The Hunter and Other Stories Part 8

Lying across the bed, these things he found pleasant. To listen to praise, even if thickly overlaid with banter, was not pleasant. It was embarra.s.sing to be studied by eyes that tried to estimate the familiar Earl Parish in terms of the new development. But that was his self-consciousness, his shyness, and would pa.s.s. It was a transient annoyance. The joy that had come to him out of this affair would not wear away, however: that was a fixed thing in him.

He went rosy-faced to work the next morning, creeping out of the house to avoid his suddenly too-tender landlady. The day was less uncomfortable than the previous one. To the same extent that he was becoming accustomed to his new position among his fellows he was drifting back to last week's position. The ticket sellers, opposite his window, still threw jests through their grilles: "The next time you save any women and children, save me a blonde!" But now he could smile back at them without perspiring.

Occasionally he met acquaintances who had seen the Post's story and spoke of it. He blushed and was uncomfortable at these times, but he enjoyed the later thoughts of them. He never went into the street without a wish for one of these meetings. The next issue of the railroad company's Employees' Magazine contained his photograph and an elaborated account of his feat.

Then the fire was as if it had never happened.

No one ever mentioned it. He brought it casually into his talk once or twice, but no one showed any interest. At first he thought this coldness sprang from boredom. Later he decided envy was truly responsible.

He began to keep to himself. After all, what had he in common with the people around him? An uninteresting lot: the lesser inhabitants of the world, unimportant cogs in not especially important machines. He himself was a cog, true enough, but with the difference that on occasion he could be an ident.i.ty. The last drop of ancestral venturesomeness had not been distilled from his blood. He experimented with this thought, evolving a sentence he liked: "All their ancestral courage distilled by industrialism out of their veins." He would look at the world over his sign that said, "Information," and repeat the sentence to himself.

People who pa.s.sed his window or brought their questions to it were sorted. Did they retain some part of their ancestral courage? Or did they not? The first cla.s.s was small.

Complaints went uptown to the general offices: the man at the information window had been un.o.bliging, had been rude, had been insulting. Earl Parish received a formal letter, calling his attention to a number of these complaints and to the purple slogan on the company's advertising matter: Courtesy All-Ways. Such important departments as the information bureau, the letter insisted, had great influence on the public's att.i.tude toward the company, and on that att.i.tude depended not only the road's income but also its success in securing favorable legislation.

Earl Parish did not like this letter. With a pencil and a pad of paper he began framing a reply, not such a reply as might be expected of a cog. A testy old man came to his window with an unanswerable question. The Earl Parish of a while ago would have led the old man around to a point where the answer to an altogether different question would have satisfied him. The Earl Parish who was busy with the draft of his reply to the general offices told the old man point-blank that his question was silly. The testy old man was a personage of some sort. The next day Earl Parish was given two weeks' notice. He left within ten minutes.

Ten days later he found a place in a steams.h.i.+p agency. A month later he was looking for work again. He had sat dreaming over his desk one afternoon and his employer, a little fat man with a fat sneering mouth, had asked him if he was afraid of work. Had asked him-a little fat man who would have buried his face in his arms at the first sign of danger. He had told the little fat man exactly what he was afraid of and exactly what not, and in the end had found himself walking down the street with his wages in his pocket.

His next position was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a wholesale drug house, but he quit this place after two weeks. He was done with working at a desk. He had reasoned things out. Desk jobs were well enough for a man who could not rise above them. But nowadays there was a scarcity of-hence must be a demand for-men whose ancestral courage had not been distilled out of their veins. He meant to find and fill such an opening.

Three months of searching exhausted his savings and persuaded him he had been mistaken. It seemed there was no place for venturesomeness in the modern world. Courage was the one thing for which business had no use-not only could not use it, but did not want to have it around. If your employer learned you were not a sheep or a worm-a timid, docile sheep or worm-he immediately got rid of you.

Earl Parish was working temporarily in a soap factory when he read one day in a newspaper that the city fire department was dangerously undermanned. He deserted the soap factory at once, amazed that he needed the newspaper to point out his path: the city fire department was so obviously the one place in the world for him!

He submitted his application and a doctor surveyed his body. Days pa.s.sed, and he was told he had failed the physical examination-a matter of defective kidneys. In the office of a fire commissioner that same afternoon Earl Parish created a diversion. An inch and a half of cut newspaper was brandished before the commissioner's eyes. The commissioner was called an old fool. Presently Earl Parish was hustled to the sidewalk.

