There had once occurred to him as he rode, and thereafter
had persisted and accumulated, the feeling that, on
the daily, solitary passage between Tidborough and
Penny Green, he was mysteriously detached from, mysteriously
suspended between, the two centres that were his two
worlds,—his business world and his home
world.
With its daily recurrence the thought developed:
it enlarged to the whimsical notion that here, on
his bicycle on the road, he was magically escaped
out of his two worlds, not belonging to or responsible
to either of his two worlds, which amounted to delicious
detachment from all the universe. A mysteriously
aloof, free, irresponsible attitude of mind was thus
obtained: it was a condition in which—as
one looking down from a high tower on scurrying, antlike
human beings—their oddness, their futility,
the apparent aimlessness of their excited scurrying
became apparent; hence frequent thought, on these
rides, on the rather odd thing that life was.
He was not in the least aware that so simple, so practical
and so obviously essential a thing as his daily ride—as
simple, practical and obviously essential as getting
out of bed in the morning and returning to bed at
night—was moulding a mind always prone to
develop meditative grooves. But it did develop
his mind in the extraordinary way in which minds are
moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere
matter of conveyance a philosopher might trace back
a singularly brutal and callous murder to the moulding
into callous and brutal regard of other people’s
sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by
the habit of daily travelling to business in London
on the top of a motor omnibus. It would only
need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat
with dignity and comfort at the bus’s starting
point and daily for years watched with amusement,
and then with callousness and so with brutality the
struggles of the unhappy fellow creatures who fought
to assail it at its stopping places on the way to
the City.
Mark Sabre was not in the least aware of any steadily
permeating influence from his sense of detachment
on this daily habit of years. But he was influenced.
On entering his Penny Green world on the return home,
or on entering his Tidborough office world, on the
way out, he had sometimes a curious feeling of descending
into this odd affair of life to which he did not really
belong. And for the few moments while the feeling
persisted he sometimes, more or less unconsciously,
took towards affairs a rather whimsical attitude,
as though they did not really matter: an irritating
attitude, unpractical, it was sometimes hinted by
his partners; an irritating attitude—“You
really are very difficult to understand sometimes”—it
was often told him by Mabel.
This very matter of the bicycle ride, indeed, apart
altogether from its effect upon his mood, supplied
an instance of the kind of thing Mabel found it so
difficult to understand in her husband.
