So he resigned himself to a brooding, astringent day when he woke up one morning and even before he opened his eyes, heard,
“But ‘falling, falling, falling’ there’s your song,
The cradle song that sings you to the grave.”
That was no longer meant for him, Lester reflected, as he struggled with the fatiguing, humiliating problem of getting himself dressed without help. He had spent years in falling, falling, falling,—and, tiring of it, had fallen once for all,—fallen all anybody could fall, so completely that there was no more to say about it. That job was done.
With a straining pull on his arms, he managed to swing and claw himself into his wheel chair, and sat quiet for a moment to get his breath. Whoever would think that dead human legs could be so infernally hard to get from one place to another! They seemed to weigh more than all the rest of his body put together, he thought, as he lifted one with both hands and changed it to an easier position.
He sat panting, losing for an instant his firmly held self-control, succumbing to what was always near the surface, a shamed horror of his mutilated, strengthless body. It came upon him that day with such poisonous violence that he was alarmed and aroused himself to resist.
“The thing to remember,” he told himself sternly and contemptuously, “is that it concerns only me, and what concerns me is not of the slightest importance. I’m done for, was really done for, long ago. Nothing that can happen to me matters now.” He heard as if it were a wistful voice saying,
“But neither parted roads, nor cent per cent
May starve quite out the child that lives in us,
The Child that is the Man, the Mystery.”