More than that he could not learn; she did not wish to pursue the subject further.
Little by little the old routine came back, and with it his ancient dread that nothing would ever happen. Every morning, the moment breakfast was ended, he climbed the many stairs to his room to work. From his window he could see his father in the studio, and the pigeons springing up like dreams from the garden and growing small above the battlements of house-tops. If he watched long enough, he might see Mr. Yaflfon come out on his steps, like an old tortoise that had wakened too early, thrusting its bewildered head out of its shell.
He wanted to work; he wanted to do something splendid. He longed more than he had ever longed before to make himself famous—famous that she might share his glory. At first his thoughts were slow in coming. Day and night, between himself and his imaginings she intruded, passing and re-passing. He saw her in all her attitudes and moods, wistful, friendly, and brooding. He could not escape her. Even his father and mother filled him with envy when he watched them; he and Desire should have been as they were, if things had turned out happily. Hal rose up as a warning of the man he might become.
Since he could think of nothing else, he determined to make her his story. Gradually his purpose cleared and concentrated; his book should be a statement of what she meant to him—an idealized commentary from his point of view on what had happened. He would call it The Book of Revelation. It should be a sequel to Life Till Twenty-One. His first book had been the account of love’s dreaming; this should be his record of its realization. After the idea had fastened on him, he rarely stirred out He wrote enfevered. If his lips had failed to tell her, she should at last know what she meant to him. As he wrote, he lost all consciousness of the public; his book was addressed to her.
Although he seemed to have lost her, he was perpetually recovering her. He re-found her in other men’s writings, in Keats’s love-letters to Fanny Brawne and particularly In Maud.
“O that ’twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again.”
He had never felt her arms about him, but such lines seemed the haunting echo of his own yearning. They gave tongue to the emotions which the dull ache of his heart had made voiceless.