'It's worth doing, anyhow—rescuing the floating faces,' she said: 'worth living for.' And she half closed her eyes so that he saw her as a girl again. He saw her as she had been even before he knew her, as he used to see her in his dream. It was the dream-eyes that peered at him through long, thick lashes. They looked down at him. He felt caught away to some remote, strange place and time. He was aware of gold, of colour, of a hotter blood, a fiercer sunlight.…
And the sense of familiarity became suddenly very real; he knew what she was going to say, how he would answer, why they had come together. It all flashed near, yet still just beyond his reach. He almost understood. They had been side by side like this before, not in this actual place, but somewhere—somewhere that he knew intimately. Her eyes had looked down into his own precisely so, long, long ago, yet at the same time strangely near. There was a perfume, a little ghostly perfume—it was the Whiff. It was gone instantly, but he had tasted it.… A veil drew up.… He saw, he knew, he remembered—almost.… Another second and he would capture the meaning of it all. Another moment and it would reveal itself—then, suddenly, the whole sensation vanished. He had missed it by the minutest fraction in the world, yet missed it utterly. It left him confused and baffled.
The veil was down again, and he was talking with Madame Jaretzka, the Lettice Aylmer of his boyhood days. Such moments of the déjà-vu leave bewilderment behind them, like the effect of sudden change of focus in the eye; and with the bewilderment a sense of insecurity as well.
'Yes,' he said half dreamily, 'and you've rescued a lot already, haven't you?' as though he still followed in speech the direction of the vanished emotion.
'You know that, Tom?' she enquired, raising her eyelids, thus finally restoring the normal.
He stammered rather: 'I have the feeling—that you're always doing good to some one somewhere. There's something,'—he searched for a word— 'impersonal about you—almost.' And he knew the word was nearly right, though found by chance. It included 'un-physical,' the word he did not like to use. He did not want an angel's love; the spiritual, to him, rose from the physical, and was not apart from it. He was not in heaven yet, and had no wish to be. He was on earth; and everything of value—love, above all—must spring from earth, or else remain incomplete, insecure, ineffective even.
And again a tiny dart of pain shot through him. Yet he was glad he said it, for it was true. He liked to face what hurt him. To face it was to get it over.…
But she was laughing again gently to herself, though certainly not at him. 'What were you thinking about so long?' she asked. 'You've been silent for several minutes and your thoughts were far away.' And as he did not reply immediately, she went on: 'If you go to Assouan you mustn't fall into reveries like that or you'll leave holes in the dam, or whatever your engineering work is—Tom!'
She spoke the name with a sudden emphasis that startled him. It was a call.
'Yes,' he said, looking up at her. He was emerging from a dream.