“Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to do as I tell you?”
“Very glad. You know everything.”
“You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what it is that’s waiting for you at home and what you dread so much. But you know that for yourself. We needn’t talk about it, eh? Silly business! Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he’ll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.”
“Oh,” I cried, “if only it were so simple. I’ve bothered myself enough with life, God knows, and little use it has been to me. To hang oneself is hard, perhaps. I don’t know. But to live is far, far harder. God, how hard it is!”
“You’ll see it’s child’s play. We’ve made a start already. You’ve polished your glasses, eaten something and had a drink. Now we’ll go and give your shoes and trousers a brush and then you’ll dance a shimmy with me.”
“Now that shows,” I cried in a fluster, “that I was right! Nothing could grieve me more than not to be able to carry out any command of yours, but I can dance no shimmy, nor waltz, nor polka, nor any of the rest of them. I’ve never danced in my life. Now you can see it isn’t all as easy as you think.”
Her bright red lips smiled and she firmly shook her waved and shingled head; and as I looked at her, I thought I could see a resemblance to Rosa Kreisler, with whom I had been in love as a boy. But she had a dark complexion and dark hair. I could not tell of whom it was she reminded me. I knew only that it was of someone in my early youth and boyhood.
“Wait a bit,” she cried. “So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even a one-step? And yet you talk of the trouble you’ve taken to live? You told a fib there, my boy, and you shouldn’t do that at your age. How can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even dance?”
“But if I can’t—I’ve never learnt!”
She laughed.
“But you learnt reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and French and Latin and a lot of other things? I don’t mind betting you were ten or twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could as well. Perhaps you’ve even got your doctor’s degree and know Chinese or Spanish. Am I right? Very well then. But you couldn’t find the time and money for a few dancing lessons! No, indeed!”
“It was my parents,” I said to justify myself. “They let me learn Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. But they didn’t let me learn to dance. It wasn’t the thing with us. My parents had never danced themselves.”
She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something in her face reminded me of my youth.
“So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with yourself all these years?”
“Well,” I confessed, “I scarcely know myself—studied, played music, read books, written books, travelled—”
“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. No time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.”
“Don’t scold me,” I implored. “It isn’t as if I didn’t know I was mad.”
“Oh, don’t make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman, Professor. You’re not half mad enough to please me. It seems to me you’re much too clever in a silly way, just like a professor. Have another roll. You can tell me some more later.”
She got another roll for me, put a little salt and mustard on it, cut a piece for herself and told me to eat it. I did all she told me except dance. It did me a prodigious lot of good to do as I was told and to have someone sitting by me who asked me things and ordered me about and scolded me. If the professor or his wife had done so an hour or two earlier, it would have spared me a lot. But no, it was well as it was. I should have missed much.
“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly.
“Harry.”
“Harry? A babyish sort of name. And a baby you are, Harry, in spite of your few grey hairs. You’re a baby and you need someone to look after you. I’ll say no more of dancing. But look at your hair! Have you no wife, no sweetheart?”
“I haven’t a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but she doesn’t live here. I don’t see her very often. We don’t get on very well.”
She whistled softly.
“You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what was up in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of your wits? Down on your luck? Lost at cards?”
This was not easy to explain.
“Well,” I began, “you see, it was really a small matter. I had an invitation to dinner with a professor—I’m not one myself, by the way—and really I ought not to have gone. I’ve lost the habit of being in company and making
