Above the Dark Circus by Walpole Hugh;

Author:Walpole, Hugh; [Hugh Walpole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6124514
Publisher: Ktoczyta.pl

BOOK II

CHAPTER VIII. Shadow Pursuing

I did not at once realize that I was at last alone. It seemed to me that all of them–Buller, Osmund, Hench, Helen–were yet at my side as I pushed into the flaming icy stream. For that, I remember, was how it just seemed to me–to be flaming with light and brilliant with cold. I was without hat or coat–I was terrified. I must confess to that now, for this was the first moment (although it was not to be the last) during this evening when I was quaking, panic-driven with terror. All that I wanted at that particular instant was to flee, to hide myself, to bury myself, to escape from every kind of contact. It was not until later that the question of Helen, of my return to the flat, of my involving myself once more in the whole adventure, began to persecute me. I had in that first moment no thought at all of Helen. I thought only of myself.

And here, if you will forgive me for an instant, I must explain that I had, for months before this, been a driven fugitive. No one who has not experienced it can have any true notion of what it is to be day after day, week after week, month after month, without any means of subsistence at all, and to have beyond that no one in the world anywhere who cares the fall of a pin whether you have subsistence or no–but, worse than that, far, far worse, is to be, at my age, without any means at all of filling the twenty-four hours–day after day stretching in front of you, naked, bare and of an infinite, infinite length.

Many English officers who had deserved something of their country were in this state after the war until a lucky job found them, or, more probably, death from sickness, despair, suicide. I know that it was very easily said by those who were more secure that it was simple enough for these men to find some kind of work, that it was only, often enough, a kind of effete snobbishness that prevented them.

But that simply was not the truth. Thousands of men were ready for any job, were ready at last, I fear, for almost any degradation... that recurring emptiness of the endless succeeding days beats any Chinese torture for long-drawn malignity.

Well, I had been like that, and it had had its effect on my vitality, my vision, my courage, and my sense of reality. I have written these words here because, looking back on this strange half-hour that I am about to describe, I can see that I was not quite in my sane mind–it is my unbalanced vision that I am trying here to recover.

The first reaction of that same unbalanced vision was to the light. I saw, as I stood on the pavement outside that door, from a clock on the opposite side of the street that it was only half-past eight. Only

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