Part 22 (1/2)

Is sympathy to be our strongest emotion? What do you think, Miss Annot.”

”Sympathy is exactly what I feel,” she replied. ”Richard and I would be very good companions. Isn't that more important than pa.s.sion?”

”Is sympathy to be the bond between the s.e.xes, then, and is all pa.s.sion and romance to die?” he exclaimed scornfully. He seemed to be struggling with himself, as if he were trying to throw off some spell that held him. ”Surely I seem to recollect that yesterday life contained some richer emotions than sympathy,” he muttered. ”What has come over us? Why doesn't my blood quicken when I think of Leonora?” He burst into a laugh. ”Harden, this is comic. There is no other word for it. It is simply comic.”

”It may be comic, Sarakoff, but to speak candidly, I prefer my state to-day to my state yesterday. Last night seems to me like a bad dream.”

I got to my feet. ”There is one thing I must see about as soon as possible, and that is getting rid of this house. What an absurd place to live in this is! It is a comic house, if you like--like a tomb.”

The room seemed suddenly absurd. It was very dark, the wallpaper was of a heavy-moulded variety, sombre in hue and covered with meaningless figuring. The ceiling was oppressive. It, too, was moulded in some fantastic manner. Several large faded oil-paintings hung on the wall. I do not know why they hung there, they were hideous and meaningless as well. The whole place was meaningless. It was the _meaninglessness_ that seemed to leap out upon me wherever I turned my eyes. The fireplace astounded me. It was a ma.s.s of pillars and super-structures and carvings, increasing in complexity from within outwards, until it attained the appearance of an ornate temple in the centre of which burned a little coal. It was grotesque. On the topmost ledges of this monstrous absurdity stood two vases. They bulged like distended stomachs, covered on their outsides with yellow, green and black splotches of colour. I recollected that I paid ten pounds apiece for them. Under what perverted impulse had I done that? My memories became incredible. I moved deliberately to the mantelpiece and seized the vases. I opened the window and hurled them out on to the pavement. They fell with a crash, and their fragments littered the ground.

Alice expressed no surprise.

”It is rather comic,” said the Russian, ”but where are you going to live?”

”Alice and I will go and live by the sea. We have plenty to think about.

I feel as if I could never stop thinking, as if I had to dig away a mountain of thought with a spade. Alice, we will go round to the house agent now.”

When Alice and I left the house the remains of the vases littered the pavement at our feet. We walked down Harley Street. The house agent lived in Regent Street. It was now a clear, crisp afternoon with a pleasant tint of sunlight in the air. A newspaper boy pa.s.sed, calling something unintelligible in an excited voice. I stopped him and bought a paper.

”What an inhuman noise to make,” said Alice. ”It seems to jar on every nerve in my body. Do ask him to stop.”

”You're making too much noise,” I said to the lad. ”You must call softly. It is an outrage to scream like that.”

He stared up at me, an impudent amazed face surmounting a tattered and dishevelled body, and spoke.

”You two do look a couple of guys, wiv' yer blue faices. If some of them doctors round 'ere catches yer, they'll pop yer into 'ospital.”

He ran off, shrieking his unintelligible jargon.

”We must get to the sea,” I said firmly. ”This clamour of London is unbearable.”

I opened the paper. Enormous headlines stared me in the face.

”Blue Disease sweeping over London. Ten thousand cases reported to-day.

Europe alarmed. Question of the isolation of Great Britain under discussion. Debate in the Commons to-night. The Duke of Thud and the Earl of Blunder victims. The Royal Family leave London.”

We stood together on the pavement and gazed at these statements in silence. A sense of wonder filled my mind. What a confusion! What an emotional, feverish, heated confusion! Why could not they take the matter calmly? What, in the name of goodness, was the reason of this panic. They knew that the Blue Disease had caused no fatalities in Birmingham, and yet so totally absent was the power of thought and deduction, that they actually printed those glaring headlines.

”The fools,” I said. ”The amazing, fatuous fools. They simply want to sell the paper. They have no other idea.”

A strong nausea came over me. I crumpled up the paper and stood staring up and down the street. The newspaper boy was in the far distance, still shrieking. I saw Sir Barnaby Burtle, the obstetrician, standing by his scarlet front door, eagerly devouring the news. His jaw was slack and his eyes protruded.

The solemn houses of Harley Street only increased my nausea. The folly of it--the selfish, savage folly of life!

”Come, Richard,” said Alice. ”The sooner we get to the house agent the better. We could never live here.”

”I'll put him on to the job of finding a bungalow on the South Coast at once,” I said. ”And then we'll go and live there.”

”We must get married,” she observed.