He smoked on again, and again removed the pipe, using it to point at
the _Police Gazette_ illustration.
"That picture--what does it mean? I do not understand."
I looked at the picture. A man, with a preposterously wicked face, his
right hand pressed dramatically to his heart, was falling backward
to the floor. Confronting him, with a face that was a composite of
destroying angel and Adonis, was a man holding a smoking revolver.
"One man is killing the other man," I said, aware of a distinct
bepuzzlement of my own and of failure to explain.
"Why?" asked Sitka Charley.
"I do not know," I confessed.
"That picture is all end," he said. "It has no beginning."
"It is life," I said.
"Life has beginning," he objected.
I was silenced for the moment, while his eyes wandered on to an
adjoining decoration, a photographic reproduction of somebody's "Leda
and the Swan."
"That picture," he said, "has no beginning. It has no end. I do not
understand pictures."
"Look at that picture," I commanded, pointing to a third decoration.
"It means something. Tell me what it means to you."
He studied it for several minutes.
"The little girl is sick," he said finally. "That is the doctor looking
at her. They have been up all night--see, the oil is low in the lamp,
the first morning light is coming in at the window. It is a great
sickness; maybe she will die, that is why the doctor looks so hard.
That is the mother. It is a great sickness, because the mother's head
is on the table and she is crying."
"How do you know she is crying?" I interrupted. "You cannot see her
face. Perhaps she is asleep."
Sitka Charley looked at me in swift surprise, then back at the picture.
It was evident that he had not reasoned the impression.
"Perhaps she is asleep," he repeated. He studied it closely. "No, she
is not asleep. The shoulders show that she is not asleep. I have seen
the shoulders of a woman who cried. The mother is crying. It is a very
great sickness."
"And now you understand the picture," I cried.