Anything might have happened. It was unthinkable that he should want the courage to read it. He had foreseen no such difficulty. Perhaps if it had come by any other hand than that of Griggsby Doane....
His thoughts wandered helplessly back over the solitary life he had led... wandering in Siam and Borneo and Celebes, dwelling here and there in untraveled corners of India, picking up the quaint folklore of the Malay Peninsula, studying the American sort of social organization in the Philippines... eight years of it! He had begun as a disheartened young man, running bitterly away from the human scheme in which he found no fitting niche. Yes, that was it, after all; he had run away! He had begun with a defeat, based his working life on just that. The five substantial books that now stood to his name in every well-stocked library in America, as in many in England and on the Continent, were, after all, but stop-gaps in an empty life. They were a subterfuge, those books.........All the hard work, the eager close thinking, was now, suddenly, meaningless. That he had chosen work instead of drink, that he had been, after all, a decent fellow, pursuing neither chance nor women, seemed immaterial.
The curse of an active imagination was on him now, and was riding him as wildly as ever witch rode a broomstick.
The very bit of paper in his hand was nothing if not the symbol of his terrible failure in the business called living. As he had built his work on failure, was he, inevitably, to build the happiness of himself and Betty on the same painful foundation. Even if the paper should announce his freedom? Bitterly he repeated aloud the word, “Freedom!” Then “Happiness?”... What were these elusive things? Were they in any sense realities?
He nerved himself and read the message:
“Absolute decree granted you are free.”
He tossed it, with its unpunctuated jumble of words, on the table.
A little later, though he still indulged in this scathing self-analysis, the habit of meeting responsibilities that was more strongly a part of his nature than in this hour of utter emotion he knew, began to assert itself. The strong character that had led him, after all, out to fight and to build his mental house, was largely the man.
He slowly got up and stood before the square bit of mirrror that hung on the rear tent-pole; then looked down at his mud-stained clothes. Deliberately, almost painfully, he shaved and dressed. It was characteristic that he put on a stiff linen collar.
There was, to a man of his stripe, just one thing to do: and that thing he was going at directly, firmly. Until it was done he could not so much as speak to Betty. Of the outcome of this effort he had no notion; he was going at it doggedly, with his character rather than with his mind. Indeed the mind quibbled, manufactured little delays, hinted at evasions. He even listened to these whisperings, entertained them; but meanwhile went straight on with his dressing.