Chapter 16

We parted in London next day, I hardly know where. She seemed so part of
my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so
little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes
lost sight of her.

I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed
my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain
district, and then we had parted. Even afterward it was as if she were
still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon
me. She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a
mill-pond, moving more and more slowly. I had been for so long in the
shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this
light, this blazing world--it was a June day in London--seemed
impossible, and hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but very
slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future. It was as if I
stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.

I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in
and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the
home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I remembered that I had been
thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill. I had had
a letter from him on the morning of the day before. When I read it,
Churchill and his "_Cromwell_" had risen in my mind like preposterous
phantoms; the one as unreal as the other--as alien. I seemed to have
passed an infinity of æons beyond them. The one and the other belonged
as absolutely to the past as a past year belongs. The thought of them
did not bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensations that, as a
rule, come with the thoughts of a too recent _temps jadis_, but rather
as a vein of rose across a gray evening. I had passed his letter over;
had dropped it half-read among the litter of the others. Then there had
seemed to be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.

Now I should have to pick the letters up again, all of them; set to work
desolately to pick up the threads of the past; and work it back into
life as one does half-drowned things. I set about it listlessly. There
remained of that time an errand for my aunt, an errand that would take
me to Etchingham; something connected with her land steward. I think the
old lady had ideas of inducting me into a position that it had grown
tacitly acknowledged I was to fill. I was to go down there; to see about
some alterations that were in progress; and to make arrangements for my
aunt's return. I was so tired, so dog tired, and the day still had so
many weary hours to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I were
to come through it sane I must tire myself more, must keep on
going--until I