"And now, sir, would you mind telling me . . .?" said the stout red-faced Treliss policeman, advancing towards them.
VIII
He was free; it was from the moment that the red-faced policeman, smiling upon him benevolently, had informed him that, for the moment, he had had from him all that he needed, his one burning and determined impulse—to get away from that hall, that garden, that house with the utmost possible urgency.
He had not wished even to stay with Hesther and Dunbar. He would see them later in the day, would see them, please God, many many times in the years to come.
What he wanted was to be alone—absolutely alone.
The cuts on the upper part of his body were nothing—a little iodine would heal them soon; it seemed that there had come to him no physical harm—only an amazing all-invading weariness. It was not like any weariness that he had ever before known. He imagined—he had had no positive experience—that it resembled the conditions of some happy doped trance, some dream-state in which the world was a vision and oneself a disembodied spirit. It was as though his body, stricken with an agony of weariness, was waiting for his descent, but his soul remained high in air in a bell of crystal glass beyond whose surface the colours of the world floated about him.
He left them all—the doctor, the policeman, Dunbar and Hesther. He did not even stop at Jabez's cottage to inquire. That was for later. As half-past seven struck from the church tower below the hill he flung the gate behind him, crossed the road, and struck off on to the Downs above the sea.
By a kind of second sight he knew exactly where he would go. There was a path that crossed the Downs that ran slipping into a little cove, across whose breast a stream trickled, then up on to the Downs again, pushing up over fields of corn, past the cottage gardens up to the very gate of the hotel.
It was all mapped in his mind in bright clear-painted colours.
The world was indeed as though it had only that morning been painted in green and blue and gold. While the fog hung, under its canopy the master-artist had been at work. Now from the shoulder of the Downs a shimmer of mist tempered the splendour of the day. Harkness could see it all. The long line of sea on whose blue surface three white sails hovered, the bend of the Downs where it turned to deeper green, the dip of the hill out of whose hollow the church spire like a spear steel-tipped gesticulated, the rising hill with the wood and the tall white tower, the green Downs far to the right where tiny sheep like flowers quivered in the early morning haze.