Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/159

147 what I want to be? A woman—to save me? Oh, God, God, God, God, I would I had never been born!—Nay, is it not strange that, in an hour of weakness like this, the only thing I cry out to for help is what I have always thought I despised as being itself incarnate weakness—woman! I don't know what's the matter with me. I'm not myself. Virtue is gone out of me. This must be a passing humour. I shall be strong again, as I used to be. Or was it that I did not know my weakness? … I don't know! ' A complete sense of loneliness and purposelessness seemed suddenly to grow like a great grey-cut chasm in me. I could struggle no more to find out what was the matter with me. I turned and let the current take me where it would.

From that depth of weariness I raised myself a little to take up a book off the table beside me and read it. It was no good staying stretched on the bottom of that dark submarinity in that way. Better kill myself at once; and that most certainly I would not do.… Why not? I was afraid of death? I didn't know. I had not thought about it. I would not think about it. A piano-organ was playing outside.

I looked out into the sunshiny day; for some little of the sunshine had entered me even then. I would go out for a walk. Nay, I would go and see where Rayne lived. Why not?

Away I went, and out for my walk—out and away to beautiful summer Hampstead, fresh and green from the late showers, in the soft lights of the early day. I did not think much of Rayne. I do not remember what I thought of: probably of hundreds of unconnected things, passing in a fairy-procession in the yellow-gold light before my eyes. I wandered about happily till about one o'clock, when hunger made itself perceptible, and I went off in the pursuit of bread and fruit and milk. Followed a Pythagorean feast on the grass, with delightful half-dreams as in the old time; till it occurred to me to return home and read. Accordingly, after a little trifling with resolution in the shape of dawdling about in hollows, looking at a small stream's meandering water, or the serried grasses and the earth, I fairly set off.