Chapter 16

XVI

STRETCHED out under an awning on the deck of the Ibis, Nick
Lansing looked up for a moment at the vanishing cliffs of Malta
and then plunged again into his book.

He had had nearly three weeks of drug-taking on the Ibis. The
drugs he had absorbed were of two kinds: visions of fleeing
landscapes, looming up from the blue sea to vanish into it
again, and visions of study absorbed from the volumes piled up
day and night at his elbow. For the first time in months he was
in reach of a real library, just the kind of scholarly yet
miscellaneous library, that his restless and impatient spirit
craved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitive
scenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: he
swallowed them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeks
only to still pain and deaden memory. But they were beginning
to produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable,
that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days,
was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that he
needed.

There is probably no point on which the average man has more
definite views than on the uselessness of writing a letter that
is hard to write. In the line he had sent to Susy from Genoa
Nick had told her that she would hear from him again in a few
days; but when the few days had passed, and he began to consider
setting himself to the task, he found fifty reasons for
postponing it.

Had there been any practical questions to write about it would
have been different; he could not have borne for twenty-four
hours the idea that she was in uncertainty as to money. But
that had all been settled long ago. From the first she had had
the administering of their modest fortune. On their marriage
Nick's own meagre income, paid in, none too regularly, by the
agent who had managed for years the dwindling family properties,
had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present he
could make. And the wedding cheques had of course all been
deposited in her name. There were therefore no "business"
reasons for communicating with her; and when it came to reasons
of another order the mere thought of them benumbed him.

For the first few days he reproached himself for his inertia;
then he began to seek reasons for justifying it. After all, for
both their sakes a waiting policy might be the wisest he could
pursue. He had left Susy because he could not tolerate the
conditions on which he had discovered their life together to be
based; and he had told her so. What more was there to say?

Nothing was changed in their respective situations; if they came
together it could be only to resume the same life; and that, as
the days went by, seemed to