“‘I suppose it is quite certain,’ he said, ‘that there is no mistake? I mean, it’s quite certain he’s dead?’
“‘Quite,’ I answered rather grimly, as certain visions rose before my eyes. ‘I buried him myself;’ and the flat with its dirty lace, its cheap pretension, melted away into the quiet beauty of Ephesus.
“I walked away from the building with an inexpressible loneliness at heart, faced with my own immediate and remoter future, a problem I had hitherto refused to consider, but which now rushed at me like the oncoming wave rushes at the failing swimmer and overwhelms him. I had finished with Ephesus and MacPherson, and with MacPherson’s wife, and to say that I felt depressed would give you no idea of my feelings: an immense desolation took possession of me, an immense desolation, and more: an immense, soul-destroying disgust and weariness at the cruelty of things, a lassitude such as I had never conceived, so that I envied MacPherson lying for ever at peace, away from strife and difficulties and things that would not go right, among beautiful and untroubled hills, with wild flowers blooming round his grave. Yes, I envied him, I that am a sane man and have always prized rich life at its full value.
“And as I walked I met two men I had known, who spoke to me by my name and stopped me.
“‘Why, it’s Malory,’ said one of them. ‘I haven’t seen you lately. Somebody told me you had gone to Scotland?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I went to Scotland.’
“He asked me, ‘What part of Scotland?’
“‘To Aberdeen,’ I cried, ‘to Aberdeen!’ and laughed, and left them.
“I had been prepared to pass unrecognised after ten years, but for this friendliness, which had not ‘seen me lately,’ I was unprepared. I turned into a park, longing instinctively for the country as the only palliative for my loneliness and melancholy. In all London that day I think there was no lonelier soul than I. I would have sought you out, but in such crisis of world-sorrow as was mine, I could desire only one presence—a presence I might not have. She could have annihilated my sorrow by a word, could have made me forget the dirt, and the irony; all that hurt me so profoundly—though I don’t think myself a sentimentalist. For I was hurt as a raw sentimentalist is hurt, and this pain blended with my own trouble into a sea of despair. I wanted to find a haven of refuge, some beautiful gulf where the wind never blows, but where harmonious hills rise serenely from the water, and all is cultivated and easy and fertile.