"I'm sorry for that," I agreed. "But I'm going to make amends. I realised
it all this afternoon in the wood when I went to meet Arthur. I'm going to
begin all over again, now. I'm coming to Canada--to work." The whole
solution of my problem was suddenly clear, although I had not guessed it
until that moment. "I'm going to buy a farm for all of us," I went on
quickly, "and all the money that's over, I shall give away. The hospitals
are always willing to accept money without asking why you give it. They're
not suspicious, _they_ don't consider themselves under any obligation."
"How much should you have to give away?" she asked.
"Thirty or forty thousand pounds," I said. "It depends on how much the
farm costs."
"Hadn't you better keep a little, in case the farm fails?" she put in.
"It won't fail," I said. "How could it?"
"And you'd do all that just because you've--remembered me?"
"There was another influence," I admitted.
"What was that?" she asked, with the sound of new interest in her voice.
"All this affair with the Jervaises," I said. "It has made me hate the
possession of money and the power money gives. That farm of ours is going
to be a communal farm. Our workers shall have an interest in the profits.
No one is to be the proprietor. We'll all be one family--no scraping for
favours, or fears of dismissal; we'll all be equal and free."
She did not answer that, at once; and I had an unpleasant feeling that she
was testing my quality by some criterion of her own, weighing the
genuineness of my emotion.
"Did you feel like this about things this afternoon?" she asked, after
what seemed to me an immense interval.
I was determined to tell her nothing less than the truth. "No," I
confessed, "much of it was a result of what you said to me. I--I had an
illumination. You made me see what a poor thing my life had been; how
conventional, artificial, worthless, it was. What you said about my plays
was so true. I had never realised it before--I hadn't bothered to think
about it."
"I don't remember saying anything about your plays," she interrupted me.
"Oh! you did," I assured her; "very little; nothing directly; but I knew
what you felt, and when I came to think it over, I agreed with you."
"I've only seen _one_," she remarked.
"They're all the same," I assured her, becoming fervent in my humility.
"But why go to Canada?" she asked. "Why not try to write better plays?"
"Because I saw my whole life plainly, in the wood this afternoon," was my
reply. "I did not know what to do then. I couldn't see any answer to my
problem. But when you were speaking to me a minute ago, I realised the
whole thing clearly. I understood what I wanted to do.
"It's a form of conversion," I concluded resolutely.
"I'm sure you mean it all--now," she commented, as if she were speaking to
herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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