“Sell it! Why, I’d sell myself first. No joke intended. By Jove! I have sold myself.”
They both laughed—laughter that tripped and tumbled down the old, wide stairs; laughter that was caught up by the rough wind outside and carried—whither?
*****
For some weeks Kinsman had his silent chuckle against Harrowsmith. He told himself that this was mean and narrow. He struggled against his jubilation and his contemptuous reflection that the doctor was a fool. He tried to regard him as a fellow-enthusiast—with a different objective. He wished to avoid the narrow outlook of the average collector. He imagined that his flirtations with china, with Empire lounges and candelabra, with the tapering legs of Chippendale chairs had made him tolerant and broadly sympathetic. Evidently it was not so. He looked at his cabinet; he thought of his eccentric thorax—which, after all, Harrowsmith might never possess—and again, silently, in the seclusion of his own rooms, he chuckled.
After dinner each night, as he sat and smoked, he stole frequent moments for the cabinet. He jumped up now and then imagining that he had discovered some new minute detail in the work. Or he opened the doors and stuck his head far into the cavernous cupboards. They exhaled an aromatic perfume. Perhaps some woman had once kept Eastern embroideries there; this was a superficial speculation which he afterward discarded as being unworthy and improbable. He finally decided that it had been used as a linen press—linen folded away with lavender; or a thrifty housewife had stored within choice apples. It was the perfume of old orchards that teased his nostrils.
He tried to supply the cabinet with a history. Harrowsmith could tell him nothing except that his Uncle Bob had bought it at a sale. Sometimes he looked at it so long, so ardently, that he almost thought he was on the point of drawing from the massive brown thing the secrets of dead generations.
He could never tell me the exact momentous occasion when the first faint chill of repugnance struck him. He did remember the night when, as he came home tired from the City, and cast his eyes on the cabinet as usual, it seemed insufficient for the first time. What was it, after all, to make so much fuss about? Had he paid too great a price? Until that moment he had never given one thought to the price.
In the evenings, smoking his cigarette, one hand loose on his knee, he asked himself how that hand would look—dead. Involuntarily he stiffened it. Perhaps it was the slowly rising horror in him which made it appear whiter than it ever had been before. His hand! He was sorry for it. His body! What an injustice he had done it. Had any man the right to rob his body of the sanctity and superb solitude which come after death? The meanest wretch living retained the right to that majestic aloofness. He had mortgaged his. The first seeds of hate and fear sprouted in his heart.
He dashed out of his chambers and went down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street. He walked west to a theater. The play was a tragedy. As he sat in the pit he laughed when the other people thrilled. He then looked in amazement at the scandalized faces surrounding him.
He had left his chambers without casting a farewell look at the cabinet, without murmuring some word of admiration. This had never happened before. He became grave. He reproached himself. He was tender with foolish little penitences—as one would be with a loved woman.