I knocked at the locked door, paid my magician what I owed him and went my way.
From now on all hope of ever seeing her again vanished. But my soul cried out after her. And the world receded from me. Its figures dislimned into things that have been, its noise did not thunder at my threshold. A solitariness half voluntary and half enforced dragged its steps through my house. Only a few, the intimates of my heart and brothers of my blood, surrounded my life with peace and kept watch without my doors.
* * * * *
It was a late afternoon near Advent Sunday.
But no message of Christmas came to my yearning soul.
Somewhere, like a discarded toy, lay amid rubbish the motive power of my passions. My heart was dumb, my hand nerveless, and even need—that last incentive—had slackened to a wild memory.
The world was white with frost…. The dust of ice and the rain of star-light filled the world… cloths of glittering white covered the plains…. The bare twigs of the trees stretched upwards like staves of coral…. The fir trees trembled like spun glass.
A red sunset spread its reflection over all. But the sunset itself was poverty stricken. No purple lights, no gleam of seven colours warmed the whiteness of the world. Not like the gentle farewell of the sun but cruel as the threat of paralysing night did the bloody stripe stare through my window.
It is the hour of afternoon tea. The regulations of the house demand that.
Grayish blue steam whirls up to the shadowed ceiling and moistens with falling drops the rounded silver of the tea urn.