"I thought there was nothing more for me. She brought me to life again. Help her, Jack. I think we can neither of us change. I think it will be the old story again. But I'll try."
Mavering looked down and felt a touch of compunction curious to himself.
"I suppose the anchorite was correct—problematical, but accurate. I don't carry your price. You're too expensive for me. As to the anchorite. I'll find him and bring him back, dead or alive. That's cheap, but the rest of it is expensive."
A half hour later the white steamer was ploughing down the river. Mavering, in the long, nearly empty cabin, stretched himself on a sofa, denounced the execrable taste of steamboat furnishing, and went philosophically to sleep. Helen, on the upper deck, stared at the starlit Virginia shore.
[Chapter XXI]
In Which We Go Down the River and Return
A loud wind blew up the river, cold, sombre, insistent. The river seemed to tremble in waves and shiver in wrinkles under the monotonous threatening of the wind, the stars to be fretful in their bleak spaces. "Forever is a long time." Helen wrapped her cloak more closely.
"Dead!" The wind stated it coldly, insistently, and did not mind how fiercely she denied it. It was only the surface of the river that trembled and glimmered so. The inevitable reality was the current below—dark, steady, and leading downward to that sea from which the cold wind came with insistent statement. If men and women were incidents to powers beneath and influences over them, like the myriad tiny flickers born of coincidences between the divinity of the stars and the toil of the river; if one only carried for a short time this little torch of courage in a night without horizon; and behind the surface of things "their substance and third dimension," in Gard's phrase, stretched away into a ghostly distance; yet it was inborn in Helen to carry her torch high, to lay lance in rest and challenge the ghostliest shadow in sight, to be herself personal and definite, to accuse even abstractions of personality, to make a vivid world of nearby things and live vividly within it.
In that world, life had seemed mainly to consist of purpose and achievement; but on the wide river between the crouching shores that night—with the wind calling continually. "Dead, dead"—wishes, resolves, and actions to follow them, how shrunken and chilled they seemed, if one were only an accidental wrinkle on the river, possibly a glimmer if a star happened to look that way!
"It is not true!" She went in and saw lamps swinging the length of the saloon, where men were asleep on the sofas and the floor.