Even before the war a series of melancholy public mis-adventures had gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep anti-social offence of the "suffragettes," with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He "called" the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King's peace and not be any losers, in their own persons, by doing it.
The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of morality, even of wisdom for a man's self or a nation's? Potsdam called the world's bluff, and the world's hand was found to be empty. Potsdam lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with assurance. The total number of policemen on a race-course is always a minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of sight of her friends.
The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as at a probable dog-fight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far, indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines. Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this disfurnished soul.
Genius in some leader might either possess it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There's reason, he still feels, in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy.
CHAPTER XV
ANY CURE?
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 anæsthetics 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