nd so, when it is defeated has no imaginable
hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human
words. But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow
a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver. And of this ultimate
resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is
something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the
secrets of God. At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there
will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment.
It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and
defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is not knowledge, for
the intellect seems to have no particular part in it. Nor is it (as the
modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative
paralysis of the powers of grief. It is not negative in the least; it
is as positive as good news. In some sense, indeed, it is good news. It
seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance
in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we
should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of
this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him
to the brim. He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross
was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was
going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least
whether he was killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to
start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror
had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder. By
the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some
impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm,
careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map,
was wise, careful, and useless. He had fancied that he would have to let
himself vertically down the face of the whole building. When he dropped
into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe
as if he had only dropped from the sun to t
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