t a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity
to think how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling
long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great
central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the
disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for
Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner
should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He DID mean
that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made
of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting
inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long
procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He wasn't human," I said,
and remembered that last despairing cry, "My God! My God! why hast Thou
forsaken Me?"

"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind will,
with an obvious repartee....

I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage
against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I
wanted--in the intervals of love and fine thinking--to fling about that
strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW
into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous
rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that
transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive
anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of
exhaustion.

"I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me
and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I
save what I can? I can't save myself without her...."

I remember myself--as a sort of anti-climax to that--rather tediously
asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland
Park....

It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without
any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to
Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest
facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt
for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and
the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that.
I hope now that in this book I am able to give something of her silvery
splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of th