»Well, and then?«
»There's no more to be said. Think it out for yourself, and I'll stop talking. It's only five years since I went to church. That's the truth.«
Truth? What truth? What was this unexplored terror, that he had never met before either in the face of death or in life itself? Truth?
Square-cheeked, hard-headed, conscious only of the conflict in his soul, he sat there resting his head on his hands and slowly turning his eyes as though from one extreme of life to the other. And life was collapsing—as a badly glued chest, rained upon in the autumn, falls into unrecognisable fragments of what had been so beautiful. He remembered the good fellows with whom he had lived his life and worked in a marvellous union of joy and sorrow—and they seemed strange to him and their life incomprehensible and their work senseless. It was as though someone with mighty fingers had taken hold of his soul and snapped it in two, as one snaps a stick across one's knee, and flung the fragments far apart. It was only a few hours since he left there—and all his life seemed to have been spent here, in front of this half-naked woman, listening to the distant music and the jingling of spurs; and that it would always be so. And he did not know which side to turn, up or down, but only that he was opposed, tormentingly opposed, to all that had that day become part of his very life and soul. Shameful to be fine....
He recalled the books which had taught him how to live, and he smiled bitterly. Books! There before him was one book, sitting with bare shoulders, closed eyes, an expression of beatitude on a pale distracted face, waiting patiently to be read to the end. Shameful to be fine....
And, all at once, with unbearable pain, grief-stricken, affrighted, he realized once and for all that that life was done with, that it had already become impossible for him to be fine!
He had only lived in that he was fine, it had been his only joy, and his only weapon in the battle of life and death.
All this was gone. Nothing was left. The Dark! Whether he stayed there or returned to his own people ... now, for him, his comrades were no more.
Why had he come to this accursed house! Better had he remained on the street, surrendered to the police, gone to prison where it was possible and even not disgraceful to be fine. And now it was too late even for prison.
»Are you crying?« the girl asked, perturbed.