CHAP: VIII. VOLCANIC EVIDENCE
Richard Lovat Somers registered a new vow: not to take things with too overwhelming an amount of emotional seriousness, but to accept everything that came along with a certain sang froid, and not to sit frenziedly in judgment before he had heard the case. He had come to the end of his own tether, so why should he go off into tantrums if other folks strayed about with the broken bits of their tethers trailing from their ankles. Is it better to be savagely tugging at the end of your rope, or to wander at random tetherless? Matter of choice!
But the day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. "But when you get to the end of your tether you've nothing to do but die"—so sings an out-of-date vulgar song. But is it so? Why not all? When you come to the end of your tether you break the rope. When you come to the end of the lane you straggle on into the bush and beat about till you find a new way through, and no matter if you raise vipers or goannas or wallabies, or even only a stink. And if you see a man beating about for a new track you don't immediately shout, "Perverted wretch!" or "Villain!" or "Vicious creature!" or even merely "The fool," or mildly: "Poor dear!" You have to let him try. Anything is better than stewing in your own juice, or grinding at the end of your tether, or tread-milling away at a career. Better a "wicked creature" any day, than a mechanical tread-miller of a careerist. Better anything on earth than the millions of human ants.
In this way Mr Somers had to take himself to task, for his Pommy stupidity and his pommigrant superiority, and kick himself rather severely, looking at the ends of the tether he presumed he had just broken. Why should people who are tethered to a post be so God-Almighty puffed up about their posts? It seems queer. Yet there they are, going round and round at the ends of their tethers, and being immensely sniffy about the people who stray loose trailing the broken end of their old rope, and looking for a new way through the bush. Yet so men
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