Drugged? No, he was not drugged. But was she really dragging him down again, poor child, into her own place of dreams?
After the ecstasy, in the darkness of her breast and arms, he knew again the horrible surge of suffering that life had always meant to him. He saw, as though through deep waters, the love, the strife, the clinging to all that went; he saw the withering of dreams, and death, and the implacable, devouring thought that underlay all life and found its joy in the rending sorrow of the tragedy it triumphed over.
It was like a wave catching him, sucking him down into a gulf of blackness. The dizziness of the whirlpool reeled its descending spiral through his brain. Eppie was the sweet, the magical, the sinister mermaid; she held him, triumphing, and he clung to her, helpless; while, like the music of rushing waters, the horror and enchantment of life rang in his ears. But the horror grew and grew. The music rang on to a multitudinous world-cry of despair,—the cry of all the torments of the world turning on their rack of consciousness,—and, in a crash of unendurable anguish, came the thought of what it all would mean; what it all might mean now—now—unless he could save her; for he guessed that her faith, put to the test, might accept any risk, might pay any price, to keep him. And the anguish was for her.
He started from her, putting away her arms, yet pinioning her, holding her from him with a fierceness of final challenge and looking in the darkness into her darker eyes.
“Suppose I do,” he said. “Suppose I marry you,”—for he must show her that some tests she should not be put to. “Suppose I take you and reënter the dream. Look at it, Eppie. Look at your life with me. It won’t stay like this, you know. Look far, far ahead.”
“I do,” she said.
“No, no. You don’t. You can’t. It would, for a year, perhaps, perhaps only for a day, be dream and ecstasy,—ah, Eppie, don’t imagine that I don’t know what it would be,—the beauty, the joy, the forgetfulness, a radiant mist hanging over an abyss. Your will could keep me in it—for a year, perhaps. But then, the inevitable fading. See what comes. Eppie, don’t you know, don’t you feel, that I’m dead—dead?”
“No; not while you suffer. You are suffering now—for me.”
“The shadow of a shadow. It will pass. No, don’t speak; wait; as you said, we can’t argue, we can’t, now, go into the reasons of it. As you said, thought can’t cure me; it’s probably something far deeper than our little thought: it’s probably the aspect we are fated to be by that one reality that makes and unmakes our dreams. And I’m not of the robust Western stuff that can work in its dream,—create more dream, and find it worth while. I’ve not enough life in me to create the illusion of realities to strive for. Action, to me, brings no proof of life’s reality; it’s merely a symptom of life, its result, not its cause or its sanction. And the power of action is dead in me because the desire of life is dead,—unless you are there to infect me with it.”
“I am here, Gavan.”