Yes, that was it, why she was so great a part, a whole wall, a whole beam of my life’s house. I saw her suddenly in the blackness, her full red lips, her quivering nostrils, the curve of her breasts, her lithe movements from the hips, the way she set her feet down, the white flower waxen in the darkness of her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes. I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison’s wall till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else; fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker of Salazar’s returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe across the two walls from the corridor. I slept.
I had the feeling of appalled horror suddenly invading my sleep; a vast voice seemed to be exclaiming:
“Tell me where she is!”
I looked at the glowing horn of a lanthorn. It was O’Brien who held it. He stood over me, very sombre.
“Tell me where she is,” he said, the moment my eyes opened.
I said, “She’s... she’s———I don’t know.”
It appalls me even now to think how narrow was my escape. It was only because I had gone to sleep in the thought that I did not know, that I answered that I did not know. Ah—he was a cunning devil! To suddenly wake one; to get one’s thoughts before one had had time to think! I lay looking at him, shivering. I couldn’t even see much of his face.
“Where is she?” he said again. “Where? Dead? Dead? God have mercy on your soul if the child is dead!”
I was still trembling. If I had told him!—I could hardly believe I had not. He continued bending over me with an attitude that hideously mocked solicitude.
“Where is she?” he asked again.