"The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her, he completely married her; and she was the lady in green to whom I had recently and `good-night.'
"They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury. Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word.
One could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled down.
`I am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with gravity, `and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for tea.'
"He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.
He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies.
And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other people's.
"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his rather weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.
I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.'
"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.
Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense, and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.
"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?
A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!
