“You can’t do that, Philip ... you mustn’t. It would be like killing yourself. You can’t go back where there’s fever.” She wanted to cry out wildly, desperately, against the vague, dark force, which she felt closing in about her.
“That’s all nonsense,” he said. “Doctors don’t know everything. I shan’t get the fever. I’ve got to go back. I want to go back there to paint ... I’ve got to go back.”
“You hated the place. You told me so.”
“And you said once that I really liked it. You told me that some day I’d go back. Do you remember the day we were walking ... a few days after I came home? You were right. I’ve got to go back. I’m like that queer Englishwoman.”
“You won’t go ... leaving me alone.”
“It wouldn’t be for long ... a year, maybe.”
She did not answer him at once. “A year,” she thought. “A year! But that’s long enough. Too long. Anything could happen in a year. He might....” Looking at him as he lay back in the old horsehair sofa, he became unbearably precious to her. She seemed to see him for the first time—the thin, drawn, tormented face, the dark skin, the high cheekbones, the thin lips, even the tired eyelids. He didn’t know she was watching him. He wasn’t perhaps even thinking of her. He looked young, like a boy ... the way he had been long ago at twenty, when he was still hypnotized by Emma. She thought, “I can’t lose him now just when we’ve a chance of being happy. I can’t. I can’t. He’s mine ... my Philip.” He was free now of his mother, but he was still a captive.
She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Philip, my Philip,” she said. Opening his eyes, he looked at her for a moment lazily, and then smiled. It was the old shy smile she had seen on that solitary walk into the country. And then he said slowly what Naomi had once said—“I’m tired, Mary dear, that’s all....” She drew his head to her shoulder and began stroking it slowly. She thought, “It’s odd. My grandmother would turn in her grave if she knew. Or maybe she’d understand. He’s been mine always, since the beginning. I mean to keep him.”
And yet she knew that he was in that very moment escaping her. She knew again the terrifying sensation of fighting some dark and shadowy thing which she could neither see nor feel nor touch.
“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.”