Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [142]
"Not exactly original."
"Not long ago it was poor little defenceless Ethiopia. Before that, poor little defenceless Flanders. To say nothing of course of the poor little defenceless Belgian Congo. And tomorrow it will be poor little defenceless Latvia. Or Finland. Or Piddiedeedee. Or even Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a--What in God's name has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal reason--"
"Hell, I told you that--"
"--to do with the survival of the human spirit? Nothing whatsoever. Less than nothing. Countries, civilizations, empires, great hordes perish for no reason at all, and their soul and meaning with them, that one old man perhaps you never heard of, and who never heard of them, sitting boiling in Timbuktu, proving the existence of the mathematical correlative of ignoratio elenchi with obsolete instruments, may survive!"
"For Christ's sake," said Hugh.
"Just go back to Tolstoy's day--Yvonne, where are you going?"
"Out."
"Then it was poor little defenceless Montenegro. Poor little defenceless Serbia. Or back a little farther still, Hugh, to your Shelley's, when it was poor little defenceless Greece--Cervantes!"
"--As it will be again, of course. Or to Boswell's--poor little defenceless Corsica! Shades of Paoli and Monboddo. Applesquires and fairies strong for freedom. As always. And Rousseau--not douanier--knew he was talking nonsense--"
" I should like to know what the bloody hell it is you imagine you're talking!"
"Why can't people mind their own damned business!"
"Or say what they mean? "
"It was something else, I grant you. The dishonest mass rationalization of motive," justification of the common pathological itch. Of the motives for interference; merely a passion for fatality half the time. Curiosity. Experience--very natural... But nothing constructive at bottom, only acceptance really, a piddling contemptible acceptance of the state of affairs that flatters one into feeling thus noble or useful!"
"But my God it's against such a state of affairs that people like the Loyalists--"
"But with calamity at the end of it! There must be calamity because otherwise the people who did the interfering would have to come back and cope with their responsibilities for a change--"
"Just let a real war come along and then see how bloodthirsty chaps like you are!"
"Which would never do. Why all you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom--Cervantes!--should learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in War and Peace, that conversation with the volunteers in the train--"
"But anyhow that was in--"
"Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he'd been drinking that he was doing something heroic--what are you laughing at, Hugh?"
"It's funny."
"And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third--" Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, "an artillery man, was the only one who struck him at first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who'd failed in his examinations. All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived--"
"Quitters?" Hugh said. "Didn't Karamazov or whoever he was believe that the action of those volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian people?--Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in San Sebastian hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to tell the British Government the truth of what's really going on in Spain can't possibly consist of quitters!"