"I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it's rotten luck when you're weak and can't help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time."
"But we're all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it's the right."
"By a careful study of Hell and its inhabitants."
"Then you don't mean the Hell one's people talk about?"
"No. I mean here and now, the world as it is. I'm not interested in any other."
This conversation was the first of many. Haslam used to wait for Serge and walk with him as far as their roads lay together. He was an ambitious young man with his eyes set on the road to London, not so much because he was eager for fame and material rewards as because he was hotly impatient of art which stopped short at Benskin and Beecroft.
"But," Serge would say, "Benskin and Beecroft will both die."
"I know, but there'll be a new Beecroft and a new Benskin by that time."
"That's true. We shall never be rid of them."
"I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts."
"Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too."
"If I don't reach London by the time I'm twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge."
"Why twenty-seven?" asked Serge, smiling.
"Oh! if a man hasn't done something by the time he's twenty-seven he never will."
"But you've done everything. You've made yourself. You're not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old."
"Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end."
Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly:
"Respectable! Respectable! Give me a list of any ten men living in respectable suburban villas and I warrant you there'll be more dishonesty and cowardly misdoing in their lives than in ten of the so-called criminal classes. I don't understand it. I do rotten things myself--who doesn't?--but I can't shut my eyes to them when they're done. Take my brother. He's a beastly idiot or an idiotic beast, always getting into scrapes and shuffling out of them. By the time he's thirty he'll still be doing the same things, but he'll have learned how to prevent them coming to the surface. He'll marry, settle down, enjoy a comfortable income, be a pillar of the Church and a smug, hard Pharisee like all the rest, with all his tracks carefully covered up and his conscience having a splendid time going over them."