Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/23

Rh instant perception and agreement. He was so clever and haggard and hungry!'

'Hungry?' the Brother asked.

'I don't mean for bread, though he had none too much, I think, even of that. I mean for—well, what I had and what I was a monument of to him as I stood there up to my neck in preposterous evidence. He, poor chap, had been for ten years serenading closed windows and had never yet caused a shutter to show that it stirred. My dim blind was the first to be raised an inch; my reading of his book, my impression of it, my note and my invitation, formed literally the only response ever dropped into his dark street. He saw in my littered room, my shattered day, my bored face and spoiled temper—it's embarrassing, but I must tell you—the very blaze of my glory. And he saw in the blaze of my glory—deluded innocent!—what he had yearned for in vain.'

'What he had yearned for was to be you, said the Brother. Then he added: 'I see where you're coming out.'

'At my saying to him by the end of five minutes: "My dear fellow, I wish you'd just try it—wish you'd, for a while, just be me!" You go straight to the mark, and that was exactly what occurred—extraordinary though it was that we should both have understood. I saw what he could give, and he did too. He saw moreover what I could take; in fact what he saw was wonderful.'

'He must be very remarkable!' the Brother laughed.

'There's no doubt of it whatever—far more remarkable than I. That's just the reason why what I put to him in joke—with a fantastic, desperate irony—became, on his hands, with his vision of his chance, the blessed guarantee of my sitting on this spot in your company. "Oh, if I could just shift it all—make it straight over for an hour to other shoulders! If there only were a pair!"—that's the way I put it to him. And then at something in his face, "Would you, by a miracle, undertake it?" I asked. I let him know all