long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate....
It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did.
“He DID mean that!” I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of His Christianity.
Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy.
“He wasn't human,” I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, “My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
“Oh, HE forsakes every one,” I said, flying out as a tired mind will, with an obvious repartee....
I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I wanted—in the intervals of love and fine thinking—to fling about that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the concomitant of exhaustion.
“I will have her,” I cried. “By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again.... Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without her....”
I remember myself—as a sort