The elephant story was all a lie, so resolved Cambon, and, no sooner had he bowed his visitor out, than he rushed to the telephone, rang up his broker, and ordered him to sell out his rubber stock at any price.
Berselius, when he left the lawyer’s house, drove to his club. The selling of his rubber industry shares had been prompted by no feeling of compunction; it was an act entirely dictated by the profound irritation he felt against the other one who had made his fortune out of those same rubber industries.
He wished to break every bond between himself and the infernal entity that dominated him by night. Surely it was enough to be that other one at night, without being perpetually haunted by that other one’s traces by day.
In the Place de L’Opera, his fiacre paused in a crowd of vehicles. Berselius heard himself hailed. He turned his head. In a barouche drawn up beside his carriage, was seated a young and pretty woman. It was Sophia Melmotte, a flame from his past life, burning now for a space in the life of a Russian prince.
“Ma foi,” said Sophia, as her carriage pushed up till it was quite level with Berselius. “So you are back from—where was it you went to? And how are the tigers? Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you look. One would think you had swallowed a hearse and had not digested the trappings——”
To all of which Berselius bowed.
“You are just the same as ever,” said he.
The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was something in Berselius’s tone that made the simple words an insult. Before she could reply, however, the block in the traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on Berselius bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a stranger with whom he had spoken for a moment, and whom he had never seen before.
At the club in the smoking room, where he went for an absinthe before luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very man who had presided at the banquet given to him on the day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who had been his friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt pleasure, was now obnoxious to him. And after a while the weird fact was borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him. Tirard was talking to the man who was dead—the other Berselius. The new rifle for the army, which filled Tirard’s conversation, would have been an interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to the new.
Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized that all the friends, pursuits, and interests that had filled his life till this, were useless to him and dead as the cast-off self that had once dominated his being. Not only useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He would have to re-create a world of interests for himself out of new media. He was living in a world where all the fruit and foliage and crops had been blighted by some wizard’s wand; he would have to re-plant it over anew, and at the present moment he did not know where to cast about him for a single seed.