On the hot agony in his heart the languorous
Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb
of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half
spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his
immediate suffering.
For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of
its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he
drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion
of politics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech
was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might
take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself
to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.
A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the
patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty
years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a
brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the
following Friday. Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a
futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself,
and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal
code, he still hoped on with the divine far-sighted hope of the
visionary--hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging
in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he
would probably have continued to do so had Fate been so unjust as to
consign him to an Inferno.
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