That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was
destined to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I
forget altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the station
believing her to be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding with
Carnaby, just as I had seen them first. The encounter jumped upon us
unprepared. She rode by, her eyes dark in her white face, and scarcely
noticed me. She winced and grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed her
head. But Carnaby, because he thought I was a broken and discomfited
man, saluted me with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genial
commonplace to me.
They passed out of sight and left me by the roadside....
And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For the
first time I felt utter futility, and was wrung by emotion that begot
no action, by shame and pity beyond words. I had parted from her dully
and I had seen my uncle break and die with dry eyes and a steady mind,
but this chance sight of my lost Beatrice brought me to tears. My face
was wrung, and tears came pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had
for me had changed to wild sorrow. “Oh God!” I cried, “this is too
much,” and turned my face after her and made appealing gestures to the
beech trees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to
pursue her, to save her, to turn life back so that she might begin
again. I wonder what would have happened had I overtaken them in
pursuit, breathless with running, uttering incoherent words, weeping,
expostulatory. I came near to doing that.
There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or weeping.
In the midst of it a man who had been trimming the opposite hedge
appeared and stared at me.
Abruptly, ridiculously, I dissembled before him and went on and caught
my train....
But the pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times; it is with me as
I write. It haunts this book, I see, that is what haunts this book,
from end to end.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
NIGHT AND THE OPEN SEA
I
I have tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened
to me. In the beginning—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy
and dogs-eared and old-looking—I said I wanted to tell _myself_ and the
world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I
have succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and dead
and trite and unmeaning to me; some of it I know by heart. I am the
last person to judge it.
As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things
become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my
experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of
activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it _Tono-Bungay_, but
I had far better have called it _Waste_. I have told of childless
Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and
futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I
think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my
industrious scheming with my uncle, of Crest Hill’s vast cessation, of
his resonant strenuous career. Ten thousand men have envied him and
wished to live as he lived. It is all one spectacle of forces running
to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country
hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and
pleasure-seeking. And now I build destroyers!
Other people may see this country in other terms; this is how I have
seen it. In some early chapter in this heap I compared all our present
colour and abundance to October foliage before the frosts nip down the
leaves. That I still feel was a good image. Perhaps I see wrongly. It
may be I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To
others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with
hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that
finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our
time.
How they will look in history I do not know, how time and chance will
prove them I cannot guess; that is how they have mirrored themselves on
one contemporary mind.