“Good God!” he said. “Shortlands! Never again. Not that. Besides we should be too late.”
“Where are we going then—to the Mill?”
“If you like. Pity to go anywhere on this good dark night. Pity to come out of it, really. Pity we can’t stop in the good darkness. It is better than anything ever would be—this good immediate darkness.”
She sat wondering. The car lurched and swayed. She knew there was no leaving him, the darkness held them both and contained them, it was not to be surpassed. Besides she had a full mystic knowledge of his suave loins of darkness, dark-clad and suave, and in this knowledge there was some of the inevitability and the beauty of fate, fate which one asks for, which one accepts in full.
He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.
It was very difficult to speak, it was so perfect to sit in this pure living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force, upheld immemorially in timeless force, like the immobile, supremely potent Egyptians, seated forever in their living, subtle silence.
“We need not go home,” he said. “This car has seats that let down and make a bed, and we can lift the hood.”
She was glad and frightened. She cowered near to him.
“But what about them at home?” she said.
“Send a telegram.”