The Red Planet eBook

William John Locke
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 391 pages of information about The Red Planet.

The Red Planet eBook

William John Locke
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 391 pages of information about The Red Planet.

CHAPTER II

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.  The tag has been all but outworn during these unending days of death; it has become almost a cant phrase which the judicious shrink from using.  Yet to hundreds of thousands of mourning men and women there has been nothing but its truth to bring consolation.  They are conscious of the supreme sacrifice and thereby are ennobled.  The cause in which they made it becomes more sacred.  The community of grief raises human dignity.  In England, at any rate, there are no widows of Ashur.  All are silent in their lamentations.  You see little black worn in the public ways.  The Fenimores mourned for their only son, the idol of their hearts; but the manifestation of their grief was stoical compared with their unconcealed desolation on the occasion of a tragedy that occurred the year before.

Towards the end of the preceding June their only daughter, Althea, had been drowned in the canal.  Here was a tragedy unrelieved, stupid, useless.  Here was no consoling knowledge of glorious sacrifice; no dying for one’s country.  There was no dismissing it with a heroic word that caught in the throat.

I have not started out to write this little chronicle of Wellingsford in order to weep over the pain of the world.  God knows there is in it an infinity of beauty, fresh revelations of which are being every day unfolded before my eyes.

If I did not believe with all my soul that out of Darkness cometh Light, I would take my old service revolver from its holster and blow out my brains this very minute.  The eternal laughter of the earth has ever since its creation pierced through the mist of tears in which at times it has been shrouded.  What has been will be.  Nay, more, what has been shall be.  It is the Law of what I believe to be God....  As a concrete instance, where do you find a fuller expression of the divine gaiety of the human spirit than in the Houses of Pain, strewn the length and breadth of the land, filled with maimed and shattered men who have looked into the jaws of Hell?  If it comes to that, I have looked into them myself, and have heard the heroic jests of men who looked with me.

For some years up to the outbreak of the war which has knocked all so-called modern values silly, my young friends, with a certain respectful superciliousness, regarded me as an amiable person hopelessly out of date.  Now that we are at grip with elementals, I find myself, if anything, in advance of the fashion.  This, however, by the way.  What I am clumsily trying to explain is that if I am to make this story intelligible I must start from the darkness where its roots lie hidden.  And that darkness is the black depths of the canal by the lock gates where Althea Fenimore’s body was found.

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Project Gutenberg
The Red Planet from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.