I. — THE NEW LIFE
She was standing on
Westminster Bridge. It was twilight, but the City was no longer dark.
The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the
buildings shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left
undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint
stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true that formal
peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting
had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed, and one more
crisis of agony was done. Labour, intelligence, patience—much need
for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery,
but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair.
Lester Furnival stood and
looked at the City while the twilight deepened. The devastated areas
were hidden; much was to be done but could be. In the distance she
could hear an occasional plane. Its sound gave her a greater sense of
relief than the silence. It was precisely not dangerous; it promised
a truer safety than all the squadrons of fighters and bombers had
held. Something was ended, and those remote engines told her so. The
moon was not yet risen; the river was dark below. She put her hand on
the parapet and looked at it; it should make no more bandages if she
could help it. It was not a bad hand, though it was neither so clean
nor so smooth as it had been years ago, before the war. It was
twenty-five now, and to her that seemed a great age. She went on
looking at it for a long while; in the silence and the peace, until
it occurred to her that the silence was very prolonged, except for
that recurrent solitary plane. No one, all the time she had been
standing there, had crossed the bridge; no voice, no step, no car had
sounded in the deepening night.
She took her hand off the
wall, and turned. The bridge was as empty as the river; no vehicles
or pedestrians here, no craft there. In all that City she might have
been the only living thing. She had been so impressed by the sense of
security and peace while she had been looking down at the river that
only now did she begin to try and remember why she was there on the
bridge. There was a confused sense in her mind that she was on her
way somewhere; she was either going to or coming from her own flat.
It might have been to meet Richard, though she had an idea that
Richard, or someone with Richard, had told her not to come. But she
could not think of anyone, except Richard, who was at all likely to
do so, and anyhow she knew she had been determined to come. It was
all mixed up with that crash which had put everything out of her
head; and as she lifted her eyes, she saw beyond the Houses and the
Abbey the cause of the crash, the plane lying half in the river and
half on the Embankment. She looked at it with a sense of its
importance to her, but she could not tell why it should seem so
important. Her only immediate concern with it seemed to be that it
might have blocked the direct road home to her flat, which lay beyond
Millbank and was where Richard was or would be and her own chief
affairs. She thought of it with pleasure; it was reasonably new and
fresh, and they had been lucky to get it when Richard and she had
been married yesterday. At least—yesterday? well, not yesterday but
not very much longer than yesterday, only the other day. It had been
the other day. The word for a moment worried her; it had been indeed
another, a separate, day. She felt as if she had almost lost her
memory of it, yet she knew she had not. She had been married, and to
Richard.
The plane, in the
thickening darkness, was now but a thicker darkness, and
distinguishable only because her eyes were still fixed on it. If she
moved she would lose it. If she lost it, she would be left in the
midst of this —this lull. She knew the sudden London lulls well
enough, but this lull was lasting absurdly long. All the lulls she
had ever known were not as deep as this, in which there seemed no
movement at all, if the gentle agitation of the now visible stars
were less than movement, or the steady flow of the river beneath her;
she had at least seen that flowing—or had she? was that also still?
She was alone with this night in the City—a night of peace and
lights and stars, and of bridges and streets she knew, but all in a
silence she did not know, so that if she yielded to the silence she
would not know those other things, and the whole place would be
different and dreadful.
She stood up from the
parapet against which she had been leaning, and shook herself
impatiently. "I'm moithering," she said in a word she had
picked up from a Red Cross companion, and took a step forward. If she
could not get directly along Millbank, she must go round. Fortunately
the City was at least partially lit now. The lights in the houses
shone out, and by them she could see more clearly than in the bad old
days. Also she could see into them; and somewhere in her there was a
small desire to see someone—a woman reading, children playing, a
man listening to the wireless; something of that humanity which must
be near, but of which on that lonely bridge she could feel nothing.
She turned her face towards Westminster and began to walk.
She had hardly taken a
dozen steps when she stopped. In the first moment, she thought it was
only the echo of her own steps that she heard, but immediately she
knew it was not. Someone else, at last, was there; someone else was
coming, and coming quickly. Her heart leapt and subsided; the sound
at once delighted and frightened her. But she grew angry with this
sort of dallying, this over-consciousness of sensation. It was more
like Richard than herself. Richard could be aware of sensation so and
yet take it in its stride; it was apt to distract her. She had
admired him for it, and still did; only now she was a little envious
and irritated. She blamed Richard for her own incapacity. She had
paused, and before she could go on she knew the steps. They were his.
