She had come to a standstill in the middle of the road because she could not bear any longer the sound of her own feet running after her: and so waited, impotently, for the passing of a fellow creature or her own mood. And presently, mercifully, the face of the night changed to her. The loneliness faded from it like a veil withdrawn, and with it the sense of isolation that had oppressed her faded too. She was gradually aware of the universal alive-ness of the still world about her. It was as if her late, bewildered thoughts had evolved some ruthless one who stood beside her, thrusting a torch into the secrets of the deep ditches and shuttered cottages and mist-veiled fields, and, with a heavy hand upon her neck, bowed her forward to peer at what the light revealed.
And she saw—saw the arcades and the galleries of the hedges and how unbelievably full they were of living, mated things: saw the warm round nests and in each a stir of bright eyes and perking crests: saw the day-moths with their flattened wings, asleep upon blanched blackberry leaves: saw the snuggled mice in the straw stacks and hares couched in the standing corn and the friendly horses drowsing shoulder to crupper: saw tramps sheltering in the flowery chalk-pits and lovers under the stars: and beneath thatched roofs men lying, pinned down by the sleep that comes of earthy labour, and women kept awake by life awake in their bodies, and little children dreaming, and old folk at their dying, and the dead reviving eternally in the divine womb of earth.
She was held by her youth and her ignorance as in a narrow cell; but through the bars of her imprisonment she stretched forth hands in passionate greeting to these her kith and kin. She was overwhelmed by a sense of alliance, of sisterhood: she felt herself gathered in, embraced, merged in the endlessly faceted identity of the universe. She was burningly happy. All knowledge sang in her ears: all secrets lay bare and beautiful to her eyes. She understood all things and forgot them, and remembered them, and forgot them again, with the carelessness of illimitable possession.
Out of that timeless ecstasy she looked down upon her life lying like a sloughed snake-skin at her feet: surveyed the length of it, past, present, and future, with infinite wise amusement, thinking——Here Laura went wrong.... This—how foolish! she did not do.... And then, with a quickening and personalization of interest——She should have told Justin—I must tell Justin....
But at that, as if the word ‘Justin’ were the signal for the inevitable revulsion, she felt herself contracting, shuddering away again from the universal life, crying in futile anger and despair: “All this—is too big—is too big for me. This will kill me. I can’t hold it. I’m not God!” And so, with the roar in her ears of huge waters rushing into a deep and narrow channel, was back in her body again, with but one word of all the infinite wisdom that had been hers echoing in her memory—the one word ‘Justin.’ She found herself repeating it over and over again, unintelligently, like a lost child—“Justin. Where’s Justin? I want Justin.”
And all the myriad voices of the life she had shared merged in one to answer her, to answer with laughter that was like sunlight, with laughter that was like tears, to answer her with the still small Voice Itself—
“Find Justin then. Love Justin then. Am I not Justin also?”
She listened and was comforted: and going home, went to bed and slept.