Esther gave a little sigh and sat down beside George. For a moment she looked round her with an expression of thoughtful appraisal. Everything was just the same as it had always been. If anyone came in here now, he would never dream that anything had happened.
“Wasn’t it all strange?” she said musingly. “The party—and then the fire!...I mean, the way it happened.” Her tone had grown a little vague, as if there was something she could not quite express. “I don’t know, but the way we were all sitting here after Mr. Logan’s performance…then all of a sudden the fire-engines going past…and we didn’t know…we thought they were going somewhere else. There was something so—sort of weird—about it.” Her brow was furrowed with her difficulty as she tried to define the emotion she felt. “It sort of frightens you, doesn’t it?—No, not the fire!” she spoke quickly. “That didn’t amount to anything. No one got hurt. It was terribly exciting, really…What I mean is”—again the vague and puzzled tone—“when you think of how…big...things have got…I mean, the way people live nowadays…in these big buildings…and how a fire can break out in the very house you live in, and you not even know about it…There’s something sort of terrible in that, isn’t there?...And God!” she burst out with sudden eagerness. “In all your life did you ever see the like of them? I mean the kind of people who live here—they way they all looked as they poured out into the court?”
She laughed and paused, then took his hand, and with a rapt look on her face she whispered tenderly:
“But what do they matter?...They’re all gone now…The whole world’s gone…There’s no one left but you and I…Do you know,” she said quietly, “that I think about you all the time? When I wake up in the morning the first thought that comes into my head is you. And from that moment on I carry you round inside me all day long—here.” She laid her hand upon her breast, then went on in a rapt whisper: “You fill my life, my heart, my spirit, my whole being. Oh, do you think there ever was another love like ours since the world began—two other people who ever loved each other as we do? If I could play, I’d make of it great music. If I could sing, I’d make of it a great song. If I could write, I’d make of it a great story. But when I try to play or write or sing, I can think of nothing else but you…Did you know that I once tried to write a story!” Smiling, she inclined her rosy face towards his: “Didn’t I ever tell you?” He shook his head.
“I was sure that it would make a wonderful story,” she went on eagerly. “It seemed to fill me up. I was ready to burst with it. But when I tried to write it, all that I could say was: ‘Long, long into the night I lay—thinking of you.’”
She laughed suddenly, richly.
“And that’s as far as I could get. But wasn’t it a grand beginning for a story? And now at night when I try to go to sleep, that one line of the story that I couldn’t write comes back to me and haunts me, and keeps ringing in my ears. ‘Long, long into the night I lay—thinking of you.’ For that’s the story.”
She moved closer to him, and lifted her lips to his.
“Ah, dearest, that’s the story. In the whole world there’s nothing more. Love is enough.”
He could not answer. For as she spoke he knew that for him it was not the story. He felt desolate and tired. The memory of all their years of love, of beauty and devotion, of pain and conflict, together with all her faith and tenderness and noble loyalty—the whole universe of love which had been his, all that the tenement of flesh and one small room could hold—returned to rend him in this instant.
For he had learned to-night that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach. But to-night, in a hundred separate moments of intense reality, it had revealed to him its very core. He had seen it naked, with its guards down. He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind’s blood and sweat and agony. So now he knew that if he was ever to succeed in writing the books he felt were in him, he must turn about and lift his face up to some nobler height.