Six months of marriage had not dulled the recognition; she knew the
true time of it at once. It was Richard himself coming. She went
quickly on.
In a few moments she saw
him; her eyes as well as her ears recognized him. Her relief
increased her anger. Why had he let her in for this inconvenience?
had they arranged to meet? if so, why had he not been there? why had
she been kept waiting? and what had she been doing while she had been
kept lingering? The lack of memory drove her on and increased her
irritation. He was coming. His fair bare head shone dark gold under a
farther street lamp; under the nearer they came face to face.
He stopped dead as he saw
her, and his face went white. Then he sprang towards her. She threw
up her hand as if to keep him off. She said, with a coldness against
her deeper will, but she could not help it: "Where have you
been? what have you been doing? I've been waiting."
He said: "How did you
get out? what do you mean waiting?"
The question startled her.
She stared at him. His own gaze was troubled and almost inimical;
there was something in him which scared her more. She wondered if she
were going to faint, for he seemed almost to float before her in the
air and to be far away. She said: "What do you mean? Where are
you going? Richard!"
For he was going—in
another sense. Her hand still raised, in that repelling gesture, she
saw him move backwards, uncertainly, out of the range of that dimmed
light. She went after him; he should not evade her. She was almost up
to him, and she saw him throw out his hands towards her. She caught
them; she knew she caught them, for she could see them in her own,
but she could not feel them. They were terrifying, and he was
terrifying. She brought her hands against her breast, and they grew
fixed there, as, wide-eyed with anger and fear, she watched him
disappearing before her. As if he were a ghost he faded; and with him
faded all the pleasant human sounds—feet, voices, bells, engines,
wheels—which now she knew that, while she had talked to him, she
had again clearly heard. He had gone; all was silent. She choked on
his name; it did not recall him. He had vanished, and she stood once
more alone.
She could not tell how
long she stood there, shocked and impotent to move. Her fear was at
first part of her rage, but presently it separated itself, and was
cold in her, and became a single definite thought. When at last she
could move, could step again to the parapet and lean against it and
rest her hands on it, the thought possessed her with its desolation.
It dominated everything—anger and perplexity and the silence; it
was in a word —"Dead," she thought, "dead." He
could not otherwise have gone; never in all their quarrels had he
gone or she; that certainty had allowed them a licence they dared not
otherwise have risked. She began to cry—unusually, helplessly,
stupidly. She felt the tears on her face and peered at the parapet
for her handbag and a handkerchief, since now she could not—O
despair!—borrow his, as with her most blasting taunts she had
sometimes done. It was not on the parapet. She took a step or two
away, brushed with her hand the tears from her eyes, and looked about
the pavement. It was not on the pavement. She was crying in the
street and she had neither handkerchief nor powder. This was what
happened when Richard was gone, was dead. He must be dead; how else
could he be gone? How else could she be there, and so?
Dead, and she had done it
once too often. Dead, and this had been their parting. Dead; her
misery swamped her penitence. They had told each other it made no
difference, and now it had made this. They had reassured each other
in their reconciliations, for though they had been fools and
quick-tempered, high egotists and bitter of tongue, they had been
much in love and they had been but fighting their way. But she felt
her own inner mind had always foreboded this. Dead; separate; for
ever separate. It did not, in that separation, much matter who was
dead. If it had been she—
She. On the instant she
knew it. The word still meant to her so much only this separation
that the knowledge did not at first surprise her. One of them was;
she was. Very well; she was. But then—she was. On that apparent
bridge, beneath those apparent stars, she stood up and knew it. Her
tears stopped and dried; she felt the stiffness and the stains on her
apparent flesh. She did not now doubt the fact and was still not
surprised. She remembered what had happened—herself setting out to
meet Evelyn at the Tube, and instead coming across her just over
there, and their stopping. And then the sudden loud noise, the
shrieks, the violent pain. The plane had crashed on them. She had
then, or very soon after, become what she now was.
She was no longer crying;
her misery had frozen. The separation she endured was deeper than
even she had believed. She had seen Richard for the last time, for
now she herself was away, away beyond him. She was entirely cut off;
she was dead. It was now a more foreign word than it had ever been
and it meant this. She could perhaps, if it was he who had been dead,
have gone to him; now she could not. She could never get back to him,
and he would never come to her. He could not: she had thrown him
away. It was all quite proper; quite inevitable. She had pushed him
away, and there was an end to Richard. But there was no end to her.
