“I shall, one of these days,” said he—“a very bad hell.”
“Good God! Wallie,” cried Risca, “are you in trouble, too?”
“Not yet,” Herold replied, with a smile, for he saw that the instinct of friendship, at any rate, had not been consumed. “I 've walked on roses all my life. That 's why I 've never done anything great. But my hell is before me. How can I escape it?” The smile faded from his face, and he looked far away into the gray sky. “Sometimes my mother's Celtic nature seems to speak and prophesy within me. It tells me that my roses shall turn into red-hot ploughshares and my soul shall be on fire. The curtains of the future are opened for an elusive fraction of a second—” He broke off suddenly. “I'm talking rot, John. At least it's not all rot. I was only thinking that in my bad time I should have a great, strong friend to stand by my side.”
“If you mean me,” said Risca, “you know I shall. But, in the meanwhile I pray to God to spare you a hell like mine. Sometimes I wonder,” he continued after a gloomy pause, “whether this would have happened if I had stuck by her. I could have seen which way things were tending, and I would have stepped in. After all, I am strong enough to have borne it.”
“You were talking about murder just now,” said Herold. “If you had stayed with her, there would have been murder done or something precious near it.”
Risca sighed. He was a big, burly man, with a heavy, intellectual face, prematurely furrowed, and a sigh shook his loose frame somewhat oddly. “I don't know,” said he, after a lumbering turn or so up and down the room. “How can any man know? She was impossible enough, but I never dreamed of such developments. And now that I reflect, I remember signs. Once we had a little dog—no, I have no right to tell you. Damn it! man,” he cried fiercely, “I have no right to keep you here in this revolting atmosphere.” He picked up Herold's hat. “Go away, Wallie, and leave me to myself. You 're good and kind and all that, but I 've no right to make your life a burden to you.”
Herold rescued his hat and deliberately put it down. “Oh, yes, you have,” said he, with smiling seriousness. “You have every right. Have you ever considered the ethics of friendship? Few people do consider them nowadays. Existence has grown so complicated that such a simple, primitive thing as friendship is apt to be neglected in the practical philosophy of life. Our friendship, John, is something I could no more tear out of me than I could tear out my heart itself. It's one of the few vital, real things—indeed, it's perhaps the only tremendous thing in my damfool of a life. I believe in friendship. If a man hath not a friend, let him quit the stage. Old Bacon had sense: a man has every right over his friend, every claim upon him, except the right of betrayal. My purse is yours, your purse is mine. My time is yours, and yours mine. My joys and sorrows are yours, and yours mine. But a friend may not supplant a friend either in material ambition or in the love of a woman. That is the unforgivable sin, high treason against friendship. Don't talk folly about having no right.”
He lit with nervous fingers the cigarette he was about to light when he began his harangue. Risca gripped him by the arm.
“God knows I don't want you to go. I 'm pretty tough, and I 'm not going to cave in, but it's God's comfort to have you here. If I'm not a merry companion to you, what the devil do you think I am to myself?”
He walked up and down the dreary room, on which the dark of evening had fallen. At last he paused by his writing-table, and then a sudden thought flashing on him, he smote his temples with his hands.