"Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college.
The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night.
Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.
Smith had been at Dr. Eames's lecture for the first half of the morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half.
He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman's private house.
"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European reputation and a bald head.
"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,' said Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small, `because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.
I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise--bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers--'
"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'
"After a patch of pause, not the first--for this depressing conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence-- the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: `It's all a question of wrong calculation. The most flies into the candle because he doesn't happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.
IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin--because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness--that they don't even know how to look for it--is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours are cries of pain.
Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.
There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!'
"`Of course,' he went on dreamily, `one or two men see the sober fact a long way off--they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs mostly try either to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that wanders about the coulisse of a theater.
He has only opened the wrong door and come into the right place.
He sees things at the right angle. But the common world--'
"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith, letting his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.
"`Let's give it a bad name first,' said the Professor calmly, `and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it.
So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain.
He would strike us dead.'
"`Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked the undergraduate abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.
"`He is dead himself,' said the philosopher; `that is where he is really enviable.'
"`To any one who thinks,' proceeded Eames, `the pleasures of life, trivial and soon tasteless, and bribes to bring us into a torture chamber.
We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the... What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.'
"Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top.
It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was.
Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
"`I'll help you out of your hole, old man,' said Smith, with rough tenderness. `I'll put the puppy out of his pain.'
"Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. `Do you mean to kill me?' he cried.
"`It's not a thing I'd do for every one,' said Smith with emotion;
`but you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow.
I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.'
"`Put that thing down,' shouted the Warden.
"`It'll soon be over, you know,' said Smith with the air of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a compassionate expression.
"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames's balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
