He was old and grey and down-at-heel--fifty, if a day--and
his clothes hung loose on his bony frame. "You'll excuse me if I say I
know better'n you. When a man's done, he's done. And that's me. Yes,"--
he grew inflated again in reciting his woes--"I'm one o' your hopeless
cases, just as surely as if I was being eaten up by a cancer or a
consumption. To mend me, you doctors 'ud need to start me afresh--from
the mother-egg."
"You exaggerate, I'm sure."
"It's that--knowin' one's played out, with by rights still a good third
of one's life to run--that's what puts the sleep away. In the daylight
it's none so hard to keep the black thoughts under; themselves they're
not so daresome; and there's one's pipe, and the haver o' the young fry.
But night's the time! Then they come tramplin' along, a whole army of
'em, carryin' banners with letters a dozen feet high, so's you shan't
miss rememberin' what you'd give your soul to forget. And so it'll go
on, et cetera and ad lib., till it pleases the old Joker who sits
grinnin' up aloft to put His heel down--as you or me would squash a
bull-ant or a scorpion."
"You speak bitterly, Mr. Tangye. Does a night like this not bring you
calmer, clearer thoughts?" and Mahony waved his arm in a large, loose
gesture at the sky.
His words passed unheeded. The man he addressed spun round and faced
him, with a rusty laugh. "Hark at that!" he cried. "Just hark at it!
Why, in all the years I've been in this God-forsaken place--long as
I've been here--I've never yet heard my own name properly spoken.
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