I lie in this agony of confusion, holding within my hand the key to the mystery that has distraught my world: and surely my eyes are good, yet when I strain to see, they veer, they tangent off. I cannot see what I hold!
From this turmoil there must be release. My body is moving. I do not know how long I have lain in bed, breaking in vain at the gate of my Dream. Not very long, for the night is still there murmuring like a hollow sea outside and sending in breakers at my open window. There have been no other thoughts, no fancies at all. The Dream is palpable and I within it, and my mind that must rejoin me, knocking, beating. That is all.
Then, sudden I am moving! I am getting up, and calmly with the certainty of custom I put on my clothes: I shut the house door: I am in the street.
Faint vestige of dawn. In sparse gray filaments dawn threads through the night: a gradual loom of light that will thicken, that will converge, that will become a texture.... On the street, at the door as I step out, is a man.
He is waiting for me. He is clad in black, he stands in the black shadow of the house: all that emerges of him is his head which is round and white.
All of his head is white: it has a plastic and smooth pallor like the form of certain larvæ: it is a color inhuman and yet deeply fertile. He sees me and nods his head and I feel the black-clad body stir in the gloom of my house. I make no sign: I begin to walk. At my rear I feel him walk apace with me. He is behind and quiet, but he is leading me by an invisible pressure which he holds upon the nape of my neck, the cortex of my brain.
The city has that flaccid impenetrance which comes before dawn. The rush of a car, the pelt of horses’ hoofs, the stride of a man, the flutter of a woman, quiver like darts against the night and fall away. Night is this impenetrable hide about the city.... We are outside the city. A ferry-boat plethorically heaves us across the River. I stand at the forward rail, and the white head man, lost in a shadow of drays and draymen and slowly stamping horses, holds still his palpable pressure on my brain.
—What if I turn about?
I look at the little waves ... the night is windless ... thridding and skipping about the hull of the boat. Their cool tips carry dawn, between the night of the sky and the night of the black waters.