The loneliness of the great city, the very atmosphere of it had seized upon him, cut him off from those past few brilliant weeks of adventure and stress. He could no longer feel as he felt then. He tried, remembering how they had pre-judged him, to work up his feelings of only a few hours ago, but the old anger would not come. He had left it behind him on the Heart of Ireland or, maybe, on the ferry boat. Anger would not come, because the way was barred by a new-found sense of reason that kept saying to him, “Well, suppose they did? Look at the facts—they made a mistake—you were furious because you were innocent, but were you made of glass so that they could see your innocence? Not you; why you were Vanderdecken. You had already done a shady trick by getting on board the Wear Jack under that contract; you were no white lamb. Facts were against you and you were too proud to explain—that’s the truth—and you had a grudge against everything. Well there it is and no more to be said.”
He went into a picture house and sat for ten minutes and came out again and had some food.
It was evening now and the lamps were springing alight. He wandered down towards the docks, Hank, Bud and Tommie still clinging to him, and Reason, refreshed with a porter-house steak, clearing her throat to say something. Then in Tallis Street where the crimps abide, she said it.
“Swab!” Then she began to rub it in. “You wrote that letter. Every line you wrote, down there in the foc’sle of the Heart, was pure joy. You said to yourself, ‘When they read this they will suffer.’ That’s what you said and what you felt. You didn’t write to explain, you wrote to hit.”
That was the truth.
They were the best people he had ever met and he had wounded them all he could. Done all he could to make them feel mean and small.
If they had not been the best people, the letter would have had no effect; if he had not loved them, the odious pleasure of writing it would not have been there. If he had not loved them, he would not have struck them, struck them with the feverish anger of the child that breaks and destroys the thing it cares for.
He walked on, making towards the water side, reviewing himself and his futilities.
Impulse and a volcanic nature had been his ruin right along from the first—and pride. And the devil of it was his impulse had always been—or nearly always—towards the good. Why, look away back to the time when he commanded a ship and had been fired for a volcanic letter to the owners for supplying his crew with “grub that a dog wouldn’t eat.” And he had chucked a good chance to go and fight in a war that had nothing to do with him, just because the Lusitania had been torpedoed. Look at the McGinnis business. Look at everything.
A man rarely sees himself in the glass of mind. When he does the image is rarely quite true. Candon saw a reflection uglier than the reality. At all events it was a good thing that he saw it. Then he went home and tried to sleep and could not.