What the fruits of solitude are, my dearest friend, I know now very much better and more profoundly than I did then: because of my experiences and because of your wisdom. The person that I was then seems captive and blind. My instincts were true and my sense of direction was sound. Only the way turned out to be very much longer than I expected.
The mind, so constantly busy with its own welfare, is always sensitively filing and sorting the ways in which self-respect (vanity) has been damaged. In doing so it is at the same time industriously discovering methods of making good the damage. I had felt chagrined and ashamed because Rachel regarded me as a failed muddler, and Arnold was posing as having, in some unspecified sense, «found me out.» (And, what was worse, «forgiven me»!) Reflection on what had happened was already repainting this picture. I was quite strong enough to «hold» them both, to comfort Rachel and to «play» Arnold. The sense of challenge involved already made my bruised vanity cease a little to droop.
I would console Rachel with innocent love. This resolution and the ring of the good word made me feel, on that momentous morning, a better man. But what rather preoccupied my thoughts was the image of Christian: her image rather than any definite proposition about her. These images which float in the mind's cave (and whatever the philosophers may say the mind is a dark cave full of drifting beings) are of course not neutral apparitions but already saturated with judgment, lurid with it. I still felt in waves my old poisonous hatred of this bully. I also felt the not very edifying desire beforementioned to erase, by a show of indifference, the undignified impression which I had made. I had displayed too much emotion. Now instead I must stare with cold curiosity. As I practised staring at her charged and glowing image it seemed to be dissolving and changing before my eyes. Was I beginning to remember at last that I had once loved her?
I shook myself and closed the suitcase and snapped the catch to. If I could only get started on the book. A day of solitude, and I could write down something, a precious pregnant something like a growing seed. With that for company I could make terms with the past. And I was not now thinking of reconciliations or even of exorcisms, but just of the shedding of the load of sheer biting remorse which I had carried with me through my life.
The telephone rang.
«Hartbourne here.»
«Oh hello.»
«Why didn't you come to the party?»
«What party?»
«The office party. We specially put it on a day that suited you.»
«Oh God. Sorry.»
«Everyone was very disappointed.»
«I'm terribly sorry.»
«So were we.»
«I-er-hope it was a good party all the same-«In spite of your absence it was an excellent party.»
«Who was there?»
«All the old gang. Caldicott and Grey-Pelham and Dyson and Randolph and Matheson and Hadley-Smith and-«Did Mrs. Grey-Pelham come?»
«No.»
«Oh good. Hartbourne, I am sorry.»
«Never mind, Pearson. Can we make a lunch date?»
«I'm leaving town.»
