Presently Jean pattered across the room and picked up the telegram, which had fallen from hands powerless to hold it. She looked at it soberly for a minute. Then with a ripple of laughter she crumpled it up in her hands. She was very fond of all things yellow.
CHAPTER XL
I went home, and in the quiet of my own room I said that I would not let this thing be true.
I, who had been walking with the Altruist on heights where the hidden meanings of the world lay clear to view, fell into a horror of great darkness. One utterly inexplicable event made all life incoherent.
The Lad was dead. He had perished in an accident that was the result of his own reckless daring. For the mere physical delight of battling with danger he had rushed to his destruction. A life guided steadily toward great issues had ended in a swift caprice.
Now for the first time I knew what Janet had meant when she said that there is no God, but only a mocking will that makes sport of our hope and our endeavour.
Infinite irony could find no expression more cruel, I thought, as I walked up and down my long floor, than in making us the instruments of our own undoing, in causing us to tear down ourselves the work of our own hands.
All that the Lad had thought of life was contradicted by his death. It could be perfect in itself, he had said so often. Its completeness lay in finished work. And now—
I turned, sick at heart, from this place so full of tragedy and of baffling puzzles, and resolved to go back to the lanes and garden-plots of my native village. There in peace and loneliness I would try to forget all that I had known here, even this little story.
But oh, the pity of it! The Lad had walked with so firm a tread. I had thought of him as one real, moving among the shows of things, where we groped our way, uncertain of the path.