Chapter 9 - Page 2

again. He couldn't exactly see at first how it had
been in the power of his late companion to extinguish them, since
it was neither for her nor by her that they had been called into
being. Then he understood that it was essentially in his own soul
the revival had taken place, and that in the air of this soul they
were now unable to breathe. The candles might mechanically burn,
but each of them had lost its lustre. The church had become a
void; it was his presence, her presence, their common presence,
that had made the indispensable medium. If anything was wrong
everything was - her silence spoiled the tune.

Then when three months were gone he felt so lonely that he went
back; reflecting that as they had been his best society for years
his Dead perhaps wouldn't let him forsake them without doing
something more for him. They stood there, as he had left them, in
their tall radiance, the bright cluster that had already made him,
on occasions when he was willing to compare small things with
great, liken them to a group of sea-lights on the edge of the ocean
of life. It was a relief to him, after a while, as he sat there,
to feel they had still a virtue. He was more and more easily
tired, and he always drove now; the action of his heart was weak
and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the action of his
fancy. None the less he returned yet again, returned several
times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a
renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience. In winter the
church was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the
glow of his shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.
He sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and
what she now did with the hours of her absence. There were other
churches, there were other altars, there were other candles; in one
way or another her piety would still operate; he couldn't
absolutely have deprived her of her rites. So he argued, but
without contentment; for he well enough knew there was no other
such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had once mentioned
to him as the satisfaction of her need. As this semblance again
gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he
found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her
darkness; for never so much as in these weeks had his rites been
real, never had his gathered company seemed so to respond and even
to invite. He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and
more what he had from the first wished it to be - as dazzling as
the vision of heaven in the mind of a child. He wandered in the
fields of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier to
tier, from fire to fire, from name to name, from the white