The work upon the widening of the bridge was still in progress. Opposite De Keyser's Hotel a big wooden hoarding covered the pavement, making a little niche with the low granite wall of the Embankment. It was too early in the evening for the recess to be occupied or to be explored by the bull's-eye lantern of law and order. He crept within it under cover of the fog, and, resting his arms upon the wet granite wall, relit a half-smoked cigarette. All day long, throughout his defiant speech, his indignant bearing, his wretched assumption of energy, he had felt himself under an observation as unfriendly as it was thorough. Some other self, cold, critical, sneering, was watching his struggles with amused contempt. He had felt its presence before, but never so utterly detached, so hostile or so impatient. That alter se which education creates and easy living nourishes, and which, deplore him as we may, is a personality to be reckoned with at every crisis and in every action of our lives, is never long content to outlive such an experience as his. It is only a question of time before the rational in man wearies of prison and poor entertainment.
"Let us go hence!"
Ingram smoked his cigarette until it burnt his lips, leaned over the parapet, and, as he dropped the glowing end into the river, measured the distance to the water that was "clop-clopping" soupily against the foot of the Embankment. His isolation in the heart of London was strangely complete, for such foot-passengers as passed, passed wide of him by a railed plank walk built outside of the great wooden hoarding that concealed him from view. The wide roadway, moreover, full of vague sound and motion—blast of motor-horns, rumble of trams, quick come and go of blurred lamps, accentuated his solitude. He waited until a heavy tread that was going westward had died away into the fog. Then he drew up his legs, first one, then the other, upon the parapet beside his hands.
"Oh Gawd! oh Gawd!" a voice groaned behind him. He checked his sinister movement and listened intently. Some one—some fellow-creature in torment—was cursing and sobbing on the pavement he had just left. He got down and groped for it. A man, huddled together, and with one leg jerking convulsively, was lying with his head against the boards.
Ingram put his arms round him and lifted him gently.
III
VALEDICTORY
Mrs. McNaughten has assured me that I stood for nearly five minutes, the brown paper parcel under my arm, staring blankly, first in one direction, then in another, and licking my lips. I am glad of her evidence that a mood so abject and personal lasted no longer. Because—alas!—what held me in a trance that temporarily lost count of time was not that this intolerable thing had befallen Paul Ingram, dear Paul, with whom I had sat, so many a night and on into the small hours, holding converse, high and austere, on man's destiny through life and beyond—no, it was that, having befallen him, it might befall any one, and, befalling any one—let me give the full measure of my craven heart—it might befall me. For one paralyzing instant that veil which mercifully cloaks the extreme chances of fate had been plucked aside. I had looked full into its malignant eyes, and, like the man in the Greek fable, what I had seen had been enough to turn flesh to stone. In that moment the shadowy safeguards which men erect between themselves and the grim possibilities of destiny—knowledge of the world, self-consciousness, confidence in untested friendships—stood revealed, the shams they are. The security born of years—anxious, toilsome years it is true, but during none of which, for a single day or night, bread, clothing, or sheltered sleep had failed me—shook and fluttered darkly like the eternal hills in an earthquake. I literally lost hold on life.
Thank God, the mood was over soon. I had time to be pitiful, to be even angry, with an illogical but humanizing wrath that fate, taking hourly toll of the world, had not spared one dear to me. I blamed myself bitterly for leaving him alone those few minutes. I had wearied of well-doing too soon. He must have yielded at last. Seated by the familiar fireside, fed and comforted, with the pipe in his mouth that still bore the scar of his long wolfish teeth upon its stem, a better mood must have awakened. I say a better mood, because, at certain depths, misfortune calls almost for the same treatment as crime, and the kindness that seeks to save must be disciplining as well as compassionate.
I dined at the À-peu-près after my work was done, hoping against hope there would be news of him there—some indication that might put me on his track again. Smeaton was in the chair to-night—old Smeaton, best and bravest knight that ever set quill in rest—with his little restless pink face, snapping black eyes, tumbled white hair, and bulging and disordered waistcoat. I was greeted uproariously. For nearly a month I had been away in the south of France, press correspondent at a murder trial which had stirred all thinking Europe by the depths it revealed of cynical depravity on the one side, and of morbid, reiterated condonation on the other. It was by far the biggest thing I had been given to do yet, and I hoped I had done it well; but it was too much to hope that, in a subject coming home so nearly to the average sensual male, the psychological conclusions I had drawn should pass unchallenged. I sat for over an hour, besieged by questions, pelted with authorities, shouted down, derided unexpectedly and as unexpectedly championed. Even madame's indulgence was not proof against such pandemonium. She pushed open the lace-curtained door, put her hands to her pretty brown ears, and shook a reproving finger at her unruly family.