Never in her life had she
contemplated so final an end which was no end. All change had carried
on some kind of memory which was encouragement. She had not always
supposed it to be so; she had told herself, when she left school,
when she was married, that she was facing a new life. But she had, on
the whole, been fortunate in her passage, and some pleasantness in
her past had always offered her a promise in the future. This however
was a quite new life. Her good fortune had preserved her from any
experience of that state which is—almost adequately—called
"death-in-life;" it had consequently little prepared her
for this life-in-death. Her heart had not fallen ever, ever—through
an unfathomed emptiness, supported only on the fluttering wings of
every-day life; and not even realizing that it was so supported. She
was a quite ordinary, and rather lucky, girl, and she was dead.
Only the City lay silently
around her; only the river flowed below, and the stars flickered
above, and in the houses lights shone. It occurred to her presently
to wonder vaguely—as in hopeless affliction men do wonder —why
the lights were shining. If the City were as empty as it seemed, if
there were no companion anywhere, why the lights? She gazed at them,
and the wonder flickered and went away, and after a while returned
and presently went away again, and so on for a long time. She
remained standing there, for though she had been a reasonably
intelligent and forceful creature, she had never in fact had to
display any initiative—much less such initiative as was needed
here. She had never much thought about death; she had never prepared
for it; she had never related anything to it; She had nothing
whatever to do with it, or (therefore) in it. As it seemed to have
nothing to offer her except this wide prospect of London, she
remained helpless. She knew it was a wide prospect, for after she had
remained for a great while in the dark it had grown slowly light
again. A kind of pale October day had dawned, and the lights in the
apparent houses had gone out; and then it had once more grown dark,
and they had shone—and so on—twenty or thirty times. There had
been no sun. During the day she saw the River and the City; during
the night, the stars. Nothing else.
Why at last she began to
move she could not have said. She was not hungry or thirsty or cold
or tired—well, perhaps a little cold and tired, but only a little,
and certainly not hungry or thirsty. But if Richard, in this new
sense, were not coming, it presently seemed to her useless to wait.
But besides Richard, the only thing in which she had been interested
had been the apparatus of mortal life; not people—she had not cared
for people particularly, except perhaps Evelyn; she was sincerely
used to Evelyn, whom she had known at school and since; but apart
from Evelyn, not people—only the things they used and lived in,
houses, dresses, furniture, gadgets of all kinds. That was what she
had liked, and (if she wanted it now) that was what she had got. She
did not, of course, know this, and she could not know that it was the
sincerity of her interest that procured her this relaxation in the
void. If Richard had died, this would have remained vivid to her.
Since she was dead, it remained also, though not (stripped of all
forms of men and women) particularly vivid.
She began to walk. It did
not much matter which way. Her first conscious movement—and even
that was hardly a movement of volition—was to look over her
shoulder in the seeming daylight to see if the plane were there. It
was, though dimmer and smaller, as if it were fading. Would the whole
City gradually fade and leave her to emptiness? Or would she too
fade? She did not really attempt to grapple with the problem of her
seeming body; death did not offer her problems of that sort. Her body
in life had never been a problem; she had accepted it, inconveniences
and all, as a thing that simply was. Her pride—and she had a good
deal of pride, especially sexual—had kept her from commitments
except with Richard. It was her willingness to commit herself with
Richard that made her believe she (as she called it) loved Richard,
though in her bad moments she definitely wished Richard, in that
sense, to love her more than she loved him. But her bad moments were
not many. She really did want, need, and (so far) love Richard. Her
lack and longing and despair and self-blame were sincere enough, and
they did not surprise her. It had been plain honest passion, and
plain honest passion it remained. But now the passion more and more
took the form of one thought; she had done it again, she had done it
once too often, and this was the unalterable result.
She began to walk. She
went up northward. That was instinct; she at least knew that part of
London. Up from the bridge, up Whitehall—no-one. Into Trafalgar
Square—no-one. In the shops, in the offices—no-one. They were all
full and furnished with everything but man. At moments, as she
walked, a horrible fancy took her that those at which she was not, at
the moment, looking were completely empty; that everything was but a
facade, with nothing at all behind it; that if she had walked
straight through one of those shops, she would come out into entire
nothing. It was a creeping sensation of the void; she herself could
not have put it into words. But there the suspicion was.
