“You’ve come to the wrong office. Everybody here knows that mules are ugly brutes, and never rise to Christian feelings even when war ennobles them.”
“Not at all, if I may say so. You don’t understand, sir. If I tell people that our mules kicked the enemy, that’s all right. But if I tell ’em one of our gun mules bit me, why, I don’t know but what they’d think the artful patriotic swine saw through me, if you know what I mean. Got to be careful. Besides, that’s nothing now.”
“What, nothing to lose your arm?”
The shabby figure stared over the literary table to the shadow of the bridge beyond. He spoke with the quiet confidence of a man whose rich uncle had unexpectedly left a fortune to him. “Nothing at all, sir. I’ve found God. I’ve found God.” Then he looked at the journalist. “Do you believe in God? You don’t begin to live until you do.”
The journalist rose in alarm. Not in all his life had another fellow creature asked him whether he believed in God. In that office it was assumed that the name of God should never be used except rhetorically.
“Of all the swindling rogues! You talk to me like that, after telling me you’d have lied, if I’d been an old woman!”
“Sorry, sir, but you were not an old lady, so I give it to you straight. I give people what they can take, just to make the world go around, you understand. What does it matter? People who can’t see the light—well, you can’t blame ’em.”
“So you think there’s a chance I may see it? I wish I knew how to tell whether you are only another hypocrite or not. Here, I’m living in darkness, too, but I’ll buy your stock of cards if you’ll tell me whether you’d have mentioned God to me if I’d been a nice old lady. What about it?”
“Not a word about God to the old lady, sir. Not a word. On my oath. And for the same reason. She wouldn’t have known what I meant. She wouldn’t understand that a hero nearly lost his life in a righteous war through the bite of an allied bastard, if you understand me, sir, but if I said I’d found God she’d take it for granted I was all right, like herself. Why get her mixed up, the old dear?”
“So you’re all right, are you?” said the envious man of letters, mournfully, who had no God to whom he could give a name. He pointed to the vision of the dissolution of London in the murk. “How do you feel about being at the fag end of everything in that?”