He had straightened up in his chair. He was no longer staring at her, but at the unlighted cigarette that he was rolling between his fingers.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’ve been spoiled. People listen to me—any damned nonsense I spout—and I’ve got out of the way of listening myself. Now, you see, when I take up a book that’s worth reading, I feel as if the writer fellow had got me into a corner, and was trying to lay down the law; so I want to contradict him, and I chuck the blamed thing across the room.”
He spoke earnestly, and he was in earnest. It was his great charm that he was always sincere. He was not inventing things to say to this girl. He was simply selecting from his restless, curious mind those things which he thought would interest her. He was succeeding, too—he saw that.
Geraldine did not speak, because to her reserved and proud spirit it was impossible to speak easily to a stranger; but she thought over his words with an odd sensation of distress. She felt sorry for the conquering Sambo.
He had picked up her book, and was turning the pages. It was a copy of “The Hound of Heaven,” which her father had given her long ago.
“Poetry!” he said. “Queer sort of stuff!”
Then he read aloud:
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind—”
He stopped, and for a moment he sat silent. The light was fading out of the sky now, and in the dusk his face looked white and strained. The echo of his strong young voice seemed still to drift through the shadowy room.
Looking at him, Geraldine had an extraordinary fancy, almost a vision, of his terribly defiant soul fleeing, swift and laughing, to its own destruction. She was filled with an austere compassion and wonder. It was as if, in an instant, and without a word spoken, he had told her all the long tale of his wasted years.