at.

There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or weeping. In
the midst of it a man who had been trimming the opposite hedge appeared
and stared at me.

Abruptly, ridiculously, I dissembled before him and went on and caught
my train....

But the pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times; it is with me as
I write. It haunts this book, I see, that is what haunts this book, from
end to end.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA

I

I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened
to me. In the beginning--the sheets are still here on the table, grimy
and dogs-eared and old-looking--I said I wanted to tell MYSELF and the
world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I
have succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and dead
and trite and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the last
person to judge it.

As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things
become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my
experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of
activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I
had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of
my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope
is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the
energy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious scheming
with my uncle, of Crest Hill's vast cessation, of his resonant strenuous
career. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to live as he lived.
It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use
and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless
fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. And now I build
destroyers!

Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I have
seen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all our present
colour and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down the
leaves. That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. It
may be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To
others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with
hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that
finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our
time.

How they will look in history I