owing in the trough of
the seas, and the men who should put things right for us do not even know
that it is the main shaft on which they should concentrate. They are
irritating the passengers by changing the cabins, confiscating luggage,
insisting on higher fares, cutting down the rations, and instructing the
sailors in the goose-step; but the ship has no way on her, and the sound
of breakers grows louder from a sombre, precipitous, and unknown coast.

XXVI. Joy

JULY 19, 1919. It has come. This is the great day of the English. Many
have doubted whether we should ever have it, for faith had been weak and
the mind weary while the enemy was still fixed in his fanatic resolution.
But here it is, half my window-blind already bright with its first light.
To-day we celebrate our return to peace, to an earth made the fairer for
children, fit for the habitation of free men, safe for quiet folk ... the
day that once had seemed as remote as truth, as inaccessible as good
fortune; a day, so we used to think in France, more distant even than
those incredible years of the past that were undervalued by us, when we
were happy in our ignorance of the glory men could distil from misery and
filth; when we had not guessed what wealth could be got from the needs of
a public anxious for its life; nor that sleeping children could be bombed
in a noble cause. Yes, it had seemed to us even farther off than our
memories of the happy past. Yet here it is, its coffee-cups tinkling
below, and I welcome its early shafts of gold like the fortune they are.
The fortune seems innocent and unaware of its nature. It does not know
what it means to us. I had often been with soldier friends across the
water when with mock rapture they had planned an itinerary for this day.
They spoke of it where their surroundings made the thought of secure
leisure or unremarkable toil only a painful reminder of what was
beatific, but might never be. This day had not come to them. But it had
come to me.

I was luckier than they. Yet when luck comes to us, does it ever look
quite as we had imagined it when it was not ours? I lift the curtain on
this luck, and look out. From an upper window of the house opposite the
national emblem of the American Republic is hanging like an apron. Next
door to it a man is decorating his windowsills with fairy lamps, and from
his demeanour he might be devising a taboo against evil. I see no other
sign that the new and better place of