And down that road you shall not pass alone;
And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—’”
He paused; and I waited for the rime that should complete the couplet:
“How does it go on?”
“‘And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—
. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.’
It’s . . . Chinese, I was told. Two or three hundred years before Homer.”
I drove on, staring drowsily ahead of me at the broad, unfolding ribbon of black road and the monotonous water-meadows on either hand. The tender warmth of the little poem made me forget for a moment the bleakness of the Kennet valley in late autumn; and, after a sleepless night, the rushing wind drugged my brain.
“Though all night long I lie awake and know
That you are lying waking even so.” . . .