Like he had been on a trip and come back, telling me about the trip, without any living earth against him yet.”
“Oh,” Hightower says, in his shrill, high voice.
Though he has not moved, though the knuckles of the hands which grip the chairarms are taut and white, there begins to emerge from beneath his clothing a slow and repressed quivering. “Ah, yes,” he says. “That’s all.
That’s simple.
Simple.
Simple.” Apparently he cannot stop saying it. “Simple.
Simple.” He has been speaking in a low tone; now his voice rises. “What is it they want me to do?
What must I do now?
Byron!
Byron?
What is it? What are they asking of me now?” Byron has risen.
He now stands beside the desk, his hands on the desk, facing Hightower.
Still Hightower does not move save for that steadily increasing quivering of his flabby body. “Ah, yes.
I should have known.
It will be Byron who will ask it.
I should have known.
That will be reserved for Byron and for me.
Come, come.
Out with it.
Why do you hesitate now?”
Byron looks down at the desk, at his hands upon the desk.
“It’s a poor thing.
A poor thing.”
“Ah.
Commiseration?
After this long time?
Commiseration for me, or for Byron?
Come; out with it.
What do you want me to do?
For it is you: I know that.
I have known that all along.
Ah, Byron, Byron. What a dramatist you would have made.”
“Or maybe you mean a drummer, a agent, a salesman,” Byron says. “It’s a poor thing.
I know that.
You don’t need to tell me.”
“But I am not clairvoyant, like you.
You seem to know already what I could tell you, yet you will not tell me what you intend for me to know.
What is it you want me to do?
Shall I go plead guilty to the murder?
Is that it?”
Byron’s face cracks with that grimace faint, fleeting, sardonic, weary, without mirth.
“It’s next to that, I reckon.” Then his face sobers; it is quite grave. “It’s a poor thing to ask.
God knows I know that.” He watches his slow hand where it moves, preoccupied and trivial, upon the desk top. “I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay.
And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around.
They can’t deny it for the reason that there ain’t anyway to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles.
The bad men can deny it; that’s why don’t anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time.
But the good can’t.
Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.
And it won’t be like you haven’t done it before, haven’t already paid a bill like it once before.
It oughtn’t to be so bad now as it was then.”