THE UNDYING FIRE
my son but to the dying penguin roasted alive for a farthing's worth of oil. There must be an answer to the men who go in ships to do such things. There has to be a justification for all the filth and wretchedness of louse and fluke. I will not have you slipping by on the other side, chattering of planes of living and sublimated atoms, while there is a drunken mother or a man dying of cholera in this world. I will not hear of a God who is just a means for getting away. Whatever foulness and beastliness there is, you must square God with that. Or there is no universal God, but only a coldness, a vast cruel indifference. . . .
"I would not make my peace with such a God if I could. . . .
"I tell you of these black and sinister realities, and what do you reply? That it is all right, because after death we shall get away from them. Why? if presently I go down under the surgeon's knife, down out of this hot and weary world, and then find myself being put together by a spirit doctor in this beyond of yours, waking up to a new world of amiable conversations and artificial flowers, having my hair restored and the gaps among my teeth filled up, I shall feel like someone who has deserted his kind, who has sneaked from a sick-room into a party. . . . Well—my infection will go with me. I shall talk of nothing but the tragedy out of which I have come—which still remains—which continues—tragedy.
"And yet I believe in Immortality!"
Dr. Barrack, who had hitherto been following Mr. Huss with evident approval, started, sounded a note
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