perpetual deviation from what one expects, and their hands moving and making a thousand past days rise again in the darkness, shake my purpose.’
‘Something flickers and dances,’ said Louis. ‘Illusion returns as they approach down the avenue. Rippling and questioning begin. What do I think of you — what do you think of me? Who are you? Who am I?— that quivers again its uneasy air over us, and the pulse quickens and the eye brightens and all the insanity of personal existence without which life would fall flat and die, begins again. They are on us. The southern sun flickers over this urn; we push off in to the tide of the violent and cruel sea. Lord help us to act our parts as we greet them returning — Susan and Bernard, Neville and Jinny.’
‘We have destroyed something by our presence,’ said Bernard, ‘a world perhaps.’
‘Yet we scarcely breathe,’ said Neville, ‘spent as we are. We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed. All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth-coloured in this light; Susan’s eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us. And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you, torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone, some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we are worn out.’
‘After our fire,’ said Jinny, ‘there is nothing left to put in lockets.’
‘Still I gape,’ said Susan, ‘like a young bird, unsatisfied, for something that has escaped me.’
‘Let us stay for a moment,’ said Bernard, ‘before we go. Let us pace the terrace by the river almost alone. It is nearly bed-time. People have gone home. Now how comforting it is to watch the lights coming out in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers on the other side of the river. There is one — there is another. What do you think their takings
