With a wistful smile he watched her wipe her eyes, and then he said, “Well, I doubt ... I must be going. The motor will be there. God bless you ... Pilar,” he looked at her, then turned slowly and walked away in the direction of the house.
She made as if to run after him, and then, with a gesture of despair, sank down upon the ground.
So silently they one to th’other come,
As colours steale into the Pear or Plum,
And, Aire-like, leave no pression to be seen
Where e’re they met, or parting place has been.
Well, it was over. She had shut up Life into a plot, and there had been a counterplot, the liturgical plot into which Rome compresses life’s vast psychic stratification; and, somehow or other, her plot and the counterplot had become one.
Why had he looked so happy when he arrived—only yesterday? Was it joy at the thought of so soon saying his first mass? She would never know. The dead, plotting through a plot, had silenced him for ever.
Oh, foolish race of myth-makers! Starving, though the plain is golden with wheat; though their tent is pitched between two rivers, dying of thirst; calling for the sun when it is dark, and for the moon when it is midday.