René pulled a scented pocket-handkerchief out of the breast-pocket of his coat and proceeded delicately to wipe the fingers and palms of his gray suède gloves. He was unaccustomed to such exertion. His heart thumped against his ribs. His sight was blurred. He felt slightly faint and light-headed and was grateful for the cold back-draught of air off the rapidly flowing river. It was his pride, part of his pose, in fact, never to display emotion; and he now found himself excited and shaken, by no means fully self-possessed. He needed a space of quiet in which to regain his accustomed affectations of bearing and manner. He was aware, too, that those shabby garments were decidedly unpleasant to touch. Therefore he stood still, breathing rather hard through his nostrils, and daintily wiping the neat, little gray suede gloves incasing his quick, clever little fingers.
"I must express regret for my violence," he said, with the utmost civility, to the heap on the pavement, as soon as he judged his voice sufficiently steady for speech. "I must apologize to you for such absence of ceremony, but really, my dear sir, it appeared to me no time should be lost. You had, unconsciously of course, placed yourself in a highly ridiculous position from which it was clearly incumbent upon me, as an amiable and sympathetic person, immediately to remove you. At times one is compelled to act with decision rather than politeness. This was a case in point. Doubtless you are at present annoyed with me. But a few moments' reflection will, I feel sure, commend my action to you. You will recognize how right, even to the point of an apparent sacrifice of personal dignity, I was."
The man by now had got upon all fours, looking like some unsightly, shambling animal. Limply he rose to his feet and, supporting himself against the balustrade, turned upon his savior a dissipated boyish countenance, down which tears dribbled miserably.
"Why the devil couldn't you leave me alone?" he asked, petulantly, in English. "What earthly concern is it of yours? Aren't I my own master?"
His voice rose to a wail.
"I've been trying to—to do it all day, but there have been too many people about. They stared at me. They suspected and followed me. I could not dodge them. Now I thought the opportunity had come. I was rid of them at last. I never saw you, curse you, you're so short. After all, one doesn't think of looking on the ground, except for vermin. And I'd just pulled myself together. I mayn't have the nerve to try again. I've lost my chance," he wailed, childishly, his weak, loose-lipped mouth twisted by the wretchedness of crying. "I've lost my chance through you, you beast. And you've torn my coat, too. It's the only one I have left; and I did want to look decent, when they found me, when I was dead."
He flung away passionately, pressing his face down on his folded arms upon the parapet, while his angular shoulders heaved and his body shuddered under the ragged blue-serge jacket.
"I shall not have the pluck again. I know myself, and I sha'n't have it. By now I should have been out of the whole accursed tangle. The whole show would have been over—over—I should know nothing more. I should be quit of my misery. I should be dead—ah! my God, dead—dead—"
But René Dax continued to wipe his neat, little gray suède gloves. For his mood had changed. The taunt regarding his smallness of stature had turned him wicked, so that the exquisite minor poet, yearning for the companionship of things pure, lovely, and of good report, fled away. The injured friend fled away likewise. And the satirist, the caricaturist, impure and unsimple, greedy of human ugliness and degradation, malignant, mercilessly scoffing, reigned in their stead. And here, in this loose-limbed, blue-eyed, tawny-headed foreign youth—whose voice and speech, coarseness of expression notwithstanding, witnessed to education and gentle blood—vainly essaying to drown himself under the dying sunset skies of the city of fire built on foundations of dreams, was a subject, surely made to the satirist's hand, a subject of great price! The despotism of his art came upon René Dax, that necessity for vengeance upon humanity; and this time, for him, the edge of vengeance was sharpened by personal insult. For this was no common vagabond wastrel, thrown up from the foul underlying dregs of the population, but a person of condition, once his social equal, whose insolence therefore touched his honor as that of a man of the people could not.
"You are offensive, my young friend," he said, in careful, slightly over-pronounced, but fluent English. "You are also remarkably unattractive and wanting in intelligence. But I, being happily none of these things—offensive, I would say, unattractive or wanting in intelligence—can afford to be magnanimous. Learn, then, that had I not intervened—at much inconvenience to myself—to prevent your projecting your unsavory carcass into the river, but permitted you to carry out your thrice-idiotic purpose, it would not, as you say, have been all over by now and you quit of your misery, not one bit of it! Were you less crude in idea, less bestially ignorant, you would be aware that the principle of life is indestructible. Choking and struggling in the black water there you would have suffered abominable discomfort. But, even when the process of asphyxiation was complete, you yourself would have been still alive, still conscious, and would have discovered, to your infinite chagrin, that you had merely exchanged one state of being for an other and more odious one."