No More Learning

"And that's rather more than you deserve," he concluded, pleasantly,
"though the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe mill.
Never mind; we'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon. "

I declined firmly to be cured. "You've been much too good to me already,
old man," said I; "but I don't think I need trouble you further. "

In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the
burden that had been laid upon me.

With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion
against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no
better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another
world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone
should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in
time give place to another where it seemed that the 'rickshaw and I were
the only realities in a world of shadows; that Kitty was a ghost; that
Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men and women I knew were all
ghosts; and the great, grey hills themselves but vain shadows devised
to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backward and forward for
seven weary days; my body growing daily stronger and stronger, until the
bedroom looking-glass told me that I had returned to everyday life, and
was as other men once more. Curiously enough my face showed no signs
of the struggle I had gone through. It was pale indeed, but as
expressionless and commonplace as ever. I had expected some permanent
alteration--visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I
found nothing.

On the 15th of May, I left Heatherlegh's house at eleven o'clock in the
morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I
found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in
clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive.
Nevertheless I recognized
that for the rest of my natural life I should be among but not of my
fellows; and I envied very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on
the Mall below. I lunched at the Club, and at four o'clock wandered
aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to
the Band-stand the black and white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs.
Wessington's old appeal at my side. I had been expecting this ever since
I came out; and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom 'rickshaw
and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close to
the bazar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any
sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay
me the compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had
served for an excuse.

So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o'-Love, crept
round Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines
dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of
fine, driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying to myself
almost aloud: "I'm Jack Pansay on leave at Simla--at Simla! Everyday,
ordinary Simla. I mustn't forget that--I mustn't forget that. " Then I
would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the
prices of So-and-So's horses--anything, in fact, that related to
the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the
multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was
not taking leave of my senses.