Christ!
He opened his eyes quickly and blindly, as if to do so would stop the whirl of impressions and phrases — it was if he were drunk, or sick, and sought any sight of the world, any fragmentary and lurching vision of a wall or ceiling, to check the wild swoop of his vertigo. And now the daybreak was square and bright in the little window, as sharp and immediate as the tiny jeweled picture in the finder of a camera, each moving cloud separate and round and distinct and with a color forever its own, never to be repeated, immortal. It was as good as a cinema, as comforting as the sight of moving water, he lay and watched the irregular regularity of the cloud-procession, listened to the faint intermittent claw-grazing of the little rain, tried to fix his attention there, to avert his attention by averting his face. And for a while it was in fact as if he had managed to fall asleep with his eyes wide open. He felt like a cat, with the cunning of a cat, allowed his mind to be lulled by the activity of his eyes, permitted all the motion of his consciousness to concentrate there on the surface, in those two points of sight. His hands were still, his body was still, his feet were softly pressed against the footboard of the bed, he breathed as lightly as possible. It was the process of becoming a cloud, or of becoming nothing but a consciousness of cloud: even the sounds came to him only indistinctly and tangentially: he refused to admit them: the bell-sounds, the car-sounds, the slamming of a door, the milkman hurrying along the hall, clinking his bottles, the first morning hum of the elevator, summoned down to the second floor by Jack, the janitor — aware of these, he also dismissed them, allowing himself to become simply a recipient of light. It was all like a world of glass, translucent, brittle, precarious, but infinitely precious. It was like having an enormous pain, which even to breathe was to invite: as long as one held one’s breath, it vanished. When one breathed again, one tried it cautiously, round the edges and corners, one sent down to begin with the tiniest little tentacle of air, a silver thread of exploration—
But it was no use. It was all no use. As soon as one did try to breathe, that preposterous and incredible mountain of sensation was there again, the unbelievable shape once more had to be believed. As in a nightmare the figure of the old woman seen in the street reappears vaguely again in the distance at the quayside, or on the ship, perhaps altered and unrecognizable, and later is heard mounting the stairs behind one, with a sort of scrambling and sinister haste, coughing and sneezing as she comes, and to one’s gaze over the banisters lifts at last the face of which the horror, hitherto not admitted or confessed, is freely and lethally given, so to his consciousness, through all its elaborate structure of dispersal, came the beginnings and misremembered fragments of that conversation with Jones. It could not have happened, and yet it had happened: that he should have leaned there at the public telephone in the hall by the elevator, with Jack standing at the front door to take his last nocturnal look at the weather, holding a dust-cloth in his hand, and that instead of an unruffled arrangement of the final plan should have occured this sudden plunge into the murkiest and ugliest and most painful of unsolicited intimacies—
But why should it be painful? Why should he want both to think of it and not think of it?
You’ll have to excuse me, I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident—
An accident! The word looked a mile long, he was walking slowly from end to end of it, sparrows were chirping on the window ledge above Plympton Street, he must have slept. It was a quarter to eight, and still lightly raining. There was no time to lose, for Jones would probably go to Mount Auburn early — it wasn’t the sort of thing one dawdled about. And to make the necessary inquiries, one would have to get there first.
XIII The Stranger Becomes Oneself
The impulse was absurd, but he obeyed it, obeyed it with a kind of angry arrogance, he turned away from the Merle, deciding not to have any breakfast at all, and walked quite deliberately in the wrong direction, his back to Mount Auburn. At this point, when the pattern of one’s life was all speed and no detail, it was idle to ask oneself the reason for one’s decisions: one simply followed one’s feet. He followed his feet in the drizzle, the gray light, down Bow Street to Saint Paul’s Church, looked up at the Siennese tower — or was it Verona? — to observe through a light cloud of rain that the clock was on the stroke of eight, and that he would be in time for the Angelus. And as he entered, and stood at the back of the ornate and hushed interior, watching the priest and the mass-servers begin the service for three or four women and himself, and hearing the bell strike its first faint triad of notes far up in the steeple, he became aware that he had really been intending to do this for a long time. It was only the other day, in fact, that he had almost done so—
— Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.
— Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
— Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, mater dei, ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
Blessed Mary, God’s mother, pray for us, now and in the hour of our death.
He tried to remember, while the priest and the mass-servers intoned the responses, and the soft bell again sounded its remote three overhead, just when this had been, and what had made him think of it. Et verbum caro factum est. Et habitavit in nobis … Ave Maria. The Latin phrases echoed with silver purity in the hollow church, as always the Catholic service seemed curiously hurried and casual, almost undignified, and yet from this very appearance of carelessness, even in the shambling movements of the surpliced priest and mass-servers, came all the more a sense of power and certainty: they themselves might cough or stumble, be graceless or inaudible, but the mystery sustained them. He watched them, frowning — half listened to the final sentences; suddenly the thing was unceremoniously finished; and it was then, as he turned again toward the door, that he remembered. It had been the very morning—
The thing shocked him, he walked quickly along the wet brick sidewalks of Mount Auburn Street.
It had been the very morning of his first discovery of Jones. And his purpose in the notion of going there, of course, had been simply to see if actually, in the church, he might not find his victim: some member of the congregation might turn out to be the supposititious Jones. He remembered it now quite clearly; he had thought of it while he was taking his shower, hearing the bells of the Angelus through the little window — the window from which he had then watched Mrs. Finden drying her hands and arms, putting on her rings. Yes. It seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote, and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and although it was still spring, somehow now it seemed as if he were looking back to it from another season, another year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new things, new undertakings — the stranger had not yet been discovered or his strangeness identified — the whole problem still remained metaphysical — a mere formula — and it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there had been an unmistakable sense of freedom which had at once, with the actual selection of Jones, disappeared. But more curious still was the fact that today, of all days, he should again have the impulse to go there. This was very peculiar, it had about it the air as of a compulsory completion of some obscure sort, like a forced move in chess. The idea had occurred to him casually, no doubt, but could he be sure that it had occurred without some deep reason? Its queer appropriateness — the appropriateness of the whole thing, the scene, the service, the words themselves — suggested a kind of rootedness in the pattern which it would be painful to investigate.