“Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European reputation and a bald head.
“‘I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,’ said Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small, ‘because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise–bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers–’
“‘All thinkers,’ said Eames, ‘are pessimist thinkers.’
“After a patch of pause, not the first–for this depressing conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence– the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: ‘It’s all a question of wrong calculation. The most flies into the candle because he doesn’t happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin–because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness–that they don’t even know how to look for it–is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river. There’s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!’
“‘Of course,’ he went on dreamily, ‘one or two men see the sober fact a long way off–they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs mostly try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle. But the common world–’
“‘Oh, hang the common world!’ said the sullen Smith, letting his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.
“‘Let’s give it a bad name first,’ said the Professor calmly, ‘and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.’
“‘Why doesn’t he strike us dead?’ asked the undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.
“‘He is dead himself,’ said the philosopher; ‘that is where he is really enviable.’
“‘To any one who thinks,’ proceeded Eames, ‘the pleasures of life, trivial and soon tasteless, and bribes to bring us into a torture chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.’
“Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was. Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
“‘I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,’ said Smith, with rough tenderness. ‘I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.’
“Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. ‘Do you mean to kill me?’ he cried.
“‘It’s not a thing I’d do for every one,’ said Smith with emotion; ‘but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.’
“‘Put that thing down,’ shouted the Warden.
“‘It’ll soon be over, you know,’ said Smith with the air of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a compassionate expression.
“Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames’s balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.
“‘Hang the world, we said,’ observed Smith, ‘and the world is hanged. “He has hanged the world upon nothing,” says the Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I’m going to be hanged upon something myself. I’m going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,’ he murmured; ‘never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you. For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.’
“‘Help!’ cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; ‘help!’
“‘The puppy struggles,’ said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity, ‘the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and kinder than he,’ and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the upper part of Eames’s bald head.
“‘Smith,’ said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of ghastly lucidity, ‘I shall go mad.’
“‘And so look at things from the right angle,’ observed Smith, sighing gently. ‘Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only cure is an operation–an operation that is always successfuclass="underline" death.’
“As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything, with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different tints: here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply. As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college. The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night. He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
“Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have called to a student to shut a door.
“‘Let me come off this place,’ he cried; ‘I can’t bear it.’
“‘I rather doubt if it will bear you,’ said Smith critically; ‘but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back to life?’
“‘I’d give anything to get back,’ replied the unhappy professor.
“‘Give anything!’ cried Smith; ‘then, blast your impudence, give us a song!’
“‘What song do you mean?’ demanded the exasperated Eames; ‘what song?’
“‘A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,’ answered the other gravely. ‘I’ll let you off if you’ll repeat after me the words–
“Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic statue.