conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though
he did not know why he could not. The capacity for suicide evidently
was not contained in his nature. He rejected the worm of Izrail; he
rejected, too, the other death. He must, then, live.

He washed and lay down on his bed. And directly he lay down he wondered
why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question. For
in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir
Carey Ingleton. When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have
decided. That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life,
the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations
with his kind. He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it. In paying
it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form
of life.

He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window. A
gust of wind came to him from the sea. It seemed to hint at a land that
was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places
in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he
was, or trouble about the past events of his life. There before him was
Asia rising out of the dawn. He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea
and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him. So he had
thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at
Marseilles. But he had not crossed to Africa.

The wind died away. It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering
guest of the morning. Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters
were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small
yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings. The wind had
been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its
bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, "Come with me!"

Once before he had felt something like that in a London Divorce Court,
but it had been fainter, subtler and perhaps warmer. The memory of his
curiosity about the unwise life returned to him, somehow linked with the
wandering wind. In his months of the living death he had often looked on
at it in the cities through which he had drifted, but he had never taken
part in it. He had been emptied of the force to do that by his misery.
Now he was conscious of force though his misery was not lessened, seemed
to him even to have increased. He had often been dulled by grief; now he
felt crue