“What is the matter?”
“Matter?” said I, “nothing!”
“Tell me!” she says—with such an intensity and rage, as to make me shudder.
“There is nothing to tell, Leda!”
“Oh, but how can you be so cluel to me?” she cries, and ah, there was anguish in that voice! “There is something to tell—there is! Don’t I know it vely well by your voice?”
Ah, the thought took me then, how, on the morrow, she would ring, and have no answer; and she would ring again, and have no answer; and she would ring all day, and ring, and ring; and forever she would ring, with white-flowing hair and the staring eyeballs of frenzy, battering reproaches at the doors of God, and the Universe would cry back to her howls and ravings only one eternal answer of Silence, of Silence. And as I thought of that—for very pity, for very pity, my God—I could not help sobbing aloud:
“May God pity you, woman!”
I do not know if she heard it: she must, I think, have heard: but no reply came; and there I, shivering like the sheeted dead, stood waiting for her next word, waiting long, dreading, hoping for, her voice, thinking that if she spoke and sobbed but once, I should drop dead, dead, where I stood, or bite my tongue through, or shriek the high laugh of distraction. But when at last, after quite thirty or forty minutes she spoke, her voice was perfectly firm and calm. She said:
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” said I, “yes, Leda.”
“What was the color,” says she, “of the poison-cloud which destroyed the world?”
“Purple, Leda,” said I.
“And it had a smell like almonds or peach blossoms, did it not?” says she.
“Yes,” said I, “yes.”
“Then,” says she, “there is another eruption. Every now and again I seem to scent strange whiffs like that … and there is a purple vapour in the East which glows and glows … just see if you can see it. …”
I flew across the room to an east window, threw up the grimy sash, and looked. But the view was barred by the plain brick back of a tall warehouse. I rushed back, gasped to her to wait, rushed down the two stairs, and out upon the Hard. For a minute I ran dodging wildly about, seeking a purview to the East, and finally ran up the dockyard, behind the storehouses to the Semaphore, and reached the top, panting for life. I looked abroad. The morning sky, but for a bank of cloud to the northwest, was cloudless, the sun blazing in a region of clear azure pallor. And back again I flew.
“I cannot see it … !” I cried.
“Then it has not tlavelled far enough to the northwest yet,” she said with decision.
“My wife!” I cried: “you are my wife now!”
“Am I?” says she: “at last? Are you glad? … But shall I not soon die?”
“No! You can escape! My home! My heart! If only for an hour or two, then death—just think, together—on the same couch, forever, heart to heart—how sweet!”
“Yes! how sweet! But how escape?”
“It travelled slowly before. Get quick—will you?—into one of the smaller boats by the quay—there is one just under the crane that is an air-boat—you have seen me turn on the air, haven’t you?—that handle on the right as you descend the steps under the dial-thing—get first a bucket of oil from the shop next to the clock-tower in the quay-street, and throw it over everything that you see rusted. Only, spend no time—for me, my heaven! You can steer by the tiller and compass: well, the wheel is quite the same, only just the opposite. First unmoor, then to the handle, then to the wheel. The course is directly Northeast by North. I will meet you on the sea—go now—”
I was wild with bliss. I thought that I should take her between my arms, and have the little freckles against my face, and taste her short firm-fleshed upper-lip, and moan upon her, and whimper upon her, and mutter upon her, and say “My wife.” And even when I knew that she was gone from the telephone, I still stood there, hoarsely calling after her: “My wife! My wife!”
I flew down to where the steamer lay moored that had borne me the previous day. Her joint speed with the speed of Leda’s boat would be forty knots: in three hours we must meet. I had not the least fear of her dying before I saw her: for, apart from the deliberate movement of the vapour that first time, I fore-tasted and trusted my love, that she would surely come, and not fail: as dying saints fore-tasted and trusted Eternal Life.
I was no sooner on board the Stettin than her engines were straining under what was equivalent to forced draught. On the previous day it would have little surprised me at any moment, while I drove her, to be carried to the clouds in an explosion from her deep-rusted steel tanks: but this day such a fear never crossed my mind: for I knew very well that I was immortal till I saw her.
The sea was not only perfectly smooth, but placid, as on the previous day: only it seemed far placider, and the sun brighter, and there was a levity in the breezes that frilled the sea in fugitive dark patches, like frissons of tickling; and I thought that the morning was a true marriage-morning, and remembered that it was a Sabbath; and sweet odours our wedding would not lack of peach and almond, though, looking eastward, I could see no faintest sign of any purple cloud, but only rags of chiffon under the sun; and it would be an eternal wedding, for one day in our sight would be as a thousand years, and our thousand years of bliss would be but one day, and in the evening of all that eternity death would come and sweetly lay its finger upon our languid lids, and we should die of weary bliss;
