She was awake all that night. Harding Powell and the horror begotten of
him had no pity; he would not let her go. Her gift, her secret, was
powerless now against the pursuer.
She had a light burning in her room till morning, for she was afraid of
sleep. Those unlit roads down which, if she slept, the Thing would
surely hunt her, were ten times more terrible than the white-washed,
familiar room where it merely watched and waited.
In the morning she found a letter on her breakfast-table, which she said
Mrs. Powell had left late last evening, after Agatha had gone to bed.
Milly wrote: “Dearest Agatha,— Of course I understand. But are we
_never_ going to see you again? What was the matter with you last night?
You terrified poor Harding.— Yours ever, M. P.”
Without knowing why, Agatha tore the letter into bits and burned them in
the flame of a candle. She watched them burn.
“Of course,” she said to herself, “that isn’t sane of me.”
And when she had gone round her house and shut all the doors and locked
them, and drawn down the blinds in every closed window, and found
herself cowering over her fireless hearth, shuddering with fear, she
knew that, whether she were mad or not, there was madness in her. She
knew that her face in the glass (she had the courage to look at it) was
the face of an insane terror let loose.
That she did know it, that there were moments—flashes—in which she could
contemplate her state and recognize it for what it was, showed that
there was still a trace of sanity in her. It was not her own madness
that possessed her. It was, or rather, it had been, Harding Powell’s;
she had taken it from him. That was what it meant—to take away madness.
There could be no doubt as to what had happened, nor as to the way of
its happening. The danger of it, utterly unforeseen, was part of the
very operation of the gift. In the process of getting at Harding to heal
him she had had to destroy, not only the barriers of flesh and blood,
but those innermost walls of personality that divide and protect,
mercifully, one spirit from another. With the first thinning of the
walls Harding’s insanity had leaked through to her, with the first
breach it had broken in. It had been transferred to her complete with
all its details, with its very gestures, in all the phases that it ran
through; Harding’s premonitory fears and tremblings; Harding’s exalted
sensibility; Harding’s abominable vision of the world, that vision from
which the resplendent divinity had perished; Harding’s flight before the
pursuing Terror. She was sitting now as Harding had sat when she found
him crouching over the hearth in that horrible room with the drawn
blinds. It seemed to her that to have a madness of your own would not be
so very horrible. It would be, after all, your own. It could not
possibly be one-half so horrible as this, to have somebody else’s
madness put into you.
The one thing by which she knew herself was the desire that no longer
ran underground, but emerged and appeared before her, lit by her lucid
flashes, naked and unshamed.
She still knew her own. And there was something in her still that was
greater than the thing that inhabited her, the pursuer, the pursued, who
had rushed into her as his refuge, his sanctuary; and that was her fear
of him and of what he might do there. If her doors stood open to him,
they stood open to Bella and to Rodney Lanyon too. What else had she
been trying for, if it were not to break down in all three of them the
barriers of flesh and blood, and to transmit the Power? In the
unthinkable sacrament to which she called them they had all three
partaken. And since the holy thing could suffer her to be thus
permeated, saturated with Harding Powell, was it to be supposed that she
could keep him to herself, that she would not pass him on to Rodney
Lanyon?
It was not, after all, incredible. If he could get at her, of course he
could get, through her, at Rodney.
That was the Terror of terrors, and it was her own. That it could
subsist together with that alien horror, that it remained supreme beside
it, proved that there was still some tract in her where the invader had
not yet penetrated. In her love for Rodney and her fear for him she
entrenched herself against the destroyer. There at least she knew
herself impregnable.
It was in such a luminous flash that she saw the thing still in her own
hands, and resolved that it should cease.
She would have to break her word to Milly. She would have to let Harding
go, to loosen deliberately his hold on her and cut him off. It could be
done. She had held him through her gift, and it would be still possible,
through the gift, to let him go. Of course she knew it would be hard.
It _was_ hard. It was terrible; for he clung. She had not counted on his
clinging. It was as if, in their undivided substance, he had had
knowledge of her purpose and had prepared himself to fight it. He hung
on desperately; he refused to yield an inch of the ground he had taken
from her. He was no longer a passive thing in that world where she had
brought him. And he had certain advantages. He had possessed her for
three nights and for three days. She had made herself porous to him; and
her sleep had always been his opportunity.
It took her three nights and three days to cast him out. In the first
night she struggled with him. She lay with all her senses hushed, and
brought the divine darkness round her, but in the darkness she was aware
that she struggled. She could build up the walls between them, but she
knew that as fast as she built them he tore at them and pulled them
down.
She bore herself humbly towards the Power that permitted him. She
conceived of it as holiness—estranged and offended; she pleaded with it.
She could no longer trust her knowledge of its working, but she tried to
come to terms with it. She offered herself as a propitiation, as a
substitute for Rodney Lanyon, if there was no other way by which he
might be saved.
Apparently, that was not the way it worked. Harding seemed to gain. But,
as he kept her awake all night, he had no chance to establish himself,
as he would otherwise have done, in her sleep. The odds between her and
her adversary were even.
The second night _she_ gained. She felt that she had built up her walls
again; that she had cut Harding off. With spiritual pain, with the
tearing of the bonds of compassion, with a supreme agony of rupture, he
parted from her.
Possibly the Power was neutral; for in the dawn after the second night
she slept. That sleep left her uncertain of the event. There was no
telling into what unguarded depths it might have carried her. She knew
that she had been free of her adversary before she slept, but the
chances were that he had got at her in her sleep. Since the Power held
the balance even between her and the invader, it would no doubt permit
him to enter by any loophole that he could seize.
On the third night, as it were in the last watch, she surrendered, but
not to Harding Powell.
She could not say how it came to her; she was lying in her bed with her
eyes shut and her arms held apart from her body, diminishing all
contacts, stripping for her long slide into the cleansing darkness, when
she found herself recalling some forgotten, yet inalienable knowledge
that she had. Something said to her: “Do you not remember? There is no
striving and no crying in the world which you would enter. There is no
more appeasing where peace _is_. You cannot make your own terms with the
high and holy Power. It is not enough to give yourself for Rodney
Lanyon, for he is more to you than you are yourself. Besides, any
substitution of self for self would be useless, for there is no more
self there. That is why the Power cannot work that way. But if it should
require you, here on this side the threshold, to give him up, to give up
your desire of him, what then? Would you loose your hold on him and let
him go?”
“Would you?” the voice insisted.
She heard herself answer from the pure threshold of the darkness: “I
would.”
Sleep came on her there; a divine sleep from beyond the threshold;
sacred, inviolate sleep.
It was the seal upon the bond.