nests to the agoraphobia of the ground level and, with the most strenuous suppressions of his primary instincts, living in ever-expanding communities. He wants intensely to say,
“You can rely on me to do this. It is quite impossible for me to do that. But since I am a Moslem you cannot expect me to do that! No healthy Englishman would dream of...”