Belknap paused with their lighted cigarette match arrested between them, and quickly met the eyes he had been studiously avoiding.
“Leave? Why, when, and where for? Going abroad?”
Whittaker’s immediate answer was a cold smile. He accepted his light and crossed to a chair. Belknap regarded him intently through puffs of his own smoke, and being a keen student of men when he cared to be, or found it necessary, he remarked a new hardness in the hard grey face. Whittaker was a grey man: iron-grey hair, granite skin, grey-blue eyes, gun-metal suits, and plenty of grey matter. He was a man too able, too willfully brilliant, for the cramped position in which he had to work. So he put the extra energy into deviltry. “That’s just what he is doing now,” thought Belknap, “and God help somebody. Somehow I think it’s God help him for a change.” But he wasn’t prepared for being quite as right as he proved to be.
“Not exactly abroad. Though perhaps yes, in a very broad sense. Sit down, Belknap, and we’ll talk, if you don’t mind being serious on an empty stomach. The drinks will be up shortly.”
“Fire away, man, by all means. You are now making things sound, not only mysterious, but rather important. What’s it to you?”
“It’s a great deal to me, I’m afraid. It seems I have short shrift, Belknap. I’m sentenced to death. The doctors have given me six months—or ‘with luck,’ as they put it, an extra one or two.”
“Good Lord! Why I’ve always thought you one of the fittest. What is wrong? Whittaker, I’m sorry—too terribly sorry. Is there a thing I can do?”
“Yes, there is.” A flare of wicked humor came and went in Whittaker’s eyes. “But we’ll come to that in a moment. I’m dying of cancer. In a bad spot. I’m in for pain and a great deal of it; more than I can quite bear to put up with, I guess. ‘Six months to live.’ It may sound short enough to you, but to me it sounds an eternity. Six weeks, yes; I might have kept a stiff upper lip for six weeks. But that’s about my limit.”
“You mean—it’s suicide?” Belknap asked, and did his level best, in respect to the situation, not to show a fierce impatience that he should have been asked in at the death.
“No-o, not strictly speaking. Though I’ve always contended suicide is justifiable in such circumstances. And I purchased a very pretty little Colt last week for the purpose. But I reconsidered. I’ve been a man who made himself felt going and coming; you can testify to that, Belknap. Then why make this particular exit dull and unromantic, with nothing more said of it than, ‘Mr. Bertrand Whittaker had been suffering from ill health, and it is thought—etc., etc.’ You know the line. So, as I’ve said, I didn’t shoot. For here was the perfect opportunity to go the limit with life and death, nothing to lose that wouldn’t be gain. In other words I could leave a bit of a pother behind me—in commemoration. And, my dear fellow, I’ve hit on an idea that I doubt even you could match.”