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me, but I will neither expect

it nor allow for it. It is a habit man yields to, no more; and I will

be lord of that customary thing as I am of all, and draw power and

delight from it as I do from all. Who follows?”

 

Isabel, as if from a depth of meditation, answered: “But those that

die may be lordlier than you: they are obedient to defeat. Can you

live truly till you have been quite defeated? You talk of living by

your hurts, but perhaps you avoid the utter hurt that’s destruction.”

 

He smiled down at her. “Why, have it as you will,” he said. “But it

isn’t such submission and destruction that man desires.”

 

There was a little silence; then he said again, speaking to Roger:

“What. then will you do?”

 

Roger looked down at the floor, and only when a much longer silence

had gone by did he say, “Yes; I’ll come. You’re right—I’d decided

already, and I won’t go back.”

 

“Then”, Considine said, “tonight you will be at Bernard Travers’s

house, for I shall come there. And don’t fear for your wife, whatever

happens. I will not destroy London tonight.”

 

Roger looked up again sharply. “But-” he began.

 

There were voices in the hall; Muriel’s, Rosamond’s, others’. Roger

got up, looking over his shoulder, and turned. Isabel and Mottreux

also rose: only Considine stood motionless. The door opened and

Rosamond came in. Behind her were uniforms—a police inspector

followed, and another, and two or three men. The inspector said: “Mr.

Ingram?”

 

“What’s this about?” Roger asked staring.

 

“We’ve had information that there’s a man here whom we want,” the

inspector said, looking round, and letting his eyes rest on Considine.

“Mr. Nigel Considine?” he asked.

 

Considine did not speak or move.

 

“I’ve a warrant here for your arrest,” the inspector said, “on a

charge of high treason and conspiracy to murder.” He showed a paper

and stepped across the room. Mottreux said something, and the

inspector glanced at him. But he halted a pace or two away from

Considine, it might be to give his men time to come up, it might be

from hesitation in the sudden oppression that began to fill the room,

as if invisible waters flowed through it. The air weighed on them,

stifling them with its rich presence; the inspector put a finger to

his collar as he poised watchfully. Rosamond sank heavily on to a

chair; Roger drew deep breaths, sighing as he did sometimes in his

passion after repeating mighty verses aloud. The air spoke; in the

voice of Nigel Considine the element of life, echoing from all around,

said: “Whom?”

 

The inspector struggled forward; it needed labour, so heavily was he

oppressed by the depths into which the air had opened. He took a step

and staggered as he did so. The eyes fixed on him saw him rock and

steady himself; he said, holding himself upright, “Nigel Considine,

I-”

 

“I am Nigel Considine,” his great opponent answered, and also moved

forward, and the quiver that went through them all answered the

laughter in the voice. The inspector reeled again, half-falling

sideways, and as he recovered footing a sudden hand went out towards

him-whether it touched him or not they could not tell-and he stumbled

backward once more. The wind swept into their faces, and on it a

ringing laughter came, and in its midst Considine went on towards the

door, with Mottreux by him, sending towards Roger one imperious glance

from eyes bright with joy. The uniforms thronged and shifted and were

in confusion, and wind swirled in the room as if strength were

released through it, and Roger, half-dazed, ran forward and saw the

two visitors already in the hall. The inspector came heavily and

blindly back; he called out; his men moved uncertainly after Considine

who paused, turned, and paused again.

 

“I am Nigel Considine,” he cried out. “Who takes me?”

 

He flung out his arms as if in derisive submission, and took a step or

two towards them. They recoiled; there was renewed confusion, men

pressing back and pressing forward, men exclaiming and commanding.

Someone slipped and crashed against the doorpost, someone else, thrust

backward, tripped over a foot; there was falling and stumbling, and

through it Roger saw the wide-armed figure offering itself in

laughing scorn. Then, with a motion as if he gathered up the air and

cast it against them, so that they blinked and thrust and shielded

their eyes, he turned from that struggling mass of fallen and pushing

bodies, and went to the front-door. A panting Muriel leaned against

it; he laughed at her and signed, and hastily she drew away, opening

it, and he and Mottreux went through.

 

Roger gazed after him “I have lived,” he sighed. “I have seen the

gods. Phoebus, Phoebus, Python-destroyer, hear and save.”

