The Collaborators | Page 6

evening, like the day
before yesterday, closing in early, throttling the afternoon prematurely,
as it were. A drizzling rain falls softly, drenching everything--the
sodden leaves of the trees on the Embankment, the road, which is
heavy with clinging yellow mud, the stone coping of the wall that skirts
the river.
"And the river heaves along. Its gray, dirty waves are beaten up by a
light, chilly wind, and chase the black barges with a puny, fretful,
sinister fury, falling back from their dark, wet sides with a hiss of
baffled hatred. Yes, it is dreary weather.
"Do you know, Henley, as I know, the strange, subtle influence of
certain kinds of weather? There are days on which I could do great
deeds merely because of the way the sun is shining. There are days,
there are evenings, when I could commit crimes merely because of the
way the wind is whispering, the river is sighing, the dingy night is
clustering around me. There can be an angel in the weather, or there
can be a devil. On this evening I am describing there is a devil in the
night!
"The lights twinkle through the drizzling rain, and they are blurred, as
bright eyes are blurred, and made dull and ugly, by tears. Two or three
cabs roll slowly by the houses on the Embankment.. A few people
hurry past along the slippery, shining pavement. But as the night closes
in there is little life outside those tall, gaunt houses that are so near the
river! And in one of those houses the man comes down to the woman to

tell her the truth.
"There is a devil in the weather that night, as I said, and that devil
whispers to the man, and tells him that it is now his struggle must end
finally, and the new era of unresisted yielding to the vice begin. In the
sinister darkness, in the diminutive, drenching mist of rain, he speaks,
and the man listens, and bows his head and answers 'yes!' It is over. He
has fallen finally. He is resolved, with a strange, dull obstinacy that
gives him a strange, dull pleasure--do you see?--to go down to the
room below, and tell the woman that she has conquered him--that his
power of will is a reed which can be crushed--that henceforth there
shall be two victims instead of one. He goes down."
Andrew paused a moment. His lips were twitching again. He looked
terribly excited. Henley listened in silence. He had lost all wish to
interrupt.
"He goes down into the room below where the woman is, with her dark
hair, and her dead-white face, and her extraordinary eyes--large,
luminous, sometimes dull and without expression, sometimes dilated,
and with an unnatural life staring out of them. She is on the sofa near
the fire. He sits down beside her. His head falls into his hands, and at
first he is silent. He is thinking how he will tell her. She puts her soft,
dry hand on his, and she says: 'I am very tired to-night. Do not begin
your evening sermon. Let me have it to-morrow. How you must love
me to be so persistent! and how you must love me to be so stupid as to
think that your power of will can break the power of such a habit as
mine!'
"Then he draws his hand away from hers, and he lifts his head from his
hands, and he tells her the truth. She leans back against a cushion
staring at him in silence, devouring him with her eyes, which have
become very bright and eager and searching. Presently he stops.
"'Go on,' she says, 'go on. Tell me more. Tell me all you feel. Tell me
how the habit stole upon you, and came to you again and again, and
stayed with you. Tell me how you first liked it, and then loved it, and
how it was something to you, and then much, and then everything. Go

on! go on!'
"And he catches her excitement. He conceals nothing from her. All the
hideous, terrible, mental processes he has been through, he details to
her, at first almost gloating over his own degradation. He even
exaggerates, as a man exaggerates in telling a story to an eager auditor.
He is carried away by her strange fury of listening. He lays bare his
soul; he exposes its wounds; he sears them with red-hot irons for her to
see. And then at last all is told. He can think of no more details. He has
even embellished the abominable truth. So he is silent, and he looks at
her."
"And what does she do?" asked Henley, with a catch in his voice as he
spoke. Undoubtedly in relating a fictitious narrative Andrew