In the end Dennison spent his fury by travelling round the deck until the
sea and sky became like pearly smoke. Then he dropped into a chair and
fell asleep.
Cunningham had also watched through the night. The silent steersman heard
him frequently rustling papers on the chart table or clumping to the
bridge or lolling on the port sills--a restlessness that had about it
something of the captive tiger.
Retrospection--he could not break the crowding spell of it, twist mentally
as he would; and the counter-thought was dimly suicidal. The sea there; a
few strides would carry him to the end of the bridge, and then--oblivion.
And the girl would not permit him to enact this thought. He laughed. God
had mocked him at his birth, and the devil had played with him ever
since. He had often faced death hotly and hopefully, but to consider
suicide coldly!
A woman who had crossed his path reluctantly, without will of her own; the
sort he had always ignored because they had been born for the peace of
chimney corners! She--the thought of her--could bring the past crowding
upon him and create in his mind a suicidal bent!
Pearls! A great distaste of life fell upon him; the adventure grew flat.
The zest that had been his ten days gone, where was it?
Imagination! He had been cursed with too much of it. In his youth he had
skulked through alleys and back streets--the fear of laughter and ridicule
dogging his mixed heels. Never before to have paused to philosophize over
what had caused his wasted life! Too much imagination! Mental strabismus!
He had let his over-sensitive imagination wreck and ruin him. A woman's
laughter had given him the viewpoint of a careless world; and he had fled,
and he had gone on fleeing all these years from pillar to post. From a
shadow!
He was something of a monster. He saw now where the fault lay. He had
never stayed long enough in any one place for people to get accustomed to
him. His damnable imagination! And there was conceit of a sort. Probably
nobody paid any attention to him after the initial shock and curiosity
had died away. There was Scarron in his wheel chair--merry and cheerful
and brave, jesting with misfortune; and men and women had loved him.
A moral coward, and until this hour he had never sensed the truth! That
was it! He had been a moral coward; he had tried to run away from fate;
and here he was at last, in the blind alley the coward always found at the
end of the run. He had never thought of anything but what he was--never of
what he might have been. For having thrust him unfinished upon a
thoughtless rather than a heartless world he had been trying to punish
fate, and had punished only himself. A wastrel, a roisterer by night, a
spendthrift, and a thief!