from the moment when i confessed my decision to stay we gave no further thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours together. we thought only of those hours. things lent themselves to us. we stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel on the engstlen see. we would take food with us as we decided and row out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. and i remember now how mary stood and called to miss satchel's window to tell her of this intention, and how i discovered again that exquisite slender grace i knew so well.
you know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet and incredible. it was as if we were but dreaming together and might at any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. i rowed slowly with those clumsy swiss oars that one must thrust forward, breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking forward, saying very little and with much the same sense i think of enchantment and unreality. and i saw now for the first time as i watched her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, i thought, stronger than the mary i had known.
even now i can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. and yet i remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. perhaps it is that very luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that are ordinarily real.
we rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end of the water. we had not realized at first that we could row beyond the range of the hotel windows. the rock that comes out of the lake is a clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. it splinters vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become more rude and massive and begin to overhang. under the cliffs the water is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts. this place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place was paved with ice-worn boulders. two huge bluffs put their foreheads together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the near presence of ice in the air. out between them boiled a little torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst the great pebbles. and those pebbles were covered by a network of marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a peculiar gentleness and richness to the alpine severity that had dwarfed and tangled them. it was astounding that any plant could find nourishment among those stones. the great headland, with patches of yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses, had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it altogether. there was nothing to remind us of the world that had separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the stones at the limpid water's edge.
"it is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a voice to my thought.
she sat down upon a boulder and i sat on a lower slab a yard or so away, and we looked at one another. "it's still unreal," she said.
i felt awkward and at a loss as i sat there before her, as a man unused to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"you are so you," i said; "so altogether my nearest thing—and so strange too, so far off, that i feel—shy....
"i'm shy," i repeated. "i feel that if i speak loudly all this will vanish...."
i looked about me. "but surely this is the most beautiful place in the whole world! is it indeed in the world?"
"stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is! strange! the disproportions! the things that will not fit together. the little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to ordinary sensible affairs.... this beauty....
"do you remember, stephen, how long ago in the old park you and i talked about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of what comes after life. even now do you want to know? you are too busy and i am not busy enough. i want to be sure, not only to know, but to know that it is so, that this life—no, not this life, but that life, is only the bleak twilight of the morning. i think death—just dead death—after the life i have had is the most impossible of ends.... you don't want—particularly? i want to passionately. i want to live again—out of this body, stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be free—as beautiful things are free. to be free as this is free—an exquisite clean freedom....
"i can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for us—or why should we ever think it strange? why should we still find the ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? we do—because they aren't—us.... eating. stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what were queer little hot and eager beasts.... the perpetual need to do such things. and all the mad fury of sex, stephen!... we don't live, we suffocate in our living bodies. they storm and rage and snatch; it isn't us, stephen, really. it can't be us. it's all so excessive—if it is anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that will go on—go on at last to quite beautiful real things. like this perhaps. to-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... it's so incredible that you and i must part to-day. it's as if—someone told me the sun was a little mad. it's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."
her voice sank. she leant a little forward towards me. "stephen, suppose that you and i were dead to-day. suppose that when you imagined you were climbing yesterday, you died. suppose that yesterday you died and that you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me. perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and i am lying dead in my room in this hotel, and this is the great beginning....
"stephen, i am talking nonsense because i am so happy to be with you here...."
