Page:Morley roberts--Painted Rock.djvu/107

 You see, I liked Jack Willett and I was interested in the game, and the Western fever had been burning up my vitals for three years. I could take Texas on my way,

There is no drug in the pharmacopœia which has any effect upon that disease of desire. The only thing is to give way and get the thing over, or to get old and die.

To be in London, that whirlpool, that of mankind, that main drain of civilisation, and then to land suddenly in the burning sun of a late Texan spring, is to leap from darkness into light. So might a sad imp sit inside a camera and weep till fate squeezes the ball and lets the sunlight in. For an hour, a day, even a week I sat exposed, I the imp and the plate, and there are pictures printed on me, some of them so over-exposed that they have run into blackness. But that quick week was a long film; its hours biographic, swift, fluctuating, jerky.

I saw Silas Northrop before I met Tom Willett, and found him less than I had imagined him and more. He was thin and little, hard as a keg of nails, blue-eyed and