"May you meet the South Wind!" she whispered.
18
THE BLEAKEST HOUR
It is a thankless job to raise a voice in the din of things as they are, a voice saying things are wrong. One may do this for years without penetrating the din, so long as he does not become specific. Or one may become a specialist in a certain wrong, gain recognition as a gentle fanatic on a certain subject, do much good with his passion, find certain friends and sterling enemies—and either lose or win, ultimately, according to change in the styles of his time.
Or, with one-pointed desire to change the spirit of things, one may reach the gloomy eminence from which it is perceived that all things are wrong, because the present underlying motive of the whole is wrong. He sees one body of men scrubbing one spot on the carpet, another sewing earnestly at a certain frayed selvage, another trying to bring out the dead colour from a patch that wear and weather have irrevocably changed. He blesses them all, but his soul cries out for a new carpet—at least, a wholesome and vigorous tubbing of the entire carpet, and a turning over of the whole afterward.
Unless our life here is a sort of spontaneous ebullition out of the bosom of nature, without significance to us before and after, we are moving about our business of house and country and world in a most stupid, cruel and short-sighted fashion. I realise, and this is the wine of life, that the hearts of men are tender and lovable, naturally open and subject by nature to beauty and faith; that the hearts of men, indeed, yearn for that purity of condition in which truth may be the only utterance, and the atmosphere of untruth as revolting as bad air to the nostrils.
But with this realisation appears the facts that the activities in the world of men have little to do with this purity and heart-giving—but with an evil covering, the integument of which is the lie born of self-desire, and the true skin of which is the predatory instinct which has not remotely to do with an erect spine.