—What if I leap in?
Will the waves hold me? They will part, treacherous and careless, and let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me.
... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles. The earth breaks into warty mounds, grass tufted, and falls to sudden hollows slakish with caked mud. I walk, and though I have not seen his form save for that moment at the door of my house, I know the white head man following at my rear, and leading, keeping pace with my feet so that the sound of his steps is lost in mine.
The field is wide and long: no light of habitation flecks its sallow gloom. But the rathe filaments of dawn swirl in its air with more abundance: a gray flush lies close to its black furrows, catches in the grass and brings to it a tremorous stir as if it was a mouth feebly in voice. I walk. The field is wide and long. The field’s horizons lip darkly down, making this murmurous silence of the field a shut dank thing, and I and the white head man imprisoned in it.
He still prodding me on, prodding upon the quick of my brain: he who is behind and who is silent....
The ground looms a little ahead. And as it rises, the dead grass ceases underneath my feet. My feet tread sterile clay: they strike on it hard as if the clay were frozen, and yet the air of the field is wet and sultry.... My feet stop.
I am at the top of the little loom of the ground. Straight before me an empty shadow. The ground cuts precipitous at my feet. It wreathes about into a semicircle. Below me in the black lies a slakish gleam: a sort of slime within the night: far below. And beyond that, above this bottom of the circling pit yet lower than the crest where I stand, the field goes on over a clutter of broken rocks and stone.
I have stopped short at the edge of a limekiln! My feet have held firm!
There is rage in me.
“So this is where you led me? to my death? to this ridiculous death? I, after Philip LaMotte, after my mother and my father! My death was to be at once more secret and more horrible. No trace of me was to remain. Well: come and push me in. It’ll take more than the pressure of your eyes.”