Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [141]
But there was a slight mistake. The Consul was not talking. Apparently not. The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last, at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and complete, order:
"The act of a madman or a drunkard, old bean," he said, "or of a man labouring under violent excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable to the one who does not know it."
It was like a piece on a piano, it was like that little bit in seven flats, on the black keys--it was what, more or less, he now remembered, he'd gone to the excusado in the first place in order to remember, to bring off pat--it was perhaps also like Hugh's quotation from Matthew Arnold on Marcus Aurelius, like that little piece one had learned, so laboriously, years ago, only to forget whenever one particularly wanted to play it, until one day one got drunk in such a way that one's fingers themselves recalled the combination and, miraculously, perfectly, unlocked the wealth of melody; only here Tolstoy had supplied no melody.
"What?" Hugh said.
"Not at all. I always come back to the point, and take a thing up where it has been left off. How else should I have maintained myself so long as Consul? When we have absolutely no understanding of the causes of an action--I am referring, in case your mind has wandered to the subject of your own conversation, to the events of the afternoon--the causes, whether vicious or virtuous or what not, we ascribe, according to Tolstoy, a greater element of free will to it. According to Tolstoy then, we should have had less reluctance in interfering than we did..."
"All cases without exception in which our conception of free will and necessity varies depend on three considerations," the Consul said. "You can't get away from it."
"Moreover, according to Tolstoy," he went on, "before we pass judgement on the thief--if thief he were--we would have to ask ourselves: what were his connexions with other thieves, ties of family, his place in time, if we know even that, his relation to the external world, and to the consequences leading to the act... Cervantes!"
"Of course we're taking time to find out all this while the poor fellow just goes on dying in the road," Hugh was saying. "How did we get on to this? No one had an opportunity to interfere till after the deed was done. None of us saw him steal the money, to the best of my knowledge. Which crime are you talking about anyway, Geoff? If other crime there were... And the fact that we did nothing to stop the thief is surely beside the point that we did nothing really to save the man's life."
"Precisely," said the Consul, "I was talking about interference in general, I think. Why should we have done anything to save his life? Hadn't he a right to die, if he wanted to?... Cervantes--mescal--no, parras, por favor... Why should anybody interfere with anybody? Why should anybody have interfered with the Tlaxcalans, for example, who were perfectly happy by their own stricken in years trees, among the web-footed fowl in the first lagoon--"
"What web-footed fowl in what lagoon? "
"Or more specifically perhaps, Hugh, I was talking of nothing at all... Since supposing we settled anything--ah, ignoratio elenchi, Hugh, that's what. Or the fallacy of supposing a point proved or disproved by argument which proves or disproves something not at issue. Like these wars. For it seems to me that almost everywhere in the world these days there has long since ceased to be anything fundamental to man at issue at all... Ah, you people with ideas!
"Ah, ignoratio elenchi!... All this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain?...and poor little defenceless China! Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run."
"Well...."
A gust of wind moaned round the house with an eerie sound like a northerner prowling among the tennis nets in England, jingling the rings.