an end;
there, in the heart of those mysterious spaces, were fitting place for
a poet to die!

CHAPTER V.

He turned to go back and descend to the shore below, but just then he
heard a strange whispering that reechoed through the passages. A flash
of light seemed to fly down the long gallery, driving the darkness
before it, and then a young man and a girl passed by, the former
holding a lighted match. He waited a moment, half-startled,
half-annoyed at their intrusion, then groped his way after them,
eventually stumbling out of the tunnel's mouth. And, as he descended
the incline again, he became aware of other couples standing about in
the shadows, within alcoves of the cliff, or seated on the grassy
slope just outside the wooden hand-rail. In his first abstraction he
had overlooked these.

He could not begin his swim here with the consciousness of all these
human beings so near at hand. He wanted the complete sense of
isolation from his fellow-creatures, the feeling that he and the
infinite were alone face to face. An idea came to him. On the other
side of the town stretched some miles of shingle at the foot of the
cliffs. Here he would seek the aloneness he felt to be imperative.

He started to walk briskly the length of the town, and his way took
him through the harbour again. Here again he caught glimpses of
isolated couples, leaning against the stacks of wood or half-lost in
the shade of some black hull rising high alongside the footways.

His perception of externals seemed to have grown keener; his glance
seemed to pierce where the shadows were thickest.

And all these couples gave him just then a sense of the vast, futile
movement of life on the planet, of the infinite succession of human
generations, each appearing and blossoming and mating and dying. He
seemed in that moment to feel a hideous meaninglessness in this tidal
wave of life travelling through the ages.

He crossed the railway line and passed on to the broad shingle that
sloped to the water's edge. The air was almost still, the water was
smooth and gentle. He set his face westward and trudged along, seeking
the place where his foot should stand on the solid shore for the last
time. He calculated to go about a mile, so as to be free from any
sense of the proximity of the town; but he was somewhat dismayed to
pass another couple after he had gone about a hundred yards.
Couples--couples everywhere! Should he never escape from them? How