But look at Green! Just look at him! No wonder the Jewish youth is angry with him!
Green has wilfully and deliberately violated every Standard Concentrated Principle of Blotterdom. He has not only gone and dashed his brains out, but he has done it in a public place—upon a piece of Standard Concentrated Mobway. He has messed up the sidewalk, messed up another Standard Concentrated Blotter, stopped traffic, taken people from their business, upset the nerves of his fellow Blotters—and now lies there, all sprawled out, in a place where he has no right to be. And, to make his crime unpardonable, C. Green has----
—Come to Life!
Consider that, old Drake! We can understand some measure of your strangeness, because we heard you swearing in the tavern and saw your sails stand to the west. Can you now do the same for us? Consider strangeness, Drake—and look at Green! For you have heard it said by your own countryman, and in your living generation: “The times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die.” But now, old Drake, what hath Time wrought? There is surely here some strangeness in us that you could never have foretold. For the brains are “out” now—and the man has----
—Come to Life!
What’s that, Admiral? You do not understand it? Small wonder, though it’s really very simple:
For just ten minutes since, C. Green was a Concentrated Blotter like the rest of us. Ten minutes since, he, too, might hurry in and out of the subway, thrust and scurry on the pavement, go hurtling past with whited blur in one of our beetles of machinery, a nameless atom, cypher, cinder, swarming with the rest of us, just another “guy” like a hundred million other “guys”. But now, observe him! No longer is he just “another guy”—already he has become a “special guy”—has become “The Guy”. C. Green at last has turned into a—_Man_!
Four hundred years ago, brave Admiral Drake, if we had seen you lying on your deck, your bronze gone pale and cold, imbrued in your own blood, and hewn to the middle by the Spaniards’ steel, we could have understood that, for there was blood in you. But Green—this Concentrated Blotter of ten minutes since—made in our own image, shaped in our own dust, compacted of the same grey stuff of which our own lives are compacted, and filled, we thought, with the same Standard Concentration of embalming fluid that fills our veins—oh, Drake, we did not know the fellow had such blood in him! We could not have thought it was so red, so rich, and so abundant!
Poor, shabby, and corrupted cypher! Poor, nameless, and exploded atom! Poor little guy! He fills us Concentrated Blotters of the Universe with fear, with shame, with awe, with pity, and with terror—for we see ourselves in him. If he was a man with blood in him, then so are we! If he, in the midst of his always-driven life, could at last be driven to this final and defiant gesture of refusal to remain a Concentrated Blotter, then we, too, might be driven to a point of equal desperation! And there are other methods of defiance, other ways of ultimate refusal, other means of exercising one’s last-remaining right of manhood—and some of them are no less terrifying to contemplate than this! So our fascinated eyes go up and up, past floor after floor of Standard Concentrated brick, and fasten on the open window where he stood—and suddenly we crane our necks along the ridges of our collars, look away with constricted faces, and taste the acrid bitterness of steel upon our lips!
It is too hard, and not to be endured—to know that little Green, speaking our own tongue and stuffed with our own stuffing, had yet concealed in him some secret, dark, and frightful thing more terrible than anything that we have ever known—that he bore within him some black and hideous horror, some depth of madness or of courage, and could stand there—upon the sheer and nauseating verge of that grey window-ledge for five full minutes—and know the thing he was about to do—and tell himself he must now!—that he had to!—that the compulsion of every horror-fascinated eye down in the gulf below had now made escape impossible—and then, horror-sick past all regeneration, see, too, before he jumped, his fall, the downward-hurtling plunge, and his own exploded body—feel the bones crack and fly apart, and the brutal obliteration of the instant when his brains would shoot out against the lamp-post—and even while his soul drew back from that sheer verge of imagined terror, shame, and unutterable self-loathing, crying: “I cannot do it!”—then jumped!