Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/470

 Here Peter came. Every part of him now seemed to be at war with every other part. Had he gone straight to Scaw House with bag and baggage and never left it again, then the Westcott tradition might have caught him when he was in that numbed condition—caught him and held him.

Now he had stayed away just long enough for all the old Peter to have become alive and active again.

He looked back upon London with a great shuddering. The torment that he had suffered there he must never undergo again. Norah was now the one friend left to him in the world. He would cut himself into pieces to make these last days of hers happy, and yet the one thing that could give her happiness was that he should promise to go back.

She did not understand—no one could understand—the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift—to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive—all this had come to him.

She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once more. To go back a failure—to be pointed out as the man whose wife left him because she found him so dull—to hear men like young Percival Galleon laughing at his book—to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a living—to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world—to break out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of debauch how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody knew nor cared!

And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance that Norah Monogue had held in his life.

Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He'd just do anything in the world for her!—anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down