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By Root 13892 0

‘They’re my favourite reading,’ he was fond of saying. A search was made for the writers. Two Russian Jews from Houndsditch, a Nottingham typist and an ardent young undergraduate of Balliol, were identified as the authors of the most menacing and arrested, only to be released again almost immediately. The days passed. The murderers remained at large. Public interest in the crime was not allowed to abate. In part of the conservative press it was openly affirmed that the LiberalLabour Government had given orders to the police that the affair was not to be too closely looked into. ‘Screening the Murderers.’ ‘Socialists fear the Light.’ ‘Politics before the Ten Commandments.’ The headlines were lively. The crime was a godsend to the opposition. The Daily Mail offered ten thousand pounds reward to any person who would give information leading to the arrest of Webley’s murderers. Meanwhile, the British Freemen had almost doubled their numbers in a week. ‘Are you on the side of Murder? If not, join the British Freemen.’ The posters glared from every hoarding. Troops of Freemen in uniform and plain clothes scoured London canvassing for recruits, making patriotic demonstrations, doing amateur detective work. They also took the opportunity to beat a number of people with whose opinions they disagreed. In Tottenham and East Ham they fought pitched battles with hostile crowds and damaged numerous policemen. At Everard’s funeral a green procession more than three miles long followed the coffin to the grave.

Spandrell read all the papers every morning. They amused him. What a farce! What knockabout! What an incomparable idiocy! To Illidge, who had gone down to Lancashire to stay with his mother, he sent a picture postcard of Everard in uniform on his white horse—the shops were full of them now; hawkers peddled them in the streets. ‘The dead lion seems likely to do much more damage than the live dog,’ he wrote on the back. ‘God was always a joker.’

God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But perhaps that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.

‘God’s not apart, not above, not outside.’ He remembered what Rampion had once said. ‘At any rate, no relevant, humanly important aspect of God’s above and outside. Neither is God inside, in the sense that the Protestants use the phrase—safely stowed away in the imagination, in the feelings and intellect, in the soul. He’s there, of course among other places. But he’s also inside in the sense that a lump of bread’s inside when you’ve eaten it. He’s in the very body, in the blood and bowels, in the heart and skin and loins. God’s the total result, spiritual and physical, of any thought or action that makes for life, of any vital relation with the world. God’s a quality of actions and relations—a felt, experienced quality. At any rate, he’s that for our purposes, for purposes of living. Because, of course for purposes of knowing and speculating he may be dozens of other things as well. He may be a Rock of Ages; he may be the Jehovah of the Old Testament; he may be anything you like. But what’s that got to do with us as living corporeal beings? Nothing, nothing but harm, at any rate. The moment you allow speculative truth to take the place of felt instinctive truth as a guide to living, you ruin everything.’

Spandrell had protested. Men must have absolutes, must steer by fixed external marks. ‘Music exists,’ he concluded, ‘even though you personally happen to be unmusical. You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.

‘Speculatively, theoretically, yes. Admit it as much as you like. But don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don