"He's much better alone."
They heard Nigel slipping and stumbling on the stairs. Once he fell with a crash, but at last he reached the top. Luckily his door was open, and he lurched in. The next minute they heard a thud and a creak as he flung himself on the bed.
He woke at dawn from what seemed an eternity of sleep—not one of those swift, deep sleeps which we are unconscious of till we find their healing touch on our lids at waking, but a series of sleeps, heavy, yet tossed, continually broken by grey glimmers of consciousness, by sudden heats and pains, quick stabs of memory, blind spaces of forgetfulness—that feverish, aching forgetfulness, which is memory in its acutest form.
He sat up in bed, his temples throbbing, his face flushed and damp. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, and stared out at the morning with eyes that burned. He fully remembered all that had happened, without such reminders as his headache, his sickness, and the rumpled clothes in which he had slept all night. His brain throbbed to the point of torture. Sharp cuts of pain tore through it, hideous revisualisations seemed to scorch whole surfaces of it with sudden flames. Facts hammered at it with monotonous mercilessness.
He fell back on the pillow, and for some minutes lay quite still, staring out at the woods. There they lay in their straight brown line, those woods. He could almost hear the rock of the wind in them, creeping to him over the stillness of the fields. They seemed to whisper peace—peace to his throbbing pulses and burning skin and aching body and breaking heart. All his universe was shattered, except those quiet external things—the woods and fields round his home. They stood unchanged through all his turmoils, they responded only to their own remote influences—the warming and cooling of winds, the waxing and waning of the sun's heat, the frostiness of vapours. He might rage, despair, scream, and curse in them without changing the colour of one leaf.
He longed stupidly for tears, but those easy tears of his humiliation would not come. He felt that if he thought of Len and Janey he might cry. But he would not think of them, though in his heart was an infinite tenderness. Len and Janey were like the woods, they did not change—then suddenly he realised that nothing had changed, it was only he. He had changed, and could not fit in with his old environment. Curse it! Damn it! Where could he find peace?
Perhaps he had formally renounced peace on that day he plunged his hands into the pitchy mess of money-making. He had known peace before then—soft dreams that flew to him from the lattices of dawn. He remembered days when he had lain in the corner of some field, among the rustling hay-grass, his soul lost in the eternities of peace within it. But now—he had renounced peace. He had turned from pure things to defiled—and he had sharpened his brain, whetted it on artificialities. For the man with brains there is seldom peace, but an eternal questing. The man without brains suffers only the problem of "what?" It is the man with brains who has to face the seven-times hotter problem of "why?"
Why was a man, alone of all creatures, allowed to be at war with his environment—a prey to changes that were independent of, and unable to reproduce themselves in, the world around him? Why was a man the meeting-place of god and brute, the battle-ground of the two with their unending wars?—and so made that if one should triumph and drive out the other, the vanquished, whether god or brute, took away part of his manhood with him, and peace was won only at the price of incompleteness?... Why was consummation only a prelude to destruction?—the lustreless horns of the daylight moon seemed to be telling him that it waxed full only to wane. Why was a man given desires that were gratified only at their own expense? Why did his young blood call—call into the fire and dark—with only the fire and dark to answer it?