He went then to the offices of the Morning Post, where he found someone to listen to his story. The Post happened to be an opposition paper at the time. It gave half a column to the tale of the man who once had "dashed into a blazing building to rescue a little child," and who now, unable to find other employment, was barred from the Fire Department by "the same red tape which is responsible for the department's inability to get and keep an adequate force."

Out of this advertis.e.m.e.nt Earl Parish got-besides a new clipping -employment as night watchman in a packing plant. He was paid four dollars a night and soon learned that two men who had divided the work had been discharged to make a place for him. It was the watchman's duty to make a tour of the building once an hour, registering at fifteen little boxes hung on the walls. After the first week Earl Parish began to skip boxes, those in distant corners. There were complaints, of course, but he ignored them. He had been hired, he reasoned, because of his known courage, and he trusted that to overbalance minor irregularities. He was mistaken. He was discharged at the end of the third week.

Returning to the Post, he could find no one to listen to his story. The other papers were as indifferent. He found several positions within the next few months. Sometimes he resigned, sometimes he was discharged. He earned enough to pay for meals and a place to sleep. He spent much time in a public square just out of the business district. Sitting on a bench, or sprawling on the gra.s.s, he would sort pa.s.sersby according to his habit. Fewer and fewer were those whose ancestral courage had not been distilled by industrialism out of their veins. Now and then, he would write a letter to the Post's Open Forum, commenting bitterly on this failing of the race.

Sometimes he would go down to the waterfront, pretending he was going to make his way to some virile land where the courageous still prospered and sheep were eaten. He never put his foot on a deck, never asked a question that could lead to a place aboard a boat. The periods of halfhearted search for work grew longer. The intervals of employment shrank. Some days he was hungry.

One of these days he went to the house from which he had carried the child. The child's family had moved from the neighborhood to n.o.body knew where. Another morning when hunger was a hard lump in his stomach he walked the streets studying the faces of the people he pa.s.sed, cla.s.sifying them, but not in his familiar fas.h.i.+on. He sought now to pick out the probably liberal from the probably not liberal.

Three times, he approached faces that bespoke generosity. Three times, last-minute timidity and the too-near presence of others in the street kept him silent, sent him hurrying on as if a pressing engagement awaited him at the end of the street. The fourth face that attracted him was very old, and years had washed it clean of all color, of all expression save a meek friendliness. Its owner walked alone and slowly with the help of a silver-k.n.o.bbed cane. His shoes were black mirrors.

Earl Parish turned around and followed the old man. Other pedestrians pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed them. Earl Parish kept half a block behind his man, and as he walked he took his three finger-worn clippings out of their envelope and put them loose in his pocket, where they would be readily available if his request for "a dime or so" needed doc.u.mentary bolstering.

Presently the old man turned into a street where people were few. Earl Parish quickened his pace and the distance between them shrank. Hurrying thus, he came to a corner where a bareheaded man was breaking the gla.s.s front of a fire-alarm box with a fist wrapped in a handkerchief.

Earl Parish forgot his kindly faced quarry.

"Where is it?" he asked the bareheaded man in a curt professional tone.

"Around in the back street."

Earl Parish ran around the corner. Three men were converging on the opening of a narrow street that split the block. He hurried after them. From a red-and-white house in the middle of the block spongy smoke rolled out to gray the street.

In front of the house a man tried to grab Earl Parish's arm. He struck aside the interfering hand and sprang up the front steps.

"Hey! Come out o' there, you!" the man called after him.

Earl Parish pushed open the front door and plunged into the murky interior. A blow on his chest stopped him, jarred him back on his heels, emptied his lungs of the clean air they had carried in from the street. Smoke stung his throat, chest. His hands found the thing that had struck him-a newel. He clung to it while he closed his eyes against the scorching smoke and coughed.

A foot found the bottom of a flight of steps. He went up, one hand fumbling along the railing, the other clenched over nose and mouth. The platform of an interfloor landing came under his feet. His hand on the rail guided him around the turning in the stairs. He started to climb again.

A boiling hiss, the beat of hotness on his face jerked his eyes open. In front of him nimble red blades of fire poked up at the ceiling.

Earl Parish cried out-a smoke-garbled protest against this trickery, this betrayal. In that other house had been no visible fire. Nothing had been there but smoke, and a child to be carried out. Here was live flame and-he was a fool!-perhaps n.o.body to be carried out. How did he know anyone was upstairs? Was it likely?

