Lighting his pipe, the little yellow flame bright against young grass, he listened to the sound of a car climbing up a road in the distance, thrust the half-carbonized match into the soft earth, frowned. The scene was not quite what he had expected — it was curiously relaxed, random, directionless — and of course it was easy to see why, it was because Gerta wanted desperately to know exactly what he was going to do, but didn’t quite dare to ask him point-blank. She was probing, but probing without courage. Even now, in the slight droop of her shoulder, in the half-averted profile of which the expression was a deep powerlessness, he felt her to be about to give the whole thing up. She was discouraged, she was divided, her physical and moral loyalty to Sandbach was trying to assert itself, she was in the very act of listening to Sandbach’s voice. That madman Ammen. You must give up that madman Ammen. She was listening to this, but also she was feeling, and feeling profoundly, as if it were a kind of poison, the deep seal he had himself put upon her, that culminating moment of mystic communion between them when they had — as it were — tacitly agreed to share an insane secret. The voice of Kay! Sandbach was struggling violently in her against this ghost, the voice of Kay; she sat perfectly still; it was as if he were watching a stage from the opposite sides of which two choruses were trying to out-shout each other. Sandbach! It was in a sense Sandbach himself who ought to be destroyed, the loathsome and insinuating voice of reason, of common sense, the slimy voice of universal belongingness, of social safety, the shrill chorus of a world of parasites. His hatred rose suddenly and violently, the vision made him raise his head, the muscles in his arms tightened, his sense of time suddenly sharpened and became positively visual, as if the whole world were a swift and vast escalator moving rapidly upward towards the sun, towards the final flash of action. His own wisdom was omnipotent there, he had but to extend his hand, the right moment was near. He said:
— You’d better hurry back to the lower levels. You’d better listen to little Sandbach. It’s not very safe up here.
— My dear, it’s not myself I’m any longer concerned about, it’s you. It’s not very safe for you. I wish I could persuade you—
— Give it up. I’m beyond the pale.
— But of course I don’t quite believe you. It’s really nothing but a sort of fever, isn’t it? Couldn’t you go away for a time? Couldn’t you come with me to New York?
— New York! Good God!
— You’re not in a normal state.
— Is New York more normal?
This made her angry: she glared down at him Medusalike, with an admirable and delightful air of challenge, she looked somehow Hellenic.
— And what’s more, if you don’t come to your senses, I suppose we’ll have to do something about it!
— Who, exactly?
— All of us.
— Is that a threat?
— Just as you like!
He laughed, jumping up, stood above her laughing.
— Go ahead! But would you mind telling me what evidence you’ve got? Or who you propose to go to, or what you propose to say? Don’t be a fool. Nothing could be more harmless than my little attempt to make a scientific study of the habits of a stranger — and all with a view to writing a novel! Any time you want to look at my notes, my dear Gerta, you’re quite welcome. And if you think King Coffin would be of burning interest to the police, send them around, I’d be delighted to see them.… Can I drive you to Cambridge?
— No, thanks. I’m going back to Miss Bottrall’s. And I think I’ll walk.
— All right then — I’m off. Dislocation number — fill it in yourself! And I’ll see you in hell.
She looked up at him calmly, her hands on her knees, she seemed to be about to say something, but her lips remained closed, he noticed the little golden cord with which her blouse was knitted at the throat. With a wave of the hand he turned away, walked off whistling, was aware as he entered the path that she had not moved, still sat unmoving. Let her imitate Buddha as much as she liked, exert her pressures, sit there all afternoon, lie in the grass and cry, as she probably would — by all means! It would come to nothing. She would begin writing him letters again, telephoning to him at all hours, conferring with Sandbach and Julius, but the gesture would be helpless and fumbling and feminine, all three of them were helpless, as helpless as Jones himself; they could accomplish nothing. He broke a branch of birch, whipped it, as he walked, against other birches, until it was stripped of its leaves, dropped it before him in the green path and trod upon it. This was Sandbach. For a few seconds he stopped, stood still, closed his eyes — something had made him feel slightly sick, slightly giddy, the turmoil for a moment seemed unnatural — like the confused clamor of the echoed pistol shots, eeyah, eeyah, eeyah, a concentric and derisive chorus — but this passed, he opened his eyes again, and saw the sun just emerging with swimming rim, a pale lemon-yellow, from a bright edge of cloud. It was time caught in the act of moving, time in its dizzy descent to time.
X The Pure Murder
That he should fall asleep during the daytime was unusual, that he should fall asleep in a chair was stranger still; from a ragged fragment of dream, a wail of unintelligible voices in a darkening scene of leafless trees, he woke with a start to find that night had fallen, he had slept for two hours, it was after eight. The sea shell shone whitely on the window sill, there was a dim light in the little attic room of the club across the street, above the dark cowl of the ventilator on the roof were a few stars. The effect was odd, as of a profoundly mysterious hiatus in time, a sense of loss, and he sat still, listening to the delicate ticking of his watch, and trying to remember what it was, in the dream, that Gerta had said. Miles of aching arches of eyebrows—? was that it? It was something like that, but the words, even as he looked at them, seemed to be changing in shape, he could not be sure. And that he should have fallen asleep like this, in the midst of making notes, with the book on his knee — which now, with the pencil, had fallen to the carpet — this was subtly disturbing; and as he thought of it he felt his heart suddenly begin beating more loudly and quickly. Was there anything abnormal in it? It was true that he had not been sleeping well, as Toppan of course had reported gleefully to Gerta, but this was not at all because he was really worried, or because his nerves were in any way upset — not at all, not in the least. It was simply and solely because of late his conscious life had become so severely and energetically concentrated: the preoccupation had become so intense and unremitting that to break it off, for sleep, seemed a waste of time. No doubt, in the upshot, he had been more fatigued than he had supposed. One couldn’t go on working indefinitely without rest. And if in addition one was by nature more conscious than other people, and occupied, moreover, with a special problem, so that one’s consciousness was hourly deepening and widening, with a progressive increase in this peculiar interiorness of one’s life — an increase in its essential silence — why then it was natural enough that this should constitute not a strain exactly but at any rate a fatigue. That was it, of course! The scene with Gerta at Belmont, three days before, had somehow accentuated this; in some unanalyzable way had had the effect of still further emptying his world; and of leaving him there, for the future, alone with Jones. Henceforth, as he had seen almost at once, he was alone with Jones. They stood there together, at the center, like a man and his shadow.…
He gave a little shiver, the night had turned cool, got up to switch on the lights.