I stepped out on the little balcony.
What was it Sir Robert had said? Oh, yes, that Crocker had come to Peking. This was dreadful. It meant trouble. One way or the other, I myself was involved in this trouble. A wife is, in a sense, the property of her husband—in a sense. If she dishonors his home by leaving him for another, he has some right to be indignant. If his outraged sense of possession lashes him into a murderous passion he can not be stopped from killing her. In England now—something about competent witnesses. And the difficulty of convincing a jury that she was not living with me....
In the confusion of mind that lay over my faculties like a paralysis, one curious fact sticks out in my memory. I deliberately shook myself, standing there on my balcony. I tried to shake myself awake.
I seemed to be recalling a story that the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati told on the ship, one night. It had to do with a celebrated prize fight in New York some years back. He reveled in memories of fights, that vaudeville man. An odd mental habit!
On the occasion he mentioned, one fighter was knocked down and very nearly, as the phrase runs, “out.” Lying there upon the floor of the ring, dazed, all but unconscious, the man actually beat his own head against the door in a desperate effort to rouse himself.
Over and over again that picture rose in my mind. I have never witnessed such a spectacle. Primitive brutality has played, needless to say, no part in my life. But at this time, caught up and whirled about, as I was, in a bewildering conflict of primitive emotions, it was a second-hand recollection of the prize ring that came to my aid.
The fact is not uninteresting.
I chanced to glance down. A tiny, lacy ball lay there at my feet. I picked it up. It was Heloise's handkerchief.
I held the absurdly small square of linen and lace in my two hands and looked at it. I folded and unfolded it. I pressed it to my lips, again and again.
Am I to become the helpless victim of these crude emotional uprushes—like any common clerk with his shopgirl? I, who have for so long observed the human herd from afar with a sort of casual interest?... I wonder.