CHAPTER XLI
It seemed to Karen, after hours had passed, that she had ceased to be tired and that her body, wafted by an involuntary rhythm, was as light as thistle-down on the wind.
She had crossed the Goonhilly Downs where the moonlight, spreading far and wide with vast unearthly brightness, filled all the vision with immensities of space and brought memories of strains from Schubert's symphonies, silver monotonies of never-ending sound.
She had plunged down winding roads, blackly shadowed by their hedgerow trees, passing sometimes a cottage that slept between its clumps of fuchsia and veronica. She had climbed bare hill-sides where abandoned mines or quarries had left desolate mementoes that looked in the moonlight like ancient tombs and catacombs.
Horror lay behind her at Les Solitudes, a long, low cloud on the horizon to which she had turned her back. The misery that had overpowered and made her one with its dread realities lay beneath her feet. She was lifted above it in a strange, disembodied enfranchisement all the night, and the steady blowing of the wind, the leagues of silver, the mighty sky with its far, high priestess, were part of an ecstasy of sadness, impersonal, serene, hallucinated, like that of the music that accompanied the rhythm of her feet.
The night was almost over and dawn was coming, when, on a long uphill road, she felt her heart flag and her footsteps stagger.
The moon still rode sharp and high, but its light seemed concentrated in its own glittering disk and the world was visible in an uncanny darkness that was not dark. The magic of the night had vanished and the beat of vast, winding melodies melted from Karen's mind leaving her dry and brittle and empty, like a shell from which the tides have drawn away.
She knew what she had still to do. At the top of the road she was to turn and cut across fields to a headland above Falmouth—from which a path she knew led to the town. She had not gone to Helston, but had taken this cross-country way to Falmouth because she knew that at any hour of the night she might be missed and followed and captured. They would not think of Falmouth; they would not dream that she could walk so far. In the town she would pawn Onkel Ernst's watch and take the early train to London and by evening she would be with Frau Lippheim. So she had seen it all, in flashes, last night.
But now, toiling up the interminable road, clots of darkness floating before her eyes, cold sweats standing on her forehead, the sense of her exhaustion crushed down upon her. She tried to fix her thoughts on the trivial memories and forecasts that danced in her mind. The odd blinking of Mrs. Talcott's eyelid as she had told her story; the pattern of the breakfast set that she and Gregory had used—ah, no!—not that! she must not fix that memory!—the roofs and chimneys of some little German town where she was to find a refuge; for though it was to join the Lippheims that she fled, she did not see her life as led with theirs. Leaning upon these pictures as if upon a staff she held, she reached the hill-top. Her head now seemed to dance like a balloon, buffeted by the great throbs of her blood. She trailed with leaden feet across the fields. In the last high meadow she paused and looked down at the bend of the great bay under the pallid sky and at the town lying like a scattering of shells along its edge. How distant it was. How like a mirage.