It was a damp, misty morning, the fine frost had gone. He was going to Margaret to try and recover some reality out of the state that he was in. The recent incidents--Craven's suspicions, the 5th of November evening, Bunning's alarm, the scene with Margaret--bad dragged him for a time from that conviction that he was living in an unreal world. That day when he had run in the snowstorm from Sannet Wood had seemed to him, during these last weeks, absurd and an effect, obviously, of excited nerves. Now, on this morning of the Dublin match, he awoke again to that unreal condition. The bedmaker, the men passing through the Court beneath his windows, the porter at the gate--these people were unreal, and above him, around him, the mist seemed ever about to break into new terrible presences.
"This thing is wearing me down. I shall go off my head if something definite doesn't happen"--and then, there in his room with the stupid breakfast things still on the table, the consciousness of the presence of God seized him so that he felt as though the pursuit were suddenly at an end and there was nothing left now but complete submission.
In this world of wraiths, God was the most certain Presence. . . .
There remained only Margaret. Perhaps she could recover reality for him. He went to her.
He found her waiting for him in the little drawing-room and he could not see her. He knew then that the Pursuing Shadow had taken a new step. It was literally physically true. The room was there, the shining things, the knick-knacks, the mirror, the scent of oranges. He could see her body, her black dress, her eyes, her white neck, the movement towards him that she made when she saw him coming, but there was nothing there. It was as though he had been asked to love a picture.
He could not think of her at all as Margaret Craven or of himself as Olva Dune. Only in the glass's reflection he saw the white road stretching to the wood.
"I really am going off my head. She'll see that something's up"--and then from the bottom of his heart, far away as though it had been the cry of another person, "Oh! how I want her How I want her!"
He took her in his arms and kissed her and felt as though he were dead and she were dead and that they were both, being so young am eager for life, struggling to get back existence again.