But afterwards, when Mrs Beale had gone and she was alone in the house, there was time to think—all the time there had ever been since the world began—all the time that there would ever be till the world ended. Of that night, too, Jane cannot remember everything; but she knows that she did not sleep, and that her eyes were dry: very dry and burning, as though they had been licked into place between their lids by a tongue of flame. It was a long night: a spacious night, with room in it for more memories of Edgar than she had known herself mistress of.
Edgar, truculent schoolboy; Edgar at Oxford, superior to the point of the intolerable; Edgar journalist, novelist, war correspondent—always friend; Edgar going to America to lecture, and make the fortune that—he said—would make all things possible. He had said that on the last evening, when a lot of them—boys and girls, journalists, musicians, art students—had gone to see him off at Euston. He had said it at the instant of farewell, and had looked a question. Had she said “Yes”—or only thought it? She had often wondered that, even when her brain was clear.
Then—she pushed away the next thought with both hands, and drove herself back to the day when the schoolboy next door whom she had admired and hated, saved her pet kitten from the butcher’s dog—an heroic episode with blood in it and tears. Edgar’s voice, the touch of his hand, the swing of his waltz-step—the way his eyes smiled before his mouth did. How bright his eyes were—and his hands were very strong. He was strong every way: he would fight for his life—even with the sea. Great, smooth, dark waves seemed rushing upon her in the quiet room; she could hear the sound of them on the beach. Why had she come near the sea? It was the same sea that—— She pushed the waves away with both hands. The church clock struck two.
“You mustn’t go mad, you know,” she told herself very gently and reasonably, “because of the boys.”
Her hands had got clenched somehow, her whole body was rigid. She relaxed the tense muscles deliberately, made up the fire, swept up the hearth.
The new flame her touch inspired flickered a red reflection on the face of the cabinet—the cabinet with the secret drawer that had “inspired Edgar with mysterious tales.”
Jane went to it, and patted it, and stroked it, and coaxed it to tell her its secret. But it would not.
“If it would only inspire me,” she said, “if I could only get an idea for the story, I could do it now—this minute. Lots of people work best at night. My brain’s really quite clear again now, or else I shouldn’t be able to remember all these silly little things. No, no,” she cried to a memory of a young man kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that came to sting. She trampled on it.
Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping draught.
“You see,” she explained very earnestly, “I have some work to finish, and if I don’t sleep I can’t. And I must do it. I can’t tell you how important it is.”