’"No,” I said. He meditated, with
his legs slightly apart and his chin sunk. “A
hair’s-breadth,” he muttered. “Not
the breadth of a hair between this and that.
And at the time . . .”
’"It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,”
I put in, a little viciously I fear. Don’t
you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft?
I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated
me—me!—of a splendid opportunity
to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though
he had robbed our common life of the last spark of
its glamour. “And so you cleared out—at
once.”
’"Jumped,” he corrected me incisively.
“Jumped—mind!” he repeated,
and I wondered at the evident but obscure intention.
“Well, yes! Perhaps I could not see then.
But I had plenty of time and any amount of light in
that boat. And I could think, too. Nobody
would know, of course, but this did not make it any
easier for me. You’ve got to believe that,
too. I did not want all this talk. . . .
No . . . Yes . . . I won’t lie . .
. I wanted it: it is the very thing I wanted—there.
Do you think you or anybody could have made me if
I . . . I am—I am not afraid to tell.
And I wasn’t afraid to think either. I looked
it in the face. I wasn’t going to run away.
At first—at night, if it hadn’t been
for those fellows I might have . . . No! by heavens!
I was not going to give them that satisfaction.
They had done enough. They made up a story, and
believed it for all I know. But I knew the truth,
and I would live it down—alone, with myself.
I wasn’t going to give in to such a beastly
unfair thing. What did it prove after all?
I was confoundedly cut up. Sick of life—to
tell you the truth; but what would have been the good
to shirk it—in—in—that
way? That was not the way. I believe—I
believe it would have—it would have ended—nothing.”
’He had been walking up and down, but with the
last word he turned short at me.
’"What do you believe?” he asked
with violence. A pause ensued, and suddenly I
felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue,
as though his voice had startled me out of a dream
of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity
had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
’”. . . Would have ended nothing,”
he muttered over me obstinately, after a little while.
“No! the proper thing was to face it out—alone
for myself—wait for another chance—find
out . . ."’
’All around everything was still as far as the
ear could reach. The mist of his feelings shifted
between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and
in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear
to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with
vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture.
The chill air of the night seemed to lie on my limbs
as heavy as a slab of marble.
’"I see,” I murmured, more to prove to
myself that I could break my state of numbness than
for any other reason.
