He answered only: “You!” He had the air of one speaking to something infinitely unimportant. It was as if I had no inkling of the real issue.
With a bravery of desperation I began to explain that I hadn’t stumbled into the thing; that I had acted open-eyed; for my own ends … “My own ends.” I repeated it several times. I wanted him to understand, and I did explain. I kept nothing from him; neither her coming, nor her words, nor my feelings. I had gone in with my eyes open.
For the first time Fox looked at me as if I were a sentient being. “Oh, you know that much,” he said listlessly.
“It’s no disgrace to have gone under to her,” I said; “we had to.” His despair seemed to link him into one “we” with myself. I wanted to put heart into him. I don’t know why.
He didn’t look at me again.
“Oh, that,” he said dully, “I—I understand who you mean. … If I had known before I might have done something. But she came of a higher plane.” He seemed to be talking to himself. The half-forgotten horror grew large; I remembered that she had said that Fox, like herself, was one of a race apart, that was to supersede us—Dimensionists. And, when I looked at him now, it was plain to me that he was of a race different to my own, just as he had always seemed different from any other man. He had had a different tone in triumph; he was different now, in his despair. He went on: “I might have managed Gurnard alone, but I never thought of her coming. You see one does one’s best, but, somehow, here one grows rather blind. I ought to have stuck to Gurnard, of course; never to have broken with him. We ought all to have kept together.—But I kept my end up as long as he was alone.”
He went on talking in an expressionless monotone, perhaps to himself, perhaps to me. I listened as one listens to unmeaning sounds—to that of a distant train at night. He was looking at the floor, his mouth moving mechanically. He sat perfectly square, one hand on either knee, his back bowed out, his head drooping forward. It was as if there were no more muscular force in the whole man—as if he were one of those ancient things one sees sunning themselves on benches by the walls of workhouses.
“But,” I said angrily, “it’s not all over, you can make a fight for it still.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” he answered, “it is all over—the whole thing. I ran Churchill and his conscious rectitude gang for all they were worth. … Well, I liked them, I was a fool to give way to pity.—But I did.—One grows weak among people like you. Of course I knew that their day was over. … And it’s all over,” he said again after a long pause.
“And what will you do?” I asked, half hysterically.
“I don’t just know,” he answered; “we’ve none of us gone under before. There haven’t been enough really to clash until she came.”
The dead tranquillity of his manner was overwhelming; there was nothing to be said. I was in the presence of a man who was not as I was, whose standard of values, absolute to himself, was not to be measured by any of mine.
“I suppose I shall cut my throat,” he began again.
I noticed with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames, containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful. What kind of a being could conceive this impossibly barbaric room, could enshrine those impossibly crude designs, and then fold his hands? I turned fiercely upon him. “But you are rich enough to enjoy life,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked wearily.
“In the name of God,” I shouted, “what do you work for—what have you been plotting and plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last?” He made a small indefinite motion of ignorance, as if I had propounded to him a problem that he could not solve, that he did not think worth the solving.
It came to me as the confirmation of a suspicion—that motion. They had no joy, these people who were to supersede us; their clear-sightedness did nothing more for them than just that enabling them to spread desolation among us and take our places. It had been in her manner all along, she was like Fate; like the abominable Fate that desolates the whole length of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our plans, nothing but a hideous jumble of fragments like those of statues, smashed by hammers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate that we hate, and that debases us forever and ever. She had been all that to me … and to how many more?
“I used to be a decent personality,” I vociferated at him. “Do you hear—decent. I could look a man in the face. And you cannot even enjoy. What do you come for? What do you live for? What is at the end of it all?”
“Ah, if I knew …” he answered, negligently.
XIX
I wanted to see her, to finish it one way or another, and, at my aunt’s house, I found her standing in an immense white room; waiting for me. There was a profusion of light. It left her absolutely shadowless, like a white statue in a gallery; inscrutable.
“I have come,” I said. I had it in my mind to say: “Because there is nothing for me to do on earth.” But I did not, I looked at her instead.
“You have come,” she repeated. She had no expression in her voice, in her eyes. It was as if I were nothing to her; as if I
