on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces
of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps
the spirit which had driven them into these dark boxes to gaze
open-mouthed, crying or laughing, through a peep-hole into a world of
ideal happiness, or even ideal sorrow, was dead and gone like their faith
in God and every other futile shadow which they had tried to interpose
between themselves and truth. This that remained was perhaps no more
than a tradition--a convention. When people were bored or unhappy they
said: "Let's go to a theatre!" and when they came out they wondered why
they had been, or what they had hoped for.

Reality was beginning to press hard on men. It was driving them into an
iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. Suicide and madness,
obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it. Perhaps, after
all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories. And he
remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot's final
shaft: "If there isn't a God you'll have to make one up." But even if a
man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no
faith-serum which you could inject into a patient's veins.

Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the
stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference. He was no
better. All day long he lay on his bed in the small spare room Robert
had given him and stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack,
running zig-zag from the window to the door, which reminded him, so he
said, of a river in Angola, a beastly slimy thing trailing through
mosquito-infested swamps and villainous-tangled jungles. When he dozed
it became real, and he felt the heat descend on him like a sticky hand,
and heard the menacing drone of the mosquitoes and the splash of oars as
unfriendly natives who had tracked him along the water's edge shot out
suddenly from under the shadow of the mango trees in their long
boats--deadly and swift as striking adders.

And then, near the door, the river broke off--poured into the open
sea--or fell over a cataract--he did not know what--and he woke up with a
sweating start and took his medicine. He was so painstakingly docile
about his medicine that Robert Stonehouse guessed he had no faith in it.
Sometimes indeed he had an idea that Cosgrave was rather sorry for him,
very much as old people are sorry for the young,