At any rate he had kept faith with himself.  That theatre-night with Frances Wilmot had been the first and last until now, and now assuredly he did not care any more.  But it made him remember.  How intoxicated he had been!  He had walked home like a man translated into a strange country—­words had rushed past his ears in floods of music, and the silver and black streets had been magic-built.  Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment?  She had gone, and he was older—­but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself.  It was in the atmosphere about him—­in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people.  He wondered whether they had all grown too old.  Perhaps the spirit which had driven them into these dark boxes to gaze open-mouthed, crying or laughing, through a peep-hole into a world of ideal happiness, or even ideal sorrow, was dead and gone like their faith in God and every other futile shadow which they had tried to interpose between themselves and truth.  This that remained was perhaps no more than a tradition—­a convention.  When people were bored or unhappy they said:  “Let’s go to a theatre!” and when they came out they wondered why they had been, or what they had hoped for.

Reality was beginning to press hard on men.  It was driving them into an iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape.  Suicide and madness, obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it.  Perhaps, after all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories.  And he remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot’s final shaft:  “If there isn’t a God you’ll have to make one up.”  But even if a man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no faith-serum which you could inject into a patient’s veins.

Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference.  He was no better.  All day long he lay on his bed in the small spare room Robert had given him and stared up at the white ceiling.  There was a crack, running zig-zag from the window to the door, which reminded him, so he said, of a river in Angola, a beastly slimy thing trailing through mosquito-infested swamps and villainous-tangled jungles.  When he dozed it became real, and he felt the heat descend on him like a sticky hand, and heard the menacing drone of the mosquitoes and the splash of oars as unfriendly natives who had tracked him along the water’s edge shot out suddenly from under the shadow of the mango trees in their long boats—­deadly and swift as striking adders.

And then, near the door, the river broke off—­poured into the open sea—­or fell over a cataract—­he did not know what—­and he woke up with a sweating start and took his medicine.  He was so painstakingly docile about his medicine that Robert Stonehouse guessed he had no faith in it.  Sometimes indeed he had an idea that Cosgrave was rather sorry for him, very much as old people are sorry for the young, knowing the end to all their enthusiasms.  It was as though he had travelled ahead, and had found out how meaningless everything was, even his clever friend’s strength and cleverness.