The Dawn of a To-morrow | Page 5

properly
managed, would obliterate resemblance to any human thing. Months
ago through chance talk he had heard how it could be done--and done
quickly. He could leave a misleading letter. He had planned what it
should be-- the story it should tell of a disheartened mediocre venturer
of his poor all returning bankrupt and humiliated from Australia,

ending existence in such pennilessness that the parish must give him a
pauper's grave. What did it matter where a man lay, so that he
slept--slept-- slept? Surely with one's brains scattered one would sleep
soundly anywhere.
He had come to the house the night before, dressed shabbily with the
pitiable respectability of a defeated man. He had entered droopingly
with bent shoulders and hopeless hang of head. In his own sphere he
was a man who held himself well. He had let fall a few dispirited
sentences when he had engaged his back room from the woman of the
house, and she had recognized him as one of the luckless. In fact, she
had hesitated a moment before his unreliable look until he had taken
out money from his pocket and paid his rent for a week in advance. She
would have that at least for her trouble, he had said to himself. He
should not occupy the room after to-morrow. In his own home some
days would pass before his household began to make inquiries. He had
told his servants that he was going over to Paris for a change. He would
be safe and deep in his pauper's grave a week before they asked each
other why they did not hear from him. All was in order. One of the
mocking agonies was that living was done for. He had ceased to live.
Work, pleasure, sun, moon, and stars had lost their meaning. He stood
and looked at the most radiant loveliness of land and sky and sea and
felt nothing. Success brought greater wealth each day without stirring a
pulse of pleasure, even in triumph. There was nothing left but the awful
days and awful nights to which he knew physicians could give their
scientific name, but had no healing for. He had gone far enough. He
would go no farther. To-morrow it would have been over long hours.
And there would have been no public declaiming over the humiliating
pitifulness of his end. And what did it matter?
How thick the fog was outside-- thick enough for a man to lose himself
in it. The yellow mist which had crept in under the doors and through
the crevices of the window- sashes gave a ghostly look to the room--a
ghastly, abnormal look, he said to himself. The fire was smouldering
instead of blazing. But what did it matter? He was going out. He had
not bought the pistol last night--like a fool. Somehow his brain had
been so tired and crowded that he had forgotten.
"Forgotten." He mentally repeated the word as he got out of bed. By
this time to-morrow he should have forgotten everything. THIS TIME

TO-MORROW. His mind repeated that also, as he began to dress
himself. Where should he be? Should he be anywhere? Suppose he
awakened again--to something as bad as this? How did a man get out of
his body? After the crash and shock what happened? Did one find
oneself standing beside the Thing and looking down at it? It would not
be a good thing to stand and look down on--even for that which had
deserted it. But having torn oneself loose from it and its devilish aches
and pains, one would not care --one would see how little it all mattered.
Anything else must be better than this--the thing for which there was a
scientific name but no healing. He had taken all the drugs, he had
obeyed all the medical orders, and here he was after that last hell of a
night--dressing himself in a back bedroom of a cheap lodging-house to
go out and buy a pistol in this damned fog.
He laughed at the last phrase of his thought, the laugh which was a
mirthless grin.
"I am thinking of it as if I was afraid of taking cold," he said. "And
to-morrow--!"
There would be no To-morrow. To-morrows were at an end. No more
nights--no more days--no more morrows.
He finished dressing, putting on his discriminatingly chosen shabby-
genteel clothes with a care for the effect he intended them to produce.
The collar and cuffs of his shirt were frayed and yellow, and he
fastened his collar with a pin and tied his worn necktie carelessly. His
overcoat was beginning to wear a greenish shade and look threadbare,
so was his hat. When his toilet was complete he looked at himself in
the cracked and hazy glass,