WHEN he rose every morning, the first thing he would do was to fall on his knees beside his bed. His figure in its white garment—for he wore a nightshirt—was rather long and lean, and looked its longest thus bent from the loins. His thick fair hair, little disturbed by sleep, together with a glimpse of sanguine neck and cheek, was all that could be seen above that figure, for his face was buried in the counterpane. Here he would commune with the deity he had constructed for himself out of his secret aspirations and desires, out of his most private consciousness. In the long and subtle processes of contemplation this deity had come to be a big white-clothed figure, whose face and head were shrouded from his gaze in frosty dimness, but whose hands—great hands, a little red—were always clearly visible, reposing motionless on knees parted beneath the white and flowing garment. The figure appeared in his imagination seated as it were on air ten or fifteen feet above the floor of a white, wide, marble corridor, and its great hands seemed to be pressing down and stilling all that came before them. So oddly concrete was this image that sometimes he addressed no prayers to it, but knelt, simply feeling that it was sitting there above him; and when at last he raised his head, a strange aspiring look had come into his strained eyes, and face suffused with blood. When he did pray, he himself hardly knew for what he prayed, unless it were to be made like his deity, that sat so quiet, above the marble corridor.
For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order—it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave, freed from the still, cold hands of Power. He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust—which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places—had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust. And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself. She had marked him down as quite a tiny boy, walking with his governess, chopping the heads off thistles with his stick, and ordering his brothers’ games precisely, so that they should all know what they were playing at. She had seen him take his dog, and, squatting on the floor, hold it close to the biscuit that it did not want to eat; and she had marked the expression in his grey eyes, fixed on that little white fox-terrier, trying so hard to back out through her collar. She saw at once that he did not trust the little creature to know whether it required to eat the biscuit; it was her proper time for eating it, and even though by holding her nose close he could not make her eat it, he could put her in the corner for not eating it. And having in due course seen him do so, Nature had felt ever since that he would keep himself apart, year by year and step by step, till he was safely serving in the cold, still corridors of Power. She watched him, then, with interest, throughout his school and university career, considering what division of the State she had best build with him, though whether he should work at feeding soldiers, at supervising education, or organizing the incarceration of his fellows, did not seem to her to matter much. In all these things order was essential, and the love of placing the hand kindly but firmly on the public head, desirable; further, these were all things that must be done, and with her unerring instinct for economy, Nature saw that he should do them.
He had accordingly entered the State’s service at a proper age, and had remained there, rising.
Well aware that his was an occupation tending to the constriction of the mind, he had early made a practice of keeping it elastic by reading, argument, and a habit of presenting every case in every light, before pronouncing judgment; indeed, he would often take another person’s point of view, and, having improved on it, show that it was not really what the person thought it. Only when he was contradicted did a somewhat ugly look come into his eyes, and a peculiar smile contract his straight lips between his little fair moustache and his little, carefully kept, fair beard. At such moments he would raise his hands—red, and shapely, though rather large—as though about to press them on the head or shoulders of the presumptuous person. For, certain as he was that he always took all points of view before deciding any matter, he knew he must be right. But he was careful not to domineer in any way, recognising that to domineer was peculiarly unbecoming in a bureaucrat.
Keeping his mind elastic, he was always ready to welcome any sort of progress; the word indeed was often on his lips, and he regarded the thing itself as essential to the well-being of any modern State; it was only when some particular kind of progress happened to be mentioned that he felt any doubt. Then, caressing his beard slowly, and, if possible, taking up a pen, he would point out the difficulties. These were, it seemed, more numerous than the lay mind had imagined.
In the first place one must clearly understand what was meant by this word progress; he would personally not admit that it meant advancing backwards. If this were established as a premise, it became imperative to ask whether the public were in a fit condition to assimilate this measure of so-called reform. Personally he had grave doubts; he was open to conviction, but his doubts were grave. And a very little smile would part his lips, seeming to say: “Yes, yes, my dear sir; progress—you use the word most glibly, and we all of us admit that it is necessary; but if you suppose that we are going to progress by trusting human nature—well, pardon me, but is there any precedent? One could trust oneself, no doubt, because of one’s sense of duty to one’s deity, but—men at large! If you think a minute you will see that they have practically no sense of duty or responsibility at all. You say you wish to foster it, but, my dear sir, if we foster it, what becomes of—Government? Depend on it, a sense of duty is only the possession of a few who have been trained to have it; and I cannot think it wise to take the slightest risk in a matter of this gravity. The bonds that keep us all together, and me on the top—in my place, the machinery of morals and the State, are being daily loosened by disintegrating forces, and considering that I am here—by natural selection, not by accident—to keep the ship together, I am not exactly likely to help another wave to knock the ship to pieces. ‘It is,’ you say, ‘a question of degree.’ I consider that a very dangerous saying. I have little doubt that all so-called reforms at all times have been ushered in by the use of that expression. You make the fundamental error of overtrusting human nature. Believe me, if you lived here, and saw the machinery of things as closely as I see it, and worked, as I do, in this powerful atmosphere, and knew the worry and the difficulty of changing anything, and the thanklessness of the public that one works for, you would soon get a very different notion of the necessity of what you call reform. You must bear in mind the fact that the State has carefully considered what is best for all, and that I am only an official of the State. And now I have three hours at least before I can get away, of important details (which you, no doubt, despise), connected with the business of the State, and which it is my duty and my pride to transact efficiently; so that you will forgive me if I drop a subject, on which of course I am still open to conviction. Progress, we must all admit, is necessary, but, I assure you, in this case you are making a mistake.”
The little smile died off his lips, and preceding the intruder to the door, he politely opened it. Then, in the marble corridor, he raised his eyes above his visitor’s retiring back. There, with its great red hands on the knees parted beneath a white and flowing robe, sat Power—his deity; and a silent prayer, far too instinctive and inevitable to be expressed in words, rose through the stagnant, dusty atmosphere:
“O great image that put me here, knowing as thou must the failings of my fellow-beings, give me power to see that they do right; let me provide for them the moral and the social diet they require. For, since I have been here, I have daily, hourly, humbly felt more certain of what it is they really want; more assured that, through thy help, I am the person who can give it them. O great image, before thou didst put me here I was not quite certain about anything, but now, thanks be to thee, everything is daily clearer and more definite; and I am less and less harassed by my spirit. Let this go on, great image, till my spirit is utterly at rest, and I am cold and still and changeless as this marble corridor.”