She came to the bottom of
Charing Cross Road, and began to go up it. In front of her she saw
the curtains of brick that hid the entrances to Leicester Square Tube
Station. By one of them, on the opposite side of the road, someone
was standing. She was still not conscious of any shock of surprise or
of fear or even of relief. Her emotions were not in action. There had
been no-one; there was now someone. It was not Richard; it was
another young woman. She crossed the road towards the unknown; it
seemed the thing to do. Unknown? not unknown. It was—and now she
did feel a faint surprise—it was Evelyn. In the sudden recollection
of having arranged to meet Evelyn there, she almost forgot that she
was dead. But then she remembered that their actual meeting had been
accidental. They had both happened to be on their way to their
appointed place. As she remembered, she felt a sudden renewal of the
pain and of the oblivion. It did not remain. There was nothing to do
but go on. She went on.
The figure of Evelyn moved
and came towards her. The sound of her heels was at first hideously
loud on the pavement as she came, but after a step or two it dwindled
to almost nothing. Lester hardly noticed the noise at the time or its
diminution; her sense was in her eyes. She absorbed the approaching
form as it neared her with a growing intensity which caused her
almost to forget Richard. The second-best was now the only best. As
they drew together, she could not find anything to say beyond what
she had said a hundred times—dull and careless: "O hallo,
Evelyn!" The sound of the words scared her, but much more the
immediate intolerable anxiety about the reply: would it come? It did
come. The shape of her friend said in a shaking voice: "O hallo,
Lester!"
They stopped and looked at
each other. Lester could not find it possible to speak of their
present state. Evelyn stood before her, a little shorter than she,
with her rather pinched face and quick glancing black eyes. Her black
hair was covered by a small green hat. She wore a green coat; and her
hands were fidgeting with each other. Lester saw at once that she
also was without a handbag. This lack of what, for both of them, was
almost, if not quite, part of their very dress, something without
which they were never seen in public; this loss of handkerchief,
compact, keys, money, letters, left them peculiarly desolate. They
had nothing but themselves and what they wore —no property, no
convenience. Lester felt nervous of the loss of her dress itself; she
clutched it defensively. Without her handbag she was doubly forlorn
in this empty City. But Evelyn was there, and Evelyn was something.
They could, each of them, whatever was to happen, meet it with
something human close by. Poor deserted vagrants as they were, they
could at least be companions in their wanderings.
She said: "So you're
here!" and felt a little cheered. Perhaps soon she would be able
to utter the word death. Lester had no lack of courage. She had
always been willing, as it is called, "to face facts";
indeed, her chief danger had been that, in a life with no particular
crisis and no particular meaning, she would invent for herself facts
to face. She had the common, vague idea of her age that if your
sexual life was all right you were all right, and she had the common
vague idea of all ages that if you (and your sexual life) were not
all right, it was probably someone else's fault—perhaps
undeliberate, but still their fault. Her irritation with her husband
had been much more the result of power seeking material than mere
fretfulness. Her courage and her power, when she saw Evelyn, stirred;
she half-prepared a part for them to play—frankness, exploration,
daring. Oh if it could but have been with Richard!
Evelyn was speaking. Her
quick and yet inaccurate voice rippled in words and slurred them. She
said: "You have been a long time. I quite thought you wouldn't
be coming. I've been waiting—you can't think how long. Let's go
into the Park and sit down."
Lester was about to answer
when she was appalled by the mere flat ordinariness of the words. She
had been gripping to herself so long her final loss of Richard that
she had gripped also the new state in which they were. This talk of
sitting down in the Park came over her like a nightmare, with a
nightmare's horror of unreality become actual. She saw before her the
entrance to the station, and she remembered they had meant to go
somewhere by Tube. She began, with an equal idiocy, to say: "But
weren't we—" when Evelyn gripped her arm. Lester disliked
being held; she disliked Evelyn holding her; now she disliked it more
than ever. Her flesh shrank. Her eyes were on the station entrance,
and the repulsion of her flesh spread. There was the entrance; they
had meant to go—yes, but there could not now be any Tube below; or
it would be as empty as the street. A medieval would have feared
other things in such a moment—the way perhaps to the citta dolente,
or the people of it, smooth or hairy, tusked or clawed, malicious or
lustful, creeping and clambering up from the lower depths. She did
not think of that, but she did think of the spaces and what might
fill them; what but the dead? Perhaps—in a flash she saw
them—perhaps there the people, the dead people, of this empty City
were; perhaps that was where the whole population had been lying,
waiting for her too, the entrance waiting and all below the entrance.
