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towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell behind it. But these
are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which is after all a smouldering sort
of rage. And take any more active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not
a smashing and swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined,
cold-blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will rage
dangerously."
    "A vertebrate. Yes. But even among the vertebrata; who has ever seen a
furious rabbit?"
    "Don't the bucks fight?" questioned Sir Richmond.
    Dr. Martineau admitted the point.
    "I've always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can remember.
I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I once threw a fork
at my elder brother and it stuck in his forehead, doing no serious
damage—happily. There were whole days of wrath—days, as I remember
them. Perhaps they were only hours.... I've never thought before what
a peculiar thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They
used to say it was the devil. If it isn't the devil, then what the devil
is it? After all," he went on as the doctor was about to answer his
question; "as you pointed out, it isn't the lowlier things that rage.
It's the HIGHER things and US."
    "The devil nowadays," the doctor reflected after a pause, "so far as
man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral ape. And more
particularly the old male ape."
    But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. "Life itself,
flaring out. Brooking no contradiction." He came round suddenly to the
doctor's qualification. "Why male? Don't little girls smash things just
as much?"
    "They don't," said Dr. Martineau. "Not nearly as much."
    Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. "I suppose you have watched
any number of babies?"'
    "Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do. There's a lot of
rage about most of them at first, male or female."
    "Queer little eddies of fury.... Recently—it happens—I've been seeing
one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its fists and squalling threats at a
damned disobedient universe."
    The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and questioningly
at his companion's profile.
    "Blind driving force," said Sir Richmond, musing.
    "Isn't that after all what we really are?" he asked the doctor.
"Essentially—Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it alive."
    "Schopenhauer," footnoted the doctor. "Boehme."
    "Plain fact," said Sir Richmond. "No Rage—no Go."
    "But rage without discipline?"
    "Discipline afterwards. The rage first."
    "But rage against what? And FOR what?"
    "Against the Universe. And for—? That's more difficult. What IS the
little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately? ... What is it
clutching after? In the long run, what will it get?"
    ("Yours the car in distress what sent this?" asked an unheeded voice.)
    "Of course, if you were to say 'desire'," said Dr. Martineau, "then you
would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk of LIBIDO, meaning
a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks of it at times almost as if it
were the universal driving force."
    "No," said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. "Not desire. Desire
would have a definite direction, and that is just what this driving
force hasn't. It's rage."
    "Yours the car in distress what sent this?" the voice repeated. It was
the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car. He was holding up the blue
request for assistance that Sir Richmond had recently filled in.
    The two philosophers returned to practical matters.
Section 3
    For half an hour after the departure of the little Charmeuse car with
Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau, the brass Mercury lay unheeded in the
dusty roadside grass. Then it caught the eye of a passing child.
    He was a bright little boy of five. From the moment when he caught the
gleam of brass he knew that he had made the find of his life. But his
nurse was a timorous, foolish thing. "You did ought to of left it there,
Masterrarry," she said.
    "Findings ain't keepings nowadays, not by no manner of