“You had, then, once the temptation of drugs?”
“Yes,” she assented a little dreamily, “I had the temptation.—And yet,” she added with a sudden return of interest, “it is wonderful how little of these drugs you can take, and live with energy and joy. Are the lips of Monica pallid or her eyes stony? Theresa has a clear mind: she can set her house in order. The songs and glories of the Creatures, do they not pass purely and freely, as you say, through the lips of Saint Francis?”
“True, but for us this aspect of the thing is past. The central trust in the Christ-God is a skeletoned shadow, that the grate holds up a moment beyond its time of falling in. You see it lying, a pile of shapeless ash, and wonder it ever stood. The Mother of Love and Grief appears no more save in the brilliant burning of distorted vision. It is a case of opium or nothing!”
“You are right,” she said, “and so I saw it.”
“What, then, remains,” he asked, “but resignation? There is no joy in patience. Nay, worse, there is little pleasure. I too take drugs, and I have more than once thought that, if Fate had not kindly given me the wherewithal to buy them, I should have ended the dreary business for ever. What is the good of our life except to despise it? says Leopardi. It is just bearable with drugs, but, without, I cannot think it worth the bearing. Pure indifference keeps more of its high souls alive now than the world wots of. They are careless of life, but they are equally careless of death. They live merely waiting for chance to kill them, or for life to become unendurable enough for them to care to kill themselves. Such men are not miserable. Sometimes, it is true, they suffer disgust; but they know nothing of despair, for despair means illusion, and they have the truth. Sometimes, again they have pleasure. But how, tell me, is it possible to have at once both truth and joy?”
“All this,” she said, “I too felt, and not so long ago—although I could not have put it to myself so clearly. You, I think, have learned your belief more by living than by reading: with me it was different. Before I began properly to live,—to be free, that is, to examine and try everything for myself,—I had arrived at my belief, and all my living has only confirmed me in it.”
“What is your belief?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
“I will not try to tell it you explicitly,” she said, “for fear of harming it. Analysis is a mistake, and now I have so long known this, that I have little temptation to give way to it. You, it seems, have tried to be a Heathen. You gave yourself up to the natural joy of your youth and fortune, your health and strength and riches and powers, until the joy turned to pleasure and the pleasure to almost pain. Then you went for interest to the spiritual life of those about you, and again joy turned to pleasure and pleasure to almost pain. But you—you were not one that knew how to be resigned! You could not, as your great Master could, add to the ‘Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity’ the ‘Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.’ Far otherwise with you, as you have told me, was ‘the conclusion of the whole matter.’”
“And you?” he said with the tone of comrade to comrade, “and you?”