Gareth was now wandering round and round the wide sweep of road which encircled the church, standing aloof on the topmost crest of the hill. The dark narrow lanes scurrying downwards on all sides to more level streets, were solitary of loiterers. The scent of daisy-studded grass within the railinged spaces of the church lifted from the man his weariness of the long hot London day. Almost he could imagine the cold rush of seven cascades down the steep asphalt lanes; imagine that in the valley of Lansdowne Road stood a wooden châlet with shutters painted green and pink ... somewhere a wan girl waiting in a wood—and oh, to be free to seek her out, and all she stood for of youth and impulse!... "Grant the path be clear before you...."
But twenty-four had stumbled into a bondage that forty could not decently quit. If twenty-four had had the strength to have made a clean end to romance when vision had warned him to do so, had not shirked the unknown quantity of pain and longing and empty days awaiting him in the further blankness—what a passage he might then have made through life, endowed with the power to recognize that adventure need not of necessity be joyous adventure; and that he was no true adventurer who dared not let go of a once-found happiness; who thought a dream could be taken by storm, grabbed, and held forever as a right.... Pale fool and egoist, blindly groping, blindly resenting—while ahead of him strode in conquering mood the man he had thought himself: brave to exchange love's gain for love's loss; willing, for the sake of illusion, to plough through its inevitable aftermath of disappointment; older than needs be, for the contrast of youth forfeited; hands emptier, because they had been but recently so brimful. Yet unhesitating in trust that all could be met again: love and illusion and youth and fortune.... The round adventure, this; no mere arc of the circle, but completing each time the full sweep of the compass....
Gareth was walking faster now, ideas surging on a wine-coloured flood down the reopened channels of his mind.... The man he had thought himself; Kathleen, tumultuous red-and-brown as he had once known her; half-forgotten figures of mediæval song, so alive to his boyhood. All trooping past him like some glowing pageant; set to a cadence of words that sank from triumph to a wistful lilt of regret; swelling again to the clarion-song of achievement. Dimly remembered dreams floating towards him as clouds drift from all corners of the sky into a rich sunset. Fragments of love-scenes, spoken he knew not when. Slim form of the cool girl flitting now beside the conqueror ... now beside the shadowy failure who stumbled in his wake....
But what did it all mean? Was it a book he had somewhere read? He read so many books. Yes, but this idea seemed new to him—"The round adventure; no mere arc of the circle...." The round adventure?—a new idea, and good.
It was his own.
Gareth stood stock-still, dizzy with the flash of realization. It was as though a lamp had been lit in the heart of the world. His idea. His book at last. He was glad now that his imagination had lain barren for so long; all that he had should go to the book. His inspiration—his by right of sixteen years' blood-payment.
Gareth strode with pounding heart down Ladbroke Hill. He was in a fever to start, start at once on his book; start that very night, the instant he reached home. Suppose the idea should somehow slide away and leave him with empty hands and blank sight, as the years had done hitherto. Recklessly he hailed a passing taxi, and bade the man drive furiously. Shepherds Bush Road whizzed by, a blurred arcade of colour. A great ship of light swung past with a clanging rhythm. He had thought it a vehicle of misery that afternoon, when it had stood for only just a motor-bus. Gareth let down the windows of his flying chariot, and breathed deeply and happily. Why, every footfall whispered of meaning now. Walls and chimney-pots, the postered railway-bridge beneath which they thundered hollowly, crowds pouring thickly from a gaudy music-hall, the flare of yellow light beneath the striped awning of a kerbstone barrow, hoarse eternal mutter of blended humanity and traffic—these were no more the mere material for other people's books, realities which endlessly echoed the endless echoes of reality that all day he had to read. His now, the fabric from which pavements and green grass alike were woven; his, to create into a book, his book, the book he would start upon that very night.