He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a revulsion of feeling—shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he tore his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, “my dear Sheila,” dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing. … He would write to Grisel another day.
He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present, pictures of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed, that even now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there, in the old green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand stars. The breath of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little scampering shape slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly, over the globe. He shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the small lamplit room.
Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless air, the phantoms of another life passed by, unmindful of his motionless body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only gradually became aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of rain at the window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in, chilled with its waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed away all thought for a while. He turned back to his chair. He would wait until the rain had lulled before starting. …
A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care, pushed open, and Mr. Bethany’s old face, with an intense and sharpened scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast.
He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What was this monstrous web of Craik’s? What had the creature been nodding and ducketing about?—those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles, then sat blinking—and softly slowly deciphered the solitary “My dear Sheila” on Lawford’s notepaper. “H’m,” he muttered, and looked up again at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of sleep might yet be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them some hint of his presence. “I wish to goodness, you wonderful old creature,” he muttered, wagging his head, “I wish to goodness you’d wake up.”
For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. “They don’t come to me,” he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. “It’s that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year’s rookery!” And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on Lawford.
At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him. A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at his phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of multitudinous raindrops, like the roar of Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend’s denuded battlefield.
Colophon
The Return
was published in 1910 by
Walter de la Mare.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Michael Cox,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2002 by
Eve Sobol and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Tomb of a Suicide,
a painting completed in 1900 by
Wilhelm Kotarbiński.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
October 17, 2022, 8:19 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/walter-de-la-mare/the-return.
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