He was sufficiently reflective. But
if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence
that he paused at any time between the date of that evening and the
morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men
who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are
terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them. They lower their
heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity which nothing but an
indisciplined imagination can give.
He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where this
was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations
of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust
that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.
On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small
theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the
landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her
abandoned childhood.
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