I closed the window. Soane was holding a champagne bottle in one hand. In the other he had a paper knife of Fox’s—a metal thing, a Japanese dagger or a Deccan knife. He sliced the neck off the bottle.
“Thought you were going to throw yourself out,” he said; “I wouldn’t stop you. I’m sick of it … sick.”
“Look at this … tonight … this infernal trick of Fox’s. … And I helped too. … Why? … I must eat.” He paused “… and drink,” he added. “But there is starvation for no end of fools in this little move. A few will be losing their good names too. … I don’t care, I’m off. … By the by: What is he doing it for? Money? Funk?—You ought to know. You must be in it too. It’s not hunger with you. Wonderful what people will do to keep their pet vice going. … Eh?” He swayed a little. “You don’t drink—what’s your pet vice?”
He looked at me very defiantly, clutching the neck of the empty bottle. His drunken and overbearing glare seemed to force upon me a complicity in his squalid bargain with life, rewarded by a squalid freedom. He was pitiful and odious to my eyes; and somehow in a moment he appeared menacing.
“You can’t frighten me,” I said, in response to the strange fear he had inspired. “No one can frighten me now.” A sense of my inaccessibility was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The poor devil before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was only one of the lost; one of those that I could see already overwhelmed by the rush from the floodgates opened at my touch. He would be destroyed in good company; swept out of my sight together with the past they had known and with the future they had waited for. But he was odious. “I am done with you,” I said.
“Eh; what? … Who wants to frighten? … I wanted to know what’s your pet vice. … Won’t tell? You might safely—I’m off. … No. … Want to tell me mine? … No time. … I’m off. … Ask the policeman … crossing sweeper will do. … I’m going.”
“You will have to,” I said.
“What. … Dismiss me? … Throw the indispensable Soane overboard like a squeezed lemon? … Would you? … What would Fox say? … Eh? But you can’t, my boy—not you. Tell you … tell you … can’t. … Beforehand with you … sick of it. … I’m off … to the Islands—the Islands of the Blest. … I’m going to be an … no, not an angel like Fox … an … oh, a beachcomber. Lie on white sand, in the sun … blue sky and palm-trees—eh? … S.S. Waikato. I’m off. … Come too … lark … dismiss yourself out of all this. Warm sand, warm, mind you … you won’t?” He had an injured expression. “Well, I’m off. See me into the cab, old chap, you’re a decent fellow after all … not one of these beggars who would sell their best friend … for a little money … or some woman. Will see the last of me. …”
I didn’t believe he would reach the South Seas, but I went downstairs and watched him march up the street with a slight stagger under the pallid dawn. I suppose it was the lingering chill of the night that made me shiver. I felt unbounded confidence in the future, there was nothing now between her and me. The echo of my footsteps on the flagstones accompanied me, filling the empty earth with the sound of my progress.
XVIII
I walked along, got to my club and upstairs into my room peaceably. A feeling of entire tranquillity had come over me. I rested after a strife which had issued in a victory whose meaning was too great to comprehend and enjoy at once. I only knew that it was great because there seemed nothing more left to do. Everything reposed within me—even conscience, even memory, reposed as in death. I had risen above them, and my thoughts moved serenely as in a new light, as men move in sunshine above the graves of the forgotten dead. I felt like a man at the beginning of a long holiday—an indefinite space of idleness with some great felicity—a felicity too great for words, too great for joy—at the end. Everything was delicious and vague; there were no shapes, no persons. Names flitted through my mind—Fox, Churchill, my aunt; but they were living people seen from above, flitting in the dusk, without individuality; things that moved below me in a valley from which I had emerged. I must have been dreaming of them.
I know I dreamed of her. She alone was distinct among these shapes. She appeared dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness, and I braced myself to the shock of love, the love I had known, that all men had known; but greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit reward for the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly she spoke. I heard a sound like the rustling of a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an unknown emotion made up of fear and of enthusiasm, as though she had been not a woman but only a voice crying strange, unknown words in inspiring tones, promising and cruel, without any passion of love or hate. I listened. It was like the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate … no love. No love. There was a crash as of a falling temple. I
