The shaky hands unfolded the bit of foolscap on which was scrawled in a laborious script:
“Wait on the Lord; wait, I say, on the Lord.”
Beneath this counsel from one psalm were the verses from another:
“I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
I suppose you will call my impulse by some modern psychological name, and for aught I know you may be right. But the words were not without their effect on me. They came to me with the mystery of a message emanating from the days before Time, and from spheres which have no need of the sun to rise or of the moon to give brightness or of the light of any candle. That it was carried to me by this tottering old man whom I had known in such different conditions only added to the awe.
I struggled to feet that were as shaky as Lovey’s hands, carried my little white ticket to the bookkeeper, paid for my drink, which I had left untouched, and flinging an “All right, Lovey; I’m your man!” to him, hobbled out into the lobby of the hotel.
My immediate sensation was that which you have known when the black cloud of troubles that enveloped you on waking has been instantly dispelled on your getting out of bed. The troubles may still be there; but you know your competence to live and work and deal with them.
What I felt chiefly, I think, was that the old temptation would never master me again. I had been face to face with it, and hadn’t submitted to its spell. Something had been healed in me; something had been outgrown. A simple old man with no eloquence but that of his affection had led me as another might be led by a child.
With this sense of release came a sense of energy. I was given back to my mission; my mission was given back to me. That which for lack of a more humble term I can only call the spirit of consecration took hold of me again and made me its own. The aims for which the war was being fought were my aims; I had no others. When these objectives were won my life, it seemed to me, would be over. It would melt away in that victory as dawn into sunrise. It would not be lost; it would only be absorbed—a spark in the blaze of noonday.
And as for love—well, after all, there was the moratorium of love. My lot in this respect—if it was to be my lot—would be no harder than that of millions of other men the wide world over. Love was no longer the first of a man’s considerations, not any more than the earning of a living could be the first. It might be a higher thing for her—a higher thing for me—to give it up.