into a thousand pieces. He saw the man himself, choking, sinking down
beneath the black waters; heard the stifled cry from his palsied lips,
saw the slow dawning agony of death in his distorted features. Some one
was playing a mandolin down in the second class. He heard the feet of a
dancer upon the deck, the little murmur of applause. Well, after all,
this was life. It was a rebuke of fate to his own illogical and useless
vapourings. Men died every second whilst women danced, and no one who
knew life had any care save for the measure of their own days. Some
freakish thought pleaded stridently his own justification. His mind
travelled back down the gloomy avenues of his past, along those last
aching years of grinding and undeserved poverty. He remembered his
upbringing, his widowed mother, a woman used to every luxury, struggling
to make both ends meet in a suburban street, in a hired cottage filled
with hired furniture. He remembered his schooldays, devoid of pocket
money, unable to join in the sports of others, slaving with melancholy
perseverance for a scholarship to lighten his mother's burden. Always
there was the same ghastly, crushing penuriousness, the struggle to make
a living before his schooldays were well over, the unbought books he had
fingered at the bookstalls and let drop again, the coarse clothes he had
been compelled to wear, the scanty food he had eaten, the narrow, driving
ways of poverty, culminating in his mother's death and his own fear--he,
at the age of nineteen years--lest the money for her funeral should not
be forthcoming. If there were any hell, surely he had lived in it! This
other, whose flames mocked him now, could be no worse. Sin! Crime! He
remembered the words of the girl who during these latter years had
represented to him what there might have been of light in life. He
remembered, and it seemed to him that he could meet that ghostly image
which had risen from the black waters, without shrinking, almost
contemptuously. Fate had mocked him long enough. It was time, indeed,
that he helped himself.