He looked vaguely round for the vest and braces he had just thrown away. But it was half an hour since he had flung them down. His consciousness tricked him, obliterating the interval. He could not believe his eye. They had ghostlily disappeared.
So he rolled his trousers on his naked hips, and pressed his hurt hand on his naked breast, and set off again in a sort of fear. His hat had gone long ago. And all the time he had this strange desire to throw all his clothes away, even his boots, and be absolutely naked, as when he was born. And all the time something obstinate in him combated the desire. He wanted to throw everything away, and go absolutely naked over the border. And at the same time, something in him deeper than himself obstinately withstood the desire. He wanted to go over the border. And something deeper even than his consciousness, refused.
So he went on, scarcely conscious at all. He himself was in the middle of a vacuum, and pressing round were visions and agonies. The vacuum was perhaps the greatest agony, like a death-tension. But the other agonies were pressing on its border: his dry, cardboard mouth, his aching body. And the visions pressed on the border too. A great lake of ghostly white water, such as lies in the valleys where the dead are. But he walked to it, and it wasn't there. The moon was shining whitely.
And on the edge of the aching void of him, a wheel was spinning in his brain like a prayer-wheel.
"Petition me no petitions, Sir, to-day;
Let other hours be set apart for business.
Today it is our pleasure to be drunk
And this our queen . . ."
Water! Water! Water! Was water only a visionary thing of memory, something only achingly, wearyingly, thought and thought and thought, and never substantiated?
"A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave . . ."
The wheel of words went round, the wheel of his brain, on the edge of the vacuum. What did that mean? What was a Briton?
"A Briton even in love should be
A subject not a slave."
he words went round and round and were absolutely meaningless to him.