CHAPTER XXVII
Within a few days I saw the correctness of Annette’s summing up.
A medieval legend tells of an angel being sent to Satan with the message that God meant to take from the devil all the temptations with which he had seduced mankind. To this Satan resigned himself because he couldn’t help it, begging of the angel that he should be left with just one—and that the least important. “Which?” asked the angel. “Depression,” said Satan. The angel considered the request, found that depression cut but slight figure as a sin, and went back to heaven, leaving it behind him. “Good!” laughed Satan, as the celestial vision faded out. “In this one gift I’ve secured the whole bag of tricks.”
And that is what I was to find.
I was depressed on leaving Europe. I grew more depressed because of the experience on board ship. In New York I was still more depressed. There was a month in which all things worked together for evil; and then I came to the place at which Satan had desired to have me.
I have not said that during all this time I made no attempt to look up my old friends at the Down and Out or, beyond an occasional argument with Cantyre, to fulfil the mission with which I had been intrusted. Ralph Coningsby had come and offered me work, and I had refused it. Even the march of public events, with the introduction of lawless submarine warfare and the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States, hadn’t roused me. I marked the slow rise of the impulse toward war in the breasts of the American people, as passionless and as irresistible as an incoming tide, but it seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was out of it, flung aside by a fate that had made sport of me.
I was so far from the current of whatever could be called life that I grew apathetic. Though I hadn’t seen Regina for weeks, I sat down under the impalpable obstacles between us, making no effort to overcome them. I ate and drank and slept and brooded on the futility of living, and let the doing so fill my time. Lovey was worried, and dogged me round till there were minutes when I could have sprung on him and choked him.
Then came the afternoon when I decided that Satan must have his way.
There is a hotel in New York of which I had many recollections because I had frequented its barroom in the days before I went altogether down. It is a somewhat expensive-looking barroom, with heavy mahogany, gilded cornices, and frescoes of hunting-scenes on the wall. Hanging over the bar at any time during the day or night can be seen all the types that are commonly known as sporting, from the dashing to the cheap.
They might have been the same as on that day when I turned my back upon the place five years previously. They hung in the same attitudes; they called for the same drinks; they used the same profanities, though with some novelty in the slang. With my limp, my black patch, and my general haggardness, I felt like a ghost returning among them.