I was startled at last by hearing the wheezy groan of an aged taxi outside and like the galvanized corpse I was, I felt my members heavily stirring and propelling me to the door.
On the path in the curiously sickly light of a premature dusk under a clouded, lifeless sky I saw Dibdin and Pendleton, slightly stooping forward to the slope, walking toward me. That moment of poignant joy at seeing Dibdin, of exquisite pain on beholding Pendleton—I shall never forget it!
"Dibdin!" I cried, rushing at his hand and clinging to it to defer as long as possible touching the other's. Then, after ages it seemed, my eyes slowly turned to the tall figure of Pendleton and rested on the fleshy face, somewhat loose and pendulous, smooth-shaven and purplish, with eyes that fell before my own. Finally I disengaged my hand and held it out to him. I could not do otherwise.
"Jim," I murmured and my voice had labored over a universe of barriers to achieve that. But I could utter no more.
He peered at me from his protruding eyes as though he also were struggling, struggling with memory and with memories, with a teeming past, with all that he had been and committed, and for an instant I felt sorry for him.
"Come in," I breathed deeply, and we made our way into the house and into my study.
"Randolph," Pendleton finally uttered with a profound sigh, and then I recalled that he was playing a part. To me the appalling reality of the whole episode had been so excruciating that momentarily I forgot that he was in all likelihood playing a part. But was he? How could he? In the face of these children, in the face of all he is guilty of, how could he play a part, when the truth would raise him almost to a kind of manhood? I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt and yet I cannot wholly doubt him. Some idiotic simplicity or imbecility inside me makes it impossible for me to envisage any creature in human form as so consummate a villain. Perhaps—perhaps there is something—
"Randolph," he murmured in a deep guttural—"I know you—I remember you—yes, you are—you are—" and he paused. We hung for a moment like things dangling by threads, like marionettes motionless. Then, with a prickling sensation of sweat over all my body, I broke the spell by fumbling with a box of cigarettes and with a hand spasmodically quivering like the needle of a seismograph, I held them out.
"Have a good voyage?" I heard myself saying, as we all smoked and covertly stole glances at one another. I was not flying at his throat. Dibdin puffed heavily with the crease deepening between his eyes and Pendleton's gaze roved questing and unsteady about the room. Melodrama! There never was any except on the stage! In life there is only drama—and pain.
"How are the kids?" Dibdin asked abruptly.