How could it? There was nothing behind it. All Milly’s plans had been
like that; they fell to dust; they _were_ dust. There had been always
that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the
futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing’s eyes. As if he couldn’t
see through it. As if, with the supernatural ludicity, the invincible
cunning of the insane, he didn’t see through anything and provide for
it. It was really only his indestructible urbanity, persisting through
the wreck of him, that bore, tolerantly, temperately, with Milly and her
plans. Without it he might be dangerous. With it, as long as it lasted,
little Milly, plan as she would, was safe.
But they couldn’t count on its lasting. Agatha had realized that from
the moment when she had seen him draw down the blind again after his
wife had drawn it up. That was the maddest thing he had done yet. She
had shuddered at it as at an act of violence. It outraged, cruelly, his
exquisite quality. It was so unlike him.
She was not sure that Milly hadn’t even made things worse by her latest
plan, the flight to Sarratt End. It emphasized the fact that they were
flying, that they had to fly. It had brought her to the house with the
drawn blinds in the closed, barred valley, to the end of the world, to
the end of her tether. And when she realized that it _was_ the end, when
he realized it....
Agatha couldn’t leave him there. She couldn’t (when she had the secret)
leave him to poor Milly and her plans. That had been in her mind when
she had insisted on it that he would sleep.
She knew what Milly meant by her sigh and the look she gave her. If
Milly could have been impolite she would have told her that it was all
very well to say so, but how were they going to make him? And she, too,
felt that something more was required of her than that irritating
affirmation. She had got to make him. His case, his piteous case, cried
out for an extension of the gift.
She hadn’t any doubt as to its working. There were things she didn’t
know about it yet, but she was sure of that. She had proved it by a
hundred experimental intermissions, abstentions, and recoveries. In
order to be sure you had only to let go and see how you got on without
it. She had tried in that way, with scepticism and precaution, on
herself.
But not in the beginning. She could not say that she had tried it in the
beginning at all, even on herself. It had simply come to her, as she put
it, by a divine accident. Heaven knew she had needed it. She had been,
like Rodney Lanyon, on the verge, where he, poor dear, had brought her;
so impossible had it been then to bear her knowledge and, what was
worse, her divination of the things he bore from Bella. It was her
divination, her compassion, that had wrecked her as she stood aside, cut
off from him, he on the verge and she near it, looking on, powerless to
help while Bella tore at him. Talk of the verge, the wonder was they
hadn’t gone clean over it, both of them.
[Illustration]
She couldn’t say then from what region, what tract of unexplored,
incredible mystery her help had come. It came one day, one night when
she was at her worst. She remembered how, with some resurgent, ultimate
instinct of surrender, she had sunk on the floor of her room, flung out
her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus
gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean
into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing
had found her.
It had found her. Agatha was precise on that point. She had not found
it. She had not even stumbled on it, blundered up against it in the
blackness. The way it worked, the wonder of her instantaneous
well-being, had been the first, the very first hint she had that it was
there.
She had never quite recaptured her primal, virgin sense of it; but to
set against that, she had entered more and more into possession. She had
found out the secret of its working and had controlled it, reduced it to
an almost intelligible method. You could think of it as a current of
transcendent power, hitherto mysteriously inhibited. You made the
connection, having cut off all other currents that interfered, and then
you simply turned it on. In other words, if you could put it into words
at all, you shut your eyes and ears, you closed up the sense of touch,
you made everything dark around you and withdrew into your innermost
self; you burrowed deep into the darkness there till you got beyond it;
you tapped the Power, as it were, underground at any point you pleased
and turned it on in any direction.
She could turn it on to Harding Powell without any loss to Rodney
Lanyon; for it was immeasurable, inexhaustible.
She looked back at the farm-house with its veiled windows. Formless and
immense, the shadow of Harding Powell swayed uneasily on one of the
yellow blinds. Across the field her own house showed pure and dim
against the darkening slope behind it, showed washed and watered white
in the liquid, lucid twilight. Her house was open always and on every
side; it flung out its casement arms to the night and to the day. And
now all the lamps were lit, every doorway was a golden shaft, every
window a golden square; the whiteness of its walls quivered and the
blurred edges flowed into the dark of the garden. It was the fragile
shell of a sacred and a burning light.
She did not go in all at once. She crossed the river and went up the
hill through the beech-wood. She walked there every evening in the
darkness, calling her thoughts home to sleep. The Easter moon,
golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long, sharp
arch of the beech-trees; it was like going up and up towards a dim
sanctuary where the holiest sat enshrined. A sense of consecration was
upon her. It came, solemn and pure and still, out of the tumult of her
tenderness and pity; but it was too awful for pity and for tenderness;
it aspired like a flame and lost itself in light; it grew like a wave
till it was vaster than any tenderness or any pity. It was as if her
heart rose on the swell of it and was carried away into a rhythm so
tremendous that her own pulses of compassion were no longer felt, or
felt only as the hushed and delicate vibration of the wave. She
recognized her state. It was the blessed state desired as the condition
of the working of the gift.
She turned when the last arch of the beech-trees broke and opened to the
sky at the top of the hill, where the moon hung in immensity, free of
her hill, free of the shrine that held her. She went down with slow soft
footsteps as if she carried herself, her whole fragile being, as a
vessel, a crystal vessel for the holy thing, and was careful lest a
touch of the earth should jar and break her.