With a great sigh he rose, yawned cavernously and shivered. Better get to bed and to sleep:--a bed that didn't clank and jolt and batter your brains to a pulp. Things would look amazingly different in the morning.
"Darkness and solitude shine for me: For life's fair outward part, are rife The silver noises: let them be. It is the very soul of life Listens for thee, listens for thee." --ALICE MEYNELL.
The depressingly bare, whitewashed bedroom owned a French bedstead, with brass rails;--a welcome 'find' in a dák bungalow, especially after three very broken nights in an Indian train. Tired to the point of stupefaction, Roy promised himself he would sleep the clock round; eat a three-decker Anglo-Indian breakfast, and thereafter be his own man again. In that faith he laid his head on the least lumpy portion of the pillow--and in less than five minutes found himself quite intolerably wide awake.
Though the bedstead neither repudiated him, nor took liberties with his person, ghostly clankings and vibrations still jarred his nerves and played devil's tunes in his brain. Though he kept his eyelids severely closed, sleep--the coveted anodyne--seemed to hover on the misty edge of things, always just out of reach. His body was over-tired, his brain abnormally alert. Each change of position, that was to be positively the last, lost its virtue in the space of three minutes, till the sheet--that was too narrow for the mattress--became ruckled into hills and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this, he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and to-night, of all nights----!
Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight--the almost incredible moonlight of India. He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the chick. A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated, imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin. But to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic pellets,--because he wanted to dream. It was many weeks since he last had sight of his mother. But surely she must be near him in his loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with which he longed for sight or sense of her, to assure him that--in spite of qualms and indecisions--he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:--till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....