From where he walked it was not yet light enough to see the valley clearly. Only at intervals the red spark of a lighted window would make a crevice in the grey veil, and after he had walked some miles a cock crew. The downs were bare of life, save for the occasional brooding hunched form of a dark tree. He walked, and as he walked the first poignancy of his shame departed and the events of the night slipped a little way into shadow. When Andrews realised this, he stayed for a moment still and strove to drag them back. For this had happened many times before. It was the first stage towards a repetition of the sin, this forgetfulness. How could he ever keep clean if the sense of shame was so short lived? After all I enjoyed myself, he thought against his will, why repent? It’s a coward’s part. Go back and do it again. Why run my head into danger? With an effort he clenched his will and ran, to stifle thought, ran fast until he had no more breath and flung himself down upon the grass.
The grass grew in cool, crisp, salty tufts, on which he leant his forehead. If it were barren of desire and of the need of any action how sweet life would be. If it were only this coolness, this silver sky touched now with green, those unfurling wings of orange. If he could but sit and watch and listen—listen to Carlyon speaking, and watch the enthusiasm in his eyes, with no dangerous echo in his own. It was a strange, unrealisable thing that Carlyon was his enemy. Carlyon was seeking to kill him, and yet his heart still leapt a little at the sound of the name. Carlyon, who was all the things which Andrews wished to be—courageous, understanding, hopelessly romantic, not about women, but about life, Carlyon who hated well because he knew so clearly what he loved—truth, danger, poetry. If I hate him, Andrews thought, it is because I have done him an injury, but he hates me because he thinks I’ve injured life. He tried to laugh—the man was only a romantic fool with an ugly face. That was the real secret of his humility, his courage, even his love of beauty. He was always seeking a compensation for his face, as though an ape in purple and ermine were less an ape. The qualities he had built round himself were dreams only, which Andrews by one act had destroyed. There remained the large body, heavy, however lightly poised, thick wrists, misshapen skull. Strip off Carlyon’s dreams and the remainder is inferior to me, Andrews thought. A sudden longing came that he could trap Carlyon into some unworthy action, not consonant with the dreams which he followed. That would show him they were dreams and not himself.
How could one judge a man when all was said but by his body and his private acts, not by dreams he followed in the world’s eye? His father to his crew was a hero, a king, a man of dash, of initiative. Andrews knew the truth—that he was a bully who killed his wife and ruined his son. And myself, Andrews thought, I have as good dreams as any man, of purity and courage and the rest, but I can only be judged by my body which sins and is cowardly. How do I know what Carlyon is in private. But as he spoke he wondered uneasily whether Carlyon might not follow his dreams even when alone. Suppose that after all a man, perhaps when a child, at any rate at some forgotten time, chose his dreams whether they were to be good or evil. Then, even though he were untrue to them, some credit was owing simply to the baseless dreaming. They were potentialities, aspects, and no man could tell whether suddenly and without warning they might not take control and turn the coward for one instant into the hero.
Carlyon and I are then on the same plane, he thought, with a wistful longing for belief. He follows his dreams and I do not follow mine, but the mere dreaming is good. And I am better than my father, for he had no dreams, and that part of him that men admired came not from following an ideal but from mere physical courage. But how he longed now for that mere physical valour, which would give him the power to fling himself blind-eyed upon the breast of his dream. He sometimes imagined that if courage could be granted him for a moment only to turn his back on fear, his dreams would have strength to seize him in their current and sweep him irrevocably on, with no need of further decision or further gallantry.
He rose and with a little melodramatic gesture opened his arms as though he would entice courage to his heart, but all that came was a cold sweep of early wind. He walked on. Why could he not, as Lucy said, kill his conscience and be content? Why if he was given these aspirations, softened and blurred by sentiment as they were, was he not given sinew to attain them? He was the son of his mother, he supposed. Her heart had been trapped by vague romantic longings. His father when he desired something which could not be attained by other means had the power of showing himself as a sort of rough, genial fellow—a sea dog of the old Elizabethan tradition. He was of Drake’s county and he spoke Drake’s tongue. The sea had even given him a little of Drake’s face and manner, the colour, lines, aggressive beard, loud voice, loud laugh, what those who did not know him in his black moods called “a way with him.” Tears of anger, self-pity and some of love pricked Andrews’s eyes. If I could revenge you on the dead, he thought. Is there
