The Empty Sack

by Basil King

He must find a lavatory, and so began walking up and down the corridors, looking at doors discreetly placed in corners. When he came to his objective, it was locked. Again it was reprieve. The same door would be on other floors, but he was not ready for the moment to forsake his shelter. It was true that at any minute Flynn and Jackman might emerge from the lift, but there were nearly thirty chances that if they had followed him so closely they would not select this landing. Even more were the chances that they had not seen him slip into the building at all.

Fevered and thirsty, he stooped to drink at the fountain crowning the head of a little bronze woman with a pair of dolphins on her shoulders. She seemed to be of Maya type, and a uniformed guardian had once told him that a great modern sculptor had molded her. With a difference in dolphins, she was repeated on every floor, forever diademed in water.

Teddy's mind had so far suspended operation as to his immediate plight that he went back to the morning, seven or eight months previously, when an errand from Mr. Brunt had brought him into the great ground-floor atrium, revealing the Basilica Julia or the Basilica Emilia of Ancient Rome Restored right there in lower Broadway. Simplicity, immensity, the awesome beauty of mere form! The wide spaces, the mighty columns, the tempered white light of majestic Roman windows! The absence of striving for effect! The peace, the restfulness, the cheerfulness, when striving for effect are abandoned, dwarfing the magnitude of crowds and reducing their ebbings and flowing to mere vanity! Like Jennie with her emotions, like Pansy with her intuitions, Teddy had no words for these impressions; but the Scarborough tradition, nursed on Ancient Rome Restored, vibrated to their music.

"And here I am, trapped like a rat in a hole!"

So he came back to it. He wondered if he were awake. Was it possible that ten or fifteen minutes could have transformed him from a hard-working, home-loving boy into a fugitive who had no choice left but to shoot himself? As for facing the disgrace, he did not consider it. To stand before his mother charged with theft, even if it was on her behalf, was not to be thought of. He couldn't do it, and there was an end to it. Still less could he go through the other incidentals, handcuffs, a cell, the court, the sentence, Bitterwell, and the lifetime that would come after his release. He could put the pistol to his heart and, if necessary, he could burn in hell—if there was a hell; but he couldn't do the other thing.

And yet to put the pistol to his heart and burn in hell formed a lamentable choice on their side.

"I'm not a thief," he protested, inwardly. "I took the money—how could I help it, with dad sick and ma at the end of everything?—but I'm not a thief."

He was sure of that. It became a formula, not perhaps of comfort, but of justification. Had he been a thief, he told himself, he could have faced the music; but it was precisely because he had taken money while preserving his inner probity that he refused to be judged by the standards of men. Once more he couldn't express it in this way to himself; but it was the conclusion to which his instincts leaped. Only one tribunal could discern between the good and evil in his case; so he was resolved to go before it.

In a quiet corner he began to cry. He was only a boy, with a boy's facility of emotion, especially of distress. He cried at the thought of his mother and the girls, with no one to fend for them, and no Teddy coming home in the evenings. It was true that, apart from his filchings, he had been able to fend for them only to the extent of eighteen per, but there was always a chance of better days ahead. Even at the worst of times, they had a good deal of fun among themselves, and now....

Now his mother would be in the kitchen, beginning to get supper, and each of the girls would be making her way back to Indiana Avenue. Pansy's dog clock would tell her when to watch for them, and the loving little creature would be eying the door, ready to welcome each of them in turn. If she had a preference, it was for himself, and the feeling of her gentle paws against his shin was connected with the tenderest things he knew.