I have been lying dreaming until now, and now I have awakened, and there is still nothing but the rain. I am alone. The unborn is not more weak or more ignorant, and like the unborn I wait and wait, knowing neither what has been nor what is to come, because of the rain, which is, has been, and must be. The house is still and silent, and those small noises that make me start are only the imagination of the spirit or they are the rain. There is only the rain for it to feed on and to crawl in. The rain swallows it up as the sea does its own foam. I will lie still and stretch out my body and close my eyes. My breath is all that has been spared by the rain, and that comes softly and at long intervals, as if it were trying to hide itself from the rain. I feel that I am so little I have crept away into a corner and been forgotten by the rain. All else has perished except me and the rain. There is no room for anything in the world but the rain. It alone is great and strong. It alone knows joy. It chants monotonous praise of the order of nature, which I have disobeyed or slipped out of. I have done evilly and weakly, and I have left undone. Fool! you never were alive. Lie still. Stretch out yourself like foam on a wave, and think no more of good or evil. There was no good and no evil. There was life and there was death, and you chose. Now there is neither life nor death, but only the rain. Sleep as all things, past, present, and future, lie still and sleep, except the rain, the heavy, black rain falling straight through the air that was once a sea of life. That was a dream only. The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age--for it is all one--I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: “Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”
TENTH DAY--EAST HENDRED TO WANBOROUGH, BY LOCKINGE PARK, WANTAGE, ASHBURY, AND BISHOPSTONE
On the following morning early I returned to where I had left my conjectured road, which I shall now call Ickleton Street, at the crossing half a mile south of East Hendred Church. The eastern road at the crossing came from the south-east (out of Hungerford Lane) and was only for a few hundred yards in the line of Ickleton Street, falling into it a hundred yards or so west of Aldfield Common, where I had lost the road. The western road was apparently mine, but it was so unimportant for _through_ traffic that though the eastern road forked on entering the northern or Hendred road, neither of the forks ran exactly into Ickleton Street. Between these forks was a triangular waste of yellow parsnip, wild carrot, and dock, uneven from digging, and somewhat above the roads which were sunken by downhill wearing.