His mind could make no further steps.  It had worked for its spell.  His rage had ebbed away now altogether.  His despair was no longer infinite.  But the world was dark and dreadful still.  It seemed none the less dark because at the end there was a gleam of light.  It was a gleam of light far beyond the limits of his own life, far beyond the life of his son.  It had no balm for these sufferings.  Between it and himself stretched the weary generations still to come, generations of bickering and accusation, greed and faintheartedness, and half truth and the hasty blow.  And all those years would be full of pitiful things, such pitiful things as the blackened ruins in the town behind, the little grey-faced corpses, the lives torn and wasted, the hopes extinguished and the gladness gone....

He was no longer thinking of the Germans as diabolical.  They were human; they had a case.  It was a stupid case, but our case, too, was a stupid case.  How stupid were all our cases!  What was it we missed?  Something, he felt, very close to us, and very elusive.  Something that would resolve a hundred tangled oppositions....

His mind hung at that.  Back upon his consciousness came crowding the horrors and desolations that had been his daily food now for three quarters of a year.  He groaned aloud.  He struggled against that renewed envelopment of his spirit.  “Oh, blood-stained fools!” he cried, “oh, pitiful, tormented fools!

“Even that vile airship was a ship of fools!

“We are all fools still.  Striving apes, irritated beyond measure by our own striving, easily moved to anger.”

Some train of subconscious suggestion brought a long-forgotten speech back into Mr. Britling’s mind, a speech that is full of that light which still seeks so mysteriously and indefatigably to break through the darkness and thickness of the human mind.

He whispered the words.  No unfamiliar words could have had the same effect of comfort and conviction.

He whispered it of those men whom he still imagined flying far away there eastward, through the clear freezing air beneath the stars, those muffled sailors and engineers who had caused so much pain and agony in this little town.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

IN THE WEB OF THE INEFFECTIVE

Section 1

Hugh’s letters were becoming a very important influence upon Mr. Britling’s thought.  Hugh had always been something of a letter-writer, and now what was perhaps an inherited desire to set things down was manifest.  He had been accustomed to decorate his letters from school with absurd little sketches—­sometimes his letters had been all sketches—­and now he broke from drawing to writing and back to drawing in a way that pleased his father mightily.  The father loved this queer