"There are not many parts of the civilized world in which his name will be unknown in four days from now," said Paul Lane, "or even in twenty-four hours. I'm going to meet him and his wife at supper at Adelaide Shiffney's, so I must say good-night—oh, and good-night, Mr. Heath."
Oh—and good-night, Mr. Heath.
Claude had walked all the way home alone slowly. He had passed through Piccadilly Circus, through Regent Street, through Oxford Street, along the north side of the closed and deserted Park on which the faint moonlight lay. When he reached his door he had not gone in. He had turned, had paced up and down. The sight of a very large policeman looking attentive, then grimly inquiring, then crudely suspicious, had finally decided him to enter his house.
What was life going to do to him if he did not hold back, did not persist any longer in his mania for refusal? There was a new world spread out before him. He stood upon its border. He wanted to step into it. But something within him, something that seemed obscure, hesitated, was perhaps afraid. In his restless mood, in his strong excitement, he wanted to crush that thing down, to stifle its voice. Caution seemed to him almost effeminate just then. He remembered how one day Charmian had said to him, after an argument about psychology: "Really, Mr. Heath, whatever you may say, your strongest instinct is a selfish one, the instinct of self-preservation."
What was Jacques Sennier's strongest instinct?
Madame Sennier had made a powerful impression on Heath, and he had been greatly flattered by the deep attention with which she had listened to what he had to say about her husband's opera.
"Here's a man who knows what he is talking about," she exclaimed, when he finished speaking. When he got up to leave the box she had looked full into his eyes and said: "You are going to do something, too."
Could Jacques Sennier have won his triumph alone?
Impulse was boiling up in Heath. After all that had happened that night he felt as if he could not go to bed without accomplishing some decisive action. Powers were on tiptoe within him surely ready for the giant leap.
He got up, went to the piano, went to his writing-table, fingered the manuscript paper covered with tiny notes which lay scattered upon it. But, no, it would be absurd, mad, to begin to work at such an hour. And, beside, he could not work. He could not be patient. He wanted to do something with a rush, to change his life in a moment, to take a leap forward, as Sennier had done that night, a leap from shadow into light. He wanted to grasp something, to have a new experience. All the long refusal of his life, which had not seemed to cost him very much till this moment, abruptly, revengefully attacked him in the very soul, crying: "You must pay for me! Pay! Pay!" He hated the thought of his remote and solitary life. He hated the memory of the lonely evenings passed in the study of scores, or in composition, by the lamp that shed a restricted light.