When they entered the large hotel where they were to spend the night Jim hid his face as best he could from the little groups of tourists gathered about the hall, and, telling Monimé that his head ached, hastened up the stairs to the room which had been assigned to them.
But as he was about to enter, his destiny descended upon him. A door further along the passage opened, and a moment later, to his horror, the fat, well-remembered figure of Mrs. Darling faced him in the bright illumination of the electric light. He saw her start, he saw her eyes open wide in surprise, and, with a gasp, he dashed forward into his room, and slammed the door behind him.
Monimé had preceded him, and her back was turned as he staggered forward and fell into an armchair, his face as white as the whitewashed walls. She was busying herself with the baggage, and did not look in his direction for some moments. When at length she glanced at him he had nearly recovered from the first force of the shock, and she saw only a tired man mopping his forehead with his handkerchief.
Chapter XXI: THE LAST KICK
When the gong sounded for dinner, Jim protested to Monimé that he was ill and did not wish to change his clothes and come down. For a while he had hoped, in his madness, that when Mrs. Darling saw him again he would be able to look straight at her and deny that he was her son-in-law. “I evidently have a double,” he would say. “My name is Easton, madam; the proprietor of the hotel will tell you that he has known me as such for the last five years.” A fact, indeed, which was beyond dispute, for he had stayed here before he went to the gold mines.
But now that the time had come he realized that this was fantastic, and his one idea was to get away, so that he might make an end of himself in decent privacy. He was not a coward: he was not afraid of death or physical suffering. But with all his soul he dreaded captivity or enforcement of any kind. The possibility of being chased into a corner, of being handcuffed and put behind bolts and bars, of being compelled and constrained, and finally led, pinioned, to the gallows, filled him with horrible terror.
One of the most common forms in which a breakdown of the nervous system shows itself is that known as claustrophobia, a fear of being shut up or surrounded and fettered. It is a primitive and primeval dread to which the disordered consciousness leaps back; it is a survival of the days, æons ago, when man was both hunter and prey of man; it is, in essence, the fear of the trap.
Monimé, from whom his mental torture could not be altogether concealed, looked at him with troubled, anxious eyes. “Oh, Jim,” she said, “what is the matter with you? There’s something dreadful on your mind; there’s something worrying you, and you won’t tell me about it.”