So all day they went about in this distressful tranquillity, pretending that this day was as yesterday, and as the day before. At midday the tide was down; the grey sky crept up from the far roofs and hid the sun. There was the damp promise of a drizzle in the air, and the bleak depression of low tide lay over the mud and the meagre stream and the deserted boats. They had lunch almost in silence, and after lunch a thin rain began. Stephen stared out at it silent from the window, thinking and thinking and deciding nothing; and Margery sat silent by the fire, darning. And her silence, and the silent riot of his thoughts, and the silent miserable rain, and the empty abandoned river, united in a vast conspiracy of menace and accusation and gloom. They were leagued together to get on his nerves and drive him to despair. He went out suddenly, and down to the dining-room, and there he drank some whisky, very quickly, and very strong.
Then, because he must do something or he would go mad, he dragged the dinghy over the mud and shingle down to the water, and he rowed up to the Island to pick up firewood from the mud-banks, where the high tides took it and left it tangled in the reeds and young willow stems.
It was an infinite toil to get this wood, but all afternoon he worked there, crashing fiercely through the tall forest of withes and crowded reeds, and slithering down banks into deep mud, and groping laboriously in the slush of small inlets for tiny pieces of tarred wood, and filling his basket with great beams and bits of bark, and small planks and boxwood, and painfully carrying them through the mud and the wet reeds down to the boat. He worked hard, with a savage determination to tire himself, to occupy his mind, cursing with a kind of furious satisfaction when the stems sprang back and whipped him in the face. The sweat came out upon him, and his hands were scratched, and the mud was thick upon his clothes. But all the time he thought. He could not stop thinking.
And somehow the fierce energy of the work communicated itself to his thoughts. As he struck down the brittle reeds he fancied himself striking at his enemies, manfully meeting his Fate. All his life he had done things thoroughly, as he was doing this foolish wood-gathering. He had faced things, he had not been afraid. He would not be afraid now. He would give himself up. No, no! He couldn’t do that. Not fair to Margery—a long wait, prison, trial, the dock—hanging! Aah! He made a shuddering cry at that thought, and he lashed out with the stick in his hand, beating at the withes in a fury of fear. No, no! by God, no!—hanging—the last morning! Not that.
But still, he must be brave. No more cowardice. That was the worst of all he had done this summer—the cowardice. No more sitting tight at John’s expense. Whatever Margery said. It was sweet of her, but later it would be different. When all this was forgotten, she would remember … she would be living with him, day after day, knowing every night there was a murderer in her bed, a liar, a coward, a treacherous coward. … Very soon she would hate him. And he would hate her, because she knew. He would be always ashamed before her, all day, always. … Just now they did not mind, because they were afraid. But they would mind. … She had not even minded about Muriel, when he told her—and he had told her everything. But she would mind that, too, in the end. … She would always be imagining Muriels.
No, there must be no more cowardice. It must finish now, one way or another. But there was only one way.
The rain had stopped now, and a warm wind blew freshly from the southwest. The two swans of the Island washed themselves in the ruffled shallows, wings flapping and necks busily twisting. In the west was a stormy and marvellous sky, still dark pillows of heavy clouds, black and grey, and an angry purple, with small white tufts floating irresponsibly across them, and here and there a startling lake of the palest blue; while low down, beneath them, as if rebellious at the long grey day, and determined somehow to make a show at his own setting, the sun revealed himself as an orange dome on the roof of the Quick Boat Company, and poised grotesquely between the tall black chimneys, flung out behind the Richmond Hills a narrow ribbon of defiant light, and away towards Hammersmith all the windows in a big house lit up suddenly with orange and gold, as if the house were burning furiously within. The boat was heavy now with wood, and Stephen pushed her off, to row home with his face to the sunset and the storm. Now the light was caught in the mud-slopes by the Island, and they, too, were beautiful. And as he rowed he said a self-conscious farewell to the sun and the warm wind and the river which he loved. No one loved this river as he did. They lived smugly in their drawing-rooms like Kensington people, and they looked out at the river when the sun shone at high tide, and in the summer crept out timidly for an hour in hired boats like trippers. But when it was winter and the wind blew, they drew their curtains and shivered over their fires and shut out the river, so that they hardly knew it was there from the autumn to the spring. They did not deserve to live by the river; they did not understand it. They did not see
