many of the particulars of my journey to ireland have faded out of my mind altogether. i remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that at last i had to deal with accessible persons again....
the weather was windy and violent, and i was sea-sick for most of the crossing, and very tired and exhausted when i landed. williams had thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and i sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. i got to some little junction at last where i had to wait an hour for a branch-line train. i tasted all the bitterness of irish hospitality, and such coffee as ireland alone can produce. then i went on to a station called clumber or clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some difficulty i got a car for my destination. it was a wretched car in which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that had sores under its mended harness.
an immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies to the south of mirk. everything was wet, the hillside above me was either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and beyond a vast waste of tumbling waters unlit by any sun. not a tree broke that melancholy wilderness, nor any living thing but ourselves. the horse went stumblingly under the incessant stimulation of the driver's lash and tongue....
"yonder it is," said my man, pointing with his whip, and i twisted round to see over his shoulder, not the rhine-like castle i had expected, but a long low house of stone upon a headland, backed by a distant mountain that vanished in a wild driven storm of rain as i looked. but at the sight of mirk my lassitude passed, my nerves tightened, and my will began to march again. now, thought i, we bring things to an issue. now we come to something personal and definite. the vagueness is at an end. i kept my eyes upon the place, and thought it more and more like a prison as we drew nearer. perhaps from that window mary was looking for me now. had she wondered why i did not come to her before? now at any rate i had found her. i sprang off the car, found a bell-handle, and set the house jangling.
the door opened, and a little old man appeared with his fingers thrust inside his collar as though he were struggling against strangulation. he regarded me for a second, and spoke before i could speak.
"what might you be wanting?" said he, as if he had an answer ready.
"i want to see lady mary justin," i said.
"you can't," he said. "she's gone."
"gone!"
"the day before yesterday she went to london. you'll have to be getting back there."
"she's gone to london."
"no less."
"willingly?"
the little old man struggled with his collar. "anyone would go willingly," he said, and seemed to await my further commands. he eyed me obliquely with a shadow of malice in his eyes.
it was then my heart failed, and i knew that we lovers were beaten. i turned from the door without another word to the janitor. "back," said i to my driver, and got up behind him.
but it is one thing to decide to go back, and another to do it. at the little station i studied time-tables, and i could not get to england again without a delay of half a day. somewhere i must wait. i did not want to wait where there was any concourse of people. i decided to stay in the inn by the station for the intervening six hours, and get some sleep before i started upon my return, but when i saw the bedroom i changed my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards the shore. i wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated man. for i had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of defeat. i saw as if i ought always to have seen that i had been pursuing a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream of ever possessing mary again was fantastic and foolish, and that i had expended all my strength in vain. over me triumphed a law and tradition more towering than those cliffs and stronger than those waves. i was overwhelmed by a sense of human weakness, of the infinite feebleness of the individual man against wind and wave and the stress of tradition and the ancient usages of mankind. "we must submit," i whispered, crouching close, "we must submit." ...
far as the eye could reach the waves followed one another in long unhurrying lines, an inexhaustible succession, rolling, hissing, breaking, and tossing white manes of foam, to gather at last for a crowning effort and break thunderously, squirting foam two hundred feet up the streaming faces of the cliffs. the wind tore and tugged at me, and wind and water made together a clamor as though all the evil voices in the world, all the violent passions and all the hasty judgments were seeking a hearing above the more elemental uproar....
