o’clock in the morning: after the usual nightly circuit of the gilded pleasure resorts, cafés and more unsavoury dives and stews of the district, Starwick had become very drunk and unruly, had quarrelled with Elinor and Ann when they tried to take him home, and since that time had been wandering aimlessly through the district, going from one cheap bar to another.
The women hung on doggedly; Starwick had refused to let them accompany him, and they had asked Eugene to stay with him and try to keep him out of trouble. Eugene, in fact, was only less drunk than his companion, but fortified by that sense of pride and duty which a trust imposed by two lovely women can give a young man, he hung on, keeping pace with Starwick, drink for drink, until the whole night fused into a drunken blur, a rout of evil faces, the whole to be remembered later as jags of splintered light upon a chain of darkness, as flying images, fixed, instant, and intolerably bright, in the great blank of memory. And out of all these blazing pictures of the night and the wild reel of their debauch, one would remain for ever after to haunt his vision mournfully. It was the memory—or rather the consciousness—of the two women, Ann and Elinor, waiting in the dark, following the blind weave of their drunken path, all through the mad kaleidoscope of night, never approaching them, but always there. He had not seemed to look at them, to notice them, and yet later he had always known that they were there. And the memory fused to one final mournful image that was to return a thousand times to haunt him in the years to come. He and Starwick had come out of one of the bars that broke the darkness of the long steep hill, and were reeling down past shuttered stores and old dark houses towards the invitation of another blaze of light.
Suddenly he knew that Ann and Elinor were behind them. For a moment he turned, and saw the two women pacing slowly after them, alone, patient, curiously enduring. The image of that long silent street of night, walled steeply with old houses and shuttered shops, and of the figures of these two women pacing slowly behind them, in the darkness, seemed in later years to bear the sorrowful legend of what their lives—of what so much of life—was to become. And for this reason it burned for ever in his memory with a mournful, dark and haunting radiance, became, in fact, detached from names and personalities and identic histories—became something essential, everlasting and immutable in life. It was an image of fruitless love and lost devotion, of a love that would never come to anything, and of beautiful life that must be ruinously
