"You play my song ver' nice. And that is much better than playing ze
Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend."
3
It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.
No one else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in it—did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other men would get the credit. The Committee who had appointed him consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and their own daring break with tradition—had no suspicion that even the fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure. And not even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense. They had provided the money and done what he wanted and so served their purpose. Among his old colleagues he bore himself confidently but unobtrusively. He could afford to pay them an apparent deference. He was going farther than they were. His eyes were fixed on a future far beyond the centres of their jealousies and ambitions when he would be freed from the wasteful struggle with petty ailments and petty people, and the last pretence of being concerned with individual life. It was a time of respite and revision. He was young—in his profession extraordinarily young—and he was able to look back, as a mountaineer looks back from his first peep over the weary foothills, knowing that the bitter drudgery is past and that before him lies the true and splendid adventure.
That was in the day-time. But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came. It was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide—a draining away of power. He could do nothing against it. He could only sit motionless, bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality that was slipping from him. And then into the emptiness there flowed back slowly, painfully, a strange life—a stream choked and muddied at its source—breaking through.
It was a physical thing. Some sort of nervous reaction. With the dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded deliberately. He would leave the house and walk—anywhere—but always where there were people—down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad river into a fiery, restless lake. There he let go altogether, and the crowds carried him. He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and ugly—sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound of their nasal strident voices brought him relief. He could not shake off their fascination for him. He was like a man hanging round the scene of some conquered, unforgotten vice.
It was one dismal November evening that, turning aimlessly into a Soho side-street, he came upon an old man who stood on a soap-box under a lamp and preached. He held a Bible to the light and read from it, and at intervals leant forward and beat the tattered book with his open hand.
"You hear that, men and women. This is the liar, the tyrant, the self-confessed devil whom you have worshipped from the beginning of your creation. You see for yourselves the sort of beast he is. There isn't a brute amongst us who would do the things he's done. He's made you fight and kill and torture each other for his sake. And all down the ages he has laughed at you—he is laughing now because, after all—he knows the truth—he knows what I tell you here night after night"—and Mr. Ricardo leant forward and pointed a long, dirty finger at the darkness—"that he doesn't exist—that he is a dream—a myth—a hope——"
Someone cheered—perhaps because the last words had a sound of eloquent conclusion—and Mr. Ricardo nodded and took breath. He was like a scarecrow image that had been stuck up by a freakish joker in a London street. The respectability that still clung to him made him the more ludicrous. His clothes were the ruined cast-offs of a middle-class tradesman, and over them he wore his old masters gown. It did not flutter out behind now, but lay dank and heavy along his sides like the wings of a shot bird.
Robert Stonehouse stood back against the shuttered windows of a shop and stared at him. The sea, rushing out in some monstrous tidal wave had left its floor littered with old wreckage, with dead, forgotten people who stirred and lifted themselves. A grotesque, private resurrection. . . .