"Dear fellow," said Rick Dodson, who loved him, "is it the Devil you expect to see?
And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is not such a bad old chap.""You haven't found him so?"
"Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me.A citizen of the world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few bad habits --such as myself, for example.Is this fad of yours madness? -- which would be quite to your credit, -- for gadzooks, I like a lunatic!
Or is it the complaint of a man who has gath-ered too much data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more occult, and therefore more interesting?""Rick, boy," said Tim, "you're too -- in-quiring!" And he turned to his desk with a look of delicate hauteur.
It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who, having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated.The dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the cigars burnt out.Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of sociable silence.
"Rick," he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?""And so has my nose!"
"You asked me the other night what I
feared.Holy father, I make my confession to you.What I fear is Fear.""That's because you've drunk too much --
or not enough.
"'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring Your winter garment of repentance fling --'""My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy.But it's true what I was saying.I am afraid of ghosts.""For an agnostic that seems a bit --"
"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that I do not know!
God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts -- no -- no things which shape themselves?
Why, there are things I have done --"
"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'"Tim looked about him with a sickly smile.
He looked behind him and there was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there.He pushed away the moist hair from his haggard face -- that face which would look like the blessed St.
John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.
"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'"he murmured drowsily, "'it is some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night --'"The words floated off in languid nothing-ness, and he slept.Dodson arose preparatory to stretching himself on his couch.But first he bent over his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.
"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he mut-tered."A little more, and he would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow.As it is" -- he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy -- "he is merely one of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and stretching him-self on his sofa, he, too, slept.
That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, and returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criti-cism.Except for the distant clatter of tele-graph instruments, or the peremptory cries of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still.Dodson wrote and smoked his inter-minable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head in his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence.He did not know when Dodson fin-ished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing the lights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands.Dodson gathered up the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a chair, and called:
"It is done, Tim.Come, let's get out of this."There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he had handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone, and returned to the room for his friend.He advanced no further than the doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky cor-ridor and looked within the darkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfect loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as the embodi-ment of all goodness.From it came a soft radiance and a perfume softer than the wind when "it breathes upon a bank of violets stealing and giving odor." Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend.
It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldness like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasse should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all the man-hood that was left in him, that he was able to restore light to the room, and to rush to his friend.When he reached poor Tim he was stone-still with paralysis.They took him home to the woman, who nursed him out of that attack -- and later on worried him into another.
When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and help himself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting beside him, said:
"Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, you sweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?""It was the Shape of Fear," said Tim, quite seriously.
"But it seemed mild as mother's milk."
"It was compounded of the good I might have done.It is that which I fear."He would explain no more.Later -- many months later -- he died patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest.The little beast with the yellow eyes had high mass cele-brated for him, which, all things considered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.
Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.
"Sa, sa!" cried he."I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What do you suppose Tim is looking at?"As for Jim O'Malley, he was with diffi-
culty kept from illuminating the grave with electricity.
