Page:The Best Continental Short Stories of 1923–1924.djvu/62

 Then his audience embarrassed him. He had the sensation of their being on the other side of a wall from him, an infinite distance away, and he was angry with himself for his failure to get into mental relation with them. Their faces seemed all alike, annoyingly alike. The whole thing was so lifeless that he lost all sense of reality and was revolving in a kind of void which he could neither dispel nor fill with his words. He made an effort to concentrate on one or two of these faces; he recognised people he knew, but he felt himself a stranger to them and was even surprised at a thousand details about them that struck him for the first time. He said to himself, vaguely, while repeatinghis argument: “What is the matter? How is it I feel soindifferent to my own words?”

He had the ground plan of his lecture cut and dried; he was speaking fluently and unhesitatingly; he was expounding an opinion he had long held, that had come to him as an inspiration and had grown into a conviction. But today, listening to himself in the silence of that hall, he felt utterly estranged.

“Yet this is all true, that I am saying. Truth so naked and evident that it is no longer peculiar to myself,” he thought from time to time. “I am only relating facts that have no relation to myself.”

He remembered how familiar these ideas were to him, how much they had meant to him, long ago, when they had still been at the inspiration stage. He had suffered then from their instability; he had greeted each new argument as a valued personal friend; they made up the sum of his real being. Today, they were but abstract truths, something external, impersonal, with which he had nothing to do, something so inanimate that he had haste to be rid of it. The more he tried, the more his own words tortured him. They seemed so distant, so utterly different from their former meaning. And yet every one of these phrases was familiar and sounded in his ears with the heavy, almost painful tread of a repetition. His only thought was how to bring it to an end; he chose each word with a view to its being a short cut to the close. The audience was now hanging on his lips. Boura thought: “Now I have got