CHAPTER XIV
“Forgive? O yes! How lightly, lightly said!
Forget? No, never, while the ages roll,
Till God slay o’er again the undying dead,
And quite unmake my soul!”—Mary Coleridge.
I stepped down, it seemed, into a lilliputian world where the grander issues no longer drew the souls of men. The deep and simple things were fled, the old Nature gods withdrawn. The scale of life had oddly shrunk.
I saw the names above the shuttered shops with artificial articles for sale—“11-¾d. a yard”—on printed paper labels. The cheapness of a lesser day flashed everywhere.
I passed the closed doors of a building where people flocked to mumble that no good was in them, while a man proclaimed in a loud voice things he hardly could believe. A few streets behind me Julius LeVallon stood in the shadows of another porch, solitary and apart, yet communing with stars and hills and seas, survival from a vital, vanished age when life was realised everywhere and the elemental Nature Powers walked hand in hand with men.
Through the deserted streets I made my way across the town to my own little student’s flat on the Morningside where I then lived. Gradually the crimson dawn slipped into a stormy sunrise. I watched the Pentlands take the gold, and the Castle rock turn ruddy; a gentle mist lay over Leith below; a pool of deep blue shadow marked the slumbering Old Town.