Then with a rush of incredulous disgust the constituents of his own
existence stood out in the same white light; confused, craven, petty; a
tangle that he despised and loathed with a weak fury, the more that he
could not extricate himself. Envy without emulation, spite without
hatred, violence without strength! Then the personages: Hambley, the
lick-spittle go-between; Christine Malleson, whose pretended mental
companionship with him disguised the claw of cruelty; inanimate objects,
the floods, the gale; Hannah, a ghost now, not a personage, a ghost that
gave him no rest, try as he would to weld the whole incident to his own
uses, to the furtherance of his own self-confidence; Martin, sacrificed
for the same purpose; Nan, the object of an as yet ill-defined, floating
malevolence that crouched ready for a spring on to the back of the first
poor pretext; all the men, his fellows, in whom he amused himself by
fostering dissatisfaction; and, lastly, he found that he must include an
animal in this lamentable population,—the donkey on the green, that, no
less than the others, had, that evening, fallen a victim to his need for
mischief; the coarse pelt was still vivid under his fingers, as he had
slid his hand down the leg, till he came to the fetlock, and he
remembered now the sharp puncture of the knife into the sinew, and the
animal’s start of pain—to this, to this had he sunk! when he crept out
from the abbey, his soul seething with blasphemy, and his fingers
closing over the penknife in his pocket! A small, mad deed,—all that his
soul in travail could bring forth. In this deed, tinily terrible, had
his exaltation culminated; the exaltation engendered by storm, by the
disaster on the dyke, by the organ swelling in the ruined abbey, by the
suggestion of the Black Mass.
He rolled from side to side in his bed, tearing at the blankets with his
teeth.
He directed his despair and fury then against Christine Malleson, making
her responsible for this ruthless savagery which always possessed him,
without system or goal beyond a need to damage everything that was
happy, prosperous, and entire. True, she was partly responsible; she was
responsible for the pranks of experiment that she played upon him,
stirring and poking his mind, his ambitions, into a blaze, and the chill
“Don’t forget yourself,” with which she quenched the flame. He raged
against Christine: she had him at a disadvantage; he must strive always
to compete with her serenity of class; she drew him out from his own
class, aroused his angry socialism, laughed at the gaps in his
knowledge, gave him glimpses of a life whose significance and habit he
could never encompass, but which he burnt with an envious hatred to
destroy; then she would laugh at him again,—she, who had come down from
her heights to walk curiously in his valleys,—she would laugh, and he
would fling away into fresh magniloquence, seeking to impress her; and
when the time came for him to take his leave, the excitable irritation
provoked by her remained still unappeased, consuming his vitals. But
this he believed she did not suspect. So far as he knew, he had deceived
her; he had passed off upon her the old fraud of making her believe him
strong when he was, in reality, the bewildered, unhappy prey of his own
weakness. The thought that he had so deceived her gave him a little
satisfaction. He would tell her about Martin; she would catch her
breath. He would not tell her about the donkey. And he swayed again from
the paltry tangle of his own life to the bright heroic visions that
alone contented him, weeping with an incurable sorrow, but whether for
Martin or the vague grandeur of the unattainable, he could not well have
said.