“Hullo,” said I.
He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky
light.
“Rum,” he said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Search-lights! Smoke! Ships going north! If it wasn’t for this blasted
Milky Way gone green up there, we might see.”
He was too intent to heed my questions for a time. Then he vouchsafed
over his shoulder—
“Know Bungalow village?—rather. Artis’ and such. Nice goings on! Mixed
bathing—something scandalous. Yes.”
“But where is it?” I said, suddenly exasperated.
“There!” he said. “What’s that flicker? A gunflash—or I’m a lost soul!”
“You’d hear,” I said, “long before it was near enough to see a flash.”
He didn’t answer. Only by making it clear I would distract him until he
told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbed
contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine.
Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him. Then he turned upon me cursing.
“Seven miles,” he said, “along this road. And now go to ‘ell with yer!”
I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted,
and I set off towards the bungalow village.
I found a policeman, standing star-gazing, a little way beyond the end
of the parade, and verified the wooden-legged man’s directions.
“It’s a lonely road, you know,” he called after me. . . .
I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track. I
left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the
dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a traveler who
nears his end.
The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly
succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing
fatigue. The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a
mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad
undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint sigh
and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that never
completely died out again. The way was sometimes sandy, thick with
silvery colorless sand, and sometimes chalky and lumpy, with lumps that
had shining facets; a black scrub was scattered, sometimes in thickets,
sometimes in single bunches, among the somnolent hummocks of sand. At
one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the
gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened, and made sustained
darknesses along the road, woods that frayed out at the edges to
weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated pine witches would
appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed. Grotesquely
incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards,
appealing, “Houses can be built to suit purchaser,” to the silence, to
the shadows, and the glare.
Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland
of me, and several times I took out and examined my revolver very
carefully. I must, of course, have been full of my intention when I did
that, I must have been thinking of Nettie and revenge, but I cannot now
recall those emotions at all. Only I see again very distinctly the
greenish gleams that ran over lock and barrel as I turned the weapon in
my hand.
Then there was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless
sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and
the sea. And once—strange phantoms!—I saw far out upon the shine, and
very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or
sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly, furtive things, traveling
very swiftly and keeping an equal distance. And when I looked again
they were very small, and then the shine had swallowed them up.
Then once a flash and what I thought was a gun, until I looked up and
saw a fading trail of greenish light still hanging in the sky. And
after that there was a shiver and whispering in the air, a stronger
throbbing in one’s arteries, a sense of refreshment, a renewal of
purpose. . . .
Somewhere upon my way the road forked, but I do not remember whether
that was near Shaphambury or near the end of my walk. The hesitation
between two rutted unmade roads alone remains clear in my mind.
At last I grew weary. I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed and
cart tracks running this way and that, and then I had missed the road
and was stumbling among sand hummocks quite close to the sea. I came
out on the edge of the dimly glittering sandy beach, and something
phosphorescent drew me to the water’s edge. I bent down and peered at
the little luminous specks that floated in the ripples.
Presently with a sigh I stood erect, and contemplated the lonely peace
of that last wonderful night. The meteor had now trailed its shining
nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the
east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea was an intense edge
of blackness, and now, escaped from that great shine, and faint and
still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive star could just be seen,
hovering on the verge of the invisible.
How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful! Peace! peace!—the peace
that passeth understanding, robed in light descending! . . .
My heart swelled, and suddenly I was weeping.
There was something new and strange in my blood. It came to me that
indeed I did not want to kill.
I did not want to kill. I did not want to be the servant of my passions
any more. A great desire had come to me to escape from life, from the
daylight which is heat and conflict and desire, into that cool night of
eternity—and rest. I had played—I had done.
I stood upon the edge of the great ocean, and I was filled with an
inarticulate spirit of prayer, and I desired greatly—peace from myself.
And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring
curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and
growing harsh certainties of dawn. My resolve I knew would take up with
me again. This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to-morrow I should
be William Leadford once more, ill-nourished, ill-dressed, ill-equipped
and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound upon the face of life, a source
of trouble and sorrow even to the mother I loved; no hope in life left
for me now but revenge before my death.
Why this paltry thing, revenge? It entered into my thoughts that I
might end the matter now and let these others go.
To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the
natures of water and light, to stand there breast-high, to thrust my
revolver barrel into my mouth———?
Why not?
I swung about with an effort. I walked slowly up the beach thinking. .
. .
I turned and looked back at the sea. No! Something within me said,
“No!”