THE COFFIN


He was in that mental condition, familiar to every genuine man of
action, in which, though the mind divides against itself, and there is
an apparently even conflict between two impulses, the battle is lost and
won before it is fought, and the fight is nothing but a sham fight. He
wandered about the roofs; he went as far as the restaurant garden, and
turned on all the electric festoons and standards by the secret switch,
and sat down solitary at a table before an empty glass which a waiter
had forgotten to remove. He extinguished the lights, wandered back to
the dome, climbed to the topmost gallery, and saw the moon rising over
St. Paul's Cathedral. He said he would go to bed again at once, well
knowing that he would not go to bed again at once. He swore that he
would conquer the overmastering impulse, well knowing that it would
conquer him. He cursed, as men only curse themselves. And then,
suddenly, he yielded, gladly, with relief.

He hastened out, and did not pause till he reached the balcony of flat
No. 7 in the further quadrangle. He admitted frankly now that the
dominant impulse which controlled his mind would force him to enter the
flat during that night, by means lawful or unlawful, and he perceived
with satisfaction that the great French window of the drawing-room was
not quite shut. The blinds, however, had been carefully lowered, and
nothing of the interior was revealed save the fact that a light burned
within. In the entire quadrangle, round which, tier above tier, hundreds
of people were silent in sleep or in vigil, this was the sole
illumination. Hugo leaned over the balcony, and tried to pierce the
depths of the vast pit below, and those thoughts came to him which come
to watchers by night in the presence of sleeping armies, or on the high