CHAPTER X—PUPPETS OF DESIRE
I returned to Oxford. My rooms at Lazarus were in Fellows’ Quad—one was a big room in which I lived and worked, the other was a small bedroom leading out of it. My windows overlooked the smooth lawns and gravel paths of the college garden. Flowers were over, hanging crumpled and brown on their withered stalks. Here and there, a solitary late-blooming rose shone faintly. The garden stood upon the city-wall, overlooking the meadows of the Broad Walk. Every evening white mists from the river invaded it, billowing across the open spaces, breaking against the shrubs, climbing higher and higher, till the tops of the trees were covered. Sitting beside my fire I could hear the leaves rustle, and turning my head could see them falling.
The ceiling of my living-room was low; the walls were paneled in white from bottom to top. The furniture was covered in warm red. The hearth was deep and the fender of polished steel, which reflected the glow of the coals when the day drew near its close. It was a room in which to sit quietly, to think, and to grow drowsy.
It was October when I returned. Meadows were turning from green to ash-color. Virginia-creeper flared like scarlet flame against pale walls. The contented melancholy of the austere city was healing. It cured feverishness by turning one’s thoughts away from the present. In its stoic calm it was like an old man—one who had grown indifferent to the world’s changefulness. In healthy contrast to its ancientness was the exuberant youth of the undergrads.
Most grief arises from a thwarted sense of one’s own importance. Here, among broken records of the past, the impermanence of physical existence was written plainly.
Defaced hopes of the ages encountered one at every corner. Of all the men who had wrought here, nothing but the best of what they had thought stood fast; their personalities, the fashion of their daily lives were lost beneath the dust of decades. No place could have been found better in which to doctor a wounded heart.
Through the winter that followed Vi’s departure, the new conception I had of her nobility upheld me. I could not sink beneath her standard of honor. When the temptation to write to her came over me, I shamed myself into setting it aside.
I recognized now what would have been the inevitable penalty, had we followed our inclination that night. Only the madness of the moment could have blinded me to its result. We should have become persons cast off by society—insecure even in our claim on one another’s affections, continually fleeing from the lean greyhound of remorse. Never for a day should we have been permitted to forget the irregularity of our relation. We should have been continually apologizing for our fault. We should have been continually hiding from curious, unfriendly eyes. The shame with which other people regarded us would have re-acted on our characters. And then there was Dorrie! She would have had to know one day.
We had the man by the harbor and “Lady Halloway” to thank for our escape. The strange combination of influences they had exerted at our hour of crisis, had saved us.
Black moments came when I gazed ahead into the vacant future. I must go through life without her. Unless some circumstance unforeseen should arise, we would never meet again. Then I felt that, to possess her, no price of disgrace would be too high to pay.