George gazed, conscious of his own breathing and of the strained heavings of his chest. Then he backed away and, glancing often at the bed, inspected the room. The windows of the lower rooms (which on this side of the building looked across a private lawn to the trees of the Botanic Garden) had, after much controversy, been fitted with frosted glass. George felt in no danger of being seen, other than by the terrible sleeper, as he poked about. He went to close the double doors of the bathroom in order to decrease the insistent noise, then feared that a sudden change in vibration might awaken his teacher. He sidled into the bathroom and gazed on the exotic little scene, familiar to him since he had, in younger and more carefree days, treated himself to the enjoyment of the waters in this particularly intense privacy. The taps disgorged their thick noisy jets with fast aggressive violence, and the foot or so of water which constantly surged and frothed in the bottom of the curving blunt-ended bath was covered in tumbling puff-balls of steam. The tiles gleamed and moistly ran, and the place was filled with a faint warm fog which seemed to put a film over George’s eyes as he looked with fascination upon the hot violence.
He stood again at the foot of the sage’s bed, and his heart moved within him, twisting and turning like a hooked fish. He saw now, not the familiar features, but, even more familiar, the perpetual lowering frown of purpose and dominating insight which seemed, even in sleep, to be hovering on guard above them; and he felt in the crammed blackness of his soul remorse, regret, resentment, loss, anger and terrible longing, that composition of love and hate which can be the most painful and degrading sensation in the world.
George turned at last to look at the table. Here, it seemed, John Robert had been at work. There were books: George noticed Plato, Kant, Heidegger; minds inside which John Robert had expended, perhaps wasted, his whole life. Hume’s Treatise was there too, and Schopenhauer’s Well als Wille und Vorstellung. There was also a number of thick notebooks, one of which was open at a page which was written in John Robert’s inky hand which looked so much like looking-glass writing. George thought, it’s the great book, it’s all here! He peered at the page, knowing well how to read John Robert’s scrawl.
If at a certain point it becomes impossible, for the sort of reasons suggested above, to maintain the conception of personal ownership of inner presentations, it is admittedly difficult to continue to attribute to these anything recognizable as ‘value’. The notion of the possibility of placing every perception (even) upon a moral scale was argued to be inseparable from the concept itself. But in what sense can value be asserted in the absence of the person? I must refer back at this point to my discussion of Husserl’s reduction, and to the peculiar sense in which his method denies transcendence.
George heard a faint sound behind him and swung round in fright; but all was well. John Robert had turned slightly on his side and was snoring less loudly. George stood a moment, while his senses whirled in a wild kaleidoscope, unable to focus upon the room after looking so intently at the white page. Then he tiptoed swiftly to the door and, without looking back, let himself quietly out into the corridor, where again he was blinded by the dimness after the subdued sunlight of the bedroom. He blinked and looked both ways. There was no one there. Yes, there was someone, a woman, standing against the wall down near the door marked PRIVATE through which he had come in. It was Diane.
Ever since the moment when she had started away ‘like an otter’ from the watery presence, and the so-forbidden touch, of Tom McCaffrey, Diane had been in a state near to madness. She could no longer sit patiently at home, taking modest trips abroad and returning like a soldier to her post, waiting for George to come. She had to go now and search for him, however fatally displeased he might be when she found him. The desire to see him, to be with him, made a dark sick pain which gradually assumed the aspect of fate. Within this great pain there was a tiny sparklet of joy, which joy was presumably hope. George was unhappy, outcast, alone. Only she really loved him and could save him from himself. Diane had, of course, heard (Mrs Belton had seen to that) the Institute rumour that George had killed Stella and hidden her body (some said in his back garden or on the Common, some said in the canal, some in the deep intestines of the Institute itself, where the old workings which went down to the source contained many abandoned chambers and old shafts, some going back perhaps as far as Roman times). The people who eagerly passed this rumour around less than half believed it, and Diane did not believe it at all. But what had made her leap away in anguish from Tom’s stupid, thoughtless jest was a deep and wretched desire that something like that might be true, that Stella might somehow be dead, even if this meant that George would go to prison for life. Then their parts would be reversed, he in prison and wanting to be visited, while she roamed mysterious and free. Out of this poisonous seed had grown the agony which drove her out to look for him.
Diane was so desperate that she set off at first for Druidsdale. She got no further however than the Roman bridge. Suppose Stella were at George’s house; suppose she had been there all the time, not in a shallow grave in the garden, but living there as part of some conspiracy, laughing with George at what the town might think? That this made no sense did not prevent Diane from supposing it. With George, anything was possible. She turned back and made her way up Burkestown High Road to 16 Hare Lane, where she knew Rozanov lived, because at least that was somewhere to go. She walked up and down a bit on the other side of the street watching the door and trying to believe that George might at any moment emerge. She had to cling to one hope after another, each bringing with it a delusive fading gleam, succeeded by the unmitigated pain. When it became as clear to her that George was not there as it had previously been that he might be, she ran to the Institute, arriving moaning with breathlessness and fatigue, and installed herself on the Promenade, close to the long window, whence, pacing about, she kept a restless watch, not caring whether people saw her and stared. At last she purchased a cup of tea and sat down in a daze of misery. She awoke from this to see quite plainly the figure of George passing quite close to her (he did not see her) and disappearing through the door into the Baptistry. It was now a slack time of the afternoon and no one saw George, silent as a fox, slink in through that partly open door, and no one saw Diane with equally wary little padding steps follow in after him. She passed the hot bronze doors of the source and came out into the long carpeted corridor which vibrated with water sound and smelt of water. She arrived in time to see George disappearing into one of the rooms. She tiptoed down a little, but did not dare to try to listen outside. She had never been inside the Ennistone Rooms and the mystery of them appalled her, together with the fear of George’s finding her, and the impossibility now of going away without seeing him. She retreated toward the door through which she had entered and stood there in aching indecision. She gazed and gazed until her eyes ached and flashed and she could almost believe that he could have gone away without her seeing him.