_Wherein our Hero is ill at ease with his own Shadow_
The train being gone, and Horace borne away, Noll drew aside from the
noisy crowd of departing students that strolled chattering and jocular
from the scene of their leave-taking. He walked home alone.
When he climbed to his room, the loneliness yawned at him out of the
void of the empty place. Every shadow, every chair, the bed, the whole
deserted place, whispered that Betty was gone.
He moved restlessly about his rooms all day, chafed and fretted, and,
when the twilight fell, he as aimlessly fidgeted out into the dusk and
betook himself to the streets of Paris.
And as he strode moodily along, nagging whispers went with
him--unpleasant questionings nudged at his elbow--irking discomfort
plucked at his sleeve.
He had very clearly realized during the last few days that, good
fellows as they were, Horace and his companions were all taken up with
their own affairs--that they were really only genially interested
in him in relation to themselves--that he was interested in them in
relation to himself. Not a soul had asked a word about Betty. He
resented it--yet he knew that his neglect of her alone had been the
beginning of her being set aside from their ken. If he felt so of a
sudden about their neglect of her, what must she have felt about his
neglect of her? God, how he had let her drop out of everything!
He knew now that his one selfless friend had been this girl--this
handsome dainty woman. And he had let her go out into the dusk,
alone--leaving him alone.
And for what?
He laughed bitterly.
It came to him now, a whisper in his ear, that her brain was worth
all the wits of all these others put together. It was revealed to him
that most of the keenly observant, large, and humane phrases that had
sounded the music of well-spoken insight to his understanding had been
hers.
Of a sudden he realized what an appalling obstacle his indifference to
her confidences about her work must have been! Indifference? Nay, he
had shown a harsher snarl than that. What a chill to her enthusiasms
and to the practice of her craft must have been all his silent
discouragement--or lack of encouragement.... Stay--had it even been
silent? There had been his ill-concealed impatience with the patience
of her building. Had there not indeed been hints without disguise about
her work being long enough in the doing? He could have cut out his
tongue for its jeer about priggish dilatoriness and Casauban’s _Key to
all the Mythologies_. His ill-manners and his neglect struck him in the
face, and he shrank from it now with a burning sense of shame--his face
scalded. What would he not have given to recall the shabby jibe!
He turned into a café and was greeted with a shout. And in the
resulting rolic, for several hours, he forgot his self-recriminations.
But in the black night, taking himself homewards, it struck him like a
buffet upon the mouth delivered out of the surrounding darkness. He had
lacked manhood.
Reaching his rooms, a dozen petty discomforts assailed him to remind
him of the mother-care and gentle hands that no longer showed their
tenderness--on striking a light, the stealthy shadows stole away
skulkingly into the corners, mocking at his loneliness, nudging elbows
at him.
He lit a candle, and sat down on the side of his bed.
It was borne in upon him, sitting there in solitary communion with his
own unmitigated selfishness, that the man alone is not a human entity.
Ay, Noll; thou art not the only numbskull--the very nations share thy
cap and bells. Man is indeed incomplete without the woman. Any scheme
of life that eliminates the woman is a futile scheme of life. The human
animal is not one, but two--man without woman is wholly incomplete, a
crudity, inadequate, a fatuity, and hence a thing of shame.
Nay, the lad had glimmerings into depths deeper than that; gazing
at the naked truth of things, it came to him that any scheme of
life wherein the woman is made inferior degrades the man with her
degradation, since she is a part of him--and a part of a man in a state
of humiliation humiliates the whole of him.
He wondered what she was doing; whether they were being kind to the
sensitive, large-hearted, dainty Betty.
A sob caught at his throat. He knew--with a hot flush he knew--it was
the first generous thought that had moved him these many days. He had
been pitying himself like a whipped cur, the which never yet brought a
man honour or comfort or dignity.
Wo-hee-ho-ho! moaned the scoffing wind without.
What was she doing--out there--in the dark?
Ah, Noll--what, indeed?
The very shadows bent to hear.
But, Ho-ho-hey! scoffed the mocking wind.