e did not suspect that his mother knew he
had come from Esther and how fast his blood was running.

XXVI

Jeff, writing hard on his book to tell men they were prisoners and had
to get free, was tremendously happy. He thought he saw the whole game
now, the big game these tiny issues reflected in a million mirrors. You
were given life and incalculable opportunity. But you were allowed to go
it blind. They never really interfered with you, the terrible They up
there: for he could not help believing there was an Umpire of the game,
though nobody, it seemed, was permitted to see the score until long
afterward, when the trumpery rewards had been distributed. (Some of them
were not trumpery; they were as big as the heavens and the sea.) He
found a great many things to laugh over, sane, kind laughter, in the way
the game was played there in Addington. Religion especially seemed to
him the big absurd paradox. Here were ingenuous worshippers preserving a
form of observance as primitive as the burnt-offerings before a god of
bronze or wood. They went to church and placated their god, and swore
they believed certain things the acts of their lives repudiated. They
made a festival at Christmas time and worshipped at the manger and
declared God had come to dwell among men. They honored Joseph who was
the spouse of Mary, and who was a carpenter, and on the twenty-sixth of
December they nodded with condescension to their own carpenter, if they
met him in the street, or they failed to see him at all. And their
carpenter, who was doing his level best to prevent them from grinding
the face of labour, himself ground the face of his brother carpenter if
his brother did not heartily co-operate in keeping hours down and
prices up. And everybody was behaving from the prettiest of motives;
that was the joke of it. They not only said their prayers before going
out to trip up the competitor who was lying in wait to trip up them;
they actually believed in the efficacy of the prayer. They glorified an
arch apostle of impudence who pricked bubbles for them--a modern
literary light--but they went on blowing their bubbles just the same,
and when the apostle of impudence pricked them again they only said:
"Oh, it's so amusing!" and blew more. And even the apostle of impudence
wasn't so busy pricking bubbles that he didn't have time to blow bubbles
of his own, and even he didn't know how thin and hollow his own bubbles
were, which was the reason