“I happen to be in the financial department. Two or three times each year, the whole office is thrown into a mess over some little strayed account——”
He stopped. It was less that he was saying this, than that he had come so far without a nudge from within. They had passed the big front doors, and met the wind of the street before he realised how deep the mannerism of the establishment had prevailed upon him. The process had passed almost into fulfilment before the truth within him had stirred from its sleep.... A very grey day. All through that luncheon he had found himself at angles from his companion, in strategic hollows, never in the level open. It wasn’t that he was different from usual, but that he was watching himself more shrewdly. His inner coherence was repeatedly broken, though the outer effects were not. He had never perceived before with such clarity that a man cannot be square and friendly to another man, when his mind and critical faculties are busy appraising him, while his eyes and lips approved and assuaged. Bellair that day realised his moral derangement—that he must be ripped open and his displaced organs corrected once for all, if anything decent was to come from him ever again.... He was still thinking in mid-afternoon, in the very trance of these thoughts, when he happened to look into Mr. Sproxley’s face. It seemed to him that there was a movement of most pitiful activities back of the red and black of Mr. Sproxley’s eyes.
There was much mental roving on Bellair’s part that week; moments in which the Monday morning abandon returned, and his self-amazement of the Tuesday luncheon, upon discovering how deeply his thoughts were imbedded in the prevailing lie. New York and the salary clutched him hard at intervals; so that he saw something of what was meant to give it up; also he saw that dreams are dreams.... Thousands of other young men would be glad to do his work, even his dirty work.
He had just returned from lunch on Friday when he started, to perceive the ruddy face and powerful frame of Mr. Prentidd darken the front door—which he had not done since his voice was last raised. Bellair was conscious of Seth Wetherbee hitching up his chair and a peculiar gasping cough from the old man, but his own eyes did not turn from the caller’s face—which moved slowly about, the pale little exchange-miss behind the first barrier, attentive to catch the stranger’s eye and answer his question. The inventor glanced slowly among desks and doors. His eye sought Sproxley, and the furtive black eyes of the latter shot down to his ledger as if crippled on the wing. His eyes held Bellair and the young man felt the scorn of ages burn through his veins—something new to his later life, yet deep in his heart, something he had known somewhere before, as if he had betrayed a good king, and his punishment had been to look that king in the eye before he died. Bellair had never hated himself as at that moment, and certainly never before felt himself identified body and soul with modern corruption, as now with scorn like a fiery astringent in his veins. The eyes of Mr. Prentidd finally settled upon the figure of Mr. Seth Wetherbee, their rays striking him abeam as it were. The old man hunched closer if anything, but did not raise his head.
The inventor was a physical person; his morals of a physical nature; his Nubian file of the same dimension and method of mind—a strong man who had to do with pain and pleasure of the flesh; his ideas of possessions were of the world. He moved softly, a soft, dangerous smile upon his lips, to the desk of the vice-president and jerked up a chair. The old man had to raise his head. It was as if the scene of three years ago was now to be continued, for Bellair saw the sorrowful, lengthened face of Mr. Eben turn from his desk in the other room and bend toward his father, whose face was intensely pathetic now in its forced smile of greeting.
“You’re not looking well—in fact, you’re looking old, Mr. Wetherbee, as if you would die pretty soon.”
“I’m not so strong as I was, Mr. Prentidd.”
Bellair couldn’t have done it, as the inventor did. Had the man stolen and ruined him—he could not have pushed on after the pathos of that.
“You’re a dirty old man—and you’ll die hard and soon—for you lied to me when I trusted you. I suppose you have lied to everybody, all your life——”
Thus he baited Mr. Seth feature by feature, pointing out the disorder of liver, kidney-puffs, the general encroachments of death, in fact. Then he pictured the death itself—all of a low literary strength as was Mr. Prentidd’s cold habit. The answer of Mr. Seth was an incoherent helplessness, his lips moving but with nothing rational under the sun, as if he had been called by some inexorable but superior being to an altitude where he was too evil to breathe, and begged piteously to be allowed to sink back and die. It was Mr. Eben who stopped it, coming forward quietly, his steps rounded, his shoulders bent, his face seeming brittle as chalk in its fixity. The thing that he said was quite absurd: