“If you don’t believe me,” he said again, “you can throw it out the open window. I know what I wish to do, and nothing will hinder me from doing it.”
Convinced then, I put the revolver back where I had taken it, and apologised, a little ashamed of my interference and ready to retire. But he stopped me.
“No, stay, I beg of you,” he said. “I have not yet decided. That can happen any minute.”
So I had not deceived myself about his determination after all. He continued in a manner that was both savage and enigmatic.
“What I do not want, what I will not have at any price, is to have my inexperience or my machine blamed some day. I have already killed that which I loved; I will not kill my work at the very moment I am perfecting it.”
I should have regarded these words as merely incoherent if, by one of those lucid intuitions which in exceptional circumstances guide us like some mysterious instinct, I had not instantly connected them with the less confused utterances of a few days before: “I used to think that some day I would break my wings while in full flight. It would have been a good end, and so easy. Nobody would suspect. But it is impossible. It would mean betraying the machine, allowing a false suspicion to rest upon it. It can play false; the man it carries—no.”
He was forearmed against death when its appeal would be most immediate, most alluring, most caressing; the revolver was there to put an end to the temptation if it should become irresistible. This reverence for a sacred work, which I had not expected from Raymond Cernay, formerly so fickle and so easily wearied, threw more light upon that which followed:
“A soldier goes on to the end.”
But the reason for it all still eluded me. Trembling under the domination of the raging fire that he struggled to restrain within him, he permitted himself fragmentary explanations, which the information imparted by Mme. Mairieux prepared me to comprehend:
“I am tormented by an intolerable situation—and there is no way out. I crush my victims under me as I go. I am about, you understand, to cause another misfortune.”