THE DEAD WRITERS
409
his honor. In the witness of Holy Church and Her Saints, upon his
honor. Before God, before God, upon his honor, did Harold swear
an oath he was my man. Father, Blessed Father, bless our struggle.
May God damn and quarter the perjured one. Douglas could still
hear Flint saying as he handed him the ranges: "God it is good that
this has purpose. I don't believe in the soul and neither do you but son
of a bitch this has got to be holy. Why could we stand it?"
o
it is pleasant, it is pleasant. It is a pleasure to stand upon
the shore and see ships tossed in the sea. But Flintsaith, Flintsaith:
you cannot believe in the particular: no pleasure is comparable to
the standing upon the vantage ground of truth and thus to see the
errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below.
-Umque. -umque. Lord God damn and quarter the perjurors at
the brook and the channel and the range desk. Lord God damn and
quarter Flint and Domesday on the vantage ground shadowed with
a lie-for then it will be easier.
Douglas sat silent, trembling slightly at his baseness, holding
the incident from the war in his hand. In the silence he sensed his
own words scrambling from him, effluences now disconnected from
thing and idea. He had come to the end of the incident and there
was little time before the appointment with its reporter, but he ling–
ered a moment beyond with Flint. He understood that he wished to
abandon his friend: once he had been certain that this would be
to abandon himself. He knew that he had been willing to curse
his
friend; he knew that he had in fact implored Oliver Allen and the
great Duke to unmask Flint, disclose him as hypocrite and perjuror.
Yet in this was nothing but well and fair. It was fit that Flint be
buried once for all. What was base was that he had not strength
to put Flint down-even his foreknowledge had not given him
strength. Douglas did indeed know the end. He knew that if he had
built all on the word, if his response had been always to the word–
not to feeling, situation or principle-he might have been wiser, not
weaker, than Flint. For what had begun long before Flint died
(Flint, because positive, had denied himself cognition of it) would
continue, would intricate questions that no man could stop.
That the words revolve about the earth, Flint assumed.
Wrong, it will be seen, Douglas said. It will be seen. Sentience,
the particular-all that his friend supposed must answer to the pri-
