For hours he sat over the fire, brooding, flashing occasionally into clear logical sequences of thought, but for the most part browsing and drowsing, turning over in his mind women and marriage and the theater and genius, the authentic voice of the nature of things, the spirit of the universe that sweeps into a man’s brain and heart and burns away all the thoughts of his own small life and fills him with a music that rings out and resounds and echoes and falls for the most part upon deaf ears or upon ears filled only with the clatter of the marketplace or the sweet whisperings of secret, treacherous desires. And he thought of the engines in that city, day and night, ceaselessly humming and throbbing, weaving stuffs and forging tools and weapons for the clothing and feeding of the bodies of men: the terrifying ingenuity of it all, the force and the skill, the ceaseless division and subdivision of labor, the multiplication of processes, the ever-increasing variety of possessions and outward shows and material things. But through all the changes in the activities of men, behind all their new combinations of forces “all things are the same forever and ever. . . .” He remembered then that he had hurt Matilda, that she had resented his not being “like ordinary people,” resented, that is, his acceptance of the unchanging order of things, his refusal to confuse surface change with the mighty ebb and flow of life. It was, he divined, that she had never reached up to any large idea and had never conceived of any life, individual or general, outside her own. To her, then, the life everlasting must mean her life, and he regretted having used that phrase. She was concerned, then, entirely with her own existence—(and with his in so far as it overlapped hers)—and life to her was either “fun” or something unthinkable. . . . . It seemed to him that he was near understanding her, and he loved her more than ever, and a rare warmth flooded his thoughts and they took on a life of their own, were bodied forth, and in a sort of ecstasy, thrilling and triumphant, he had the illusion of being lifted out of himself, of soaring and roaming free and with a power altogether new to him, a power whereof he was both creator and creature, he saw out of his own circumscribed area of life into another life that was no replica of this, but yet was of the same order, smaller, neater, trimmer, concentrated, and distilled. There was brilliant color in it and light and shade sharply distinct, and everything in it—houses, trees, mountains, hills, clouds—was rounded and precise: there was movement in it, but all ordered and purposeful. The sun shone, and round the corner there was a selection of moons, full, half, new, and crescent, and both sun and moon could be put away so that there should be darkness. As for stars, there were as many as he chose to sprinkle on the sky. . . . At first he could only gaze at this world in wonder. It sailed before him in a series of the most dignified evolutions, displaying all its treasures to him; mountains bowed and clouds curtseyed, and Eastern cities came drifting into view, and ships and islands; and there were palaces and the gardens of philosophers, sea beaches whereon maidens sang and mermaids combed their hair; and there were great staircases up and down which moved stately personages in silence, so that it was clear there was some great ceremony toward, but before he could discover the meaning of it all the world moved on and displayed another aspect of its seemingly endless variety. And he was sated with it and asked for it to stop, and at last with a mighty effort he became more its creator than its creature, and, as though he had just remembered the Open Sesame, it stayed in its course. It stayed, and in a narrow, dark street, with one flickering light in it, and the brilliant light of a great boulevard at the end of it, he saw an old white-bearded man with a pack on his back and a staff in his hand. And the old man knew that he was there, and he beckoned to him to come into the street. So he went and followed him, and without a word they turned through a little dark gateway and across up a courtyard and up into a garret, and the old man gave him a sack to sit on and lifted his packet from his back and out of it built up a little open box, and hung a curtain before it. Old Mole settled on his sack and opened his lips to speak to the old man, but he had disappeared.
The curtain rose.
III
INTERLUDE
I may have lost my judgment and my wits, but I must confess I liked that play. There was something in it.
THE SEAGULL
III
INTERLUDE