The brusqueness of this question flung so crudely at the young man produced a curious jar and jolt among them all. Nelly looked reproachfully at the painter. Richard scowled and sank into gloomy silence. Karmakoff lay back in his chair and shrugged his shoulders, smiling a little.
‘I can’t understand what you mean,’ remarked Catharine. ‘Roger’s always so amusing. He’s naughty of course and funny; but I can’t think how you can call him pessimistic. He always puts me into a lovely mood when I come across him.’
‘Thank you, Catharine,’ said the journalist, looking affectionately at her.
‘You’re wrong all the same,’ persisted Canyot; ‘and Roger knows it, only he won’t admit it. You haven’t answered my question yet,’ he went on, almost brutally, his eyes flashing from beneath their heavy brows.
‘Robert dear!’ protested Nelly softly.
But the atmosphere of tension in the room after the journalist’s revelation seemed to have gone to the painter’s head.
‘Why don’t you answer?’ he growled. ‘You know perfectly well I’m right.’
Roger Lamb buttoned his jacket with quiet fingers and crossed his legs.
‘Are you really going to the hospital tomorrow?’ cried Catharine. ‘It’s dreadful. It’s like a dream.’
‘Yes, you’re quite right, Robert,’ replied the condemned young man, frowning a little and opening his eyes very wide with a sort of humorous grimace. ‘I have never cared very much what happened to me. A sort of inertness — a silly kind of disillusionment about everything — I don’t know! but it’s always been here, somewhere or another, like a marble slab.’ He tapped his forehead with his long second finger.
‘But, Roger, you have helped me so much at different times,’ protested Nelly softly.
‘And me too — you poor darling — you’ve been an angel to me always,’ murmured Catharine Gordon.
‘But how has this operation news affected your indifference?’ Canyot persisted.
‘How can you go on teasing him like that?’ cried Catharine, stepping up to Canyot’s side and seizing his arm with her hands. ‘Stop it, I say! Stop it!’ And the young girl positively shook the painter in her indignation.
‘It has had absolutely no effect at all,’ answered Roger Lamb. ‘It’s all right, Catharine. Robert and I understand each other perfectly.’
‘He ought to be beaten!’ cried the young girl retreating to Nelly’s side and clutching her hand.
‘Absolutely no effect,’ the journalist repeated, bending down to straighten out one of his purple-coloured socks. ‘But I confess I’m a bit scared of that hospital. I always have been terrified of institutions. The most agitating moment of my life was when I first went into camp.’
‘But Roger dear,’ cried Catharine, ‘the army isn’t an institution.’
‘Is marriage an institution, Catharine?’ asked Karmakoff.
‘Not for you or me,’ the girl replied, giving him a strange quick look.
At that point Roger Lamb arose to his feet. ‘Well! I think I’ll be making my way home,’ he said.
They all made an involuntary movement towards him; and while Richard was searching for his hat and stick they surrounded him awkwardly, in a silence full of unsaid things.
His slim figure and closely cropped skull seemed to grow almost terrifyingly alien from them; seemed to repel them, for all his gentleness, as if with a stern and menacing gesture.
He shook their hands quietly enough when that moment’s embarrassed pause was over; the passionate sympathy of the embrace which Catharine Gordon gave him broke the spell of the general discomfort.
‘You’ll take him home, Richard, won’t you?’ said Nelly, and added a hurried ‘of course he will! No, Roger, he must go with you. You must let him. He’ll see you to bed and then come back to us.’
As Richard walked by the side of the doomed boy, up Varick Street and across Sheridan Square, in front of the Greenwich Village Theater, he became conscious of the extraordinary power of Lamb’s self-possession.
This might well be the last time the youth was destined to walk through those well-known haunts, the last time through an inconceivable eternity; and yet he seemed to look round him with his usual whimsical gravity, noting the passers-by and the various familiar scenes without a sign of dramatic self-consciousness.
They went into one of the innumerable Village cafés for a cup of coffee, and Richard was amazed at the urbanity and aplomb with which his companion greeted some casual acquaintances of his, Dulcie Foster and her strange friend Siegfried Stein, the mad musician. When finally, an hour afterwards, he left the room in Waverley Place where he had seen the young man safely to bed, he felt himself impelled to walk round Washington Square in order to collect his thoughts before returning home.
The night was a little damp and chilly, although the day had been hot. The trees in the square had already changed their tints and many of their leaves had fallen. As he strode beside the familiar arch, whose classic facade is so curiously adorned with two statues of the same Father of the Country, and let his eyes wander up the long perspective of Fifth Avenue, he realized how tremendous was the mere weight of sheer material substantiality in this astounding city. The death of a fragile man-of-letters, the death of many men-of-letters, what were they amid the palpable projections of this tremendous scene?
As he moved up close to the masonry of the arch, to shelter himself from the tornado of whirling automobiles that rolled past him, he visualized this harsh raw emphatic city as a sort of deliberately flung-out challenge to the march of the feet of the destinies. It was like a great flaring advertisement sign, this city, hung up here between the deep sky and the deep ocean, with a sort of defiance to all the old submissions and resignations. These immense marble-and-iron structures, blazing with a million lights, seemed to flaunt in the face of the gods a certain bravura of splendid levity.
The Old World with its time-bleached pieties had accepted those gods’ austere decisions and had bowed low before them in patient fatalistic ritual. But this reckless New World seemed to claim, in daring impious flippancy, the right to deny the whole traditional order, its solemn sorrows as well as its solemn assuagements, and to fling forth a sort of profane adventurous challenge to the whole system of things.
The death of a man, contemplated in the light of the illuminated perspective of Fifth Avenue, dwindled into a kind of negligible accident. So many men must have died in order that this huge shout of defiance should reach the planetary spaces.
Love and friendship and religion and loyalty, these things were proper subjects for the old forms of art; but here in New York these things seemed to fall into the background and other manifestations of the life force seemed to assume prominence.
In a different mood Richard might have been tempted to condemn these other manifestations, as part of the primordial brutality in things, but in some queer way the influence of Roger Lamb had altered his feeling about them. The journalist had thrown out to him so many capricious fancies as he prepared for his last night in his own bed, that Richard began to wonder whether it was possible that this huge chaotic welter of a world might after all be destined to evoke some completely new attitude to life; some attitude in which camaraderie took the place of love, honesty to one’s self the place of loyalty to others, cynical courage replaced submissive piety, as a reckless indifference to death did the old sad resignation.
As he walked slowly back to Charlton Street through the familiar quarter with its voluble crowds and its lighted fruit shops great splashes of crude warm colour against the darkness, there came upon him a dim feeling that there was something here, some mood, some attitude of the spirit, some breaking up of ancient barriers that it would be perhaps unwise wholly to harden one’s heart against.