That's pretty beastly, you know, but how
is one to help it? Then my affection for it is very futile. I can't
establish a civilised system here; I can't prevent the creatures from
eating each other, or the trees from crowding out the flowers. I can't eat
or use the things myself, I can't take them away with me; I can only stand
and yearn with cheap sentiment.
"And yet," he said after a moment, "there's something here in this bit of
copse that whispers to me beautiful secrets--the sunshine among the stems,
the rustle of leaves, the wandering breeze, the scent and coolness of it
all! It is crammed with beauty; it is all trying to live, and glad to live.
You may say, of course, that you don't see all that in it, and it is I that
am abnormal. But that doesn't explain it away. The fact that I feel it is a
better proof that it is there than the fact that you don't feel it is a
proof that it isn't there! The only thing about it that isn't beautiful to
me is the fact that life can't live except by taking life--that there is no
right to live; and that, I admit, is disconcerting. You may say to me, 'You
old bully, crammed with the corpses of sheep and potatoes, which you
haven't even had the honesty to kill for yourself, you dare to come here,
and talk this stuff about the beauty of it all, and the joy of living. If
all the bodies of the things you have consumed in your bloated life were
piled together, it would make a thing as big as a whole row of ricks!' If
you say that, I admit that you take the sentiment out of my sails!"
"But I don't say it," said I: "Who dies if Father Payne live?"
He laughed at this, and clapped me on the back.
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