A limber bright sword bent down at him. He turned and scurried down the stairs. The landing tripped him with its break in the step-after-step descent, tumbled him down on hands and knees. Red light sizzled down the rail after him. Its flare was mauve on a small piece of paper that lay close under his nose as he huddled there.

He stared at the paper with curious intentness. It was somehow familiar, this small rectangle of soiled wood pulp, so altogether unimportant, so trivial a thing here in a burning house. And when he recognized the paper he continued to stare, seeing now for the first time in its true size his cherished clipping from last year's Post: an inch and a half of simple news that a fire of unknown origin had been subdued with slight damage after a child had been carried to safety by Earl Parish.

Seeing the clipping truly, he saw its significance, and he saw other things: he saw himself with a clearness that mottled his face beyond power of smoke and fire. He stood up on the landing and faced upstairs with the bit of paper crunched in his fist.

"I had my fun, you-" he personified the clipping in a compound invective and flung the clipping to the fire. "Now I'm going to earn it!"

Smoke swirled in the stairs, red light sizzled, and living flame blades poked up at the ceiling. Earl Parish went through them to the second floor. Not all of him went through. Some hair, a patch of one hand's skin, parts of his clothing that were frayed into ready kindling disappeared. The rest of Earl Parish gained the second story, slammed a door between him and the stairs, and beat out the points of light that dotted his clothes.

On the other side of the door fire seethed and crackled. He laughed at the noise as well as he could with smoke strangling him, and began to explore the fumid gloom.

He found no one in the room with him, nor in the other rooms that made up the house's top story. He swayed as he walked back to the first room. His head was hollow and buoyant, and he breathed in choking gulps. He staggered toward the front window.

A small sneeze came out of a corner.

Earl Parish dropped down on hands and knees and peered under the chair there. A cinnamon kitten stopped rubbing paws on nose to sneeze again. Earl Parish laughed hoa.r.s.ely as he scooped the kitten out of its retreat and stuffed it into a coat pocket.

He had trouble in getting himself erect again, but managed it finally. The window slid up easily, to create a draft that swung open the room's door and swept in flame bulky out of all semblance to sword blades.

Earl Parish clambered up on the windowsill and looked into the upturned faces down in the street.

A policeman waved an arm.

"Stick it out, brother," he called. "Here's the wagons now!"

"Look out!" Earl Parish yelled back, and jumped.

There was a shock, but not of the expected hard pavement. He was on a sort of blue cus.h.i.+on: the policeman had run to stand under him. Men dragged them out of the arriving firemen's way, helped them to their feet. The policeman's face was bleeding.

"You're a lunatic!" he said.

Earl Parish was busy with his coat pocket, disentangling the cinnamon kitten from the torn lining. Someone took the kitten. Voices said things, asked things. One of the questions had to do with Earl Parish's name and address.

"Earl-" He coughed violently to cover up the halt, and repeated: "Earl-John W. Earl," and gave a street and number, hoping they didn't belong to any of the people around him.

He was insisting that he was all right, that he didn't need medical attention. He was sneaking through the crowd. He was hurrying away from the fire, down an alley. He turned three corners before he stopped. Out of his pocket he took two clippings-from a railroad employees' magazine, the other from a newspaper.

He tore them into very small bits and tossed them up in a flurry of artificial snow.

In Howard Street, sandwiched between a secondhand clothing store and a lunch counter, there is an establishment whose large front room is bare and unfurnished except for shabby desk, chair, table behind a battered counter in the rear and a blackboard that occupies one sidewall. You will find listed in chalk on this board such items as "Laborers, company, country, $3.75; Wood Choppers, 4 ft. and stove wood, $2.504.50 cord; Ch.o.r.emen, country, $4565, fd.; Lead Burner, company, $8." Beneath some of these items "Fare paid" will appear.

Into this establishment one afternoon came a short st.u.r.dy man of thirty or so, inordinately dirty-faced and shabby. He had no hat, and some of his hair seemed to have been eaten off. A smudge was where one eyebrow should have been. He walked unsteadily. His red eyes had the inward hilarity of a drunken philosopher. But he did not smell of alcohol-rather of fresh wood smoke. He learned over the battered counter and grinned jovially at the establishment's proprietor.

"I want," he said, "a job. Any kind of job you've got, if only it'll get me away from town before the morning papers come out."

