I
How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting forth constantly the whole force of the will. “Not to be done,” you may say. And, of course, it will be a miracle. But only the everyday miracle done in somebody’s body, or else in his soul. When the skin shines white and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not, in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. In all the breeds of cowardly livers—drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners, drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him—you will find some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that they could not face with their bow and their spear.
But these recoveries only come upon terms: no going back to heaven except through a certain purgatorial passage. There, while it lasts, the invalid must not expect to enjoy either the heady visions of the fever that is now taking its leave or the more temperate beatitude of the health that may presently come. He lies reduced to animal, almost vegetable, matter, quite joyless and unthrilled, and has to abide in numb passivity, like an unborn child’s, whatever may come of the million minute molecular changes going on unseen in the enigmatic darkness of his tissues, where tiny cell is adding itself to tiny cell to build he knows not what. And then some day the real thing, the second birth as wonderful as the first, comes of itself and the stars are singing together all right and the sons of God shouting for joy. The same way with the spirit, except that the body faints, and so is eased, at some point in any rising scale of torment: the spirit has to go on through the mill without such anaesthetics as fainting. So the man who has gone far off the rails in matters of conduct, and tries to get back to them, has such hells of patience to live through, and out of, as no liquid fire known to the war chemists could make for the flesh. To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off, the time in which
The dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.
And yet no other way out. Disease and imbecility and an early and ignoble death, or else that stoic facing, through interminable days, of an easily escapable dullness that may be anything from an ache up to an agony.