Chapter 9

It was not a long time before he had left the house, but it seemed long
and as if he had thought a great many rather incoherent things before he
had reached the street and presently parted from his gay acquaintance
and was on his way to his mother's house where she was spending a week,
having come down from Scotland as she did often.

He walked all the way home because he wanted movement. He also wanted
time to think things over because the intensity of his own mood troubled
him. It was new for him to think much about himself, but lately he had
found himself sometimes wondering at, as well as shaken by, emotional
mental phases through which he passed. A certain moving fancy always
held its own in his thoughts--as a sort of background to them. It was in
his feeling that he was in those weeks a Donal Muir who was unknown and
unseen by the passing world. No one but himself--and Robin--could know
the meaning, the feeling, the nature of this Donal. It was as if he
lived in a new Dimension of whose existence other people did not know.
He could not have explained because it would not have been understood.
He could vaguely imagine that effort at explanation would end--even
begin--by being so clumsy that it would be met by puzzled or unbelieving
smiles.

To walk about--to sleep--to awaken surrounded by rarefied light and air
in which no object or act or even word or thought wore its past familiar
meaning, or to go about the common streets, feeling as though somehow
one were apart and unseen, was a singular thing. Having had a youth
filled with quite virile pleasures and delightful emotions--and to be
lifted above them into other air and among other visions--was, he told
himself, like walking in a dream. To be filled continually with one
thought, to rebel against any obstacle in the path to one desire, and
from morning until night to be impelled by one eagerness for some moment
or hour for which there was reason enough for its having place in the
movings of the universe, if it brought him face to face with what he
must stand near to--see--hear--perhaps touch.

It was because of the world's madness, because of the human fear and
weeping everywhere, because of the new abysses which seemed to yawn
every day on every side, that both soul and senses were so abnormally
overstrung. He was overwhelmed by exquisite compassions in his thoughts
of Robin, he was afraid for her youngness, her sweetness, the innocent
defencelessness which was like a child's. He was afraid of his own young
rashness and the entrancement of the dream. The great lunging chariot of
War might plunge over them both.

But never for one moment could he force himself to regret or repent.
Boys in their twenties already lay in their thousands on