She walked across to him and, at the moment she reached him, fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking—God knows—perhaps of nothingness.
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and questionings. Before he found the woman no expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at people’s faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to others and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman’s warm body—given to him in love—had been as a boat in which he had floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had been wrecked and he was sinking again, back into the sea.
All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say he did not know, and at the same time he did know.
He was a poet, I presume, and perhaps at the moment a new poem was forming itself in his mind.
At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must have had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should if possible save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.
He had an impulse to go to the door, and by way of the stairway, to go down stairs and into the street—but the body of the woman was between him and the door.