the Zeppelin making off, high and far
in the sky, a thing dwindling to nothing among the stars, and the
thought of those murderers escaping him. Time after time he stood still
and shook his fist at Booetes, slowly sweeping up the sky....

And at last, sick and wretched, he sat down on a seat upon the deserted
parade under the stars, close to the soughing of the invisible sea
below....

His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the
Gnostics and the Manichaeans which saw the God of the World as altogether
evil, which sought only to escape by the utmost abstinences and evasions
and perversions from the black wickedness of being. For a while his soul
sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair. "I
who have loved life," he murmured, and could have believed for a time
that he wished he had never had a son....

Is the whole scheme of nature evil? Is life in its essence cruel? Is man
stretched quivering upon the table of the eternal vivisector for no
end--and without pity?

These were thoughts that Mr. Britling had never faced before the war.
They came to him now, and they came only to be rejected by the inherent
quality of his mind. For weeks, consciously and subconsciously, his mind
had been grappling with this riddle. He had thought of it during his
lonely prowlings as a special constable; it had flung itself in
monstrous symbols across the dark canvas of his dreams. "Is there indeed
a devil of pure cruelty? Does any creature, even the very cruellest of
creatures, really apprehend the pain it causes, or inflict it for the
sake of the infliction?" He summoned a score of memories, a score of
imaginations, to bear their witness before the tribunal of his mind. He
forgot cold and loneliness in this speculation. He sat, trying all
Being, on this score, under the cold indifferent stars.

He thought of certain instances of boyish cruelty that had horrified him
in his own boyhood, and it was clear to him that indeed it was not
cruelty, it was curiosity, dense textured, thick skinned, so that it
could not feel even the anguish of a blinded cat. Those boys who had
wrung his childish soul to nigh intolerable misery, had not indeed been
tormenting so much as observing torment, testing life as wantonly as one
breaks thin ice in the early days of winter. In very much cruelty the
real motive is surely no worse than that obtuse curiosity; a mere step
of understanding, a mere quickening of th