“Okay. You do as you think best,” he agreed. “I hope—Well, anyway, you’ll know where we are, and you can both come on to Tynsham and help to put that woman through the hoop until she sees sense.”
That morning the weather broke. The rain was falling in sheets as I climbed once more into the familiar truck, yet I was feeling elated and hopeful; it could have rained ten times harder without depressing me or altering my intention. Coker came out to see me off. I knew why he made a point of it, for I was aware without his telling me that the memory of his first rash plan and its consequences troubled him. He stood beside the cab, with his hair flattened and the water trickling down his neck, and held up his hand.
“Take it easy, Bill. There aren’t any ambulances these days, and she’ll prefer you to arrive all in one piece. Good luck—and my apologies for everything to the lady when you find her.”
The word was “when,” but the tone was “if.”
I wished them well at Tynsham. Then I let in the clutch and splashed away down the muddy drive.
JOURNEY IN HOPE
The morning was infected with minor mishaps. First it was water in the carburetor. Then I contrived to travel a dozen miles north under the impression I was going east, and before I had that fully rectified I was in trouble with the ignition system on a bleak upland road miles from anywhere. Either these delays or a natural reaction did a lot to spoil the hopeful mood in which I had started. By the time I had the trouble straightened out, it was one o’clock and the day had cleared up.
The sun came out. Everything looked bright and refreshed, but even that, and the fact that for the next twenty miles everything went smoothly, did not shift the mood of depression that was closing over me again. Now I was really on my own, I could not shut out the sense of loneliness. It came upon me as it had on that day when we had split up to search for Michael Beadley—only with double the force… Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary… That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do…
To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.
It needed far more resistance now than it had before. Only the strength of my hope that I would find companionship at my journey’s end kept me from turning back to find relief from the strain in the presence of Coker and the others.
The sights which I saw by the way had little or nothing to do with it. Horrible though some of them were, I was hardened to such things by now. The horror had left them, just as the horror which broods over great battlefields fades into history. Nor did I any longer see these things as part of a vast, impressive tragedy. My struggle was all a personal conflict with the instincts of my kind. A continual defensive action, with no victory possible. I knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long alone.
To give myself occupation I drove faster than I should. In some small town with a forgotten name I rounded a corner and ran straight into a van which blocked the whole street. Luckily my own tough truck suffered no more than scratches, but two vehicles managed to hitch themselves together with diabolical ingenuity, so that it was an awkward business single-handed, and in a confined space, to separate them. It was a problem which took me a full hour to solve, and did me good by turning my mind to practical matters.