“Isn’t that after all what we really are?” he asked the doctor.  “Essentially—­Rage.  A rage in dead matter, making it alive.”

“Schopenhauer,” footnoted the doctor.  “Boehme.”

“Plain fact,” said Sir Richmond.  “No Rage—­no Go.”

“But rage without discipline?”

“Discipline afterwards.  The rage first.”

“But rage against what?  And for what?”

“Against the Universe.  And for—?  That’s more difficult.  What is the little beast squalling itself crimson for?  Ultimately? ...  What is it clutching after?  In the long run, what will it get?”

("Yours the car in distress what sent this?” asked an unheeded voice.)

“Of course, if you were to say ’desire’,” said Dr. Martineau, “then you would be in line with the psychoanalysts.  They talk of libido, meaning a sort of fundamental desire.  Jung speaks of it at times almost as if it were the universal driving force.”

“No,” said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea.  “Not desire.  Desire would have a definite direction, and that is just what this driving force hasn’t.  It’s rage.”

“Yours the car in distress what sent this?” the voice repeated.  It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car.  He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir Richmond had recently filled in.

The two philosophers returned to practical matters.

Section 3

For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse car with Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury lay unheeded in the dusty roadside grass.  Then it caught the eye of a passing child.

He was a bright little boy of five.  From the moment when he caught the gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find of his life.  But his nurse was a timorous, foolish thing.  “You did ought to of left it there, Masterrarry,” she said.

“Findings ain’t keepings nowadays, not by no manner of means, Masterrarry.

“Yew’d look silly if a policeman came along arsting people if they seen a goldennimage.

“Arst yer ’ow you come by it and look pretty straight at you.”

All of which grumblings Master Harry treated with an experienced disregard.  He knew definitely that he would never relinquish this bright and lovely possession again.  It was the first beautiful thing he had ever possessed.  He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness.  This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a thing of a different order.

There was to be much conflict and distress, tears and wrath, before the affinity of that clean-limbed, shining figure and his small soul was recognized.  But he carried his point at last.  The Mercury became his inseparable darling, his symbol, his private god, the one dignified and serious thing in a little life much congested by the quaint, the burlesque, and all the smiling, dull condescensions of adult love.