VI
He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the river towards the Fövámház.
For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now by its loneliest avenue. He stood for a long while, his back to the empty market-place—which glowed by day with the red and orange of autumn ripeness—his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in darting streaks of gold.
He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often with equal reason hated himself before.
Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they extended to their neighbours! Life appeared to him the same comic spectacle from whatever point one saw it. Fate was often just as funny when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways.
It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become really abominable.
A sentimentalist with a sense of humour cut, as he could see, a very poor figure; it were better, so far as appearances went, to be a pompous fool.
Self-esteem is so widespread a virtue that the world, whatever it may say, is always impressed even by ridiculous dignity, and its one universally unconvincing spectacle is the man laughing at himself. Besides, when a man finds himself absurd, what is he likely to think imposing?
Yet, for all his humour, Caragh sighed. For the moment, as on many previous moments, he craved the solemn personal point of view to make life seem for once of some importance and give him a taste of undiluted tears.