NELSON REDLINE.

Nelson Redline was as ruddy and as plump as our employer, but more pompous than sleek-not sleek at all, in fact-and his cuffs, flamboyantly exposed to half their lengths on Mondays, day by day crept back into the sleeves of his coat until, by Friday, not even their edges could be seen.

Martin Karbo was without annoying peculiarity and therefore, in such a company as ours, colorless; and he drew pictures at night.

Myself: two months before, I had ceased being a.s.sociated with a workers' paper that had killed itself by a shortsighted policy of specialization upon the case of the unemployed, who couldn't give it the material support it needed.

Such we were. Irene Vickery's shoes were comparatively new; Karbo's brown hat was still undeniably glossy. Those were our show pieces. Beyond them we were shabby, and patched where we weren't frayed. And our jobs were good for exactly one month, Thurner having divided the work into thirty precisely proportioned lots. And he saw to it that each day's quota was accomplished to the final syllable. But his mathematics had this to our advantage: it was a rigid thing, and each day's task equaled each other day's task, with no allowance for our becoming more expert with practice, so that toward the end of our term, by carefully concealing our increased proficiency, we had rather an easy time of it.

We were established on the top floor of a ramshackle building far down on Garden Street; a building that had been-according to the wit who tended the one tired elevator-the first four-story structure erected in the city, and owed its ricketiness in large measure to its builders' fears that so dare-devil a venture would fail, and to their desire that not too much valuable material be involved in the failure. Our particular room still had the air of a bedroom, in spite of the buff paint that years before had replaced the roses with which the walls must once have been papered, and in spite of the scant and battered office equipment Thurner had provided us with.

But our month was up on a Wednesday, and by the Monday of that last week we thought this erstwhile bed-chamber, with its rented desks, chairs, typewriters, and table, not a bad sort of place at all.

We were sitting idle late that afternoon, the day's a.s.signments completed, except for the bits we habitually saved so that we might have something to be busy with when Thurner arrived. Karbo was studying the Help Wanted Male columns of an evening paper. Irene Vickery and I were listening to Redline, who, with his usual malapropos quotations from political speeches-for which he had a remarkable memory-was elaborating fancifully upon an already fanciful theory that he had come upon somewhere with wholehearted acceptance, whereby the elimination of all international differences was to be brought about by an interchange of children-only orphans, I think, until the system was perfected-between neighboring nations for periods of ten or fifteen years.

In the middle of this the door opened and the elevator man said: "You people better get out. It's burning pretty bad downstairs."

He said it calmly, even flatly, with no emphasis anywhere: an unnatural diction, under the circ.u.mstances, what could be accounted for only by supposing that he had rehea.r.s.ed it. But, delivered thus, it was undoubtedly more impressive than any stressing could have made it.

Karbo, across the desk from me, was nearest the door. With a single revolving motion he whirled himself around in his chair, to his feet, past the elevator man, and through the door. His feet sounded noisily on the wooden floor of the corridor, the elevator door slammed, and the elevator groaned downward.

It was Monday. Redline's cuff showed broad and white as he ruffled his mustache with the back of a forefinger, a little theatrically.

"The d.a.m.ned coward!" he said, also a little theatrically.

Irene Vickery and I were for the next little while only slightly less stagy than Redline. The elevator man had gone. We three, with elaborate courtesy and consideration each toward the others, and a great display of leisureliness, gathered our belongings-pointedly and a little childishly ignoring Karbo's still glossy hat on its nail-and walked down the stairs. The other compartments on our floor were used only for storing goods, and the people below had already left the building, so the dignity of our procession was undisturbed by alien influence. Even when the smoke became thicker and more pungent we quickened our steps but slightly.

Out in the street we saw Karbo immediately. He was standing in the front rank of onlookers on the opposite sidewalk, watching the lazy curls of smoke that wound out of the second-story windows; and I couldn't see wherein his face differed in expression from the faces around him.

Straight across to him Redline marched, with Irene Vickery and me-still held by the parts we were playing-at his heels.

"Never, sir, have I seen such a contemptible action!" Redline hurled at Karbo; and heretofore Redline's "sirs" had been reserved for our employer. "You are a dirty cur!"

