He sat in the middle of the great café with his head supported
on his hands, miserable even to bitterness. Inwardly he cursed the
ancestors who had left him little but a great name and a small and
ridiculous body. He thought of his father, whose expensive
eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his
fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his
grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But
most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might
not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no
friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had
left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but
dishonourable, perhaps, only by accident, had deprived even his title
of any social value, and one by one his very acquaintances had
left him to the society of broken men and the women who are anything
but light. And these, and here perhaps the root of his bitterness
lay, even these recognised him only as a victim for their mockery, a
thing more poor than themselves, whereon they could satisfy the anger
of their tortured souls. And his last misery lay in this: that he
himself could find no day in his life to admire, no one past dream to
cherish, no inmost corner of his heart to love. The lowest tramp, the
least-heeded waif of the night, might have some ultimate pride, but
he himself had nothing, nothing whatever. He was a dream-pauper, an
emotional bankrupt.
With a choked sob he drained his brandy and told the waiter to bring
him another. There had been a period in his life when he had been
able to find some measure of sentimental satisfaction in the stupor
of drunkenness. In those days, through the veil of illusion which
alcohol had flung across his brain, he had been able to regard the
contempt of the men as the intimacy of friendship, the scorn of the
women as the laughter of light love. But now drink gave him
nothing but the mordant insight of morbidity, which cut through his
rotten soul like cheese. Yet night after night he came to this place,
to be tortured afresh by the ridicule of the sordid frequenters, and
by the careless music of the orchestra which told him of a flowerless
spring and of a morning which held for him no hope. For his last
emotion rested in this self-inflicted pain; he could only breathe
freely under the lash of his own contempt.
Idly he let his dull eyes stray about the room, from table to table,
from face to face. Many there he knew by sight, from none could he
hope for sympathy or even companionship. In his bitterness he envied
the courage of the cowards who were brave enough to seek oblivion or
punishment in death. Dropping his eyes to his soft, unlovely hands,
he marvelled that anything so useless should throb with life, and yet
he realised that he was afraid of physical pain, terrified at the
thought of death. There were dim ancestors of his whose valour had
thrilled the songs of minstrels and made his name lovely in the
glowing folly of battles. But now he knew that he was a coward, and
even in the knowledge he could find no comfort. It is not given to
every man to hate himself gladly.
The music and the laughter beat on his sullen brain with a mocking
insistence, and he trembled with impotent anger at the apparent
happiness of humanity. Why should these people be merry when he was
miserable, what right had the orchestra to play a chorus of triumph
over the stinging emblems of his defeat? He drank brandy after
brandy, vainly seeking to dull the nausea of disgust which had
stricken his worn nerves; but the adulterated spirit merely maddened
his brain with the vision of new depths of horror, while his body
lay below, a mean, detestable thing. Had he known how to pray he
would have begged that something might snap. But no man may win to
faith by means of hatred alone, and his heart was cold as the marble
table against which he leant. There was no more hope in the
world. . . .
When he came out of the café, the air of the night was so pure
and cool on his face, and the lights of the square were so tender to
his eyes, that for a moment his harsh mood was softened. And in that
moment he seemed to see among the crowd that flocked by a beautiful
face, a face touched with pearls, and the inner leaves of pink
rosebuds. He leant forward eagerly. "Christine!" he cried,
"Christine!"
Then the illusion passed, and, smitten by the anger of the pitiless
stars, he saw that he was looking upon a mere woman, a woman of the
earth. He fled from her smile with a shudder.
As he went it seemed to him that the swaying houses buffeted him
about as a child might play with a ball. Sometimes they threw him
against men, who cursed him and bruised his soft body with their
fists. Sometimes they tripped him up and hurled him upon the stones
of the pavement. Still he held on, till the Embankment broke before
him with the sudden peace of space, and he leant against the
parapet, panting and sick with pain, but free from the tyranny of
the houses.
Beneath him the river rolled towards the sea, reticent but
more alive, it seemed, than the deeply painful thing which fate had
attached to his brain. He pictured himself tangled in the dark
perplexity of its waters, he fancied them falling upon his face like
a girl's hair, till they darkened his eyes and choked the mouth
which, even now, could not breathe fast enough to satisfy him. The
thought displeased him, and he turned away from the place that held
peace for other men but not for him. From the shadow of one of the
seats a woman's voice reached him, begging peevishly for money.
"I have none," he said automatically. Then he remembered and flung
coins, all the money he had, into her lap. "I give it to you because
I hate you!" he shrieked, and hurried on lest her thanks should spoil
his spite.
Then the black houses and the warped streets had him in their grip
once more, and sported with him till his consciousness waxed to one
white-hot point of pain. Overhead the stars were laughing quietly in
the fields of space, and sometimes a policeman or a chance passer-by
looked curiously at his lurching figure, but he only knew that
life was hurting him beyond endurance, and that he yet endured. Up
and down the ice-cold corridors of his brain, thought, formless and
timeless, passed like a rodent flame. Now he was the universe, a vast
thing loathsome with agony, now he was a speck of dust, an atom whose
infinite torment was imperceptible even to God. Always there was
something--something conscious of the intolerable evil called life,
something that cried bitterly to be uncreated. Always, while his soul
beat against the bars, his body staggered along the streets, a thing
helpless, unguided.
There is an hour before dawn when tired men and women die, and with
the coming of this hour his spirit found a strange release from
pain. Once more he realised that he was a man, and, bruised and
weary as he was, he tried to collect the lost threads of reason,
which the night had torn from him. Facing him he saw a vast building
dimly outlined against the darkness, and in some way it served to
touch a faint memory in his dying brain. For a while he wandered
amongst the shadows, and then he knew that it was the keep of
a castle, his castle, and that high up where a window shone upon the
night a girl was waiting for him, a girl with a face of pearls and
roses. Presently she came to the window and looked out, dressed all
in white for her love's sake. He stood up in his armour and flashed
his sword towards the envying stars.
"It is I, my love!" he cried. "I am here."
And there, before the dawn had made the shadows of the Law Courts
grey, they found him; bruised and muddy and daubed with blood,
without the sword and spurs of his honour, lacking the scented token
of his love. A thing in no way tragic, for here was no misfortune,
but merely the conclusion of Nature's remorseless logic. For century
after century those of his name had lived, sheltered by the prowess
of their ancestors from the trivial hardships and afflictions that
make us men. And now he lay on the pavement, stiff and cold, a babe
that had cried itself to sleep because it could not understand,
silent until the morning.