For an hour or two Lawford slept heavily, so heavily that when a little after midnight he awoke, with his face towards the uncurtained window, though for many minutes he lay brightly confronting all Orion, that from blazing helm to flaming dog at heel filled high the glimmering square, he could not lift or stir his cold and leaden limbs. He rose at last and threw off the burden of his bedclothes, and rested awhile, as if freed from the heaviness of an unrememberable nightmare. But so clear was his mind and so extraordinarily refreshed he seemed in body that sleep for many hours would not return again. And he spent almost all the remainder of the lagging darkness pacing softly to and fro; one face only before his eyes, the one sure thing, the one thing unattainable in a world of phantoms.
Herbert waited on in vain for his guest next morning, and after wandering up and down the mossy lawn at the back of the house, went off cheerfully at last alone for his dip. When he returned Lawford was in his place at the breakfast-table. He sat on, moody and constrained, until even Herbert’s haphazard talk trickled low.
‘I fancy my sister is nursing a headache,’ he said at last, ‘but she’ll be down soon. And I’m afraid from the looks of you, Lawford, your night was not particularly restful.’ He felt his way very heedfully. ‘Perhaps we walked you a little too far yesterday. We are so used to tramping that—’ Lawford kept thoughtful eyes fixed on the deprecating face.
‘I see what it is, Herbert—you are humouring me again. I have been wracking my brains in vain to remember what exactly did happen yesterday. I feel as if it was all sunk oceans deep in sleep. I get so far—and then I’m done. It won’t give up a hint. But you really mustn’t think I’m an invalid, or—or in my second childhood. The truth is,’ he added, ‘it’s only my first, come back again. But now that I’ve got so far, now that I’m really better, I—’ He broke off rather vacantly, as if afraid of his own confidence. ‘I must be getting on,’ he summed up with an effort, ‘and that’s the solemn fact. I keep on forgetting I’m—I’m a ratepayer!’
Herbert sat round in his chair. ‘You see, Lawford, the very term is little else than Double-Dutch to me. As a matter of fact Grisel sends all my hush-money to the horrible people that do the cleaning up, as it were. I can’t catch their drift. Government to me is merely the spectacle of the clever, or the specious, managing the dull. It deals merely with the physical, and just the fringe of consciousness. I am not joking. I think I follow you. All I mean is that the obligations—mainly tepid, I take it—that are luring you back to the fold would be the very ones that would scare me quickest off. The imagination, the appeal faded: we’re dead.’
Lawford opened his mouth; ‘Temporarily tepid,’ he at last all but coughed out.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Herbert intelligently. ‘Only temporarily. It’s this beastly gregariousness that’s the devil. The very thought of it undoes me—with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals, bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of—of infinity. And nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one thinks too much of one’s clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too deep for their poor reasons. I don’t mean that your wanting to go home is anything gregarious, but I do think their insisting on your coming back at once might be. And I know you won’t visit this stuff on me as anything more than just my “scum,” as Grisel calls the fine flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really want to say is that we should both be more than delighted if you’d stay just as long as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you’re heartily tired of us. Go back now, if you must; tell them how much better you are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He’ll say complete rest—change of scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!’
Lawford listened. ‘I wish—,’ he began, and stopped dead again. ‘Anyhow, I’ll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I’ve been playing truant. It was all very well while—To tell you the truth I can’t think quite straight yet. But it won’t last for ever. Besides—well, anyhow, I’ll go back.’
‘Right you are,’ said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. ‘You can’t expect, you really can’t, everything to come right straight away. Just have patience. And now, let’s go out and sit in the sun. They’ve mixed September up with May.’
And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.