Karbo's muddy eyes widened questioningly. Then he shrugged with slight impatience and returned his attention to the upper windows of the building we had just left, where firemen were visible now. But Redline's denunciation hadn't been low-voiced; and the people around us were forming a circle, turning away from the fire-manifestly a failure as a spectacle-toward this more promising and more intimately displayed show. Redline wasn't a man to disappoint an audience. He struck an att.i.tude and cleared his throat; and I, feeling foolish and uncomfortable, pushed through the crowd and went for a walk around the block.

I walked around several blocks, thinking of Karbo and his dash for the elevator that had left us on the fourth floor of a supposedly blazing building with only a winding wooden stairway to get out by. I had liked Karbo, in a casual way. Undersized, frail, with a pale pinched face that had not one significant feature, he was, by virtue of an utter simplicity and never-varying un.o.btrusiveness, decidedly agreeable to work with, especially when viewed in contrast with the pompous Redline and the ridiculous Vickery.

We happened to luncheon together occasionally. He was not very articulate, but neither reticent nor garrulous. He told me that he drew pen-and-ink pictures; just simply that. I didn't know whether he attached any importance to them or not. He had spent two years in the army during the war: first in a Maryland training camp and then in an English one. The uniform, except for the blouse, was the most comfortable sort of clothing he had ever worn. That was the war to him. He was as simple throughout. After his discharge from the army he had not gone back to the poverty-ridden family that had bred him in a West Virginia mining town. There seemed to have been no particular reason for it. He was now about thirty years old, and only once had he ever received a salary of more than thirty dollars a week, and that for but a short while. Except when he was discharged from the army he had never had so much as two hundred dollars at one time. He was neither humble nor resentful. Life, as he knew it, was like that.

For him to have shown the sort of cowardice that makes self-preservation a thing to be accomplished at all costs wouldn't have been, then, either surprising or especially blameworthy. Such courage as poverty breeds is usually the courage that faces danger for the sake of large reward: not-except in unusual cases, and only then when other factors are present-that which makes for sacrifice of life for another. And it couldn't very well be otherwise. A man who throughout his whole life is face to face with the threat of starvation, whose life hangs always insecurely upon the thread of his own none-too-productive day-by-day efforts, whose whole life, in short, is devoted to the business of preserving itself, can't be expected to fling it aside on some sudden chance occasion. That sort of thing is all very well for the comparatively well-to-do, for the man whose condition has permitted him to cultivate other habits than one of the struggling for his life. . . .

But this was beside the point. Karbo hadn't been afraid-not desperately. He had believed, of course, that he was in very real danger. But his face and manner in the street a few minutes later had certainly not been those of a man who had recently experienced a great fear.

Then what? I wondered, finding no answer, and coming back by this time to Garden Street, now empty of crowd and firemen.

Redline and Irene Vickery were up in the office, with Karbo's hat still upon its nail. He had not returned, and Redline was of the opinion that we would not see him again. The affair in the street had been even worse than I had feared. After being subjected to an onslaught of Redline's oratory-in which, more likely than not, the women and children, and perhaps the flag, had been featured prominently-Karbo had been knocked about by the orator and volunteers from the audience, until the police had broken up the game. Irene Vickery had refrained from partic.i.p.ating in the a.s.sault as she now refrained from echoing the vituperation that Redline still spouted-chiefly, I imagined, because she didn't wish to be suspected of thinking her s.e.x had ent.i.tled her to preference in time of danger.

Redline was wrong about not seeing Karbo again. He was at his desk when I came down the next morning. Around one eye his face was swollen and dark; his nose was buried under adhesive tape and more tape lay in little squares on forehead and cheek; one wrist was bandaged; and one of his coat's shoulder-seams was puckered with amateur tailoring.

Irene Vickery and Redline were already there, so I missed the meeting. But, in view of the totality with which they ignored him all that day and the next-when our a.s.sociation ended-I came to believe that his entrance had struck them surprisedly dumb, and that, in lieu of a more satisfactory weapon, they had nursed that momentary speechlessness into deliberate ostracism. Fortunately, Karbo's work and mine were linked together and did not touch that of the other two, and so the rift made no difference in a business way. Then, too, Karbo had never shown much interest in what either of them said or did, and so this new situation was not obtrusively noticeable. He seemed to accept it as a matter of unimportant fact.

Thus we worked through the last two days of our employment. Thurner was with us all of the final day, having taken the day off from his place of employment to supervise the winding up of the work. We finished in mid-afternoon, left our addresses with Thurner-in case he should succeed in filching another contract-and went our separate ways.

