He did not talk much for a long time, then he kept repeating: "I must build a new work-bench, Claire. That's the thing to do."
She felt at times that she must scream at him, then she would be all motherly tenderness. "Lawrence," she would whisper, "do it, my man. You can, my laddie."
He tossed, and chided an unseen man or woman for having helped him through charity under the garb of admiration. He was misunderstanding again. He thought everything was charity, pity for his blindness, and he raved. She began to see that this sudden bitterness which poured from his lips was the outcome of years of sorrow, the product of a deep-burning fire to see the beauty his soul craved.
"Lawrence," she cried, "God knows if I could I would give you my eyes!"
She knew that he was consumed with the pain of his struggle to comprehend more beauty. Even exaggerating his hunger for sight, she wept beside him. Her whole soul yearned to help him, to give him more of the beauty which seemed the prime need of his nature.
Sometimes he prayed for it, addressing Fate, Nature, Chance, anything, everything but God.
After a silence that was beginning to frighten Claire, he began again. At first his words were indistinct, but as she leaned closer, they cleared of guttural sounds. She listened spellbound.
"You see, I hadn't done my thinking with allowance for the whole of human character, Claire. That was what was wrong with me. I'm doing that now. I'm finding myself again. It is back with the beginning of things I must start. Back with the first squirm of life in the primordial mud. It's no use trying further back than that. No use at all. Back of that lies only conjecture.
"There was existence, perhaps, inert unconscious existence waiting to become suddenly aware of itself, aware of its parts and its difference from other things. Well, existence struggling, dreaming of self-knowledge, found in a wriggling, oozing spot of protoplasm--that's the start of it all. Feeding without hunger, moving without knowledge to food, reproducing mechanically by division, living without instinct, without emotion, without death. For me, that must be the beginning.
"Whether death came, or what it was--a long period without food, perhaps--that started this stuff to changing, I do not know. Maybe it was existence following the way of greatest pressure toward selfhood. Anyway, it started and began its journey. Up and up, out of the mud and ooze, into light and dry dirt.