It perplexed me that somehow my body felt strange to me. It was
unfamiliar—I could not tell how—and the barley, and the beautiful
weeds, and the slowly developing glory of the dawn behind; all those
things partook of the same unfamiliarity. I felt as though I was a
thing in some very luminous painted window, as though this dawn broke
through me. I felt I was part of some exquisite picture painted in
light and joy.
A faint breeze bent and rustled the barley-heads, and jogged my mind
forward.
Who was I? That was a good way of beginning.
I held up my left hand and arm before me, a grubby hand, a frayed cuff;
but with a quality of painted unreality, transfigured as a beggar might
have been by Botticelli. I looked for a time steadfastly at a beautiful
pearl sleeve-link.
I remembered Willie Leadford, who had owned that arm and hand, as
though he had been some one else.
Of course! My history—its rough outline rather than the immediate
past—began to shape itself in my memory, very small, very bright and
inaccessible, like a thing watched through a microscope. Clayton and
Swathinglea returned to my mind; the slums and darkness, Dureresque,
minute and in their rich dark colors pleasing, and through them I went
towards my destiny. I sat hands on knees recalling that queer
passionate career that had ended with my futile shot into the growing
darkness of the End. The thought of that shot awoke my emotions again.
There was something in it now, something absurd, that made me smile
pityingly.
Poor little angry, miserable creature! Poor little angry, miserable
world!
I sighed for pity, not only pity for myself, but for all the hot
hearts, the tormented brains, the straining, striving things of hope
and pain, who had found their peace at last beneath the pouring mist
and suffocation of the comet. Because certainly that world was over and
done. They were all so weak and unhappy, and I was now so strong and so
serene. For I felt sure I was dead; no one living could have this
perfect assurance of good, this strong and confident peace. I had made
an end of the fever called living. I was dead, and it was all right,
and these———?