Chapter Nine - THE RIOT AND THE RAID

Philip jumped on to a bus—any bus—the first he saw. He had been

walking for ever so long, and he must sit down. But also he must be

moving; he couldn’t be shut in. Things were worse than he had ever

imagined they could be; indeed he couldn’t quite imagine what exactly

they now were. The Hampstead flat was in a state of acute distress and

turmoil; he had arrived that evening innocently enough, to find half a

dozen policemen all arguing with Roger, who was glowering at Rosamond,

who was crying hysterically in Isabel’s arms, who was keeping, not

without difficulty, a grave sympathy with all of them. He had

naturally hurried to Rosamond, but not with the best effects; the

sight of him had seemed to distract her more than ever. Out of the

arguments and exclamations he had at last gathered—and more clearly

after the police had at last grimly withdrawn—that Considine had been

there, and that Rosamond, after she had realized who it really was,

had gone through a short period of conflict with herself on the right

thing to do. She said it had been conflict, and that only her duty…

whereas Roger, in a few words, implied that she had been delighted at

the chance, and that duty—except to herself—was a thing of which she

was entirely unconscious and incapable. Anyhow, after a very short

period she had rung up the police-station and explained to the

authorities there what was happening. Why the police hadn’t arrested

Considine Philip couldn’t understand. Isabel was concerned with her

sister, and Roger wasn’t very clear in his account. Somebody had gone

through the midst of somebody else; somebody had been like Pythian

Apollo. But he couldn’t bother about all that; he was too anxious

about Rosamond. Had he been challenged, he would have had to admit

that for a guest to try and have another visitor arrested in the

host’s drawing-room was not perhaps…though for Roger to call it

treachery was absurd. If anything, it was public spirit. He knew

nothing—Rosamond had seen to that—of such an orgy as the episode of

the chocolates which Isabel so clearly and reluctantly remembered; he

knew nothing of a greedy gobbling child, breaking suddenly away from

its ordinary snobbish pretences, giving way to the thrust of its

secret longings and vainly trying to conceal from others’ eyes the

force of its desires. She had cheated herself so long, consciously in

childhood, with that strange combination of perfect innocence and

deliberate sin which makes childhood so blameless and so guilty at one

and the same moment; less consciously in youth, as innocence faded and

the necessity of imposing some kind of image of herself on the world

grew stronger, till now in her first womanhood she had forgotten the

cheat, until her outraged flesh rebelled and clamoured from starvation

for food. And even now she would not admit it; she would neither fight

it nor flee from it nor yield to it nor compromise with it. She could

hardly even deny that it was there, for there was no place for it in

her mind. She, she of all people, could never be capable of abominably

longing to be near the dark prince of Africa; she couldn’t thrill to

the trumpets of conversion nor glow to the fires of ecstasy. Nor could

she hate herself for refusing them. But she could and inevitably did

hate the things that resembled them—Considine’s person and Roger’s

verse and Philip, all of Philip, for Philip to her agonized sense was

at once a detestable parody of what she wanted and a present reminder

of what she longed to forget. And now, like all men and all women who

are not masters of life, she swayed to and fro in her intention and

even in her desire. At Kensington she had shrunk away from Inkamasi

and fled from him; at Hampstead she thought of him and secretly longed

for him. Power was in her and she was terrified of it. She had been

self-possessed, but all herself was in the possessing and nothing in

the possessed; self-controlled, but she had: had only a void to

control. And now that nothing and that void were moved with fire and

darkness; the shadow of ecstasy lay over her life, and denying the

possibility of ecstasy she fled through its shadow as far as its edge,

and halted irresolute, and was drawn back by a fascination she loved

and hated. She was alive and she hated life; not with a free feeling

of judgement but with servile fear. She hated life, and therefore she

would hide in Hampstead; she lived, and therefore she would return to

Kensington. But neither in Hampstead nor Kensington, in Europe nor

Africa, in her vision of her unsubservient self, nor of her monstrous

master, was there any place for Philip, much less a Philip aware of

the exaltation of love.

 

But it was not till after, shocked and bewildered by the venom she had

flung at him in that dreadful scene, he had at last gone that she

began to fear that her relations with Kensington might have been

severed. And, not being there, she was determined to get back there.

She would run there and then run away, till the strait jacket of time

and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer

from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation

was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and

comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our

fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from

the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl

herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had

not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited

her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it

as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is

desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide.

 

Since Roger was so cruel to her, so detestably unfair, she would go to

Sir Bernard; there was no other friend in London on whom she could

descend without notice. Sir Bernard would understand her motives; he’d

tried to get that hateful man arrested. Isabel tried her best to

prevent her, saying even that Roger might be going away. But this

didn’t seem to placate Rosamond, and at last Isabel said no more.

Roger said nothing at all until Rosamond had left them “to put some of

her things together.” Isabel said: “I’m not sure that it’s a bad

thing: Sir Bernard may be able to do something. What she needs is a

sleeping-draught.”

 

“What she needs”, Roger said, “is prussic acid.”

 

Meanwhile Philip had walked, walked millions of miles, it seemed,

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