‘It is true. There’s nothing for it,’ he replied. She looked at him with mild surprise, but made no comment. When she had gone, he lay perfectly still, searching within the huge hollow space in his mind, hoping that in some neglected corner he would find the strength to keep him sane, the will to begin from the beginning. So much had to be altered; he had known it; and now this, too, the foundation on which everything else had rested. Lying there, still and frightened, he knew that the next few hours would bring him, finally, to sanity or madness. Either the loss of Veronica—not merely the loss but the need to reject every thought of her—would kill him, or it would set him free, and give meaning to his decision to sweep the violent and senseless elements from his life. Outside, the summer evening was bright; before darkness finally fell and the birds slept, he would have wrestled with his angel. The full meaning of Roderick’s message filtered piece-meal into his mind, crushing, exploding, searing, as its delayed action brought wave after wave of pain. And yet there was, at the core, a hint of release and a new strength. The night-sister, coming on duty, was told that Lumley was behaving strangely and seemed to be talking to himself; she went in to cheer him up, but met only perfunctory, listless answers, and his mutterings began again before she was out of the room: ‘the new life’, she heard him say. She was not unduly worried, being experienced enough to know that serious cases have minor relapses as a matter of course.

He himself knew only that the new life, if he could reach it without going mad or dying, contained his salvation. The long hours of slowly fading light witnessed the immensity of his struggle: it is true what he tells you, forward, to the new life, there is nothing for it. Now and then he slept, and in his tangled dreams caught glimpses of an unimaginable state of peace. There was nothing for it, time must carry him on, without a pause, forward, to the new life, it is true, it is true, I am sorry.

VIII

VIII

Charles was recovering. He could move his legs when they took the plaster off, and soon they gave him a stick with a rubber end to it and he was walking round the room.