It occurred to me as scandalous that Palmer and Antonia, after the scene in which I had taken part in the drawing-room, should have gone out to the opera. Antonia ought to have been waiting for me to come back. I resented this indifference to the tempo of my own drama.
Charles, don’t destroy yourself,” said James. “Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?
Lucas hated other people, and also hated himself.
I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!
The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.
What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man’s searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.
I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?
Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.
But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.
Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.
That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.
It was a voyage into the absurd.
Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.
But I wanted to make what was terrible so much worse so as to be sure that it was fatal; like Hartley protecting herself by thinking I must hate her.
Bellamy thought, he is beginning to avoid me, my presence embarrasses him, my problems irritate him. I am becoming an unperson.
We are conditioned beings who salivate when the bell rings. This sheer conditioning is another of our most characteristic dooms. Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world.
Perhaps it was a case of time overflowing.
The only cure here was death. They were both gone out of my life.
Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton’s stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.
I’ll look after you, I’ll go with you anywhere, I won’t ever leave you.