There were things her courage could not face. Evelyn's clutch on her
arm was light, light out of all proportion to the fear in Evelyn's
eyes, but in her own fear she yielded to it. She allowed herself to
be led away.
They went into the Park;
they found a seat; they sat down. Evelyn had begun to talk, and now
she went on. Lester had always known Evelyn talked a good deal, but
she had never listened to more than she chose. Now she could not help
listening, and she had never before heard Evelyn gabble like this.
The voice was small and thin as it usually was, but it was speedier
and much more continuous. It was like a river; no, it was like
something thrown about on a river, twisted and tossed. It had no
pressure; it had no weight. But it went on. She was saying—"that
we wouldn't go to see it to-day, after all. I mean, there aren't many
people about, and I do hate an empty theatre, don't you? Even a
cinema. It always seems different. I hate not being with people.
Should we go and see Betty? I know you don't much care for Betty, or
her mother. I don't like her mother myself, though of course with
Betty she must have had a very difficult time. I wish I could have
done more for her, but I did try. I'm really very fond of Betty, and
I've always said that there was some simple explanation for that odd
business with the little German refugee a year or two ago. Naturally
I never said anything to her about it, because she's almost morbidly
shy, isn't she? I did hear that that painter had been there several
times lately; what's his name? Drayton; he's a friend of your
husband, isn't he? but I shouldn't think he—"
Lester said—if she said;
she was not certain, but she seemed to say: "Be quiet, Evelyn."
The voice stopped. Lester
knew that she had stopped it. She could not herself say more. The
stillness of the City was immediately present again, and for a moment
she almost regretted her words. But of the two she knew she preferred
the immense, the inimical stillness to that insensate babble. Death
as death was preferable to death mimicking a foolish life. She sat,
almost defiantly, silent; they both sat silent. Presently Lester
heard by her side a small and curious noise. She looked round. Evelyn
was sitting there crying as Lester had cried, the tears running down
her face, and the small noise came from her mouth. She was shaking
all over, and her teeth were knocking together. That was the noise.
Lester looked at her. Once
she would have been impatient or sympathetic. She felt that, even
now, she might be either, but in fact she was neither. There was
Evelyn, crying and chattering; well, there was Evelyn crying and
chattering. It was not a matter that seemed relevant. She looked away
again. They went on sitting.
The first shadow of
another night was in the sky. There was never any sun, so it could
not sink. There was a moon, but a moon of some difference, for it
gave no light. It was large and bright and cold, and it hung in the
sky, but there was no moonlight on the ground. The lights in the
houses would come on, and then go out. It was certainly growing
darker. By her side the chattering went on; the crying became more
full of despair. Lester dimly remembered that she would once have
been as irritated by it as all but the truly compassionate always are
by misery. Now she was not. She said nothing; she did nothing. She
could not help being aware of Evelyn, and a slow recollection of her
past with Evelyn forced itself on her mind. She knew she had never
really liked Evelyn, but Evelyn had been a habit, almost a drug, with
which she filled spare hours. Evelyn usually did what Lester wanted.
She would talk gossip which Lester did not quite like to talk, but
did rather like to hear talked, because she could then listen to it
while despising it. She kept Lester up to date in all her less decent
curiosities. She came because she was invited and stayed because she
was needed. They went out together because it suited them; they had
been going out that afternoon because it suited them; and now they
were dead and sitting in the Park because it had suited someone or
something else—someone who had let a weakness into the plane or had
not been able to manage the plane, or perhaps this City of facades
which in a mere magnetic emptiness had drawn them to be there, just
there.
Still motionlessly gazing
across the darkening Park, Lester thought again of Richard. If
Richard had been in distress by her side—not, of course, crying and
chattering, more likely dumb and rigid—would she have done
anything? She thought probably not. But she might, she certainly
might, have cried to him. She would have expected him to help her.
But she could not think of it; the pang took her too quickly; he was
not there and could not be. Well... the pang continued, but she was
growing used to it. She knew she would have to get used to it.
