the next day my mood declined again; it was as if that light, that sense of release that had shone so clear and strong in my mind, had escaped me. i sought earnestly to recover it. but i could not do so, and i found my old narrow preoccupations calling urgently to me again.
i thought that perhaps i might get back those intimations of outlook and relief if i clambered alone into some high solitude and thought. i had a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise, communing with the sky. it was the worst season for climbing, and on the spur of the moment i could do nothing but get up the rochers de naye on the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery nor wet. i did not succeed. in one place i slipped down a wet bank for some yards and held at last by a root; if i had slipped much further i should not be writing here now; and i came back a very weary and bruised climber, without any meditation....
three nights after when i was in bed i became very lucidly awake—it must have been about two or three in the morning—and the vision of life returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination. it was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me. it bade me rouse my spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring and proliferating in my mind when i had returned to england from the cape. "dismiss your passion." but i urged that that i could not do; there was the thought of mary subjugated and weeping, the smarting memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge and discovery, the aching separation. no matter, the stillness answered, in the end all that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... i cannot forget, i insisted. do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither; this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. you are not only stephen stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are man—everyman—in this round world in which your lot has fallen. but mary, i urged, to forget mary is a treason, an ingratitude, seeing that she loved me. but the stillness did not command me to forget her, but only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. and that work? that work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand, to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which together saturate your soul. go about the world, embrue yourself with life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that i have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter....
"but who are you?" i cried out suddenly to the night. "who are you?"
i sat up on the side of my bed. the dawn was just beginning to break up the featureless blackness of the small hours. "this is just some odd corner of my brain," i said....
yet—— how did i come to have this odd corner in my brain? what is this lucid stillness?...
