CHAPTER LXXII
Wherein our Hero is ill at ease with his own Shadow
Thetrain being gone, and Horace borne away, Noll drew aside from the noisy crowd of departing students that strolled chattering and jocular from the scene of their leave-taking. He walked home alone.
When he climbed to his room, the loneliness yawned at him out of the void of the empty place. Every shadow, every chair, the bed, the whole deserted place, whispered that Betty was gone.
He moved restlessly about his rooms all day, chafed and fretted, and, when the twilight fell, he as aimlessly fidgeted out into the dusk and betook himself to the streets of Paris.
And as he strode moodily along, nagging whispers went with him—unpleasant questionings nudged at his elbow—irking discomfort plucked at his sleeve.
He had very clearly realized during the last few days that, good fellows as they were, Horace and his companions were all taken up with their own affairs—that they were really only genially interested in him in relation to themselves—that he was interested in them in relation to himself. Not a soul had asked a word about Betty. He resented it—yet he knew that his neglect of her alone had been the beginning of her being set aside from their ken. If he felt so of a sudden about their neglect of her, what must she have felt about his neglect of her? God, how he had let her drop out of everything!
He knew now that his one selfless friend had been this girl—this handsome dainty woman. And he had let her go out into the dusk, alone—leaving him alone.
And for what?
He laughed bitterly.
It came to him now, a whisper in his ear, that her brain was worth all the wits of all these others put together. It was revealed to him that most of the keenly observant, large, and humane phrases that had sounded the music of well-spoken insight to his understanding had been hers.
Of a sudden he realized what an appalling obstacle his indifference to her confidences about her work must have been! Indifference? Nay, he had shown a harsher snarl than that. Whata chill to her enthusiasms and to the practice of her craft must have been all his silent discouragement—or lack of encouragement.... Stay—had it even been silent? There had been his ill-concealed impatience with the patience of her building. Had there not indeed been hints without disguise about her work being long enough in the doing? He could have cut out his tongue for its jeer about priggish dilatoriness and Casauban’sKey to all the Mythologies. His ill-manners and his neglect struck him in the face, and he shrank from it now with a burning sense of shame—his face scalded. What would he not have given to recall the shabby jibe!
He turned into a café and was greeted with a shout. And in the resulting rolic, for several hours, he forgot his self-recriminations. But in the black night, taking himself homewards, it struck him like a buffet upon the mouth delivered out of the surrounding darkness. He had lacked manhood.
Reaching his rooms, a dozen petty discomforts assailed him to remind him of the mother-care and gentle hands that no longer showed their tenderness—on striking a light, the stealthy shadows stole away skulkingly into the corners, mocking at his loneliness, nudging elbows at him.
He lit a candle, and sat down on the side of his bed.
It was borne in upon him, sitting there in solitary communion with his own unmitigated selfishness, that the man alone is not a human entity.
Ay, Noll; thou art not the only numbskull—the very nations share thy cap and bells. Man is indeed incomplete without the woman. Any scheme of life that eliminates the woman is a futile scheme of life. The human animal is not one, but two—man without woman is wholly incomplete, a crudity, inadequate, a fatuity, and hence a thing of shame.
Nay, the lad had glimmerings into depths deeper than that; gazing at the naked truth of things, it came to him that any scheme of life wherein the woman is made inferior degrades the man with her degradation, since she is a part of him—and a part of a man in a state of humiliation humiliates the whole of him.
He wondered what she was doing; whether they were being kind to the sensitive, large-hearted, dainty Betty.
A sob caught at his throat. He knew—with a hot flush he knew—it was the first generous thought that had moved him these many days. He had been pitying himself like a whipped cur, the which never yet brought a man honour or comfort or dignity.
Wo-hee-ho-ho! moaned the scoffing wind without.
What was she doing—out there—in the dark?
Ah, Noll—what, indeed?
The very shadows bent to hear.
But, Ho-ho-hey! scoffed the mocking wind.