I CAME upon him suddenly, seated on the pavement beside his drawings, with his cap between his knees. He said nothing. He did not move. But his eyes came to meet me out of the dusk, hovered before me a moment and haunted me after I had passed. They were black, lustrous and vacant like the eyes of an animal. Yet they were strangely human. Perhaps there was a glimmer of expectancy in them, as though my approach had recalled them from infinite vistas of contemplation to the duty of fixing those who passed with a look of intelligent appeal. But any expression of that sort had been too vague and involuntary to have impressed me at the time. What I was conscious of, as I looked into them, was a curious sense of mystery: they seemed full of the mystery not of vision, but of unfathomable vacancy.
The singularity of the beggar’s appearance, as well as the absence of any positive appeal, touched my sentiment. I was aware of a mild surge of emotions, in which genuine strains of pity and curiosity were involved in the desire to indulge in an act of charity for reasons not purely altruistic. It was a familiar state of feelings. But having found that the habit of yielding to its obvious suggestion was going to mean real self-denial, I had allowed a stray sentence from a Poor-law report to convince me that indiscriminate charity was iniquitous waste of money. And now, for quite a long time, I had stamped on every nascent desire to be liberal at street corners, or in answer to shuffling knocks at the front door.
But tonight things were different. I felt an odd interest in this beggar. Besides, had I not resisted for at least five years? And may not virtue sometimes reward itself? Assuring myself that the coin in my pocket was a penny — not a florin, I returned
some distance and dropped it into the cap. I believe the beggar made a vague gesture of acknowledgement, but my attention had again veered round to myself. Within me the still small voice of the uncharitable text was making a cynical protest against my apostasy: “If the shadows were not so thick, you’ld have seen him grin, the scoundrel! — and so much wealthier than you!” Anxious to avoid further casuistry, I hastened towards the thoroughfare and its absorbing uproar.
* * *
An hour later I returned. Night had fallen, and it was bitterly cold. A green globe, suspended in the darkness, shed a lugubrious halo about the face of the fyeggar and the white patches of his drawings. Red, green and yellow lamps glided by, showing up segments of pipe-claved tyre and trailing daggers of light — topaz, emerald and ruby — along the polished mirror of the road. Footsteps came and went, wistfully claiming a moment’s identity before their echoes succumbed to the promiscuous undertone out of which they had emerged. The beggar noticed none of these things. With his shoulders barely touching the stout railings that loomed above him like the bars of a prison window, he sat erect, in an hieratic posture, staring into the darkness as he had stared into the dusk.
There was something pathetic yet serene in his appearance. His forehead was creased and contracted as with habitual consternation. His blank intent gaze gave an impression of ineffectual courage or baffled enterprise. And his whole attitude of attention was so rigid and desperate as to suggest that all his powers of vision and comprehension were absorbed in a futile effort to cope with the vast negation of an inscrutable void. But to the bleak malevolence of his surroundings and to bodily discomforts he seemed as superbly indifferent as an idol of stone.
An irresistible longing to plumb the inanity of his mood made me stop in front of him. Question after question rose to my lips. But I knew that if my conjectures were correct, he would have no answer for any of them. Here, I said to myself, is
one who, for the present, has neither consciousness nor vision, experience nor emotion; — unless indeed he feels a sort of subconscious triumph at having escaped the misery which the retention of any of, these things would have meant for him. And I felt drawn to him like a bark to the vortex …
I must have spoken, for suddenly the naive, far-reaching gaze on which mine was fixed became turbid and confused, as if involved in a struggle to adjust itself to something immediate, minute, contemptible, something of an entirely different order from that to which it was accustomed. Like a sleeper half-awakened to the consciousness of a painful reality which he still thinks remote, the beggar mumbled a feeble protest and then relapsed into silence. I did not address him again, but stood watching the anguish of intelligence fade out of his eyes till it was quite gone.
Then a bizarre change swept over them. They seemed to reflect a flight through subterranean labyrinths, as though they were the eyes of a soul escaping down subtle spirals and tunnellings in the earth’s core, the smooth, sinuous surfaces of which threw gleams of mobile ebony into their brilliant depths. Gradually the eyes dilated, and the sombre majesty that flooded them suggested vistas of basalt opening upon leagues of brooding Quiet. Finally the strange expression I had first noticed returned to glaze them with its seal of vacant mystery and abysmal calm …
Somewhere in the darkness a horse stumbled heavily and was brought to its feet with a jerk and a lash. Always the noise of traffic rose and fell, restless in its weariness like the sea after a storm. These sounds and a few others — footsteps that flagged and quickened and flagged again, the shriek of a train recommencing its monotonous tour — spoke of the harassed fatigue of the great city. Yet here, in the midst of it all, was a centre of complete indifference, a core of absolute quiet, about which revolved — whirling and grinding in vain — the modern Ixion wheel whereon the bodies of the millions are broken. A sudden impulse to vent my admiration of one who could
so effectively slip the toils of circumstance was abruptly checked. One of those inconvenient schisms in personality to which I am inordinately prone had supervened. “The sly old impostor!” muttered a voice which I could scarcely credit with belonging to me. “The sly old impostor! plunged in the unpurchasable volupté of the Void, … with your last copper in his well-filled cap!”
It was the long-suppressed sotto voce of outraged prudence. And its revenge was complete. In a flash of invincible logic it had exposed the lucky rascal at the expense of the impecunious philanthropist — who turned tail a second time and fled ignominiously into the night.
