As he sat there he thought confusedly of a great number of things of his own childhood—of his mother—of a boy at Dawson's who had asked him once as they gazed up at a great mass of apple blossoms in bloom, “Do you think there is anything in all that stuff about God anyway, Westcott?”—of a night when he had gone with some loose woman of the town and of the wet miry street that they had left behind them as she had closed the door—of that night at the party when he had seen Cardillac again—of the things that Maradick had said to him that night when young Stephen was born—and so from that to his own life, his own birth, his father, Scaw House, the struggle that it had all been.
He remembered a sentence out of a strange novel of Dostoieffsky's that he had once read, “The Brothers Karamazoff”: “It's a feature of the Karamazoffs . . . that thirst for life regardless of everything—” and the KaramazofFs were of a sensual, debased stock—rotten at the base of them with an old drunken buffoon of a father—yes, that was like the Westcotts. All his life, struggle . . . and young Stephen—all his life, struggle . . . and yet, even in the depths of degradation, if the fight were to go that way there would still be that lust for life.
So many times he had been almost under. First Stephen Brant had saved him, then at Brockett's Norah Monogue, then in Bucket Lane his illness, then in Chelsea his marriage, lately young Stephen . . . always, always something had been there to keep him on his feet. But if everything were taken from him, if he were absolutely, nakedly alone—what then? Ah, what then!
He buried his head in his hands. “God, you don't know what young Stephen is to me—or, yes, of course you do know, God—and because you do know, you will not take him from me.”
The little tearing pain at his heart held him—every now and again it turned like some grinding key.
Mitchell entered with another doctor. Peter went over to the window, and whilst they made their examination, stared through the glass at the fretwork of trees, the golden haze of London beyond, two stars that now, when the storm had spent itself, showed in a dark dim sky. Very faintly
