With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face. Mrs. Poulteney’s immediate reaction was to look round, for fear her domestics might have overheard this scene. But her carriage, which she had thought to hear draw away to the servants’ quarters, had mysteriously disappeared. In fact everything had disappeared, road and landscape (rather resembling the Great Drive up to Windsor Castle, for some peculiar reason), all, all had vanished. There was nothing but space—and horror of horrors, a devouring space. One by one, the steps up which Mrs. Poulteney had so imperially mounted began also to disappear. Only three were left; and then only two; then one. Mrs. Poulteney stood on nothing. She was most distinctly heard to say “Lady Cotton is behind this”; and then she fell, flouncing and bannering and ballooning, like a shot crow, down to where her real master waited.

45

And now, having brought this fiction to a thoroughly traditional ending, I had better explain that although all I have described in the last two chapters happened, it did not happen quite in the way you may have been led to believe.

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow.

Charles was no exception; and the last few pages you have read are not what happened, but what he spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen. To be sure he did not think in quite the detailed and coherent narrative manner I have employed; nor would I swear that he followed Mrs. Poulteney’s postmortal career in quite such interesting detail. But he certainly wished her to the Devil, so it comes to almost the same thing.

Above all he felt himself coming to the end of a story; and to an end he did not like. If you noticed in those last two chapters an abruptness, a lack of consonance, a betrayal of Charles’s deeper potentiality and a small matter of his being given a life span of very nearly a century and a quarter; if you entertained a suspicion, not uncommon in literature, that the writer’s breath has given out and he has rather arbitrarily ended the race while he feels he’s still winning, then do not blame me; because all these feelings, or reflections of them, were very present in Charles’s own mind. The book of his existence, so it seemed to him, was about to come to a distinctly shabby close.

And the “I,” that entity who found such slickly specious reasons for consigning Sarah to the shadows of oblivion, was not myself; it was merely the personification of a certain massive indifference in things—too hostile for Charles to think of as “God”—that had set its malevolent inertia on the Ernestina side of the scales; that seemed an inexorable onward direction as fixed as that of the train which drew Charles along.

I was not cheating when I said that Charles had decided, in London that day after his escapade, to go through with his marriage; that was his official decision, just as it had once been his official decision (reaction might be a more accurate word) to go into Holy Orders. Where I have cheated was in analyzing the effect that three-word letter continued to have on him. It tormented him, it obsessed him, it confused him. The more he thought about it the more Sarah-like that sending of the address—and nothing more—appeared. It was perfectly in key with all her other behavior, and to be described only by oxy-moron; luring-receding, subtle-simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing. The Victorian was a prolix age; and unaccustomed to the Delphic.

But above all it seemed to set Charles a choice; and while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom—that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.

So let us kick Sam out of his hypothetical future and back into his Exeter present. He goes to his master’s compartment when the train stops.

“Are we stayin’ the night, sir?”

Charles stares at him a moment, a decision still to make, and looks over his head at the overcast sky.

“I fancy it will rain. We’ll put up at the Ship.”

And so Sam, a thousand unpossessed pounds richer, stood a few minutes later with his master outside the station, watching the loading of Charles’s impedimenta on to the roof of a tired fly. Charles showed a decided restlessness. The portmanteau was at last tied down, and all waited on him.

“I think, Sam, after that confounded train journey, I will stretch my legs. Do you go on with the baggage.”

Sam’s heart sank.

“With respeck, Mr. Charles, I wouldn’t. Not with them rainclouds up there about to break.”

“A little rain won’t hurt me.”

Sam swallowed, bowed.

“Yes, Mr. Charles. Shall I give horders for dinner?”

“Yes… that is… I’ll see when I come in. I may attend Evensong at the Cathedral.”

Charles set off up the hill towards the city. Sam watched him gloomily on his way for a little while, then turned to the cabby.

“Eh—‘card of Hendicott’s Family ‘Otel?”

“Aye.”

“Know where it is?”

“Aye.”

“Well, you dolly me up to the Ship double quick and you may ‘ear somethink to your hadvantage, my man.”

And with a suitable aplomb Sam got into the carriage. It very soon overtook Charles, who walked with a flagrant slowness, as if taking the air. But as soon as it had gone out of sight he quickened his pace.

Sam had plenty of experience of dealing with sleepy provincial inns. The luggage was unloaded, the best available rooms chosen, a fire lit, nightwear laid out with other necessities—and all in seven minutes. Then he strode sharply out into the street, where the cabby still waited. A short further journey took place. From inside Sam looked cautiously round, then descended and paid off his driver.

“First left you’ll find ‘un, sir.”

“Thank you, my man. ‘Ere’s a couple o’ browns for you.” And with this disgracefully mean tip (even for Exeter) Sam tipped his bowler over his eyes and melted away into the dusk. Halfway down the street he was in, and facing the one the cabby had indicated, stood a Methodist Chapel, with imposing columns under its pediment. Behind one of these the embryo detective installed himself. It was now nearly night, come early under a gray-black sky.

Sam did not have to wait long. His heart leaped as a tall figure came into sight. Evidently at a loss the figure addressed himself to a small boy. The boy promptly led the way to the corner below Sam’s viewpoint, and pointed, a gesture that earned him, to judge by his grin, rather more than twopence.

Charles’s back receded. Then he stopped and looked up. He retraced a few steps back towards Sam. Then as if impatient with himself he turned again and entered one of the houses. Sam slipped from behind his pillar and ran down the steps and across to the street in which Endicott’s Family stood. He waited a while on the corner. But Charles did not reappear. Sam became bolder and lounged casually along the warehouse wall that faced the row of houses. He came to where he could see the hallway of the hotel. It was empty. Several rooms had lights. Some fifteen minutes passed and it began to rain.