If he felt a certain delicate—fussy was how he put it to himself—dislike for some of the beings around him, to be acknowledged also was, alongside it, something nearly servile: a species of admiration which placed him below them. Rather than feel elevated or strengthened by his suffering he felt diminished and weakened—chastened, he thought, like a dog which has been whipped and kicked into obedience. Something had been chased out of him and while he knew he was worse off for its absence there was a sick desire, which frightened him, to invite circumstances likely to knock out even more of his being. He felt he could no longer abide by the steps of the dance of life; therefore, the mentality which adjudicated on behalf of humanity judged him as unviable as a child gone wrong in the womb and discouraged his elimination. This was the acceptable, faceable thought which his mind formed, heard and understood. Harder to understand, more unpleasant to handle, was the fierce desire for the interrupted abuse to resume and continue until it succeeded in driving him out of the world and removing all markers of his existence.

Yet while he disliked, he also loved. He loved indiscriminately, not with his intellect but with, he presumed, his heart—but a heart standing on its own, stripped of all education so that it could no longer make informed choices as to what it would love, so that he adored, for instance, a ginger-haired man who held a teacup with extreme delicacy, as if a hair trigger sat in the bend of the handle. His shirt collar was too small, so that the soft skin of his neck swelled tenderly over it. He appeared to be one of those people who are worn smooth by life, even in childhood, and go unnoticed for their lack of distinction. You could safely assume that he had never imagined himself as a fascinating creature, but to the man by the window he was, as were they all: objects of an unconditional, impersonal love, which, thought the young major, who, having no civilian position, had not relinquished the self-definition of an officer, was as unsatisfying as it was overwhelming. He bent under it like grass in the wind, bowing at its forceful insistence. The aching need for personal love was unanswered, and resentment over that made the mystical experience of universal love painful rather than liberating, the moreso because of the circumstances under which he had come to be capable of it. Suffering, against which he had never stopped protesting, had been the agent of his transformation. He could not explain what had happened. Suffering usually hardens the person but in his case it had worked a cataclysmic softening which the rest of his being faced with horror.

The train arrived, as it eventually had to. He quite deliberately lit another cigarette and watched the intricate changes in the rising smoke; then his gaze dropped to the table with its cheap white china cellars, sugar bowl and ashtray. It struck him as a suitable altar for an atheist, the lifeless things on it invisibly luminous with the quality of repose, which did not, after all, require the notion of the eternal effortless mind as a frame of reference for identifying sanctity. Those banausic objects, in being typical rather than particular, and in existing in counterplay to the acts of ambition, were quite possibly angels. At night, it might be easy to see them darkened with the preternatural significance of the consecrated tools in a sanctuary, and feel affected, as if by something extending from the substratum of their artificial bodies, if one’s own substratum was in a sensitive state. Then the angel would show its other face, then there would be no choice but to kill it.

The rattle of the train had long since died away. He paid the bill, picked up his hat and went outside. Though it was an unknown town he was not surprised to find that he had a clear idea of where he had to go.