Chapter 19

I walked along, got to my club and upstairs into my room peaceably. A
feeling of entire tranquillity had come over me. I rested after a strife
which had issued in a victory whose meaning was too great to comprehend
and enjoy at once. I only knew that it was great because there seemed
nothing more left to do. Everything reposed within me--even conscience,
even memory, reposed as in death. I had risen above them, and my
thoughts moved serenely as in a new light, as men move in sunshine above
the graves of the forgotten dead. I felt like a man at the beginning of
a long holiday--an indefinite space of idleness with some great
felicity--a felicity too great for words, too great for joy--at the end.
Everything was delicious and vague; there were no shapes, no persons.
Names flitted through my mind--Fox, Churchill, my aunt; but they were
living people seen from above, flitting in the dusk, without
individuality; things that moved below me in a valley from which I had
emerged. I must have been dreaming of them.

I know I dreamed of her. She alone was distinct among these shapes. She
appeared dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness, and I braced
myself to the shock of love, the love I had known, that all men had
known; but greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit reward for
the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly she spoke. I heard a sound like
the rustling of a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an unknown
emotion made up of fear and of enthusiasm, as though she had been not a
woman but only a voice crying strange, unknown words in inspiring tones,
promising and cruel, without any passion of love or hate. I listened. It
was like the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate ... no love. No
love. There was a crash as of a falling temple. I was borne to the
earth, overwhelmed, crushed by an immensity of ruin and of sorrow. I
opened my eyes and saw the sun shining through the window-blinds.

I seem to remember I was surprised at it. I don't know why. Perhaps the
lingering effect of the ruin in the dream, which had involved sunshine
itself. I liked it though, and lay for a time enjoying the--what shall I
say?--usualness of it. The sunshine of yesterday--of to-morrow. It
occurred to me that the morning must be far advanced, and I got up
briskly, as a man rises to his work. But as soon as I got on my legs I
felt as if I had already over-worked myself. In reality there was
nothing to do. All my muscles twitched with fatigue. I had experienced
the same sensations once after an hour's desperate swimming to save
myself from being carried out to sea by the tide.

No. There was nothing to do. I descended the staircase, and an utter
sense of aimlessness drove me out through the big doors, which