"Not your kind."
I thanked him, and added, "Tell me—he means a lot to you, doesn't he?"
"All a man could," said the boy. "I'm going back now."
Dreve was middle-aged, clean-shaven, deep-eyed. Time had been driven to truce in his case. His face showed many battles, but when he spoke, a kind of new day dawned and you looked into the face of a boy. I remained with him three days. We talked of the new magic in the training of children. We talked of the New Age and the great song of joy and peace that would break across the world when troops turned home.
Dreve had something. He seemed to breathe something out of the air that other men's lungs aren't trained for. He seemed to have within everything necessary for a human being, including vision and humour and a firm grasp of the world. He was at peace about God and the world; at peace also about death. Slowly it dawned upon me that this man had walked arm in arm with life to the last abyss, and that life had been forced to confess that she had nothing worse to offer, whereupon the two had become fast friends.
When a man can sit tight and lose everything he formerly wanted in the sense of world possessions; when he has winnowed the last shams out of the things called fame and convention and society; when he has lost the woman who means all the world to him, and still loves her memory and her soul better than the living presence of any other woman; when he has come to realise that death contains everything he wants, yet is content to wait for it—the idea of hell becomes a boyish thing to be put away, and Lucifer returns to his old place as a Son of the Morning.
We stood together in the noon sun. Dreve did not even wear a hat.
"I came here in great shadow and could not bear the light," he said. "But one day I found my heart lifting a little as the sun came out. Then I found that it was really true—that sunlight helped me. The more I thought about it, the more I needed it; the more I loved it, the more its particular excellence for me unfolded. Take anything to the light, and it ceases to be formidable. Sickness is a confession. The time is at hand when schools will teach that. Sickness is a confession of ignorance which is a lack of light. If one is weak he cannot stand the light. Transplanted things must be protected from the light. St. Paul on the road to Damascus did not have enough inner light to endure the great flash from without. Light works upon evil like quicklime—that's why sunlight hurts the sick ones. It is also hostile to the utterly stupid idea of what clothing is for—clothing that thwarts and strangles every circulatory process of the flesh. There's nothing the matter with sunlight——"