I folded my arms and leant my back against the house wall; I heard the rise and fall of angry voices within the room; I found that I could look only at little things, such as the cracks in the stone paving of the garden path, or the latch on the gate, and that the horizon, when I raised my eyes towards it, swam. I tried to drag back my failing sense of proportions. As I did this, clinging on to and deliberately ranging my thoughts in ordered formation, there emerged the dearness and all-eclipsing importance of my scheme to me in the past; I realised that never for a moment had it been absent from my conscious or my sub-conscious thought. So, I said to myself, this is the phenomenon of poets, and are they, I wonder, as passive as I am when after months of carrying their purpose in their brain, the moment comes of its fruition? Have they, like me, no feeling of control? I remembered what Malory had said of the corelation of human effort.
I looked towards the darkened window and, hearing the drone of voices, beheld myself again as the brother of the poet whose puppets, brought by him to a certain point, continue to work along the lines he has laid down, as though independent of his agency. I would resume control, I thought, when this so terribly inevitable act had played itself out. Then I would step in, lead Malory to Ruth, and again step out, leaving them to the joy of their bewilderment.
Why should I have cherished this scheme so passionately? so passionately that my desire had risen above my reason, carrying with it that strange conviction that by the sheer force of my will events would shape themselves—as indeed they were shaping—under my inactive hand? Why? I could not explain, but as the twilight deepened rapidly in the garden I saw again Malory’s grave, lean face, heard his half-sad, half-happy comments, was pierced by the pitiable and unnecessary tragedy of his loneliness—Malory away in France, unconscious of the intensity of the situation created around him, without his knowledge and without his consent, by a woman who loved him and a man who, I suppose, loved him too.
It was at that moment, when I had worked myself up into a positive exaltation, that I heard a sudden angry shout and a shot from a revolver.
I awoke, and I confess that before rushing into the house I stood for a dizzy second while a thousand impressions wheeled like a flock of startled birds in my brain. It was over, then? Westmacott was dead, I was sure of that. Would the mice, two miles away, be waltzing? I had an insane desire to run over and look. Westmacott was dead; then I had killed him, I was his murderer as much as if I stood in Ruth’s place with the smoking revolver in my hand. It was over; the recent tradition of war, where life was cheap, had joined with Concha’s legacy for the fulfilment of my purpose. What a heritage! for that double heritage, not fate, had helped me out. Blood, war, and I were fellow conspirators.
I stood for a second only before I burst open the door, but the strength of my impression was already so powerfully upon me that when I saw Westmacott by the fire holding the revolver I did not believe my eyes. When I say I did not believe my eyes I mean that I was quite soberly, deliberately persuaded that my eyes were telling an actual falsehood to my brain. Westmacott could not be standing by the fire; he must be lying somewhere on the ground, huddled and lifeless. I removed my eyes from the false Westmacott standing by the fire, and sent them roving over the floor in search of that other Westmacott from whom life had flown.
I ran my eyes up and down the cracks between the tiles until they came to a darkness, and then, running them upwards, I reached the face of Ruth. She was there, shrinking as she must suddenly have shrunk when he snatched the revolver from her. In her face I read defeat, reaction, submission. She had struck her blow, and it had failed; and she and I were together beaten and vanquished.
I knew that my attempt would be hopeless, but a great desperation seized hold of me, and I cried out, absurdly, miserably,—
“There are other methods.”
She only shook her head, and, pointing at the revolver, said,—