Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/419

 Above all, he saw himself moving like a blind fool through this unregarded misery, the execrated cause of it, ruthless and hateful. The elder Miss Morris's cold smile changed into Mrs. McGahn's large-mouthed and voluble exasperation. "Walter Pittsey's Don Quixote" echoed from some forgotten record of his memory with a contemptuous accent. Kidder lectured him. The stage manager of "The Ruby" cursed him. Every disgraceful incident of his life rose to point its finger at him; and he took his head in his hands and groaned.

His very imagination, that had been turned always on the future, cast its light back on his past, now, and illumined it with a baleful vividness. For the first time he saw himself as one might see a character in a book, among the men and women, friends and relatives who had moved and talked and loved and sorrowed around him. He watched them, as one would watch a play, sitting above them, above himself, above life, observing and understanding it all. And slowly, as he watched, the shame of his part in it detached itself from him. He began to study it with a curious aloofness. It had an appearance of unreality, of an illusion from which he had escaped. The illusion of life!

He looked up at the wall before him with the eyes of a trance—seeing the city lying asleep below him, the men and women in their beds, insensible, like discarded marionettes. Overhead the moon and the stars stood in their appointed places amid the mystery of space; and the haste and labour of the day were silly to remember, mocked at by the quiet sarcasm of old night. "Life!" he thought, "Life, the great illusion!" He smiled the derisive phantom of a smile; and that smile, he felt,