He was fumbling at the coats, standing there sharply
outlined against the stream of light, his face cut
on it in a perfect silhouette. She had to pass
him. That hateful he. She was seized with
a fit of that same trembling that had shaken her after
the passage between them at the gate on Shoot Up Hill.
It shook her now, dreadfully. Her knees trembled.
She felt faint. Awful to hate so! She was
quite close, almost touching him. It was necessary
he should move, forward or back, to give her room.
But he did not move. His hands, outstretched
before him on the coats, and sharp against the light,
appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the hallucination
of this frightful trembling that possessed her.
She tried to say, “If you please—,”
but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some sound;
and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before
him that she had to pass.
She advanced; and felt, as if she saw it, the intensity
of the gaze of his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the
place were light and her look not averted, his “marching”
face and those lines radiating to his temples (horizon
tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and
suddenly had upon her senses, with an extraordinary
pungency, causing them to swim, that odd, nice smell
there was about him of mingled peat and soap and fresh
tobacco, of tweed and heather and the sea.
She caught her breath...
The thing’s too poignant for the words a man
has.
She was caught in his arms, terribly enfolding her.
He was crying in her ears, passionately, triumphantly,
“Rosalie! Rosalie!” She was in his
arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round
her; and she was caught against his heart, her face
upturned to his, his face against her own; and she
was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning
in incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness;
and in her ears his voice, coming to her in her extremity
like the beat of a wing in the night, like the first
pulsing roll of music enormously remote, “Rosalie!
Rosalie!”
The thing’s too poignant for the words one has.
This girl’s extremity was very great, not to
be set in words. Words cannot bring to earth
that which, ethereal, defies our comprehension as life
and death defy it and, like life and death, to our
comprehension only sublimely is. Words only
can say her spirit, bursting from bondage, streamed
up to cleave to his; how tell the anguish, how the
ecstasy? Words only can say her spirit, like
a live part of her drawn out of her, seemed to be
rushing upwards from her body to her lips; words cannot
tell the anguish that was bliss, the rapture that was
pain. Only can say that she was in his arms,
her heart to his, his lips against her own, and cannot
tell—
But also it is to be accounted to her for her extremity
that herein all her life’s habit was delivered
over by her to betrayal.
