9
For a time he lay quite still staring at the darkness, then he groaned and turned over. Then, suddenly, like one who fancies he hears a strange noise, he sat up in bed and listened. "Oh, God!" he said at last.
And then: "Oh! The DIRTINESS of life! The dirty muddle of life!
"What are we doing with life? What are we all doing with life?
"It isn't only this poor Milly business. This only brings it to a head. Of course she wants money…."
His thoughts came on again.
"But the ugliness!
"Why did I begin it?"
He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his eyes against the backs of his hands and so remained very still, a blankness beneath his own question.
After a long interval his mind moved again.
And now it was as if he looked upon his whole existence, he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persuasion, which only freshly soiled youth can feel in its extreme intensity, that life was slipping away from him, that the sands were running out, that in a little while his existence would be irretrievably lost.
By some trick of the imagination he saw life as an interminable Bond Street, lit up by night lamps, desolate, full of rubbish, full of the very best rubbish, trappings, temptations, and down it all he drove, as the damned drive, wearily, inexplicably.
WHAT ARE WE UP TO WITH LIFE! WHAT ARE WE MAKING OF LIFE!
But hadn't he intended to make something tremendous of life? Hadn't he come to London trailing a glory?…
He began to remember it as a project. It was the project of a great World–State sustained by an aristocracy of noble men. He was to have been one of those men, too fine and far–reaching for the dull manoeuvers of such politics as rule the world to–day. The project seemed still large, still whitely noble, but now it was unlit and dead, and in the foreground he sat in the flat of Mrs. Skelmersdale, feeling dissipated and fumbling with his white tie. And she was looking tired. "God!" he said. "How did I get there?"
And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed aloud to the silences.
"Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give me back my visions!"
He could have imagined he heard a voice calling upon him to come out into life, to escape from the body of this death. But it was his own voice that called to him….