‘What’s life to me now. You said the desire would come back; that I should shake myself free. I could if you would help me. I don’t know what you are or what your meaning is, only that I love you; care for nothing, wish for nothing but to see you and think of you. A flat, dull voice keeps saying that I have no right to be telling you all this. You will know best. I know I am nothing. I ask nothing. If we love one another, what is there else to say?’
‘Nothing, nothing to say, except only good-bye. What could you tell me that I have not told myself over and over again? Reason’s gone. Thinking’s gone. Now I am only sure.’ She smiled shadowily. ‘What peace did he find who couldn’t, perhaps, like you, face the last good-bye?’
They stood in utter solitude awhile in the evening gloom. The air was as still and cold as some grey unfathomable untraversed sea. Above them uncountable clouds drifted slowly across space.
‘Why do they all keep whispering together?’ he said in a low voice, with cowering face. ‘Oh if you knew, Grisel, how they have hemmed me in; how they have come pressing in through the narrow gate I left ajar. Only to mock and mislead. It’s all dark and unintelligible.’
He touched her hand, peering out of the shadows that seemed to him to be gathering between their faces. He drew her closer and touched her lips with his fingers. Her beauty seemed to his distorted senses to fill earth and sky. This, then, was the presence, the grave and lovely overshadowing dream whose surrender made life a torment, and death the near fold of an immortal, starry veil. She broke from him with a faint cry. And he found himself running and running, just as he had run that other night, with death instead of life for inspiration, towards his earthly home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He was utterly wearied, but he walked on for a long while with a dogged unglancing pertinacity and without looking behind him. Then he rested under the dew-sodden hedgeside and buried his face in his hands. Once, indeed, he did turn and grind his way back with hard uplifted face for many minutes, but at the meeting with an old woman who in the late dusk passed him unheeded on the road, he stopped again, and after standing awhile looking down upon the dust, trying to gather up the tangled threads of his thoughts, he once more set off homewards.
It was clear, starry, and quite dark when he reached the house. The lamp at the roadside obscurely lit its breadth and height. Lamp-light within, too, was showing yellow between the Venetian blinds; a cold gas-jet gleamed out of the basement window. He seemed bereft now of all desire or emotion, simply the passive witness of things external in a calm which, though he scarcely realised its cause, was an exquisite solace and relief. His senses were intensely sharpened with sleeplessness. The faintest sound belled clear and keen on his ear. The thinnest beam of light besprinkled his eyes with curious brilliance.
As quietly as some nocturnal creature he ascended the steps to the porch, and leaning between stone pilaster and wall, listened intently for any rumour of those within.
He heard a clear, rather languid and delicate voice quietly speak on until it broke into a little peal of laughter, followed, when it fell silent by Sheila’s—rapid, rich, and low. The first speaker seemed to be standing. Probably, then, his evening visitors had only just come in, or were preparing to depart. He inserted his latchkey and gently pushed at the cumbersome door. It was locked against him. With not the faintest thought of resentment or surprise, he turned back, stooped over the balustrade and looked down into the kitchen. Nothing there was visible but a narrow strip of the white table, on which lay a black cotton glove, and beyond, the glint of a copper pan. What made all these mute and inanimate things so coldly hostile?