“We were all immobilized with the sudden turn of events, and quite unable to move.
Brower staggered away from the table, holding his hand out in front of him like a masculine version of Lady Macbeth. He was as white as a corpse, and the stark terror on his face is beyond my powers of description. I felt a bolt of horror go through me such as I had never experienced before or since, not even when they brought me the telegram with the news of Rosalie’s death.
“Then he began to moan. It was a hollow, awful sound, crypt-like. I remember thinking, Why, the man’s quite insane; and then he said the queerest thing: ‘The switch… I’ve left the
switch on in the motorcar… O God, I am so sorry!’ And he fled up the stairs toward the main lobby.
“I was the first to come out of it. I lurched out of my chair and chased after him, leaving Baker and Wilden and Davidson sitting around the huge pot of money Brower had won. They
looked like graven Inca statues guarding a tribal treasure.
“The front door was still swinging to and fro, and when I dashed out into the street I saw Brower at once, standing on the edge of the sidewalk and looking vainly for a taxi. When he saw me he cringed so miserably that I could not help feeling pity intermixed with wonder.
” ‘Here,’ I said, ‘wait! I’m sorry for what Davidson did and I’m sure he didn’t mean it; all the same, if you must go because of it, you must. But you’ve left a great deal of money behind and you shall have it.’
” ‘I should never have come,’ he groaned. ‘But I was so desperate for any kind of human fellowship that I… I…’ Without thinking, I reached out to touch him — the most elemental gesture of one human being to another when he is grief-stricken — but Brower shrank away from me and cried, ‘Don’t touch me! Isn’t one enough? O God, why don’t I just die?’
“His eye suddenly lit feverishly on a stray dog with slat-thin sides and mangy, chewed fur that was making its way up the other side of the deserted, early-morning street. The cur’s tongue hung out and it walked with a wary, three-legged limp. It was looking, I suppose, for garbage cans to tip over and forage in.
” ‘That could be me over there,’ he said reflectively, as if to himself. ‘Shunned by
everyone, forced to walk alone and venture out only after every other living thing is safe behind locked doors. Pariah dog!’
” ‘Come now,’ I said, a little sternly, for such talk smacked more than a little of the melodramatic. ‘You’ve had some kind of nasty shock and obviously something has happened to
put your nerves in a bad state, but in the War I saw a thousand things which — ‘
” ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he asked. ‘You think I’m in the grip of some sort of hysteria, don’t you?’
” ‘Old man, I really don’t know what you might be gripping or what might be gripping
you, but I do know that if we continue to stand out here in the damp night air, we’ll both catch the grippe Now if you’d care to step back inside with me — only as far as the foyer, if you’d like –
– I’ll ask Stevens to — ‘
“His eyes were wild enough to make me acutely uneasy There was no light of sanity left in them, and he reminded me of nothing so much as the battle-fatigued psychotics I had seen earned away in carts from the front lines husks of men with awful, blank eyes like potholes to hell, mumbling and gibbering
” ‘Would you care to see how one outcast responds to another’?’ he asked me, taking no notice of what I had been saying at all ‘Watch, then, and see what I’ve learned in strange ports of call”
“And he suddenly raised his voice and said imperiously, ‘Dog’
“The dog raised his head, looked at him with wary, rolling eyes (one glittered with rabid