“I mean that I am going to live my own life.”
“That you’re out of politics?”
“Yes. My resignation goes in to-morrow.”
“My God! Why?”
Fallaray got up and went to the window. He stood for a moment looking out at a corner of the terrace where several steps led down to a fountain in which, out of an urn held in the hands of a weather-worn boy, water was flowing, colored like a rainbow by the evening sun.
And Lytham followed him, wondering whether he had gone off his head, become feeble-minded as the result of overstrain. And then he saw Lola sitting on the edge of the fountain, with her face tilted up, her hands clasped round one of her knees and her golden hair gleaming.
And there both men remained, gazing,—Fallaray with a smile of possession, of infinite pride and pleasure; Lytham with an expression of profound amazement and quick understanding.
“So it’s a woman,” he thought. And as he continued to look, another picture of that girl came back into his mind. He had seen her before. He had turned as she had passed him somewhere and caught his breath. He remembered to have said to himself as she had walked away, “Eve, come to life! Some poor devil of an Adam will go to hell for her.”—The Carlton—Chalfont—the foyer with its little cases of glittering jewels, the long strip of carpet leading to the stairs of the dining room—the palms—the orchestra. It all came back.—Well, this might be a form of madness in a man of Fallaray’s age and womanless life, but, thank God, it was one with which he could deal. It was physical, not mental, as he had feared. Fallaray might very well play Adam without going into hell.
“Can’t you combine the two,” he said. “Politics and that girl? It’s been done before. It’s being done every day. The one is helped by the other.”
But Fallaray shook his head. “I am not going to do it,” he said. “I have had a surfeit of one and nothing of the other. Take it from me finally, George,—I am out of the political game. I think I should have been out of it in any case, because I came here acknowledging failure, fed up, nauseated. I am not the man to juggle with intrigues, to say one thing to placate the capitalists to-day and another to fool labor to-morrow. It isn’t my way and I shall not be missed. On the contrary, my resignation will be accepted with eagerness. I am going to begin all over again, free, perfectly firm in my belief that there are better men to do my job. I was a bull in a china shop, and it will remain a china shop, whether it’s run by one party or another. It’s the system. Nothing can alter it. I couldn’t, you and your party won’t be able to. It’s gone too far. It’s a cancer. It will kill the country. And so I’m out. I consider that I have earned the right to love and make a home. Row off from my Eden, my dear fellow, and leave me in peace. I am not going to be rescued.”