This little mental activity completed itself without any volition. It was finished now, like the picture outside—the materials scattering. The idea of the truth merely appeared through a mental habit of looking at two sides—a literary habit. It had brought no direct relation to John Morning. But the lies had brought their direct relation.
He could not remain at his place by the window, now that the fifty came in for drink and play. He was afraid to demand what evil concerning him was in the minds of men; afraid something would be uncovered that was true. He felt the uncleanness of drink upon him, and a moral softening from years of newspaper work, a training begun in glibness, which does not recognize the rights of men, but obeys a City Desk. He could not organize a contending force; and yet loathed the thought of return to the Japanese Inn. He was not ready to face himself alone.
It had never come to him so stirringly as now—the sense of something within, utterly weary of imprisonment and forced companionship with the visible John Morning. His misery was a silent unswerving shame. A feverish impulse almost controlled him to take something either to lift him away, or permit him to sink in abandonment from the area of pain.
He stood near the desk in the lobby. Duke Fallows was coming. The Californian’s legs, in their worn corduroys, were far too lean for the big bony knees—a tall man of forty, with tired and sunken eyes and sunken mouth. Fallows had a reputation. Its strongly drawing side-issue was his general and encompassing, though fastidious, love of women. Someone had whispered that even if a man has the heart of a volcano, its outpouring must be spread rather thin in places to cover all women. He was out for the Western States, not only to show war, but to show it up. Certainly he loved the under-dog, which is an epigram for stating that he was an anarchist.
No anarchist could be gentler to meet, nor more terrible to read. Fallows owned a formidable interest in the Western States; otherwise he would have had to print himself. The rest of that San Francisco property was just an excellent newspaper. Its effort was to balance Duke Fallows; sometimes it seemed trying to extinguish him in order to save itself. It brought sanity and common-sense and the group-souled observation of affairs, to say nothing of news and advertising—all to cool the occasional column of this sick man. To a few, however, on the Pacific Coast, since his new assignment was announced—the Russo-Japanese war and Duke Fallows meant the same thing. The majority said: “Watch the Western States boom in circulation. They are sending Fallows to Asia.”
The two stood together, Fallows looking down. Morning was broad in brow and shoulder; slender otherwise and of medium height.
“I’m Fallows.”
“Yes.”
The tall man’s eyes turned upward so that only the whites were visible. He fingered his brow as if to pluck something forth through the bone.
“Come on upstairs.”