THE INEFFECTIVE MESSAGE


The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness;
but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots;
that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one
zealot prevented him from becoming another. He lacked the zealot's
conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to
give a message effectively. He began to see that the world could not be
lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or
late, be delivered by another. The time mattered not. Could he not be as
reposeful, as patient, as God?

In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and
it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town. As the elevated
train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room
where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men
bent their heads over busy sewing-machines. Nearest the window, full
before it, was one that touched him--a young man with some hardy spirit
of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to
recognise the odds against him. And fixed to his machine, where his eyes
might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac--his
little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross. The pathos of
it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried
him by it.

The train creaked its way around the curve--but the face dreaming
happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind,
coercing him.