“Of course, I've come to see that. All you'd been through.”
“What I'd been through, Brachey, wasn't merely hardship, fighting, wounds. It was something else, the wreck of my life. I'd had to stand by, in a way, and look at the wreckage. I was doing the wrong thing, living wrong, living a lie. For years I fought it, without being able to see that I was fighting life itself. You see, Brachey, the power of dogmatic thinking is great. It circumscribed my sense of truth for years.”
He fell silent for a moment, looking up at the stars. Then, simply, he added this:
“I want you to know the whole truth. I feel that it is due you. My struggle ended in sin. The plainest kind—with a woman—and without a shred of even human justification. Just degradation.... I can see now that it was a terrific shock. It nearly pulled me under, very nearly. They want me to stay in the church, but I can't, of course.”
“No,” said Brachey, “you wouldn't want to do that.”
“I couldn't. I went through the more or less natural morbid phases, of course. That attack on you—”
“That was partly exhaustion,” said Brachey. “You weren't in condition to analyze a situation that would have been difficult for anybody. And of course I was in the position of breaking my pledge to you.”
“It was more than that, Brachey. The primitive resurgence in me simply reached its climax then. No—let me have this out! I suspected you because I had learned to suspect myself. That blow was a direct result of my own sin. And I want you to know that I've come to see it for what it was.”
“H'm!” mused Brachey. They were standing by a pile of weathering timbers, beside the old Chinese highway. “Shall we sit a while?” Then—“I'd have to think about that.” Finally—“I don't know but what your analysis is sound. But”—he mused longer, then, his voice clouded with emotion, broke out with—“God, man, what you must have suffered! And after our row.... I can't bear to think of it.” And then, quite forgetting himself, he rested a hand on Doane's arm. It was perhaps the first time in his adult life that he had done so demonstrative a thing.
Doane compressed his lips, in the darkness, and stared away.