It seemed so long ago. That they should still be holding on to life with such tenuous threads and Hermione pulled threads to get something of that pre-chasm into her speech and all the pre-chasm was as she recalled it, worse even than their own particular and unique Purgatory. Other things. Other people. Things that had existed in one dimension, that couldn’t any more so exist. You couldn’t any more move on a straight line, you advanced in a spiral and as you grew nearer to the higher things (nearer to the higher? What muddlings) you grew more vague, no, more distinct, but a distinctness in vagueness that was most tantalizing. Get across the chasm, for those things had existed. Get across the chasm for this thing that holds you in its arms is pre-chasm, a little heavier but kisses that she had lost, that had been blinded, blotted out in a dark cloud. Get across the chasm to the other side for there are dreams still the other side, ivory, bronze. Dreams dwell in ivory and bronze, the Narcissus of the Naples gallery. “Do you remember the blue-fire phosphorescence of the huge blue deep sea sort of jelly fish that so fascinated me in the aquarium?” “Aquarium?” “Naples. I seem to be in two sets of perceptions. . blue green of phosphorescent fire and static bronzes. That Narcissus, you remember. Two sets of clearly defined perceptions. We’ll never any more be able to see anything straight on — clear—” “But we do, darling.” Almost thou persuadest me to be a heathen. She did see things straight for a little moment, but she knew it would soon slip from her. She couldn’t go on seeing things in different dimensions all the time, “steadily and” (was it?) “whole.”
“Vérène’s I told you, mad. You don’t seem interested.” “I am. Only aren’t we, all? What’s odd, incongruous—” “O, I don’t mean like that — like we say it, she’s mad, you know. I mean insane, insane, locked up.” “Where — how — why — I don’t understand.” They were drawing things out of the depth, pre-chasm to observe them. Things she had for years forgotten now came back— “How did it happen?” “I don’t know. Delia told me and it seemed like the end of a story. A story I had read, put aside, forgotten and then years and years afterwards (five years?) found again, finished, done for. It made me feel something was finished — the old régime I suppose — all the old beautiful intensity, the France we loved — Vérène so smug. She’s not now. O poor little ignorant smug little tight closed, wide open French rose. So smug, so secure and always so sure that everything would come right once one was married — do you remember?” “It links on somehow to that queer girl—” “Shirley yes. Also pre-chasm — a clean bullet, finished.” “And the other queer creature?” His breath was on her face. His ebony stick had slid to the floor. “Be careful — I get — tired—” His breath was on her face and it appeared in one sudden moment of illumination that this was not right. Vérène went mad since she couldn’t (it was evident) march with events. Shirley shot herself since she couldn’t march forward. Wasn’t that it? The wave had lifted them to the crest. One must roll in, on with the tide, with the times, or be crushed under the wave, ground to death in the trough and the great drag back that would be the inevitable aftermath of the war and all it stood for. All those lovely years. Vérène, delicious Delia, all the funny people, someone with a monocle at Delia’s, someone saying someone was like Nero, some girl who spilled hair-pins, hydrangeas and the smoke blue of odd conservatory colours, George with his almost thou persuadest me to be a heathen and the upward drift of candles in Vérène’s elegant Clichy apartment. Walter and the great drone of the sea. But Walter was out of it, always above it, he hadn’t been caught, not actually, he was the inapproachable glacier and he would go on being that. But caught in the flow, Vérène without volition to sweep onward, caught and frozen (Hermione had always known it would come) by Walter’s distant, beautiful aloofness. Vérène and Shirley, victims — victims — wasn’t she the greater victim? She and Darrington? No, no, no, no, no. She felt sensing the wave push back of her that she would land, finally, safely, be thrown, advancing, going on, be thrown by the very impetus of the wave strength up, up on dry land, onto a new post-chasm world. Strike against the wave, the advance of the wave and you are doomed. . Morganlefay.
Kisses held Morgan le Fay and she was Circe, Calypso to those kisses. She hadn’t strength against them. She was smothered and kisses recalled her to worlds away, pre-chasm. Would she go on with Darrington? She felt the kisses and she felt herself numbed, pollen dusted over with the kisses. Kisses brought back people, pictures, a honey-coloured Correggio nymph, the wide wings of the marble Nike. Wings of marble, islands of yellow stone, amber lights against rocks where the sea weed caught sunlight in its translucent surface. Ivory of small winged Erotes. Some Dionysus with a head band. The Nereids— “Do you remember those violets that you used to get me?”
He remembered the violets. He remembered everything. They remembered far and far back as if the years of terror (five was it?) never had been, had been some fulsome nightmare. Clear out of the years of terror the past rose, rose and cleft the years of terror like white lightning, a black storm cloud. The past, images of the past that had all the time been there, that had been buried under the stench of lava and molten metal, of guns and broken trenches, of earth mounds that were graves, the very substance of volcanic furious, the past, all the past had been there, all the time, white, in clear images, people, things, all the people, all the things and in some moment of rapport, holding her close, forgetting (both of them) all incidents of mere Louise, Merry or Cyril Vane, they conjured back the past, at one in a rapt intensity. The past rose and broke across the present, broke across the five years of dark disaster like some dancer that steps half-naked before a black drop-curtain. The past seemed safe and secure and the war was but a curtain that had fallen, “you will come, you will come back — Astraea?” He had conjured the past with a wave of his ebony stick, she had renewed the past with the white swansdown on her blue bed-jacket. Watchet blue, he called it. It was the colour of the blue eyes of Fayne Rabb.
Almost as if her thoughts had been his thoughts, though she had never spoken of her and the days of odd upheaval stood between them and this was the first time that he had been allowed to come to see her since — almost as if her thought that had risen like the half-naked dancer, gracious, sinuous, before the black drop-curtain, almost as if his thoughts had been her thoughts and as if the past was a very visible embodied image, Jerrold Darrington said, “yes, Phoebe is a pretty name for it. But one’s name’s a little awkward sometimes.” Darrington was looking at the very beautiful small doll with black hair that lay asleep in a wide basket. He said, “why don’t you name its other name, Fayne Rabb?”