“It kicked in my hand.”
I looked across the room, and running to the fire I picked up some bits of china which had fallen in the grate; I tried to fit them together, repeating sorrowfully,—
“Look, you have broken a plate, you have broken a plate to pieces.”
V
For how long we stood gazing at those ironical shards I do not know. There are moments of suspension in life when the whirling mind travels at so great a rate that everything else seems stationary; so, now, we were touched into immobility while our minds flew forward into space and time. I cannot say what the others found in that fourth dimension of thought; I, personally, returned to earth utterly inarticulate, with these two words shaping themselves and singing over and over in my brain: Futile creatures! futile creatures! It was as though some little mocking demon sat astride my nerve cords, drumming his heels, and chanting his refrain. I could have shaken myself like a dog coming out of water to shake him off. Then I became aware of Westmacott’s voice speaking at an immense distance.
He must have been speaking for some time before the sound pierced through to my ears, for I saw Ruth moving in obedience to his voice before I had grasped what he was saying. Her movement made the same impression upon me as his voice: muffled, slow, and infinitely remote; she crept, rather than she walked, and when she raised her hand she raised it with such torpid and deliberate effort that she seemed to be dragging it upwards with some heavy weight attached. As for her feet, they positively stuck to the ground. Westmacott said something more; he pointed. She turned, still with that slow laborious deliberation, and moved like a shackled ghost from the room.
Westmacott and I were left, and we were silent, he perhaps from choice, I certainly from inability to speak. I think now that he was less shattered than Ruth or me, having played a more negative rôle; he had merely stood there to be shot at, while Ruth and I had flung, she direct, I indirect passion into the shooting. We were worn, spent, exhausted, he had his forces still intact. An absurd phrase came into my mind, so childish that I hesitate to write it down: Which would you rather be, the shooter or the shootee? and presently I hit on the rhyme, so that a sing-song began in my head:—
“Which would you rather be,
The shooter or the shootee?”
and still Westmacott stood there holding the revolver, and I stood there holding the pieces of the broken plate, and all the while I seemed to hear the corner-stones of my cherished schemes dropping to earth like pieces of masonry after an explosion. We stood quite motionless. Overhead somebody was moving about. Outside it was nearly dark.