CHAPTER XIII

He went down the steps with his hand clutching the rail with the fervor of a tooth biting on a lip. If it had been daylight the twitching of his eyes and lip-corners would have been peculiarly noticeable.

For some reason or no reason he scorned the sidewalk; the middle of the road presently felt his nervous footfall. Underneath him he could feel and hear the droning of the cable. Some hundred yards before him he saw the vivid glare that betokened the headlight of an approaching cable-car. For an instant or two he asked himself why he should not continue walking in that direction, in the path of the Juggernaut, and allow himself to be ground into fragments--into the everlasting Forget. Gravely he pondered it: why not? Could the game be worth the candle that was snuffed? And yet, there was something so commonplace, so cheaply melodramatic in that manner of going out that he drew back; he stepped aside and let the dust of the passing car brush him spatteringly. To commit suicide, to choose such a moment for it--a moment that, after all, was but the repetition of a million similar ones--had something so ordinary, so vulgar in it, that after he resisted the thought of it, he shuddered. His lips took on a semblance of smiling.

"What a play for the gallery it would have been!" he thought bitterly.

Presently, as he walked, sobs broke through his lips. The measure of what was lost to him seemed terribly great. All the light of the world was but darkness for him now. What did it all matter now, this world, this life, this aimless race? What was ambition worth, when ambition's cause was gone? Could he take up the dream again, now that waking had brought such pain? Incoherently his mind went back to the moments that had elapsed just before he had left the house, moments that lasted longer than lifetimes. He saw it all again, that scene so indelibly graven on his mental film; he heard those fateful words again and felt their blighting import. His arms went up wildly, with fists clenched, toward the stars, and down again toward the earth like falling hammers, driven with curses.

If anyone had met him at that moment, Dick Lancaster would have been called insane.

Suddenly he stood still, and began to laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and he himself noticed that it had the discordance of the laugh bred by artifice. He had remembered a sentence that someone had addressed to him, "The thing to do is to laugh!"

So it was. Yes, that was the only armor, the armor of indifference. He walked on, evolving a philosophy of flippancy. Wounded sorely, as he was, he found himself sympathetically wondering whether that flippancy that he once had so despised in his fellow-men and women was not as often a growth of experience as a mask of fashion.

When he reached his room he flung himself on a couch. Outside everything was still. He sent his mind back to the time when he had first entered this town. How void of all suspicion, all cynicism, he was in those days! Experience after experience had left its impress on his wax-like mind and now, with the slipping away of beliefs, the vanishment of idols, the twinges of fate, he found himself at the other extreme, in the mood that laughs at all things, and believes that there is nothing potent save chance.

In that mood he resolved to remain. It was the only one that was no longer unbearable. To attempt the old beliefs were merely to give hostages to disenchantment. He was done now with disenchantment. He would expect nothing, care for nothing. Except to laugh.

But, in the meanwhile, he could no longer bear the scenes and sounds of the town. He cast about for plans. The thought that in one mind at least his flight would look like cowardice did not annoy him; that also was merely a thing to laugh at. The country was not what he wanted. It was not quiet he desired; it was struggle and strife with the dragons of memory and boredom; he wanted new battles to fight, new experiences to harvest--not sensitively, as of old, but coldly, cruelly--in other fields, as far away as possible.

He unlocked his desk and searched for his bank-book. The figures seemed to satisfy him.

"Three thousand," he murmured, "will be enough. I will take a year. I will see everything that my fancy asks for, do everything, be everything. They call it the Old World. Well, it must be able to furnish amusement for me, be it old or young."

He turned to the unfinished sketches, the letters and the other impediments that littered the room. "These shall not hold me a minute," he said. "I want a change of air. I am going to take it. Nor friends, nor promises, nor prospects shall stay me. It's goodbye."

He laughed again, and went out to buy an evening paper, to scan the sailing-lists for the out-going steamers.