“I don’t just know,” he answered; “we’ve none of us gone under before. There haven’t been enough really to clash until she came.”
The dead tranquillity of his manner was overwhelming; there was nothing to be said. I was in the presence of a man who was not as I was, whose standard of values, absolute to himself, was not to be measured by any of mine.
“I suppose I shall cut my throat,” he began again.
I noticed with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames, containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful. What kind of a being could conceive this impossibly barbaric room, could enshrine those impossibly crude designs, and then fold his hands? I turned fiercely upon him. “But you are rich enough to enjoy life,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked wearily.
“In the name of God,” I shouted, “what do you work for—what have you been plotting and plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last?” He made a small indefinite motion of ignorance, as if I had propounded to him a problem that he could not solve, that he did not think worth the solving.
It came to me as the confirmation of a suspicion—that motion. They had no joy, these people who were to supersede us; their clear-sightedness did nothing more for them than just that enabling them to spread desolation among us and take our places. It had been in her manner all along, she was like Fate; like the abominable Fate that desolates the whole length of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our plans, nothing but a hideous jumble of fragments like those of statues, smashed by hammers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate that we hate, and that debases us forever and ever. She had been all that to me ... and to how many more?
“I used to be a decent personality,” I vociferated at him. “Do you hear—decent. I could look a man in the face. And you cannot even enjoy. What do you come for? What do you live for? What is at the end of it all?”
“Ah, if I knew ...” he answered, negligently.