But she was still trembling and afraid. The flesh had terrors great as those of the spirit.
A little uncertain wind was coming out of the south-west, and the trees were stirred now and again into hushed whisperings. A dead leaf brushed her face in falling, and she started back, thrusting at an imaginary enemy with nervously agitated hands.
The thought of her remoteness from life terrified her. She was alone, face to face with implacable, brutal Nature. Man, the boastful, full of foolish pride, was vanishing from the earth. He had been an alien, ever out of place, defiling and corrupting the order of growth. Now he was beaten and a fugitive. All around her, the representative of this vile destructive species, was the slow, persistent hatred of the earth, which longed to be at peace again. There was no god favourable to man, now that he was dying; the gods of man’s creation would perish with him. Only a few women were left to realize that they were strangers in the world of Nature which hated them. The world was not theirs, had never been theirs; they were only some horrible, unnatural fungus that had disfigured the Earth for a time....
She moved cautiously and slowly under the darkness of the trees, and even when she came back to the road she could not shake off her fear. On her right she could see the black cliff of the woods transfigured by the light of the moon. In the day she knew them for woods; now they were strange and threatening; they menaced her with invasion. She knew that they would march down from the hills and swarm across the valley. In a hundred, two hundred years, Marlow would be a few heaps of brick and stone lost in the heart of the forest.
Ashamed of her race, she hurried on stealthily towards the bridge.
But before she reached it, she heard the sound of a firm, defiant step coming towards her. She paused and listened, and her fear fell from her. In the old days she would have feared man more than Nature, feared robbery or assault, but now, man was united in a common cause; the sound of humanity was the sound of a friend.
“Hullo!” she called, and the voice of Jasper Thrale answered. “Hullo! Who’s that?” he said.
“Me—Eileen,” she replied. “I’ve been for a bathe.”
He paused opposite her, and they looked at one another.
“Jolly night,” he remarked.