“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,--me, herself, life; that is why she didn’t care any longer.”
He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew clear--clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably, so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he thought on; “they are all of them right.”
With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life: joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be must always mean.
He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead as she is,” he thought.
In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of attitude,--not pitying it,--while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above it all.”
The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.
He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.
All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was stilled forever.
Gavan did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker and a tolerably interested observer of existence.