The voice by her side
spoke again. It said, through its sobs, the sobs catching and
interrupting it: "Lester! Lester, I'm so frightened." And
then again: "Lester, why won't you let me talk?"
Lester began: "Why—"
and had to pause, for in the shadow her voice was dreadful to her. It
did not sound like a voice; only like an echo. In the apparent
daylight, it had not been so bad, but in this twilight it seemed only
like something that, if it was happening at all, was happening
elsewhere. It could not hold any meaning, for all meaning had been
left behind; in her flat perhaps which she would never occupy again;
or perhaps with the other dead in the tunnels of the Tube; or perhaps
farther away yet, with, whatever it was that had drawn them there and
would draw them farther; this was only a little way—Oh what else
remained to know?
She paused, but she would
not be defeated. She forced herself to speak; she could and would
dare that at least. She said: "Why... Why do you want to talk
now?"
The other voice said: "I
can't help it. It's getting so dark. Let's go on talking. We can't do
anything else."
Lester felt again the
small weak hand on her arm, and now she had time to feel it; nothing
else intervened. She hated the contact. Evelyn's hand might have been
the hand of some pleading lover whose touch made her flesh creep. She
had, once or twice in her proud life, been caught like that; once in
a taxi—the present touch brought sharply back that other clasp, in
this very Park on a summer evening. She had only just not snapped
into irritation and resentment then; but in some ways she had liked
the unfortunate man, and they had been dining pleasantly enough. She
had remained kind; she had endured the fingers feeling up her wrist,
her whole body loathing them, until she could with sufficient decency
disengage herself. It was her first conscious recollection of an
incident in her past—that act of pure courtesy, though she did not
then recognize it either as recollection or as a courtesy. Only for a
moment she thought she saw a taxi race through the Park away before
her, and then she thought it could not be and was not. But she
stiffened herself now against her instinctive shrinking, and let her
arm lie still, while the feeble hand clutched and pawed at her.
Her apprehension quickened
as she did so. To be what she was, to be in this state of death, was
bad enough, but at the same time to feel the dead, to endure the
clinging of the dead, being dead to know the dead—the live man in
the taxi was far better than this, this that was Evelyn, the gabbling
voice, the chattering teeth, the helpless sobs, the crawling fingers.
But she had gone out with Evelyn much more than with the man in the
taxi; her heart acknowledged a debt. She continued to sit still. She
said in a voice touched by pity if not by compassion: "It's no
good talking, especially like that. Don't you understand?"
Evelyn answered,
resentfully choking, but still holding on: "I was only telling
you about Betty, and it's all quite true. And no-one can hear me
except you, so it doesn't matter."
No-one could hear; it was
true enough—unless indeed the City heard, unless the distant
facades, and the nearer facade of trees and grass, were listening,
unless they had in them just that reality at least, a capacity to
overhear and oversee. The thin nothingness could perhaps hear and
know. Lester felt all about her a strange attention, and Evelyn
herself, as if frightened by her own words, gave a hasty look round,
and then burst again into a hysterical monologue: "Isn't it
funny—we're all alone? We never thought we'd be alone like this,
did we? But I only said what was quite true, even if I do hate Betty.
I hate everyone except you; of course I don't hate you; I'm very fond
of you. You won't go away, will you? It's nearly dark again, and I
hate it when it's dark. You don't know what the dark was like before
you came. Why are we here like this? I haven't done anything. I
haven't; I tell you I haven't. I haven't done anything."
The last word rose like a
wail in the night, almost (as in the old tales) as if a protesting
ghost was loosed and fled, in a cry as thin as its own tenuous wisp
of existence, through the irresponsive air of a dark world, where its
own justification was its only, and worst, accusation. So high and
shrill was the wail that Lester felt as though Evelyn herself must
have been torn away and have vanished, but it was not so. The fingers
still clutched her wrist, and Evelyn still sat there, crying and
ejaculating, without strength to cry louder: "I haven't done
anything, anything. I haven't done anything at all."
