Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. “The longer I live, Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I, wanting to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal direct to mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves of a tree with just one—one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried to put into words—well, daybreak would find us still groping on. …” He turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. “It’s a dumb world: but there we are. And some day you’ll come again.”
“Well,” said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn thought into such primitive speech, “that’s where we stand, then.” He got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger, “Where is your sister?” he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying into the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down beside her. “It will be before dark even now,” she said, glancing out at the faintly burning skies.
They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. “This—is as far as I can go,” she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. “Even now it’s wet with dew.” She rose again and looked strangely into his face. “Yes, yes, here it is,” she said, “oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We’re both at least past that.”
“Grisel,” he said, “forgive me, but I can’t—I can’t go on.”
“Don’t think, don’t think,” she said, taking his hands, and lifting them to her bosom. “It’s only how the day goes; and it has all, my one dear, happened scores and scores of times before—mother and child and friend—and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn’t cry out. Perhaps it was all before even we could speak—this sorrow came. Take all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.”
“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 goodbye. 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 goodbye?”
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.
XXII
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. Lamplight 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
