His voice breaking his silence, came like an echo. She went like a ghost along the anticipated phrases, keenly aware only of those early moments when she had first gathered the shapes and rhythms of his talk.
Freedom; and with it that terrible darkness in his voice. Words must be said; but it was cruel to speak from far away; from the midst of joy. The unburdened years were speeding towards her; she felt their breath; the lifting of the light with the presence, just beyond the passing moments, of the old companionship that for so long had been hers only when she could forget her surrounded state. … His resonant cough brought her again the sound of his voice … how could the warm kind voice disappear from her days … she felt herself quailing in loneliness before the sharp edges of her daily life.
Glancing at him as they passed under a lamp she saw a pale, set face. His will was at work; he was facing his future and making terms with it. He would have a phrase for his loss, as a refuge from pain. That was comforting; but it was a base, social comfort; far away from the truth that was loading her with responsibility. He did not know what he was leaving. … There was no conscious thought in him that could grasp and state the reality of his loss; nor what it was in him that even now she could not sever from herself. If he knew, there would be no separation. He had actually moved into his future; taken of his own free will the first step away from the shelter she gave. Perhaps a better, kinder shelter awaited him. Perhaps he was glad in his freedom and his manner was made from his foreigner’s sense of what was due to the occasion. He did not know that there would be no more stillness for him.
Yet he did dimly know that part of his certainty about her was this mysterious youth; the strange everlasting sense of being, even with servants and young children, with any child, in the presence of adult cynical social ability, comfortably at home in the world. … Perhaps he would be better off without such an isolated, helpless personality in the life he must lead. But letting him go was giving him up to cynicism, or to the fixed blind sentiments of all who were not cynics. No one would live with him in his early childhood, and keep it alive in him. He would leave it with her, without knowing that he left it.
All the things she had made him contemplate would be forgotten. … He would plunge into the life he used to call normal. … That was jealousy; flaming through her being; pressing on her mind. For a moment she faced the certainty that she would rather annihilate his mind than give up overlooking and modifying his thoughts. Here alone was the root of her long delay … it held no selfless desire for his welfare … then he would be better off with anyone. He and the cynics and the sentimentalists were human and kindly, however blind. … They were not cruel; ready to wreck and destroy in order to impose their own certainties. … Even as she gazed into it, she felt herself drawn powerfully away from the abyss of her nature by the pain of anticipating his separated future; the experiences that would obliterate and vanquish her; justifying as far as he would ever again see, his original outlook. … She battled desperately, imploring the power of detachment, and immediately found words for them both.
“It is weak to go on; it will only become more difficult.”
“You are right, it is a weakness;” his voice broke on a gusty breath; “tomorrow we will spend as we have promised, the afternoon with Lintoffs. On Monday I will go.”
The street swayed about her. She held on, forcing her limbs; passing into emptiness. The sounds of the world were very far away; but within their muffled faintness she heard her own free voice, and his, cheerful and impersonal, sounding on through life. With the breath of this release she touched the realization that some day, he would meet, along a pathway unknown to her and in a vision different from her own, the same truth. … What truth? God? The old male prison, whether men were atheists or believers? … The whole of the truth of which her joy and her few certainties were a part, innocently conveyed to him by someone with a character that would win him to attend. Then he would remember the things they had lost in speech. The enlightener would not argue. Conviction would come to him by things taken for granted.
Clear demonstration is at once fooled. … All men in explanatory speech about life, have at once either in the face, or in the unconscious rest of them, a look of shame. Because they are not living, but calculating. … Women who are not living ought to spend all their time cracking jokes. In a rotten society women grow witty; making a heaven while they wait. …
But if from this far cool place where she now was, she breathed deep and let mirth flow out, he would never go.
At the very beginning of the
