As the old man, never failing to give expression to his own personal vindication of that which the poet had wrought, won nearer and nearer towards the end, the dying man was heard to murmur, “Courage, Achilles! Courage, Achilles!” for he seemed almost to fear that consciousness would forsake him before he could realize his own apotheosis to the full.
When the old man in a kind of triumph and defiance had come to the end of his task, the radiance upon the poet’s face was starlike in its lustre.
“Oh, oh, he can see! he can see!” muttered Dodson, in a wild consternation. “He has the sight in his eyes.”
The poet had stretched forth his weak left hand as though in quest of something.
He shaped a phrase with his lips, which Dodson had not the power to understand.
“What does he say?” cried Dodson wildly.
However, the white-haired man appeared to understand. He took from the table not the carefully written pages from which he had been reading, but the threepenny reporter’s notebook in which Dodson’s hastily pencilled criticism had been scribbled. To Dodson’s profound wonder the old man carried this over to where the poet lay and placed it in the outstretched left hand. But the hand had not the power to hold it now.
The poet was heard to mutter some inaudible words.
The old man bore the somewhat unclean threepenny reporter’s notebook, with its dilapidated green cover, to the lips of the poet, who pressed them upon it with a half-joyful gesture. In the act he had ceased to breathe.
It was left to poor Dodson to discover that the act of the divine clemency had, after many days, been extended to the Warrior-Soul. The old man was still holding the threepenny reporter’s notebook to the lips of the mighty dead, when Dodson tore it from his hand. Clutching it convulsively the young man ran forth of the room and headlong through the shop. Bare-headed, wild-eyed he reached the frost-bound, fog-engirdled darkness of the January streets. As he ran up one street and down another, not knowing nor desiring to know whither he was bound, yet with that in his clutch ever pressed to his own white lips, he cried out, “Oh Luney, Luney, I wish now I had never known you!”