“I can’t make it come clear,” he said. “I thought I could.”
“I’ve looked my eyes out that way, too,” said Thane. “Let’s take it as it is.”
What John at first had so clear a vision of was an act of heroic self-denial. It thrilled him with momentary ecstasy. That may be understood. Man is an emotional formation, subject to sudden passions, one of which is the passion of sacrifice. Blindly on the spot he rears an altar, lays the wood in order and looks to see what offering hath in a miraculous manner provided itself to be burnt. Lo! there stands the one thing most beloved in all the world. The Lord sometimes interferes, as for Isaac. Sometimes the victim saves itself. Then again the man draws back. He has not the heart to do it.
John drew back. To conclude the covenant with Thane meant forswearing Agnes in his heart forever. That was a vow he could neither bring himself to make nor trust himself to keep. And yet, any secret reservation seemed treachery to Thane. So there he stood before this truth of contradiction and “looked his eyes out” at it. How came Thane to have a thought like that?
Agnes was observing them intently with one elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, eyes half closed. She was not thinking. She was verifying a kind of knowledge that underlies the mind. She knew why John faltered, why he lost his way toward what he meant to do, what that was, and why he dropped Thane’s hand. She knew what it was of a sudden to become a woman and why a woman need never be afraid.
Far away in the sky of her immemorial self, so far that what she saw of it was but its heat’s reflection, passed a flash of contempt for those tame, romantic vanities in which now man sublimates the reckless impulses of his savage egoism. At that instant, too, as it were in the light of this archaic intuition, there stood upon her memory the figure of the Cornishman, and she was horribly ashamed.
Nevertheless she continued to feel cynical about the emotional male principle. It bored her. There was one obvious thing to do. There was in fact only one thing possible to be done. But apparently neither Thane nor John was ever going to think of it, or give her a chance to suggest it without boldly naming it. One might have thought they had forgotten her existence. They stood in the middle of the road, John with his back to her, Thane with his eyes in the heavens, sharing a vast man-silence. She was at the core of that silence; she was all there was there. That did not interest her at all. She wished to be somewhere else.
She got up quietly and walked away from them, away from New Damascus, with a very bad list and limp. They overtook her in four or five steps, one on each side.
“What’s this way now?” Thane asked.
No answer.