I sat down obediently, and looked around me again. Gradually, as I gazed, the full significance of the stripped room came home to me. It was the bareness of the station waiting-room—the room in which one chafes and frets, watching the hand crawl over the clock-face, with an ear strained to catch the faint whistle of the train that is to bear us away to where we would or should be. That was it. He had come here to wait. The poor faint voice spoke again.
"I'd been lying here a long time," it said, "watching the moon, and it must have sent me to sleep. Don't ride rough, old man," feeling clumsily for the hand that was at my eyes. "It's easier for me than it would be for almost any one else. I often wonder what it was gave me such a conviction of the utter unreality of the world. I think it was the years I spent, month after month, alone on the great wastes. I used to come into the cities and see the people swarming under the arc-lights round the hotels and theatres, and think that's what they'd been doing all the while, night after night. One can't take a world seriously that can mean two such different things to different men. Hold that basin a minute, will you, Prentice? I've got to cough. I can't put it off any longer. Thanks! Yes, it was that last winter in London that broke the bowl and loosed the golden cord. I thought I'd been through a lot and knew all life could do; but, by God! I never imagined anything like that. Stop snivelling, man. I tell you there's no pain at all now. Just something like a big yawn that gets worse while I speak. And I had a lot to say. Do you know, what you said rankled a bit: I mean about my not understanding the ethics of friendship. Why, old man, I've often said to myself that there'd have to be a God if only to thank Him for a friend like you. Now I'm going to discharge the debt. Where shall I begin?"
I told him what I knew already. I forget exactly what words I used. Poor broken ones, no doubt. I told him he was a hero, a saint: that just to have lived a life like his to the end was to have won the bays and gained the victory. He stopped me halfway.
"Nonsense, you sentimental old penny-a-liner! Any one would have done the same. You'd have done it yourself, and you'd have done it far better, because you'd have loved while you worked. That's where I break down. Try to see me as I am, Prentice. I like to have you sorry for me; but don't let illusion mingle with the regret. I hated them! yes, yes, I did. Hated them as a man like me hates anything warm and human that encumbers him and tangles his feet upon his own ruinous tragic course. Even while those angels sat on my knee and ate their bread and jam and asked for more fairy stories I was straining for escape—thinking out ways by which I could rid myself of them, once and for all. You know the way I took. I had to sell my honor for it—handle money that you'd have died before you touched. For I'd given my word to them, fool that I was. I'd eaten their bread, and there's only the one law among white men. Fumble round, Prentice—there's a tumbler full of water somewhere near your feet."
He drank and went on, at first in a calmer voice:
"It began by my going to the theatre where she was dancing. I'd gone to the door again and again, taken my place in the queue and come away at the last moment. And one night I went on and sat up in the gallery, jammed tight, waiting for her. People were talking. I won't say what I heard. It may be true. They didn't know that what they were heaping up was only more damnation for the shabby, shame-faced brute that sat among them, biting his tongue, and keeping his fists deep in his pockets for fear he should curse them suddenly and strike them over their unclean mouths. And then—she came on the stage, Prentice, and kissed her hands, and the whole house got up and roared and cheered. But I hung my head. I didn't dare look at her for a long, long time. At last, when I knew the dance was over, I found the courage. She was curtseying and smiling up at us, and it happened my first glance went straight into her eyes."
He gripped my wrist.
"There's the shadow there, Prentice, what I told you of the night we walked home: the look I was afraid of when I sent you to meet her. None of you see it, because you didn't know her before. God! how it shocked me. I couldn't stand it. I jumped up and climbed out. Some of the men hit out at me. There's some sort of a chapel on the other side of the Circus. The door was open, and there were about twenty people listening to a man gabbling in a language that's like nothing in heaven or earth. I knelt down on a bench at the bottom of the church and prayed, the first time since I swore off—oh! twenty years ago. 'Don't let it touch her!' I kept on saying. 'It's up to my neck, it's over my mouth and down my loathing throat, but don't let it touch the hem of her dress! I give in, God! You have me beaten, eternal Father, all in, down and out. But oh, Jehovah, Jahveh! Shining One! don't hurt a slip of a girl.' A man touched me on the shoulder. Said I'd better go out and come back on an evidence night.
"So you see, Prentice, for all my cleverness, I've had to come to it at last. I've had to whine for mercy to the God that made the tiger and the cancer microbe. I am only an old Puritan, after all. One lifetime's too short to get two centuries and a half of Massachusetts out of your blood. The only time a real codfish Yankee's out of mischief is when he's making the dollars. A hundred years ago I should have been a great preacher of the word, Prentice. One of the sort that the sight of a man rejoicing in his strength or a woman in her beauty goads to cruel madness. And wherever I'd have gone I'd have left bowed heads and chilled hearts and minds half-crazed with the fear of judgment to come. What joy I'd have taken in it! I'd have been so busy seeing death got its due, it never would have occurred to me life had any rights. But it's a hundred years too late for that. The world's grown wiser. It never will let that sort of deviltry get the upper hand again. They saw it in my work, Prentice. That's why they've kept me bottled up and let me kill myself inch by inch with my own poison. But if a man can't do ill broadcast, there's always a quiet place where mischief can be done. You can always take your revenge for the world's common sense on some trustful soul that's laid itself bare in your hands...."
Then I think he ceased to talk coherently.