varoff had stood
rooted to the spot with amusement, but he had not laughed. Yet the man
had gone through the contortions of a clown.... Well, then he was not to
be moved to laughter, after all. He wearily put the cork back in the
bottle of brandy. The fat bartender came forward. Suvaroff paid him and
departed.

He went to the wine-shop the next night--and the next. He began to have
a hope that if he persisted he would discover a shadow grotesque enough
to make him laugh. He sat for hours, drinking abominable brandy. The
patrons of the shop did not interest him. They were squalid, dirty,
uninteresting. But their shadows were things of wonder. How was it
possible for such drab people to have even interesting shadows? And why
were these shadows so familiar? Suvaroff recognized each in turn, as if
it were an old friend that he remembered but could not name. After the
second night he came to a definite conclusion.

"They are not old friends at all," he said to himself. "They are not
even the shadows of these people who come here. They are merely the
silhouettes of my own thoughts.... If I could but draw my thoughts, they
would be as black and as fantastic."

But at another time he dismissed this theory.

"No," he muttered, "they are not the shadows of my thoughts at all. They
are the souls of these men. They are the twisted, dark, horrible souls
of these men, that cannot crawl out except at nightfall! They are the
souls of these men seeking to escape, like dogs chained to their
kennels!... I wonder if the Italian had such a soul?..."

He rose suddenly. "I am wasting my time here," he said, almost aloud.
"One may learn to laugh at a shadow. One may even learn to laugh at the
picture of one's thoughts. But to laugh at a soul--No! A man's soul is
too dreadful a thing to laugh at." He staggered out into the night.

On his way home he went into a pawn-shop and bought a pistol. He was in
a fever to get back to his lodgings. He found Minetti waiting for him.
He tried to conceal the pistol, but he knew that Minetti had seen it.
Minetti was as pleasant as one could imagine. He told the most droll
stories of his life in London. It appeared that he had lived there in a
hotbed of exiled radicals; but he, himself, seemed to have no
convictions. Everything he described was touched with a certain ironic
humor. When he rose to go he said, quite simply:

"How are things? Do you sleep nights now?"

"No. I never expect to sleep again.