The Rubicon was before him. He looked at its swirling waters, then, without any further hesitation, he crossed it. He was never to return again....
"I'm sorry to disappoint you all," he said. "There's no sentimental motive behind my action—no desire to make any people better, nothing fine at all. It simply is, as I've said already, that those two people brought me back to life again. I don't know what, except that I was suddenly interested in them. I didn't like them, and they hated me. Now I've become interested in their friends and relations. I don't want to improve them. They wouldn't let me if I did. I came back from France nobody at all. What happened there had simply killed all my interest in life. And—I'm awfully sorry to say it—but none of you brought my interest back. I think the centre of interests changed. It's as though there were some animal under the floor, and the part of the room that he's under is the part that you look at, because he's restless and it quivers. Well, he's shifted his position, that's all. You aren't on the interesting part of the floor any longer. I do hate to be rude and personal—but you have driven me to it. All of you are getting back to exactly what you were before the war: there's almost no change at all! And you're none of you interesting. I'm just as bad—but I want to go where the interesting human beings are, and there are more in the dirty streets than the clean ones. In books like Marcella, years ago people went out of their own class because they wanted to do 'good.' I don't want to do good to anyone, but I do want to keep alive now that I've come back to life again. And—that's all there is to it," he ended lamely.
He had done as he had expected. He had offended them all mortally. He was arrogant, proud, supercilious, and a little mad. And they saw, finally, that they had lost him. No more money for any of them.
"Well," said Henry Matcham at last, "if you want to know, Tom, I think that's about the rottenest explanation I've ever heard. Of course, you're covering something up. But I'm sure we don't want to penetrate your secret if you don't like us to."
"There isn't any secret." Tom was beginning to be angry. "I tell you for the hundredth time I'm not going to start soup kitchens, or found mission rooms, or anything like that, but I don't want any more of these silly tea-parties or perpetual revues, or—or——"
"Or any of us," Dollie, her cheeks flushed with angry colour, broke in. "All Tom's been trying to explain to us is that he thinks we're a dull lot, and the Bolsheviks in the slums are more lively——"
"No," Tom broke in; "Dollie, that isn't fair. I don't want to pick and choose according to class any more. I don't want to be anything ever again with a name to it—like a Patriot, or a Democrat, or a Bolshevik, or an Anti-Bolshevik, or a Capitalist. I'm going by Individuals wherever they are. I—Oh, forgive me," he broke off, "I'm preaching; I didn't mean to. It's a thing I hate. But it's so strange—you none of you know how strange it is—being dead, so that you felt nothing, and minded nothing, and thought nothing, and then suddenly waking——"
But they had had enough. Tommy was trying to teach them. Teach them! And Tommy!...
They "must be going"—sadly, angrily, indignantly they melted away. Tom was very sorry: there was nothing to be done.
Only Claribel, taking his hand for a moment, whispered: