It seemed best to keep still upon the rock. He sat in inner wonder. There was a sense of purity, of a fresh coolness not physical, of awe. He was in presence of something comprehensive, immortal.
"Is it myself? Then let it pour out and make of naught the old poison of myself!"
The perception could not hold. It flagged and sank, echoing down into the caves. He sat still and felt the old taskmaster stir. But this time he found strength to resist. There resulted, not the divine novelty and largeness of that one moment, but a kind of dim and bare desert waste of wide extent. And as it ate up all width, so it seemed timeless. Across this, like a person, unheralded, came and went two lines from "Richard III"
Clarence is come—false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury.
It went and left awareness of the desert. "False—fleeting—perjured...."
He saw himself as in mirrors.
The desert ached and became a place of thorns and briers and bewilderment. Then rose, like Antæus, the taskmaster. "And what of all that—if I like life so?"
Sense of the villa and the roses and the nightingales in the coverts—sense of wide, mobile sweeps and flowing currents inwashing, indrawing, pleasure-crafts great and small—desire and desire for desire—lust for sweetness, lust for salt—the rose to be plucked, the grapes to be eaten—and all for self, all for Ian....
He started up from the rock above Como, and turned to descend to the boat. That within him that set itself to make thin cloud of the taskmaster pulled him back as by the hair of the head and cast him down upon the rocky floor.
He lay still, half upon his face buried in the bend of his arm. He felt misery.