He became aware after a little of an uneasy feeling, which was not fear, nor shame, nor hunger. It would be dangerous to return, he said to himself. I can get clear away from the neighbourhood while this fog lasts. He walked on a little further, but hesitatingly. Carlyon’s quick, he thought. He’d search every shelter. I’m safer in this fog walking. When hunger forced itself again upon his notice he comforted himself illogically. After all there’s other shelter besides that cottage. He discovered that it was comforting to speak aloud. The small sound of his own voice was companionship in this white darkness and at the same time muffled by the fog, it was not loud enough to be overheard. He began to imagine fresh shelter; impelled by an empty stomach he returned but less convincingly to the thought of kindly old women. But there was something lacking in these dreams that had not been lacking the previous day. There was an ache in his mind as well as his belly, although he refused to take note of it. There was something very dissatisfying about the kindliest welcome which he imagined, but how could he recognise a fact, too ridiculous for expression, that he was homesick for the cottage in which he had spent a few uncomfortable hours? He fought hard against that realisation, and even quickened his step as though to remove himself out of the influence of a malign enchantment. In his struggle, for about the first time in the last three days, he forgot his danger and his fear. He did not even notice that he was walking uphill and that the fog was thinning very gradually in front of him. If he had had ears to hear, his own speech would have come to him with startling loudness in comparison with its previous imprisonment.
“A cat,” he said, “she’d have given a cat food,” but anger was disconcertingly confined to his voice. For as far as he knew the girl had had no food herself. He dwelt on the idea of a cat as constantly as he was able, but that image of inhumanity began rapidly to be scored over by fresh lines of thought, struggle as he would to preserve it intact. He remembered how she had led him to the dead man, awakening thus a brief feeling of intimacy between himself and her, and he remembered her words about the peace of God.
Andrews’s character was built of superficial dreams, sentimentality, cowardice, and yet he was constantly made aware beneath all these of an uncomfortable questioning critic. So now this other inhabitant of his body wondered whether he had not mistaken peace for inhumanity. Peace was not cowardly nor sentimental nor filled with illusion. Peace was a sanity which he did not believe that he had ever known. He remembered how once, becalmed at sea day after endless day, he had grown to loathe the water’s smooth unstirred surface as a symbol of a hatefully indifferent deity. And yet in the week of storm that followed he had longed to regain that quality which he began to regard as peace.
It was the sun shining on his eyes that woke him to the surroundings and an immediate knowledge of danger. He had been walking up hill and now emerged from the thickest fog as from a tunnel. It stood concrete at his back like a white wall. In front of him only faint floating wisps softened hedgerows, projecting boughs, the sun’s rays. It was not, however, the mere abstract fear of light which startled Andrews. A tall man, with dark hair uncovered by a hat, stood in the middle of the road. His back was turned and his hands were clasped behind him. Andrews could not mistake the light poise of the legs and shoulders that seemed to symbolise a spirit on tiptoe. He had been walking so fast up the hill that when he suddenly checked himself he nearly stumbled forward on his hands and knees. Although he had spent the last three days in almost continuous fear of Carlyon, now when the moment he had dreaded seemed to have arrived, his first instinct was not that of flight. It appeared incredible that he should so fear Carlyon, the man to whom he had turned continually for companionship in an alien and brutal life. He was only saved from stepping forward and touching Carlyon’s elbow by the sight of the man’s hands. Their clasp was tense, strained. They were the hands of a man holding himself as still as he was able in order to listen. Andrews half shifted a foot and the shoulders in front of him stiffened. He remembered a remark that Carlyon had once made to him, prompted by a sudden friendliness, “I’d know your step, Andrews, in a thousand.” He could see quite clearly the strange ugly face of Carlyon as it had looked at him
