'
I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him
his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an
extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard
for him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so
passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destined
never to cross its threshold. Why, after all, should he not cross its
threshold? I asked him if he would like to. `What,' he growled, `would
be the good?' I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of his
nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained matters to
the foreman; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he passed with the
foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I saw him crossing the
excavated hall, crossing it along a plank, slowly and cautiously. His
attitude was very like Blondin's, but it had a certain tragic dignity
which Blondin's lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I hailed a
cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do not know.
Often as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered by it, him I
never saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight back to Australia.
Or perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him alive in the
foundations.
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