第123章

He sat still like an Egyptian Pharoah, driving the car.He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips.He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling.He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind.And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity.

It was very difficult to speak, it was so perfect to sit in this pure living silence, subtle, full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force, upheld immemorially in timeless force, like the immobile, supremely potent Egyptians, seated forever in their living, subtle silence.

`We need not go home,' he said.`This car has seats that let down and make a bed, and we can lift the hood.'

She was glad and frightened.She cowered near to him.

`But what about them at home?' she said.

`Send a telegram.'

Nothing more was said.They ran on in silence.But with a sort of second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination.For he had the free intelligence to direct his own ends.His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head.A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness.

They came to a village that lined along the road.The car crept slowly along, until he saw the post-office.Then he pulled up.

`I will send a telegram to your father,' he said.`I will merely say "spending the night in town," shall I?'

`Yes,' she answered.She did not want to be disturbed into taking thought.

She watched him move into the post-office.It was also a shop, she saw.

Strange, he was.Even as he went into the lighted, public place he remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable.There he was! In a strange uplift of elation she saw him, the being never to be revealed, awful in its potency, mystic and real.This dark, subtle reality of him, never to be translated, liberated her into perfection, her own perfected being.She too was dark and fulfilled in silence.

He came out, throwing some packages into the car.

`There is some bread, and cheese, and raisins, and apples, and hard chocolate,' he said, in his voice that was as if laughing, because of the unblemished stillness and force which was the reality in him.She would have to touch him.To speak, to see, was nothing.It was a travesty to look and to comprehend the man there.Darkness and silence must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in unrevealed touch.She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing.