“It’s amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.  Life is one long struggle against the incidental.  I can feel my anger gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason.  I want to go and expostulate.  I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate. . . .  What good would it do?  They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a politician—­how would they put it?—­ ‘with many things to consider. . . .’

“It’s my weakness to be drawn into quarrels.  It’s a thing I have to guard against. . . .

“What does it all amount to?  It is like a fight between navvies in a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star.  It doesn’t concern us. . . .  Oh! it doesn’t indeed concern us.  It’s a scuffle in the darkness, and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good work is to light up the world. . . .  There will be mischief and hatred here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on again, a little better or a little worse. . . .”

“I’m tired of this place, White, and of all such places.  I’m tired of the shouting and running, the beating and shooting.  I’m sick of all the confusions of life’s experience, which tells only of one need amidst an endless multitude of distresses.  I’ve seen my fill of wars and disputes and struggles.  I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its remorse.  No!  I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.  For they are the realities.  I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things. . . .

“What was that boy saying?  They are burning the star office. . . .  Well, let them. . . .”

And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of greatness and a new great spirit in men.  All the rest of his life, he said, must be given to that.  He would say his thing plainly and honestly and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree. . . .

Late or soon?

Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.

“Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes. . . .

“Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years or ten thousand years?  It will never come in our lives, White.  Not soon enough for that.  But after that everything will be soon—­when one comes to death then everything is at one’s fingertips—­I can feel that greater world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last darkness. . . .”