College students -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Murderers -- Fiction
About eleven o'clock of the next morning Olva went to see Margaret. He
had written to her the night before and asked her not to tell Rupert
the news of their engagement immediately, but, when the morning came, he
could not rest with that. He must know more.
It was a damp, misty morning, the fine frost had gone. He was going to
Margaret to try and recover some reality out of the state that he was
in. The recent incidents--Craven's suspicions, the 5th of November
evening, Bunning's alarm, the scene with Margaret--bad dragged him for
a time from that conviction that he was living in an unreal world. That
day when he had run in the snowstorm from Sannet Wood had seemed to him,
during these last weeks, absurd and an effect, obviously, of excited
nerves. Now, on this morning of the Dublin match, he awoke again to
that unreal condition. The bedmaker, the men passing through the Court
beneath his windows, the porter at the gate--these people were unreal,
and above him, around him, the mist seemed ever about to break into new
terrible presences.
"This thing is wearing me down. I shall go off my head if something
definite doesn't happen"--and then, there in his room with the stupid
breakfast things still on the table, the consciousness of the presence
of God seized him so that he felt as though the pursuit were suddenly at
an end and there was nothing left now but complete submission.
In this world of wraiths, God was the most certain Presence. . . .
There remained only Margaret. Perhaps she could recover reality for him.
He went to her.
He found her waiting for him in the little drawing-room and he could not
see her. He knew then that the Pursuing Shadow had taken a new step. It
was literally physically true. The room was there, the shining things,
the knick-knacks, the mirror, the scent of oranges. He could see her
body, her black dress, her eyes, her white neck, the movement towards
him that she made when she saw him coming, but there was nothing there.
It was as though he had been asked to love a picture.
He could not think of her at all as Margaret Craven or of himself
as Olva Dune. Only in the glass's reflection he saw the white road
stretching to the wood.
"I really am going off my head. She'll see that something's up"--and
then from the bottom of his heart, far away as though it had been the
cry of another person, "Oh! how I want her How I want her!"
He took her in his arms and kissed her and felt as though he were dead
and she were dead and that they were both, being so young am eager for
life, struggling to get back existence again.
Her voice came to him from a long distance "Olva, how ill you look! What
is it? What won't you tell me? There's something the matter with you all
and you all keep me in the dark."
He said nothing and she went on very gently, "It would be so much
better, dear, if you were to tell me. After all, I'm part of you now,
aren't I? Perhaps I can help you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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