XVII.
Derring threw himself into work with the intensity of despair. He worked early and late. He dared not give himself time to think. Beauty had gone from the world—interest from life. Work was the only thing left. He plodded on in a dull, monotonous fashion. It served to kill time, and there was the chance of losing himself, for a little while, in his task.
He would work for days with feverish eagerness, for the sake of these few minutes of working oblivion, in which he could lose himself, until the dull pain that always preceded his return to consciousness became too strong to be ignored. When he turned to question its meaning, memory stood always at hand to place the burden once more on his shoulders.
Except for these brief minutes there was not an hour in the day when his loss did not press upon him. To his tortured imagination he was like a man torn in two, one-half to be buried out of sight, the other to live on, suffering and enduring, till the jagged wound should heal. At every turn his thoughts went out to her—only to be met by the hopeless blank of her death. For months the thought of her had been the last in his mind at night, the first to greet him on waking. Now he sat up until worn out with work and loss of sleep. And if then sleep would not come, he counted sheep jumping over a wall, watched water falling from a high precipice down—down,—or reached out his hand for the opiate that stood always at hand. Anything was better than the hopelessness of memory.
Perhaps the hardest part was the utter loneliness of it all. He had turned to Helen with every pleasure or sorrow. Now he was called upon to face the greatest sorrow of his life alone—absolutely alone. He seemed to have lost the sense of human kinship.
Sometimes a sudden sight would touch his heart—two lovers walking together. He would follow them as long as he dared, noting every glance and gesture between them. It comforted him to feel that love was still in the world—although it had gone from his own life.
Except for this slight link he was cut off from his fellow-beings—adrift on a shoreless sea. He did not feel that others suffered as he was suffering, that many a gallant ship that passed with colors flying was freighted with a burden as heavy as his own. He clung with pathetic eagerness to a belief that others were happy and found life worth living. For, as time went on, he found the question of the worth of life forcing itself upon him with cruel insistence—not as a speculation, but out of the bitterness of life. It met him at every turn. It stood waiting at his bedside to greet him when he woke and it followed close at his side through the day. Why should he take up the burden of another day? No one depended on him—would mourn for him. His mother?—She was now independent of his help. She did not need him. No one needed him. One plunge and he would know whether death ends all, or whether in a new life one may meet or make new happiness.
Gladly would he have died. In hopeless, desperate fashion he prayed for death. But something—intangible—still held him from taking his own life. He did not perceive that there were depths of misery lower than any to which he had yet fallen. Had he foreseen the trackless country over which he was to wander, he would have laid down his life in despair at the outset. But the sight was mercifully withheld from him, and he pressed steadily on, unloved and unloving, but hugging close to his heart one delusive belief—love was still in the world. Not for him, but for others, life was still worth the living.
How or when this belief escaped him he never knew. He awoke one day to the awful conviction that even this had been taken from him—that nothing remained between him and absolute despair. He had been a fool. How could any love—even as pure as theirs—how could even this make life worth living? It was at best a frail, uncertain thing, liable to snap at any moment and leave life empty, desolate—like his own. No, life was a mistake. Derring could fancy it the gift of some arch-fiend who lay back, laughing in his sleeve, as from afar he watched men rushing here and there, pushing and scrambling, cheating, swearing, dying—for what? For a will-o'-the-wisp, a mirage, a child's fable.
Thus despair took hold on him. But the effect was not what one would have foreseen. It drove him towards his fellow-men. In his first grief he had been moody and reserved, speaking seldom and then only of the most matter-of-fact details of work. Now he sought companionship. He courted conversation. But his conversation was sharp and cynical in tone. No subject was too sacred or too tender for his wit. It was as if the fiend had taken him far above and had showed him that all is vanity and vexation of spirit—transient, fleeting, beginning nowhere and ending in nothing—too trifling to mourn over and surely not worth enthusiasm.
Every one in the office felt the change. Many a young fellow who came under the lash of his tongue wondered vaguely what had come over Derring. But no one guessed the cause. For although he seemed so open and bluff, he was more reserved than ever.
Thus two, three—six years passed. Then a change came over him. The bitterness passed from his heart and left only a great pity for mankind. It was a cruel thing to create a race capable of suffering and condemn it to a life of fruitless striving! The hopelessness and the misery haunted him—day and night. He became very gentle. Even towards sin and vice he showed a leniency that surprised his fellow-workers. His own grief had become to him a very small thing—hardly worth a heart-throb in comparison with the curse under which the human race struggled. He would gladly have died to bring a ray of light to men. He began to understand, dimly, that the sins of the world may be laid on one man. But with the understanding came a conviction of the hopelessness. Every true man must suffer, must stoop to take the burden on his shoulders—some to bear it even to a cruel death—but never must one dare hope that because he suffered another should be free.
For himself, as the years went by, he questioned no more. Life and its meaning had reduced itself to this—to help those that are in trouble—this much he had gathered from the wreck. He knew that it was only a fragment, a negative sort of comfort. But it was better than the blank apathy of indifference. It was something to live for.
But happiness—living, thrilling happiness—was for him a thing of the past. That it could ever come to him again he did not for a moment dream. Life was upon him. He must endure it as bravely, as helpfully as he might. But never might he hope for a joy that should make it perfect, or for a reason that should justify the suffering.