Every seat in the restaurant
was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest
cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed
with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other. Marsden was already well into his tale... The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romarin. It was as
he had said--there was nothing he had not done and did not exult in with
a sickening exultation. It had, indeed, ended in diabetes. In the pitiful
hunting down of sensation to the last inch he had been fiendishly
ingenious and utterly unimaginative. His unholy curiosity had spared
nothing, his unnatural appetite had known no truth. It was grinning sin. The details of it simply cannot be told....

And his vanity in it all was prodigious. Romarin was pale as he listened. What! In order that _this_ malignant growth in Society's breast should
be able to say "I know," had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions
assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright
and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night
had called--yes, stilled called--by the gentle name of Romance? Yes,
so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but
manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions by which alone the
creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame. And what was he
to look at when it was all done?... "Romance--Beauty--the Beauty of things as they are!" he croaked. If faces in the restaurant were now turned to Romarin, it was the horror
on Romarin's own face that drew them. He drew out his handkerchief and
mopped his brow. "But," he stammered presently, "you are speaking of
generalities--horrible theories--things diabolically conceivable
to be done--"

"What?" cried Marsden, checked for a moment in his horrible triumph. "No,
by God! I've done 'em, done 'em! Don't you understand? If you don't,
question me!..." "No, no!" cried Romarin. "But I say yes! You came for this, and you shall have it! I tried to stop
you, but you wanted it, and by God you shall have it! You think your
life's been full and mine empty? Ha ha!... Romance! I had the conviction
of it, and I've had the courage too! I haven't told you a tenth of it! What would you like? Chamber-windows when Love was hot? The killing of a
man who stood in my way? (I've fought a duel, and killed.) The squeezing
of the juice out of life like _that_?" He pointed to Romarin's plate;
Romarin had been eating grapes. "Did you find me saying I'd do a thing
and then drawing back from it when we--" he made a quick gesture of both
hands towards the middle of the restaurant floor. "When we fought--?" "Yes, when we fought, here!... Oh no, oh no! I've lived, I tell you,
every moment! Not a title, not a degree, but I've lived such a life as
you never dreamed of--!" "Thank God--"

But suddenly Marsden's voice, which had risen, dropped again. He began to
shake with interior chuckles. They were the old, old chuckles, and they
filled Romarin with a hatred hardly to be borne. The sound of the
animal's voice had begun it, and his every word, look, movement,
gesture, since they had entered the restaurant, had added to it. And he
was now chuckling, chuckling, shaking with chuckles, as if some
monstrous tit-bit still remained to be told. Already Romarin had tossed
aside his napkin, beckoned to the waiter, and said, "M'sieu dines
with me...."

"Ho ho ho ho!" came the drunken sounds. "It's a long time since M'sieu
dined here with his old friend Romarin! Do you remember the last time? Do
you remember it? _Pif, pan_! Two smacks across the table, Romarin--oh,
you got it in very well!--and then, _brrrrr_! quick! Back with the
tables--all the fellows round--Farquharson for me and Smith for you, and
then to it, Romarin!... And you really don't remember what it was all
about?..." Romarin had remembered. His face was not the face of the philosophic
master of Life now. "You said she shouldn't--little Pattie Hines you know--you said she
shouldn't--"

Romarin sprang half from his chair, and brought his fist down on the
table. "And by Heaven, she didn't! At least that's one thing you haven't done!" Marsden too had risen unsteadily. "Oho, oho? You think that?" A wild thought flashed across Romarin's brain. "You mean--?" "I mean?... Oho, oho! Yes, I mean! She did, Romarin...."

The mirrors, mistily seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and
cigarettes, the Loves and Shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners
starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a
great half-circle before Romarin's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if
he stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance,
he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and
had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but
he struck again with the broken edge, and left the knife where it
entered. The table appeared uptilted almost vertical; over it Marsden's
head disappeared; it was followed by a shower of glass, cigars,
artificial flowers and the tablecloth at which he clutched; and the
dirty American cloth of the table top was left bare. *       *       *       *       *

But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained
vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a
theatre into a tumbril-like cart...

And Romarin knew that, past, present, and future, he had seen it all in
an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing. And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat passed and to
take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant, _and it would be so_. A
drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time; a
year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the
moment of waking of the molecules we associate with ideas; and the past
of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment
we call the present....

_It would come true_....

For one moment Romarin stood; the next, he had turned and run for his
life. At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall
saved them from going down. Feverishly Romarin plunged his hand into his
pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the
loafer's hand. "Here--quick--take it!" he gasped. "There's a man there, by that
restaurant door--he's waiting for Mr. Romarin--tell him--tell him--tell
him Mr. Romarin's had an accident--"

And he dashed away, leaving the man looking at the silver in his palm. THE CIGARETTE CASE


"A cigarette, Loder?" I said, offering my case. For the moment Loder was
not smoking; for long enough he had not been talking. "Thanks," he replied, taking not only the cigarette, but the case also.