They talked a long while together, Brangwen flushing like a
girl when the other did not understand his idiom. Then they said
good night, and shook hands. Again the foreigner bowed and
repeated his good night.
"Good night, and bon voyage."
Then he turned to the stairs.
Brangwen went up to his room and lay staring out at the stars
of the summer night, his whole being in a whirl. What was it
all? There was a life so different from what he knew it. What
was there outside his knowledge, how much? What was this that he
had touched? What was he in this new influence? What did
everything mean? Where was life, in that which he knew or all
outside him?
He fell asleep, and in the morning had ridden away before any
other visitors were awake. He shrank from seeing any of them
again, in the morning.
His mind was one big excitement. The girl and the foreigner:
he knew neither of their names. Yet they had set fire to the
homestead of his nature, and he would be burned out of cover. Of
the two experiences, perhaps the meeting with the foreigner was
the more significant. But the girl--he had not settled
about the girl.
He did not know. He had to leave it there, as it was. He
could not sum up his experiences.
The result of these encounters was, that he dreamed day and
night, absorbedly, of a voluptuous woman and of the meeting with
a small, withered foreigner of ancient breeding. No sooner was
his mind free, no sooner had he left his own companions, than he
began to imagine an intimacy with fine-textured, subtle-mannered
people such as the foreigner at Matlock, and amidst this subtle
intimacy was always the satisfaction of a voluptuous woman.
He went about absorbed in the interest and the actuality of
this dream. His eyes glowed, he walked with his head up, full of
the exquisite pleasure of aristocratic subtlety and grace,
tormented with the desire for the girl.
Then gradually the glow began to fade, and the cold material
of his customary life to show through. He resented it. Was he
cheated in his illusion? He balked the mean enclosure of
reality, stood stubbornly like a bull at a gate, refusing to
re-enter the well-known round of his own life.
He drank more than usual to keep up the glow. But it faded
more and more for all that. He set his teeth at the commonplace,
to which he would not submit. It resolved itself starkly before
him, for all that.
He wanted to marry, to get settled somehow, to get out of the
quandary he found himself in. But how? He felt unable to move
his limbs. He had seen a little creature caught in bird-lime,
and the sight was a nightmare to him. He began to feel mad with
the rage of impotency.