through the game, you and I can spend a very quiet year in Italy."
"I can't follow all that football slang; but do explain why anyone should
want to interfere with us. It's too silly."
"It's only silly when you get to the very distant end of a most abstruse
philosophy. On the surface it's obvious. It's the objection of the burglar to
electric lights and bells. You can imagine him having enough foresight to
vote against a town councillor who proposed an appropriation for the study of
science in general. Something might turn up which would put him out of
business."
"But what is their business?"
"Ultimately, you may call it selfishness — only that's a dreadful word, and
will mislead you. We're [112] just as selfish; only we realize that other things
beyond our own consciousnesses are equally ourselves. For instance, I try to
unite myself as intimately as I can with every other mind, or body, or idea,
that comes in my way. To take that cone simile, I want to be all the different
curves I can, so as to have a better chance of realizing the cone. The Black
Lodge magician clings to his one curve, tries to make it permanent, to exalt it
above all other curves. And of course the moment the cone shifts, out he
goes: pop!"
"Observe the poet!" remarked Simon Iff. "He values himself enormously;
but his idea of perpetuating himself is to make the beauty that is inherent in
his own soul radiate beyond him so as to illumine every other mind in the
world. But your Black Magician is secret, and difficult of access; he isn't
going to tell anyone anything, not he! So even his knowledge tends to
extinction, in the long run."
"But you are yourselves a secret society!" exclaimed Lisa.
"Only to secure freedom from interruption. It is merely the same idea as
that which makes every householder close his doors at night; or, better, as
public libraries are guarded by certain regulations. We can't allow lunatics to
scrawl over our unique manuscripts, and tear the pages out of all our books.
Shallow people are always chattering about science being free to all; the truth
is that it is guarded as no other secret ever was in all history, by the simple
fact that, with all the help in the world, it takes half a lifetime to begin to
master even one small section of it. We guard our magick just as much and as
little as our other branches of physics; but people are so stupid that, though
they know it requires years of training to use so simple an instrument as a
[113] microscope, they are indignant that we cannot teach them to use the