Someone said: "Feel better now?" I answered: "I--oh, I've got to go and
see...."
It was rather difficult to speak distinctly; my tongue got in the way.
But I strove to impress the fool with the idea that I had affairs that
must be attended to--that I had private affairs.
"You aren't fit. Let me...."
I pushed him roughly aside--what business was it of his? I slunk hastily
out of the room. The others remained. I knew what they were going to
do--to talk things over, to gabble about "the man who...."
It was treacherous walking, that tessellated pavement in the hall.
Someone said: "Hullo, Granger," as I passed. I took no notice.
Where did I wish to go to? There was no one who could minister to me;
the whole world had resolved itself into a vast solitary city of closed
doors. I had no friend--no one. But I must go somewhere, must hide
somewhere, must speak to someone. I mumbled the address of Fox to a
cabman. Some idea of expiation must have been in my mind; some idea of
seeing the thing through, mingled with that necessity for talking to
someone--anyone.
I was afraid too; not of Fox's rage; not even of anything that he could
do--but of the sight of his despair. He had become a tragic figure.
I reached his flat and I had said: "It is I," and again, "It is I," and
he had not stirred. He was lying on the sofa under a rug, motionless as
a corpse. I had paced up and down the room. I remember that the pile of
the carpet was so long that it was impossible to walk upon it easily.
Everything else in the room was conceived in an exuberance of luxury
that now had something of the macabre in it. It was that now--before, it
had been unclean. There was a great bed whose lines suggested sinking
softness, a glaring yellow satin coverlet, vast, like a sea. The walls
were covered with yellow satin, the windows draped with lace worth a
king's ransom, the light was softened, the air dead, the sounds hung
slumbrously. And, in the centre of it, that motionless body. It stirred,
pivoted on some central axis beneath the rug, and faced me sitting.
There was no look of inquiry in the bloodshot eyes--they turned dully
upon me, topaz-coloured in a blood-red setting. There was no expression
in the suffused face.
"You want?" he said, in a voice that was august by dint of hopelessness.
"I want to explain," I said. I had no idea that this was what I had come
for.
He answered only: "You!" He had the air of one speaking to something
infinitely unimportant. It was as if I had no inkling of the real issue.
With a bravery of desperation I began to explain that I hadn't stumbled
into the thing; that I had acted open-eyed; for my own ends ... "My own
ends." I repeated it several times. I wanted him to understand, and I
did explain. I kept nothing from him; neither her coming, nor her words,
nor my feelings. I had gone in with my eyes open.
For the first time Fox looked at me as if I were a sentient being. "Oh,
you know that much," he said listlessly.
"It's no disgrace to have gone under to her," I said; "we _had_ to." His
despair seemed to link him into one "we" with myself. I wanted to put
heart into him. I don't know why.
He didn't look at me again.
"Oh, _that_," he said dully, "I--I understand who you mean.... If I had
known before I might have done something. But she came of a higher
plane." He seemed to be talking to himself. The half-forgotten horror
grew large; I remembered that she had said that Fox, like herself, was
one of a race apart, that was to supersede us--Dimensionists. And, when
I looked at him now, it was plain to me that he _was_ of a race
different to my own, just as he had always seemed different from any
other man. He had had a different tone in triumph; he was different now,
in his despair. He went on: "I might have managed Gurnard alone, but I
never thought of her coming. You see one does one's best, but, somehow,
here one grows rather blind. I ought to have stuck to Gurnard, of
course; never to have broken with him. We ought all to have kept
together.--But I kept my end up as long as he was alone."
He went on talking in an expressionless monotone, perhaps to himself,
perhaps to me. I listened as one listens to unmeaning sounds--to that of
a distant train at night. He was looking at the floor, his mouth moving
mechanically. He sat perfectly square, one hand on either knee, his back
bowed out, his head drooping forward. It was as if there were no more
muscular force in the whole man--as if he were one of those ancient
things one sees sunning themselves on benches by the walls of
workhouses.
"But," I said angrily, "it's not all over, you can make a fight for it
still."
"You don't seem to understand," he answered, "it _is_ all over--the
whole thing. I ran Churchill and his conscious rectitude gang for all
they were worth.... Well, I liked them, I was a fool to give way to
pity.--But I did.--One grows weak among people like you. Of course I
knew that their day was over.... And it's all _over_," he said again
after a long pause.
"And what will you _do_?" I asked, half hysterically.
"I don't just know," he answered; "we've none of us gone under before.
There haven't been enough really to clash until she came."
The dead tranquillity of his manner was overwhelming; there was nothing
to be said. I was in the presence of a man who was not as I was, whose
standard of values, absolute to himself, was not to be measured by any
of mine.
"I suppose I shall cut my throat," he began again.
I noticed with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side
was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came
opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames,
containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful.
What kind of a being could conceive this impossibly barbaric room, could
enshrine those impossibly crude designs, and then fold his hands? I
turned fiercely upon him. "But you are rich enough to enjoy life," I
said.
"What's that?" he asked wearily.
"In the name of God," I shouted, "what do you work for--what have you
been plotting and plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last?"
He made a small indefinite motion of ignorance, as if I had propounded
to him a problem that he could not solve, that he did not think worth
the solving.
It came to me as the confirmation of a suspicion--that motion. They had
no joy, these people who were to supersede us; their clear-sightedness
did nothing more for them than just that enabling them to spread
desolation among us and take our places. It had been in her manner all
along, she was like Fate; like the abominable Fate that desolates the
whole length of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our plans,
nothing but a hideous jumble of fragments like those of statues, smashed
by hammers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate that we hate, and
that debases us forever and ever. She had been all that to me ... and to
how many more?
"I used to be a decent personality," I vociferated at him. "Do you
hear--decent. I could look a man in the face. And you cannot even enjoy.
What do you come for? What do you live for? What is at the end of it
all?"
"Ah, if I knew ..." he answered, negligently.