I think that for the first instant, oddly, what I felt was merely
satisfaction, not hatred; for I all but asked him whether, by not smoking
to-day, he had got a keener edge to his thrills. I understood him, and for
an instant this sufficed me. Those pursed-out lips, so queerly different
from the compressed lips of the normal motorist, and seeming, as
elsewhere last night, to denote no more than pensive interest, had told me
suddenly all that I needed to know about Pethel. Here, as there,--and, oh,
ever so much better here than there!--he could gratify the passion that
was in him. No need of any "make-believe" here. I remembered the
queer look he had given when I asked if his gambling were always "a
life-and-death affair." Here was the real thing, the authentic game, for
the highest stakes. And here was I, a little extra stake tossed on to the
board. He had vowed I had it in me to do "something big." Perhaps,
though, there had been a touch of make-believe about that. I am afraid it
was not before my thought about myself that my moral sense began to
operate and my hatred of Pethel set in. Put it to my credit that I did see
myself as a mere detail in his villainy. You deprecate the word
"villainy"? Understand all, forgive all? No doubt. But between the acts
of understanding and forgiving an interval may sometimes be condoned.
Condone it in this instance. Even at the time I gave Pethel due credit for
risking his own life, for having doubtless risked it--it and none
other--again and again in the course of his adventurous (and
abstemious) life by field and flood. I was even rather touched by
memory of his insistence last night on another glass of that water which
just MIGHT give him typhoid; rather touched by memory of his
unsaying that he "never" touched alcohol--he who, in point of fact, had to
be ALWAYS gambling on something or other. I gave him due
credit, too, for his devotion to his daughter. But his use of that devotion,
his cold use of it to secure for himself the utmost thrill of hazard, did
seem utterly abominable to me.