Suddenly the
remembrance of some of the things which Jack Sandys had said that
morning came back to him; "real things" the boy had said, so
lightly and yet so decisively. He wondered; had he himself ever had
any touch with realities at all? He had been touched by no
adversity or tragedy, he had been devastated by no disappointed
ambitions, shattered by no emotions. His whole life had been
perfectly under his control, and he had grown into a sort of
contempt for all unbalanced people, who were run away with by their
instincts or passions. It had been a very comfortable, sheltered,
happy life; he was sure of that; he had enjoyed his work, his
relations with others, his friendships; but had he ever come near
to any fulness of living at all? Was it not, when all was said and
done, a very empty affair--void of experience, guarded from
suffering? "Suffering?" he hardly knew the meaning of the word. Had
he ever felt or suffered or rebelled? Yes, there was one little
thing. He had had a small ambition once; he had studied comparative
religion very carefully at one time to illustrate some lectures,
and a great idea had flashed across him. It was a big, a fruitful
thought; he had surveyed that strange province of human emotion,
the deepest strain of which seemed to be a disgust for mingling
with life, a loathing of bodily processes and instincts, which
drove its votaries to a deliberate sexlessness, and set them at
variance with the whole solid force of Nature, the treacherous and
alluring devices by which she drove men to reproduction with an
insatiable appetite; that mystical strain, which appeared at all
times and in all places, a spiritual rebellion against material
bondage, was not that the desperate cry of the fettered spirit? The
conception of sin, by which Nature traversed her own activities and
made them void--there was a great secret hidden here.
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