THE LITTLE WINGED GOD
The closing of the door behind his landlady was unheard by Masters. He did not move from the position in which the woman had left him for many, very many minutes.
When at last he rose, lifting his head, he caught sight of his own reflection in the mirror. Started back, almost cried out: there was such a deathly pallor covering his face.
His mouth felt as parched as Sahara. Mechanically he mixed a whisky and soda: drank it off. Then laughed. Not a pleasant mirth; one of those built up on a sob.
Then self-raillery: the old, old, ever sought useless salve. What a fool! What a fool he was to care! A woman! Just as he had always pictured them—always till the book he was now engaged on. When he thought how chaste and good and pure his last heroine was, on paper, he laughed again. The same laugh; with the same choking painful little catch-in-the-throat in it too.
He thought he had lost his ideals long ago; we are apt to flatter ourselves so. But their death is hard; they live on—unknown even to ourselves—to appear before us like some new star of whose existence we know nothing. Make it our guiding star, and we are—when it sinks below the horizon of fate—as children crying in the night.
The mantel clock chimed seven times. Masters' attention was thereby drawn to the fact that it was half-past that hour. Lodging-house clocks are not without their peculiarities; the fulfilled ambition of this particular one was to be half-an-hour behind time.
Masters started, too, at the sound. Memory of his neglected work came to him. Lying on his desk was a bundle of corrected galley proofs, which should have been posted to his publisher. Now it was too late: the post bag would be made up.
He was annoyed that he had allowed the incident—he was miserably failing in trying to label it so to himself—to interrupt the routine of his work. Another glance at the clock and he kicked off his slippers and horned on his shoes.
Putting on a cap, fastening his greatcoat as he went, he hurried railway stationwards. For all the thickness of his coat he was not warm. There was a coldness around his heart as if it were icebound.