He got up because he couldn't sleep; and he couldn't sleep because of his sensations of impending death. There was no element of fear in it. He knew how to lie on the broad of his back in bed, and stare death calmly in the face with open eyes, wondering queerly how that last moment would taste, seeking vainly to analyse his unanalysable feelings; never once yielding to any swift panic desire to be assured of long life. By day he attempted no remedy of forgetfulness in the social excitements. His instinct never informed him when the event might be anticipated.
A torch was in his pocket. He should easily be back for breakfast, and it was an unutterable relief to be abroad again. The tingling morning air cooled his cheeks and toned his lungs, oxygenating him to a new carelessness of acceptance of his rearing night. Being a doom, by no contrivance of his to be avoided, he found its advancing increase immaterial and empty of menace. He might even be fated not to return to breakfast, and still it should not particularly matter. This underground stairway to be explored might do his business, but Helga had been spoken to, those people were to get back their own, his last scrap of earthly anxiety was removed, and to-day was as good for the purpose of his death as to-morrow or next week. It should be near.
The steady night downpour had reduced the temperature by twenty degrees, recharged the atmosphere with its highest carrying capacity of ozone, and set it briskly moving; the breeze blew straight off the moors, sharp, wrapping, flogging, wonderfully fresh and sweet. The sun was not yet up; and would not show when it should be, perhaps in not many minutes now. It would come up behind that long low band of cloud across the east. And he was glad that his humour was to escape a gaudy spectacle. The stern, clear-cut purity of this half-stormy silver dawn was worth many coloured sunrises. All was black and white. The soaking rains had brought out a hundred soft pungent odours of the soil, of the trees and bushes. In the second half of the morning the depression might finally spin off and the sky clear, but till then occasional showers still threatened; which was why a mackintosh was across his arm. The suit he had worn to the Tor last evening was wet yet, so he wished to keep this he had on dry.
Poetic by blood, and made additionally susceptible by that long series of broken nights, he fell quickly into the lonely mood of wild musical melancholy bequeathed him by his ancestors of the red-deer hills and rushing torrents and phantom mists. It was a formless melancholy, delicately ennobling the preoccupations of his brain, rather than presenting anything of its own. At the most, he knew it, without also knowing what it desired; he could express to himself no particular of the vague yearning that was like a drawing of all his fibres towards this natural world around him, as the moisture of the soil is invisibly drawn to the skies.
The mood was familiar, and since he could not understand it, he had long ago invented a formula for it. The mysterious hour and dusk, the aloneness of his being, the dark friendly trees, the intimate wind, and breaking sky—it, as its equivalent of sombre enchantment experienced elsewhere on earth, he recognised to be the right element of his eternal part. Yet it was all no more than hint. It stood for nothing of itself, but was the faint imperfect copy of heaven; the proof being that, though it might call, it could not satisfy, but on the contrary produced in him such states as disturbance, sullenness, infinite longing, sadness, despair. Thus he was inevitably reminded by it of some grander world not present. His formula, therefore, was that the merely beautiful might suffice a soul, but that the sublime (which was the shadow of the beauty of another world) could never suffice, since with it came gropings that must amount to pain. …
He crossed the deserted tarred main road, and at once plunged downwards
A torch was in his pocket. He should easily be back for breakfast, and it was an unutterable relief to be abroad again. The tingling morning air cooled his cheeks and toned his lungs, oxygenating him to a new carelessness of acceptance of his rearing night. Being a doom, by no contrivance of his to be avoided, he found its advancing increase immaterial and empty of menace. He might even be fated not to return to breakfast, and still it should not particularly matter. This underground stairway to be explored might do his business, but Helga had been spoken to, those people were to get back their own, his last scrap of earthly anxiety was removed, and to-day was as good for the purpose of his death as to-morrow or next week. It should be near.
The steady night downpour had reduced the temperature by twenty degrees, recharged the atmosphere with its highest carrying capacity of ozone, and set it briskly moving; the breeze blew straight off the moors, sharp, wrapping, flogging, wonderfully fresh and sweet. The sun was not yet up; and would not show when it should be, perhaps in not many minutes now. It would come up behind that long low band of cloud across the east. And he was glad that his humour was to escape a gaudy spectacle. The stern, clear-cut purity of this half-stormy silver dawn was worth many coloured sunrises. All was black and white. The soaking rains had brought out a hundred soft pungent odours of the soil, of the trees and bushes. In the second half of the morning the depression might finally spin off and the sky clear, but till then occasional showers still threatened; which was why a mackintosh was across his arm. The suit he had worn to the Tor last evening was wet yet, so he wished to keep this he had on dry.
Poetic by blood, and made additionally susceptible by that long series of broken nights, he fell quickly into the lonely mood of wild musical melancholy bequeathed him by his ancestors of the red-deer hills and rushing torrents and phantom mists. It was a formless melancholy, delicately ennobling the preoccupations of his brain, rather than presenting anything of its own. At the most, he knew it, without also knowing what it desired; he could express to himself no particular of the vague yearning that was like a drawing of all his fibres towards this natural world around him, as the moisture of the soil is invisibly drawn to the skies.
The mood was familiar, and since he could not understand it, he had long ago invented a formula for it. The mysterious hour and dusk, the aloneness of his being, the dark friendly trees, the intimate wind, and breaking sky—it, as its equivalent of sombre enchantment experienced elsewhere on earth, he recognised to be the right element of his eternal part. Yet it was all no more than hint. It stood for nothing of itself, but was the faint imperfect copy of heaven; the proof being that, though it might call, it could not satisfy, but on the contrary produced in him such states as disturbance, sullenness, infinite longing, sadness, despair. Thus he was inevitably reminded by it of some grander world not present. His formula, therefore, was that the merely beautiful might suffice a soul, but that the sublime (which was the shadow of the beauty of another world) could never suffice, since with it came gropings that must amount to pain. …
He crossed the deserted tarred main road, and at once plunged downwards
Similar Books
