Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no
word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.
Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at
the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph,
to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had
appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty,
an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open
before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all
the ways of error and glory. On and on and on
and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence.
How far had he walked? What hour was it?
There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne
to him over the air. But the tide was near the
turn and already the day was on the wane. He
turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running
up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle,
found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls
and lay down there that the peace and silence of the
evening might still the riot of his blood.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the
calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth
beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken
him to her breast.
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His
eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement
of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they
felt the strange light of some new world. His
soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic,
dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes
and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower?
Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding,
a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in
endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson
and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf
and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the
heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper
than the other.
Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid
grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose
slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed
at its joy.
He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed
about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of
the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the
rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the
tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper
of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant
pools.
He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs
and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that
were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool
of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped
out like a boghole and the pool under it brought back
to his memory the dark turf-coloured water of the
bath in Clongowes. The box of pawn tickets at
his elbow had just been rifled and he took up idly
one after another in his greasy fingers the blue and
white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased and
bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.
