reader, it is absolutely true, and what is more remarkable, I found the
card game and several others we played extremely interesting.
Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of
extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before
us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit following the
chance of this painted pasteboard, and playing the joker with vivid
delight. Afterwards he taught me poker, and I beat him at three tough
chess games. When dark came we decided to take the risk, and lit a
lamp.
After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the artilleryman
finished the champagne. We went on smoking the cigars. He was no longer
the energetic regenerator of his species I had encountered in the
morning. He was still optimistic, but it was a less kinetic, a more
thoughtful optimism. I remember he wound up with my health, proposed in
a speech of small variety and considerable intermittence. I took a
cigar, and went upstairs to look at the lights of which he had spoken
that blazed so greenly along the Highgate hills.
At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley. The
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed up
and vanished in the deep blue night. All the rest of London was black.
Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale, violet-purple
fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze. For a space I could
not understand it, and then I knew that it must be the red weed from
which this faint irradiation proceeded. With that realisation my
dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of things, awoke
again. I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear, glowing high in the
west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the darkness of Hampstead
and Highgate.
I remained a very long time upon the roof, wondering at the grotesque
changes of the day. I recalled my mental states from the midnight
prayer to the foolish card-playing. I had a violent revulsion of
feeling. I remember I flung away the cigar with a certain wasteful
symbolism. My folly came to me with glaring exaggeration. I seemed a
traitor to my wife and to my kind; I was filled with remorse. I
resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to
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