THE UNDYING FIRE
"To all of such questions," said Sir Eliphaz serenely, "the answer is—we don't know. Why should we?"
§ 4
Mr. Huss seemed lost in meditation. His pale and sunken face and crumpled pose contrasted strongly with the bristling intellectual rectitude and mounting choler of Dr. Elihu Barrack.
"No, Sir Eliphaz," said Mr. Huss, and sighed.
"No," he repeated.
"What a poor phantom of a world these people conjure up! What a mockery of loss and love! The very mothers and lovers who mourn their dead will not believe these foolish stories. Restoration! It is a crowning indignity. It makes me think of nothing in the world but my dear boy's body, broken and crumpled, and some creature, half fool and half imposter, sitting upon it, getting between it and me, and talking cheap rubbish over it about planes of being and astral bodies. . . .
"After all, you teach me, Sir Eliphaz, that life, for all its grossness and pain and horror, is not so bad as it might be—if such things as this were true. But it needs no sifting of the evidence to know they are untrue. No sane man believes this stuff for ten minutes together. It is impossible to believe it. . . ."
Dr. Elihu Barrack applauded. Sir Eliphaz acted a fine self-restraint.
"They are contrary to the texture of everything we know," said Mr. Huss. "They are less convincing than the wildest dreams. By pain, by desire, by
96
