face blindly away from them and plunged ahead: it seemed to him that he could hear Starwick’s shout of recognition, his voice calling to him above the thousand mixed vociferations of the crowd—and like a man pursued by devils, he set his head down blindly and fled.
His life had passed into a state which, if not insane, was distinguished from insanity chiefly by a kind of quiescent understanding which surveyed the passage of time and his own actions with the powerless detachment of a spectator in a dream. Now, after this encounter with his three lost friends, even this sense of valuation was taken from him. In the weeks that followed he was caught in a spell of time in which his life passed in a kind of evil dream, and later he was no more able to recall what he had done, how he had lived, where he had gone during this period, than if he had been the subject of a powerful and complete hypnosis. He was only vaguely conscious of what had happened, he felt a numb sense of horrible catastrophe, such as a drowning man might feel, or an anæsthetized patient who is bleeding to death under the surgeon’s knife. He had a blind consciousness that some central governance of his life and reason had been exploded, that he was spinning down out of control like a shattered aeroplane—and that there was nothing he could do to save himself, that he could not get control again, that he could not “get back.”
He lost the time-sense utterly—and it was his consciousness of this that filled him with numb terror. He would return to his room at night telling himself that he must work, then sleep, then rise by day and work again, and suddenly his room would be filled with light, the street below his window would be loud with all the noisy business of noon, and he would be seated at his table, with no knowledge how the time had passed.
He was now haunted constantly by a sense of the overwhelming nearness of his three lost friends. This feeling, indeed, would become so overpowering that at times the living presences of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann seemed invisibly to be with him, beside him. And the knowledge that they were here—for his conviction had become the obsession of an unshakable belief—seemed to give to the strange and sinister life of the evil and mysterious city an unutterable magic, to infect the very air he breathed with an intolerable anguish and delight. His whole life—heart and mind and spirit, and every nerve and sense and sinew of his body—was now passionately, indefatigably on the search for them.
