Above the Dark Tumult: An Adventure

I did not at once realize that I was at last alone. It seemed to me that all of them--Buller, Osmund, Hench, Helen--were yet at my side as I pushed into the flaming icy stream. For that, I remember, was how it just seemed to me--to be flaming with light and brilliant with cold. I was without hat or coat--I was terrified. I must confess to that now, for this was the first moment (although it was not to be the last) during this evening when I was quaking, panic-driven with terror. All that I wanted at that particular instant was to flee, to hide myself, to bury myself, to escape from every kind of contact. It was not until later that the question of Helen, of my return to the flat, of my involving myself once more in the whole adventure, began to persecute me. I had in that first moment no thought at all of Helen. I thought only of myself.

And here, if you will forgive me for an instant, I must explain that I had, for months before this, been a driven fugitive. No one who has not experienced it can have any true notion of what it is to be day after day, week after week, month after month, without any means of subsistence at all, and to have beyond that no one in the world anywhere who cares the fall of a pin whether you have subsistence or no--but, worse than that, far, far worse, is to be, at my age, without any means at all of filling the twenty-four hours--day after day stretching in front of you, naked, bare and of an infinite, infinite length.