Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
He angered her more than ever. Church had an irresistible attraction
for him. And he paid no more attention to that part of the service
which was Church to her, than if he had been an angel or a fabulous
beast sitting there. He simply paid no heed to the sermon or to the
meaning of the service. There was something thick, dark, dense,
powerful about him that irritated her too deeply for her to speak of
it. The Church teaching in itself meant nothing to him. “And forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us”—it simply
did not touch him. It might have been more sounds, and it would have
acted upon him in the same way. He did not want things to be
intelligible. And he did not care about his trespasses, neither about
the trespasses of his neighbour, when he was in church. Leave that care
for weekdays. When he was in church, he took no more notice of his
daily life. It was weekday stuff. As for the welfare of mankind—he
merely did not realize that there was any such thing: except on
weekdays, when he was good-natured enough. In church, he wanted a dark,
nameless emotion, the emotion of all the great mysteries of passion.
He was not interested in the _thought_ of himself or of her: oh, and
how that irritated her! He ignored the sermon, he ignored the greatness
of mankind, he did not admit the immediate importance of mankind. He
did not care about himself as a human being. He did not attach any
vital importance to his life in the drafting office, or his life among
men. That was just merely the margin to the text. The verity was his
connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being
lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, of the Absolute.
And the great mysterious, illuminated capitals to the text, were his
feelings with the Church.
It exasperated her beyond measure. She could not get out of the Church
the satisfaction he got. The thought of her soul was intimately mixed
up with the thought of her own self. Indeed, her soul and her own self
were one and the same in her. Whereas he seemed simply to ignore the
fact of his own self, almost to refute it. He had a soul—a dark,
inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity. So she conceived it. And in
the gloom and the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free,
like some strange, underground thing, abstract.
He was very strange to her, and, in this church spirit, in conceiving
himself as a soul, he seemed to escape and run free of her. In a way,
she envied it him, this dark freedom and jubilation of the soul, some
strange entity in him. It fascinated her. Again she hated it. And
again, she despised him, wanted to destroy it in him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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