Any moment he might turn his face towards his
son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.
It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments
whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.
Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives
touched his on every side. It became a sort of secret pressure. They
were neither great nor beautiful. They were identical with the people
he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or
grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great
distance. He was down in the thick of them. They concerned him--or he
had no other concern. He was part of their strangely wandering
procession. He looked into their separate faces and thought: "This man
says 'I' to himself. And one day he will say: 'I am dying' (as Marie
Dubois said it)." And he recognized for the first time something
common to them all that was not commonplace--an heroic quality. At
least that stark fact remained that at their birth sentence of death
had been passed upon them all. Before each one of them lay a black
adventure, and they went towards it, questioning or inarticulate, not
knowing why they should endure so much, but facing the utter loneliness
of that final passage with patience and great courage.
It was not ridiculous that they should demand their immortality, the
least and worst of them. Whether it was granted them or not, it was a
just demand, and the answer to it more vital than any other form of
knowledge.
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