far away
in long lines, like strung-up beads of fire. A sinister loom as of a
hidden conflagration lit up faintly from below the mist, falling upon
a billowy and motionless sea of tiles and bricks. At the rattle of the
opened window the world seemed to leap out of the night and confront
him, while floating up to his ears there came a sound vast and faint;
the deep mutter of something immense and alive. It penetrated him with
a feeling of dismay and he gasped silently. From the cab-stand in the
square came distinct hoarse voices and a jeering laugh which sounded
ominously harsh and cruel. It sounded threatening. He drew his head in,
as if before an aimed blow, and flung the window down quickly. He made
a few steps, stumbled against a chair, and with a great effort, pulled
himself together to lay hold of a certain thought that was whizzing
about loose in his head.

He got it at last, after more exertion than he expected; he was flushed
and puffed a little as though he had been catching it with his hands,
but his mental hold on it was weak, so weak that he judged it necessary
to repeat it aloud--to hear it spoken firmly--in order to insure a
perfect measure of possession. But he was unwilling to hear his own
voice--to hear any sound whatever--owing to a vague belief, shaping
itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are the greatest
felicities of mankind. The next moment it dawned upon him that they are
perfectly unattainable--that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts
heard. All the words--all the thoughts!

He said very distinctly, and looking at the carpet, "She's gone."

It was terrible--not the fact but the words; the words charged with the
shadowy might of a meaning, that seemed to possess the tremendous power
to call Fate down upon the earth, like those strange and appalling words
that sometimes are heard in sleep. They vibrated round him in a metallic
atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron and the resonance
of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes of his boots he
seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of sound; to the
wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing streets, roofs,
church-steeples, fields--and travelling away, widening endlessly,
far, very far, where he could not hear--where he could not imagine
anything--where . . .

"And--with that . . . ass," he said again without stirring in the least.
And there was nothing but humiliation. Nothing else.