With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape from the maniac.
He sat astride of it, still in his academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further chances of flight.
The whitening daylight opened under as well as over him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the little lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
They felt as if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.
"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the world is hanged.
"He has hanged the world upon nothing," says the Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I'm going to be hanged upon something myself.
I'm going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
`never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you.
For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.'
"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'
"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity, `the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and kinder than he,' and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the upper part of Eames's bald head.
"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'
"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed Smith, sighing gently. `Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only cure is an operation--an operation that is always successful: death.'
"As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything, with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink.
All over the little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different tints: here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle, there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep church roof.
All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye, especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.
Through a narrow chink between a black timber tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with gilt hands which the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply.
As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow.
The birds were already noisy in the trees behind the college.
The sun rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the gods.
Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night.
He wondered for the first time what people lived in them.
"Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have called to a student to shut a door.
"`Let me come off this place,' he cried; `I can't bear it.'
"`I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said Smith critically;
`but before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the metaphysical point cleared up.
Do I understand that you want to get back to life?'
"`I'd give anything to get back,' replied the unhappy professor.
"`Give anything!' cried Smith; `then, blast your impudence, give us a song!'
"`What song do you mean?' demanded the exasperated Eames; `what song?'
"`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,' answered the other gravely.
`I'll let you off if you'll repeat after me the words--
"`I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth have smiled.
And perched me on this curious place, A happy English child.'
"Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise.
A bird alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic statue.
"`You are now engaged in public worship,' remarked Smith severely, `and before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks on the pond.'
"`The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.
"`Not forgetting the drakes,' said Smith sternly.
(Eames weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything, please.
You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted blinds.'
"`All right, all right,' repeated the victim in despair;
`sticks and rags and bones and blinds.'
"`Spotted blinds, I think we said,' remarked Smith with a rogueish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long metallic finger.
"`Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames faintly.
"`You can't say fairer than that,' admitted the younger man, `and now I'll just tell you this to wind up with.
If you really were what you profess to be, I don't see that it would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-worshipping brains.
But in strict biographical fact you are a very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you like a brother.
I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your head so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear), and then we will go in and have some breakfast.'
