“That,” he said, “is what the world is to all your comfortable people, behind the charm and excitement with which they cover and disguise it. The only difference between them and your old man is that he fought to get some light on it and lost. I would rather be he than they. He does take his world with him; theirs they leave behind, caught in the meshes of their factitious morals and conventions.”
“But,” said René, “isn’t he leaving his world all written out?”
“No, the tale of how he sank beneath its weight. It is true enough, anyhow, to have stirred you into a desire to give him pleasure. He has roused you exactly as I have been trying to do these last months.”
“That’s true. I do keep trying to get light on that little black world, but I say to myself that after all the sun’s light is quite enough.”
“It’s enough for beasts and trees. It isn’t enough for men unless they will consent to live like beasts, at the mercy of their instincts, in competition with the beasts, and have a very nasty time of it. No. No. The light your friend was after is the light of the imagination. Let your light so shine. He had never had it, never more than the will to have it. Probably he drank or took to some other form of vice to console himself in his more difficult moments. You’ll never know. Probably we all know that is worth knowing. Young men often make blots like that because life is such an infernal long time in beginning; but for an old man—well, it looks like a sober conclusion, as though he really had faced a fact, and had the sense of humor to go on living in spite of it. There!”
He had finished the cover.
“I hope he’ll like it.”
René took it that same evening to Old Lunt’s room. It was behind a stable and harness room used by a grocer as a store. Its one window looked out on a blank wall of yellow brick. For the rest the room was exactly as the old man had described it; not a stick of furniture in it; sacks thrown in a corner, and on these Old Lunt was lying with his legs crossed, his hand under his head, smiling up into the dim light. The setting sun struck the yellow wall outside the window, and the upper part of the room was filled with an apricot-colored glow. Dust danced in the light. The room was filled with an acrid sweetish smell.
Manuscript in hand, René stepped forward.