And to be perfectly honest, he believed it would. He
could now afford to pay for help in his work; to buy what books he
needed or fancied; to take holidays while putting in a LOCUM; even to
keep on the LOCUM, at a good salary, while he journeyed overseas to
visit the land of his birth. But at this another side of him--what he
thought of as spirit, in contradistinction to soul--cried out in alarm,
fearful lest it was again to be betrayed. Thus far, though by rights
coequal in the house of the body, it had been rigidly kept down.
Nevertheless it had persisted, like a bright cold little spark at dead
of night: his restlessness, the spiritual malaise that encumbered him
had been its mute form of protest. Did he go on turning a deaf ear to
its warnings, he might do himself irreparable harm. For time was flying,
the sum of his years mounting, shrinking that roomy future to which he
had thus far always postponed what seemed too difficult for the moment.
Now he saw that he dared delay no longer in setting free the imprisoned
elements in him, was he ever to grow to that complete whole which each
mortal aspires to be.--That a change of environment would work this
miracle he did not doubt; a congenial environment was meat and drink to
him, was light and air. Here in this country, he had remained as utterly
alien as any Jew of old who wept by the rivers of Babylon. And like a
half-remembered tune there came floating into his mind words he had lit
on somewhere, or learnt on the school-bench--Horace, he thought, but,
whatever their source, words that fitted his case to a nicety.
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