He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross
and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the
outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour,
walking for walking's sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly
he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that
guard Cleopatra's Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out
of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop
had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.
Obelisk and sphinx--what were they doing by this gray river, under this
gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.
To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the
demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things,
where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where God and Nature are
more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts
as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was
supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.
London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.
But he would still be good for something out there. There were things
there that wanted doing; things that he could do; things that men died in
doing.
Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man
do more than die for his country?
And if Molly died?
Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her
heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he
stayed. Stanistreet was right there.
Her words came back to him: "It's all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?
Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.
Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating
her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.
A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.
The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure
of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was
looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard,
on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered,
flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently
beautiful.
He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly
into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she
moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was
fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the
forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have
been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he
saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife's dead beauty.