"It's a case against me." He went on, his eyes still on the melodious orchard converts. It must have been a vagabond robin swaggering there, really deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty much done with the world. I though Mum was right: cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. I'm done with it."
Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another.
"Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way and have to come back."
"Come back?"
"Yes. Old Crow did. Remember the book. He challenged the whole business, and then he swung round to adoring it all, the world and Whoever made it. He didn't understand it a whit better, but he believed, he accepted, he adored."
"What would you say?" Dick asked curiously, after a moment. "Just what happened to him?"
"Why, I suppose," said Raven, "in the common phrase, he found God."
They were silent for a time and both of them tried desperately to think of the vagabond robin. Raven, his mind released by this fascination of dwelling on Dick apart from any responsibility of talking to him, found it running here, there, back and forth, over these weeks of their stay together. It halted, it ran on, it stopped again to consider, but always it was of Dick and incidentally of himself who didn't matter so much, but who had to be in it all. Were they at one in this epidemic of world sickness? As the great explosive forces of destruction and decay seemed to have released actual germs to attack the physical well-being of races, had the terrible crashes of spiritual destinies unsettled the very air of life, poisoned it, drugged it with madness and despair? Was there a universal disease of the mind, following this wholesale slaughter, which the human animal hadn't been able really to bear though it had come to a lull in it, so that now it was, in sheer shrieking panic, clutching at its various antidotes to keep on living? One antidote was forgetfulness. They were forgetting the War, some thousands of decent folk who clearly had meant to remember. A horrible antidote that, but perhaps they had to take it to save themselves. Too big a price to pay for living (and such thread-paper lives!) but still there did seem to be a prejudice in favor of the mere drawing of breath. Maybe you couldn't blame them, spinning in the sunshine like insects of a day. Some of the others had to save themselves by the wildness of a new intoxication. They danced, their spirits danced: a carmagnole it was, a dance of death, the death of the spirit as he saw it. But maybe, with this preposterous love of life in them they, too, had to do it. Maybe you couldn't blame them. He and Dick—they had been like two children, scared out of their wits, crying out, hitting at each other in the dark. Youth and age, that was what they had fought about. It had been an unseemly scrap, a "you're another." Dick had been brought up against life as it looks when you see it naked, the world—and what a world! No wonder he swore it was a world such as neither he nor his fellows, like him aghast, would have made. He would simply have to live some quarter century to find out what sort of a world he and his fellows did actually make.
And Raven: Lord! Lord! what was the use of having traveled his own quarter century along the everlasting road if it didn't make him at least silent in sheer pity of it: youth singing along to the Dark Tower, jingling spurs and caracoling nag, something it didn't quite know the feeling of shut in its nervous hand? What was it shut there? The key, that was it: the key to the Dark Tower. Youth made no doubt it was the key, easy to hold, quick to turn, and the gate would fly open and, if youth judged best, even the walls would fall. And yet, and yet, hasn't all youth held the key for that borrowed interval and do the walls ever really fall? But if age doesn't know enough to include youth in its understanding, as youth (except the poets) couldn't possibly include age, why then!
"I am," thought Raven, returning to the Charlottian vernacular, "very small potatoes and few in a hill."