At least, I thought our ways were separate until, at the corner below, I found Karbo at my elbow.

"Have you got an hour to spare?" he asked.

I don't know exactly why I went to his room with him. I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable, even a painful, hour-that he was going to say things that having to listen to would embarra.s.s me. But I went with him. Perhaps I thought it the part of fairness that I should give him an opportunity to explain, to defend himself. My former casual liking for him had, I think, nothing to do with it. That was gone now. I felt sorry for him, in a vague way that made me try to conceal from him my present repugnance. Perhaps that is why I went. . . . There had been nothing in his manner since the fire to indicate that he regretted his actions; and it could easily be that he had sufficient, or even excellent, reasons for so behaving that day. Then, too, there was the undeniable fact that all philosophic justification is with him who runs. So, in justice, I couldn't condemn him. But that sort of thing-if you could live up to it-would complicate life beyond reasonable bounds. These men who refuse to-or for one reason or another are unable to-conduct themselves in accordance with the accepted rules-no matter how strong their justification may be, or how foolish the rules-have to be put outside. You don't know approximately what they will do under any given set of circ.u.mstances, and so they are sources of uneasiness and confusion. You can't count on them. They make you uncomfortable. . . .

His room was what is known as a housekeeping room. Besides the bed with its iron peeping out through chipped enamel, the yellow bureau, the table, and the chairs, there were, huddled in one corner, a sink, a two-burner gas stove, and some shelves of pans and dishes.

Leaving me to close the door, he went immediately to the bureau and took out an armful of paper, which he put on the bed. Then he motioned me toward it. I looked at the drawings while he stood silently beside me. I don't know whether there was anything in them or not. Figures, mostly, more men than women, and the hands. . . . But I don't know enough about that sort of thing to pa.s.s judgment. They were all simple lines.

He spoke after I had looked through about half the pile.

"You've seen enough to know what they're like. They don't count. Nothing I've done so far does. But I wanted you to see them before I- It's about the fire I wanted to talk."

I continued looking at the pictures to avoid his eyes: a glance had shown them appealing, childishly.

"You weren't nasty about it," he went on, his voice husky and uneven. "You weren't nasty like Redline and that Vickery woman; but I know you got a pretty low opinion of me out of it, and you can't be blamed for that. About them and what they think I don't care. They're-they don't matter. But you're-you're more of-you're different. And I wouldn't want you to- I'd want to be sure that you understood, if I can make it plain."

I was fidgeting by this time, and I knew my face was blazing. He kept on talking, his voice more broken, trying to look into my eyes; and I had my eyes desperately fixed upon the drawings that I couldn't see clearly, and upon whose margins my hands were leaving sweaty marks.

"I tried to make myself think that I didn't care what anybody thought. But a man's got to have some-I've always been a lonely kind, and you're the first- This was my last chance. If I didn't get hold of you today I'd probably never see you again. And I didn't want to- Those things you are looking at: they aren't anything. Nothing I've done is. But I've got it inside me and some day- A man can't be wrong on a thing like that. I know. I've got it in me. I know. It isn't a thing that can be argued about or proved, but it's a fact. It's a fact, all right. And, knowing that, I can't afford to-"

He had stopped and was waiting for me to say something. But what could I say? Suddenly he went on, talking faster.

"It's not myself. If I could do them now I'd be willing to die tomorrow. But I can't. Tomorrow, maybe, or next month, or next year. But I can't do them now. I'm not equipped. But I will be. I've got the things in me. I can't die with them undone. It's more important than people, or obligations to people. A thing like that can't be killed for- Listen! I haven't been on a boat or a train or a street car or even an automobile for a year-not since I learned this. I don't go out at night: anything can happen to a man at night! I haven't done a thing that had the slightest danger attached to it. And I'm not a coward. I swear I'm not! You saw me after the fire. Was I scared? Trembling? No. I'm not a coward. It isn't for my own sake. This thing isn't me-isn't even a part of me-it's just something that I'm guardian of. I can't-just can't until the things are done! I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to understand, if you could, but-"

I don't like to think of the next five minutes. They were like nothing I had ever gone through before; and what wasn't too hazy for remembrance was indescribably unpleasant. My feelings: irritation, contempt, pity, but dominated by an agony of unreasonable self-consciousness. My arm for a while, I know, was around his shoulders. I gave him promises, a.s.surances. And when I stumbled down the stairs there were dark spots of moisture on my coat where he had leaned his head.