And what then could be
done now? If neither Evelyn nor she herself had ever of old done
anything, what could or should they do now—with nothing and no-one
about them? with only the shell of a City, and they themselves but
shell, and perhaps not even true shell? only a faint memory and a
pang worse than memory? It was too much to bear. As if provoked by an
ancient impetuosity of rage, Lester sprang to her feet; shell or
body, she sprang up, and the motion tore her from the hand that held
her. She took a step away. Better go alone than sit so companioned;
and then as her foot moved to the second step she paused. Evelyn had
wailed again: "Oh don't go! don't go!" Lester felt herself
again thrusting Richard away, and she paused. She looked back over
her shoulder; half in anger and half in pity, in fear and scorn and
tenderness, she looked back. She saw Evelyn, Evelyn instead of
Richard. She stared down at the other girl, and she exclaimed aloud:
"Oh my god!"
It was the kind of casual
exclamation she and Richard had been in the habit of throwing about
all over the place. It meant nothing; when they were seriously
aggressive or aggrieved, they used language borrowed from bestiality
or hell. She had never thought it meant anything. But in this air
every word meant something, meant itself; and this curious new
exactitude of speech hung there like a strange language, as if she
had sworn in Spanish or Pushtu, and the oath had echoed into an
invocation. Nothing now happened; no-one came; not a quiver disturbed
the night, but for a moment she felt as if someone might come, or
perhaps not even that—no more than a sudden sense that she was
listening as if to hear if it was raining. She was becoming strange
to herself; her words, even her intonations, were foreign. In a
foreign land she was speaking a foreign tongue; she spoke and did not
know what she said. Her mouth was uttering its own habits, but the
meaning of those habits was not her own. She did not recognize what
she used. "I haven't done anything... Oh my God!" This was
how they talked, and it was a great precise prehistoric language
forming itself out of the noises their mouths made. She articulated
the speech of Adam or Seth or Noah, and only dimly recognized the
intelligibility of it. She exclaimed again, despairingly: "Richard!"
and that word she did know. It was the only word common to her and
the City in which she stood. As she spoke, she almost saw his face,
himself saying something, and she thought she would have understood
that meaning, for his face was part of the meaning, as it always had
been, and she had lived with that meaning—loved, desired, denounced
it. Something intelligible and great loomed and was gone. She was
silent. She turned; she said, more gently than she had spoken before:
"Evelyn, let's do something now."
"But I haven't done
anything," Evelyn sobbed again. The precise words sounded round
them, and Lester answered their meaning.
"No," she said,
"I know. Nor have I—much." She had for six months kept
house for Richard and herself and meant it. She had meant it;
quarrels and bickerings could not alter that; even the throwing it
away could not alter it. She lifted her head; it was as certain as
any of the stars now above her in the sky. For the second time she
felt—apart from Evelyn —her past present with her. The first had
been in the sense of that shadowy taxi racing through the Park, but
this was stronger and more fixed. She lived more easily for that
moment. She said again: "Not very much. Let's go."
"But where can we
go?" Evelyn cried. "Where are we? It's so horrible."
Lester looked round her.
She saw the stars; she saw the lights; she saw dim shapes of houses
and trees in a landscape which was less familiar through being so
familiar. She could not even yet manage to enunciate to her companion
the word death. The landscape of death lay round them; the future of
death awaited them. Let them go to it; let them do something. She
thought of her own flat and of Richard—no. She did not wish to take
this other Evelyn there; besides, she herself would be, if anything
at all, only a dim shadow to Richard, a hallucination or a troubling
apparition. She could not bear that, if it could be avoided; she
could not bear to be only a terrifying dream. No; they must go
elsewhere. She wondered if Evelyn felt in the same way about her own
home. She knew that Evelyn had continuously snubbed and suppressed
her mother, with whom she lived; once or twice she had herself meant
to say something, if only out of an indifferent superiority. But the
indifference had beaten the superiority. It was now for Evelyn to
choose. She said: "Shall we go to your place?"
Evelyn said shrilly: "No;
no. I won't see Mother. I hate Mother."
Lester shrugged. One way
and another, they did seem to be rather vagrants, unfortunate and
helpless creatures, with no purpose and no use. She said: "Well...
let's go." Evelyn looked up at her. Lester, with an effort at
companionship, tried to smile at her. She did not very well succeed,
but at least Evelyn, slowly and reluctantly, got to her feet. The
lights in the houses had gone out, but a faint clarity was in the
air—perhaps (though it had come quickly) the first suggestion of
the day. Lester knew exactly what she had better do, and with an
effort she did it. She took Evelyn's arm. The two dead girls went
together slowly out of the Park.