He had a sister, a "beloved sister," and to her he had always turned in any distress. He praised her to me as "the soul of good- ness." (Perhaps, like you, she was one of those who live most fully in giving life to others.) In his present misery he ran to her for comfort. But strangely, though she responded with the old young-motherly words of compassion, she remained withdrawn. The hand that she reached out to save him was now intangible, a mere phantom, always duly proffered, never to be grasped. Perplexed and sore, he drifted from her.

Presently this self-pitying brother learned that the sister was ill and in great suffering. Hurrying to her, he found that a secret pain had been too long ignored. And now, too late, the scalpel ferreted again and again through her body. The added torment was useless. Each time he visited her, the bars of her prison had moved in closer on that trapped, that ever outward-living and still life-hungry spirit. "How I dreaded," he said, "those eyes, that probed through mine for comfort!" For he, bitter from his life's failure and the new-felt evil of the universe, could give only phantom comforts, through which "those eyes" easily pierced to the inner desolation.

The frequent tides of her pain, he said, rose daily higher. They lapped her tethered body with corrosive waves, eating away little by little her humanity, till she was a mere wreck of whimpering nerves. His compassion tormented him, so that at last he implored the doctors to hasten her final sleep. But they refused, since the treatment, they affirmed, might still conquer. To the brother it seemed that they cared only for the interest of playing their losing game expertly to the end. This suspected ruthlessness was for him an added horror, a symbol of that coldly evil will which ruled (so he now believed) the whole universe.

*****

All the while that the Christian had been telling me of these bitter experiences, we had been walking together in the sunny close. Small white clouds were cherubs smiling down on us. Children were playing on the grass. In a quiet corner a cat toyed with a half-killed sparrow; until a girl rushed at it, and it fled with its prey.

But now the Christian gripped my arm and halted both of us. He said, "When my marriage broke, I felt merely that all existence was pointless; but now, far worse, I believed that the point, the meaning of it all, was simply evil. Of course there was good, but only to deepen the evil. There was love, to make cruelty more subtle." Still holding my arm, he said with bared teeth, "For consider! Think of all the evil of the world! Two thousand million of us, and all of us foully sick in a sick world." His hand fell from my arm, and again we walked. He spoke of the great host of bedridden sufferers, each in endless captivity; and of those whose prison is penury; and the rest of us, each with some unique private misery, unimaginable to any other. But mostly he dwelt on the starkly evil will that secretly rules so many of us, driving us constantly to hurt what is tender and befoul what is fair. And God's will too now seemed to him evil.

I felt that I ought to have been overwhelmed by all this sum of horror that he had correctly enumerated. But strangely I was divided between pity and aloofness. Out of the corner of my eye, I placidly, frivolously, watched the life of the close: a youth with an unlit cigarette considering whom he should ask for a light; a mother trying to wipe the nose of an unruly child; an old man on a seat enjoying the legs of the passing girls.

The Christian said, "Coming away from my sister’s death I walked the streets with nerves raw to all their horror. A dog crushed on the tarmac, an ignored beggar, a woman with a face of painted lead and eyes where (the harsh phrase jarred) "a festering soul was already stinking." These sights, he said, undermined his foundations. No future millennium could make such things never to have been. Eternity itself must stink with that soul's corruption. But he reminded himself that corruption was actually no worse and no better than saintliness.

One day, as the embittered engineer was passing the cathedral, he conceived a resentful whim.