They came home in the gathering dusk on the young flood. And because of
this and because it was Saturday evening they had the river to
themselves, and moved almost alone through the silent and deserted Pool.
They followed slowly after the sun and saw the Tower Bridge as a black
scaffolding framing the last glow of yellow and gold. All the
undiscovered colours of sunset and half-darkness lay upon the water,
smooth now and velvety, and they fled away in front of the boat as the
glow departed. At Blackfriars the moon had not yet come, and Nature had
made thick darkness; but man had made a marvel of light and beauty upon
the water that left Stephen silent with wonder. The high trams swam
along the Embankment, palaces of light, and they swam yet more admirably
in the water. There were the scattered lights of houses, and the
brilliant lights of theatres, and the opulent lights of hotels, and the
regimented lights of street-lamps, and the sudden little lights of
matches on the banks, and the tiny lights of cigarettes, where men hung
smoking on the Embankment wall, and sometimes a bright, inexplicable
light high up among the roofs; and the lights of Parliament, and at
last the light of the young moon peeping shyly over a Lambeth
brewery--and all these lights were different and beautiful in the dark,
and made a glory of the muddy water. The small boat travelled on in the
lonely darkness of mid-stream, and to Stephen it seemed a wonderful
thing that no other but he and Muriel and her brother George could look
as they could upon those magical lights and the magical patterns that
the water had made of them. He had a sense of remoteness, of privileged
remoteness from the world; yet he had a yearning for pleasant
companionship, and itched for the moment when young George was to leave
them to go to his Club.
Young George left them at Westminster Pier, and those two went on
together in the boat. The lights of Chelsea were as beautiful as the
lights of Westminster, and Stephen thought suddenly of Margery's
description of evening by the Solent. It was hardly necessary to go so
far for loveliness, he thought. He was glad that Muriel was with him,
because she too was lovely, but when she clung to him in the old
passionate way he kissed her very gently and without fire. For the
poetry of all that he had seen that day had somehow purged him of the
extravagant fever of the previous nights; and he imagined,
unreasonably, that she too would be ready for this refinement of their
relations. But she was not. She was tired with the long day, with trying
to share an enthusiasm which she did not understand, for colours which
she did not see, and lights which after all were only the ordinary
lights she saw in the streets on the way to dances; she wanted to have
done with that kind of thing now that they were alone again; she wanted
to be hotly embraced and hotly kissed. For the end of this adventure was
terribly near now. After tomorrow her brother was coming to live at home
again; after that there would be no more safety. Tomorrow would be the
last night.
Of all this Stephen was but vaguely sensible. She was still a sweet and
adorable companion, and his soul was still bursting with poetry and
romance, but it was the poetry of the moonlit Thames rather than the
poetry of a furtive passion. And because of this, and because he was
dimly conscious that she looked for some more violent demonstration than
he was able in the flesh to give, he thought suddenly of the Love-Songs
which he had made to her, but never mentioned: and he wondered if they
would please her. He stopped the engine and let the boat drift. Then,
very softly, in a voice timid at first with self-consciousness, but
gathering body and feeling as he went on, he spoke for her the words of
his Love-Songs. At the end he felt that they were very good, better than
he had thought, and waited anxiously to hear what she would say. And she
listened in bewilderment. She was flattered in her vanity that a poet
should have written them for her; but she did not understand them, and
she was not moved or deeply interested.
She said at last: "How _nice_, Stephen! Did you really make up all that
about me?"
And at that the last flicker of the fire which had burned in him for so
many days went out. He saw clearly for the first time the insane
unfitness of their intimacy. In the first fascination of his senses, in
the voluptuous secrecy of their meetings under the moon, he had asked
nothing of her intellect; he had been content with the touch of her
hands, with the warm seduction of her kisses. And these, too, were still
precious, but they were not enough. They were not enough to a poet on a
night of poetry now that his senses were almost satisfied.
So all the way home he held her gently and talked to her tenderly, as he
might have talked to Margery. And Muriel saw that she must be content
with that for this night, and was happy and quiet beside him.
But when they parted under the wall it was she who whispered,
"Tomorrow--the last time," and it was he who whispered, "Yes."
In the morning he woke with a vague sense of distaste for something that
he had to do. All that day he had this restless, dissatisfied feeling.
And this was in part the first stirring of the impulse to write which
came always when he had no work in progress and no great effort forming
in his mind.
The weary reaction from the finishing of "Chivalry" was over, and the
creative itch was upon him, which could not be satisfied by the making
of little Love-Songs. And he felt no more like the making of Love-Songs.
He wished almost that he might hurry immediately down to Hampshire. But
his promise for the evening prevented that.
He sat down in the sunny window-seat and thought, pondering gloomily the
wild events of these summer months. And as he brooded over them with
regret and sadness, and the beginnings of new resolutions, there flashed
from them, with the electric suddenness of genuine inspiration, the
bright spark of a new idea, a new idea for the new work which he was
aching to begin. Thereon his mood of repentance faded away, and the
moral aspect of the things he had done dissolved into the
background--like fairies at a pantomime; and there was left the glowing
vision of a work of art.
He was excited by this vision, and immediately was busy with a sheet of
paper--like a painter capturing a first impression--jotting down in
undecipherable half-words and initials the rough outline of his plan,
even the names of his characters and a few odd phrases. There moved in
his mind a seductive first line for the opening of this poem, and that
line determined in the end the whole question of metre; for it was an
inspired line, and it was in exactly the right metre.
All the afternoon he sat in the shady corner of the garden over the
river, dreaming over the structure of this poem. In the evening he began
to work upon it; and all the evening he worked, with a feverish
concentration and excitement. At about ten o'clock the moon was well up,
and the rising tide was lapping and murmuring already about the wall and
about the boats. And he did not forget Muriel; he did not forget his
promise. He knew that she was waiting for him, silent on the wall. He
knew that he was bound in honour, or in dishonour, to go to her. But he
did not go. He had done with that. And he had better things to do
tonight.
So Muriel leaned lonely over the wall, looking down the river past the
fig-tree and the barges, looking and listening. The moon rose high over
Wimbledon, and the twin red lights of the _Stork_ were lit, and the
yellow lights twinkled in the houses and bobbed along the bridge, and
the great tide rolled up with a rich suggestion of fulfilment and hope.
Quiet couples drifted by in hired boats and were happy. But Stephen did
not come. And Muriel waited.
St. Peter's clock struck eleven, and still she waited, in a flame of
longing and impatience. The dew came down, and she was cold; the chill
of foreboding entered her heart. And still she waited. She would wait
till half-past eleven, till a quarter of twelve, till midnight. She knew
now that she loved this man with a deep and consuming love; it had begun
lightly, as a kind of diversion, but the game had turned to bitter
earnest. And still she waited.
It was slack water now, and the river stood still, holding its breath.
Men passed singing along the towpath on the outer side; the song floated
over the water, in sentimental tones of exquisite melancholy. From the
Island a wild-duck rose with his mate, and bustled away with a startling
whir to some sweet haunt among the reeds. A cat wailed at its wooing in
a far garden--a sickly amorous sound. The last pair of lovers rowed
slowly past, murmuring gently. Then all was still, and Muriel was left
alone, alone of the world's lovers thwarted and forgotten.
Midnight struck, and she crept into the house and into her bed, sick
with longing and the rage of shame.
Stephen at midnight went in contentment to his bed. He had written a
hundred lines.