In what manner the affair in the restaurant had terminated, she had no one to inform her but she could readily fancy that shortly d’Arcy and Barouffski would go somewhere and fight, or pretend to, and then return, none the worse and none the better, but with honour satisfied and their names in print.
The entire episode was shameful. But though provoked by her she had not premeditated it. In offering d’Arcy her glass, she had wished solely to display her independence. Subsequently, in going over the matter, she had realised that the wish, while human, had not been nice. Then, a bit conscience-stricken, she had wondered how she could have behaved as she had.
“I did it without thinking,” was her immediate excuse. But that, she told herself was untrue. Ever since the duel and the blow and the nightmare that followed, some such wish had been fermenting in her. The wish, reasonable in itself, though in her case unreasoned, persisted, as in certain natures a wish will persist, until, after the fashion of a constantly recurring idea, the individual becomes so saturated with it that, given the impulse, given less than that, given a vibration, some effect, perhaps wholly atmospheric, and suddenly the idea has solidified into an act, an act noble, degrading or merely banal, according to the influence that produced it, but an act which, whatever its character, has then become inevitable, even involuntary, its constant mental recurrence having exhausted the ability to choose between it and another.
Leilah had thought of this and, in search of comfort, had groped for another excuse. As an Oriental will say: “My body is tired.” “My body is hungry,” so Leilah decided: “It was my nerves that did it.”
But the sophistry displeased her. She knew that she had judged and condemned Barouffski and she knew also that she had no right to do either. The man was clearly a cad, a scoundrel and a brute, yet even though he were these things and worse and more besides, he so became in her eyes merely because her consciousness had evolved to a point higher than his own. Seen from a different angle, she might appear only a shade less reprehensible, and it might be, even equally vile. Moreover, according to the Upanishads, this consciousness of hers and that consciousness of his were fundamentally one. Both had come from the same source. To that source both would ultimately return. They would be fused there, as originally there they had been merged.
At the apperception of that, the curious lines which occur in the Book of Dzyan suggested themselves:
“Said the Flame to the Spark: ‘I have clothed myself in thee, thou art my image, my body, until that day when thou shalt rebecome myself and others, thyself and me.’”
In the penetrating beauty of the allegory Leilah told herself that she, Barouffski, Verplank, the Silverstairs, the Helley-Quetgens, everybody whom she knew, everyone whom she did not know, all the fillers of space, were sparks of one Flame, the Flame from which they had been formerly emitted and into which they would finally return. That, she felt she must believe, if she were to believe anything. But she felt too that though she did believe it, she believed also that for the present there were sparks better parted than united, as there were also others better united than apart.
On the table before her was a treatise on the Paramitas—which are The Blessed Things. She looked at it, knowing that what she had done was wrong and what she was about to do was evil. But she felt also that she could not help herself. Whatever the penalty, it was impossible for her to live with Barouffski. Whatever the punishment, it was impossible for her not to live with Verplank. At the moment it seemed to her as though the high fates had set her in a circle from which she could not escape except by the door of death or that of further sinning. At this idea she wondered about Barouffski as, after Verplank’s eruption at the Joyeuses, she had wondered about him. She wondered whether in some former existence she had injured Barouffski and whether it were for that reason that she had been led into giving him the power to injure her now. It might be so, she told herself, in which case she ought to bear it. But how could she know that it was so? Yet even though it were and the fact were made clear to her, even then, even too if the certainty of a punishment more poignant than any were shaken in her eyes, still she could not bear it.
“But I ought to,” she found herself saying.