第59章 CHAPTER XVII(2)

"`Jove!" he gasped out. "It is noble of you!"`Had he suddenly put out his tongue at me in derision, I could not have felt more humiliated. I thought to myself: Serve me right for a sneaking humbug. . . . His eyes shone straight into my face, but I perceived it was not a mocking brightness. All at once he sprang into jerky agitation, like one of those flat wooden figures that are worked by a string. His arms went up, then came down with a slap. He became another man altogether.

"And I had never seen," he shouted; then suddenly bit his lip and frowned.

"What a bally ass I've been," he said very slow in an awed tone. . . .

"You are a brick," he cried next in a muffled voice. He snatched my hand as though he had just then seen it for the first time, and dropped it at one. "Why! this is what I--you--I . . ." he stammered, and then with a return of his old stolid, I may say mulish, manner he began heavily, "Iwould be a brute now if I . . ." and then his voice seemed to break. "That's all right," I said. I was almost alarmed by this display of feeling, through which pierced a strange elation. I had pulled the string accidentally as it were; I did not fully understand the working of the toy. "I must go now," he said. "Jove! You have helped me. Can't sit still. The very thing . . ." He looked at me with puzzled admiration. "The very thing . . ."

`Of course it was the thing. It was ten to one that I had saved him from starvation--of that peculiar sort that is almost invariably associated with drink. This was all. I had not a single illusion on that score, but looking at him, I allowed myself to wonder at the nature of the one he had, within the last three minutes, so evidently taken into his bosom.

I had forced into his hands the means to carry on decently the serious business of life, to get food, drink, and shelter of the customary kind while his wounded spirit, like a bird with a broken wing, might hop and flutter into some hole to die quietly of inanition there. This is what I had thrust upon him: a definitely small thing; and--behold!--by the manner of its reception it loomed in the dim light of the candle like a big, indistinct, perhaps a dangerous shadow. "You don't mind me not saying anything appropriate,"he burst out. "There isn't anything one could say. Last night already you had done me no end of good. Listening to me--you know. I give you my word I've thought more than once the top of my head would fly off . . ." He darted--positively darted--here and there, rammed his hands into his pockets, jerked them out again, flung his cap on his head. I had no idea it was in him to be so airily brisk. I thought of a dry leaf imprisoned in an eddy of wind, while a mysterious apprehension, a load of indefinite doubt, weighed me down in my chair. He stood stock-still, as if struck motionless by a discovery. "You have given me confidence," he declared, soberly. "Oh! for God's sake, my dear fellow--don't!" I entreated, as though he had hurt me. "All right. I'll shut up now and henceforth. Can't prevent me thinking, though. . . . Never mind! . . . I'll show yet . . ." He went to the door in a hurry, paused with his head down, and came back, stepping deliberately.

"I always thought that if a fellow could begin with a clean slate . . .

And now you . . . in a measure . . . yes . . . clean slate." I waved my hand, and he marched out without looking back; the sound of his footfalls died out gradually behind the closed door--the unhesitating treat of a man walked in broad daylight.

`But as to me, left alone with the solitary candle, I remained strangely unenlightened. I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and in evil.

I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.'