CHAPTER VIII.
THE FINAL POSE.
He felt that the time had come at last. What in his misery he had thought vaguely possible now loomed close before.
With the resolve to make an end of it all, to have done with pain, to cheat the inevitable, came a flood of relief. The torture of his brain was swept away as if it had not been, and its receding tide left only a shallow residuum of false sentiment.
The poor fool busied himself with details and accessories. Since he had come to the point, he resolved that he would pose to the last. He began to play his old trick of exciting a diseased duality of consciousness.
As he walked eastwards he was composing his farewell letters, he was picturing to himself the sorrow of his friends. They would talk of him wonderingly, as a brilliant life promising great things, gone with its work undone. They would recall his sweetness, the glow of his bright youth ... the tears came into his eyes at the idea, it was so pathetic a picture.
His thoughts had run so long in the same groove, that though he felt dimly that there ought to be other and deeper feelings within him, he was unable to evoke them. He was conscious that this dainty picturing was utterly false; yet, try as he would, he could not stop it. Whether it was the last flicker of intense vanity, or merely that his mind was weakened by debauchery, it is impossible to say; but when a man plays unhealthy tricks with his mind, and is for ever feeling his spiritual muscles, the habit holds him fast as in a vice. His last hours possess a strange psychological interest.
He walked eastwards mechanically, but stopped when he had turned into Houndsditch, and the roar of the early traffic in Bishopsgate sounded less loudly.
From a card hanging in a pawnbroker's window he saw a bedroom was to let, and after paying the rent in advance, he was allowed to take possession. He lit the oil-stove that did duty for a fire, and lay down, falling into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
When he woke it was quite dark, and after washing his hands he went to a low eating-house for a last meal. The menu was pasted on the window in strips, while a cabbage-laden steam floated out of the half-open door. The room was long and low of ceiling, each table standing in a separate partition. A large woman, dressed in a scarlet silk blouse, walked up and down the centre gangway, taking the orders, which she shouted out in a hoarse voice to the open kitchen at the far end. "Pudding and peas!" "Roast, Yorkshire, and baked!"