Get out to sea!
The night of the town with its strings of lights, rigid, and crossed like
a net of flames, thrown over the sombre immensity of walls, closed round
him, with its artificial brilliance overhung by an emphatic blackness,
its unnatural animation of a restless, overdriven humanity. His thoughts
which somehow were inclined to pity every passing figure, every single
person glimpsed under a street lamp, fixed themselves at last upon a
figure which certainly could not have been seen under the lamps on that
particular night. A figure unknown to him. A figure shut up within high
unscaleable walls of stone or bricks till next morning . . . The figure
of Flora de Barral's father. De Barral the financier--the convict.
There is something in that word with its suggestions of guilt and
retribution which arrests the thought. We feel ourselves in the presence
of the power of organized society--a thing mysterious in itself and still
more mysterious in its effect. Whether guilty or innocent, it was as if
old de Barral had been down to the Nether Regions. Impossible to imagine
what he would bring out from there to the light of this world of
uncondemned men.
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