'What are you thinking of?'

'Nothing,' said Calamy.

'Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.'

'Nothing in particular,' he repeated.

'Tell me,' Mary insisted. 'I want to know.'

'Well, if you really want to know,' Calamy began slowly...

But she interrupted him. 'And why did you hold up your hand like that? And spread out the fingers? I could see it, you know; against the window.' Pitch dark it was in the room, but beyond the unshuttered windows was a starlit night.

Calamy laughed--a rather embarrassed laugh. 'Oh, you saw it, did you--the hand? Well, as a matter of fact, it was precisely about my hand that I was thinking.'

'About your hand?' said Mary incredulously. 'That seems a queer thing to think about.'

'But interesting if you think about it hard enough.'

'Your hands,' she said softly, in another voice, 'your hands. When they touch me...' With a feminine movement of gratitude, of thanks for a benefit received, she pressed herself more closely against him; in the darkness she kissed him. 'I love you too much,' she whispered, 'too much.' And at the moment it was almost true. The strong complete spirit, she had written in her note-book, must be able to love with fury, savagely, mindlessly. Not without pride, she had found herself complete and strong. Once, at a dinner party, she had been taken down by a large black and lemon coloured Argentine; unfolding his napkin, he had opened the evening's conversation, in that fantastic trans-Pyrenean French which was his only substitute for the Castilian, by saying, with a roll of his black eyes and a flashing ivory smile: 'Jé vois qué vous avez du temmperramenk.' 'Oh, à revendre,' she had answered gaily, throwing herself into the light Parisian part. How marvellously amusing! But that was Life--Life all over. She had brought the incident into a short story, long ago. But the Argentine had looked with an expert's eye; he was right. 'I love you too much,' she whispered in the darkness. Yes, it was true, it was nearly true, at the moment, in the circumstances. She took his hand and kissed it. 'That's all I think about your hand,' she said.

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it. Invisibly, in the darkness, he made a little grimace of impatience. He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment. 'Yes,' he said meditatively, 'that's one way of thinking of my hand, that's one way in which it exists and is real. Certainly. And that was what I was thinking about--all the different ways in which these five fingers'--he held them up again, splayed out, against the window's oblong of paler darkness--'have reality and exist. All the different ways,' he repeated slowly. 'If you think of that, even for five minutes, you find yourself plunged up to the eyes in the most portentous mysteries.' He was silent for a moment; then added in a very serious voice. 'And I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing--this hand, for example--really hard for several days, or weeks, or months, one might be able to burrow one's way right through the mystery and really get at something--some kind of truth, some explanation.' He paused, frowning. Down and down, through the obscurity, he was thinking. Slowly, painfully, like Milton's Devil, pushing his way through chaos; in the end, one might emerge into the light, to see the universe, sphere within sphere, hanging from the floor of heaven. But it would be a slow, laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.

'Why don't you think about me?' Mary Thriplow asked. She propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over him; with her other hand she ruffled his hair. 'Don't I bear thinking about?' she asked. She had a fistful of his thick hair in her hand; softly she tugged at it, testingly, as though she were preparing for something worse, were assuring her grip for a more violent pull. She felt a desire to hurt him. Even in her arms, she was thinking, he escaped her, he simply wasn't there. 'Don't I bear thinking about?' she repeated, tugging a little harder at his hair.

Calamy said nothing. The truth was, he was reflecting, that she didn't bear thinking about. Like a good many other things. All one's daily life was a skating over thin ice, was a scampering of water-beetles across the invisible skin of depths. Stamp a little too hard, lean a shade too heavily and you were through, you were floundering in a dangerous and unfamiliar element. This love business, for example--it simply couldn't be thought of; it could only support one on condition that one never stopped to think. But it was necessary to think, necessary to break through and sink into the depths. And yet, insanely and desperately, one still went skating on.

'Do you love me?' asked Mary.

'Of course,' he said; but the tone of his voice did not carry much conviction.

Menacingly she tugged at the tuft of hair she held twined round her fingers. It angered her that he should escape her, that he should not give himself up completely to her. And this resentful feeling that he did not love her enough produced in her a complementary conviction that she loved him too much. Her anger combined with her physical gratitude to make her feel, for the moment, peculiarly passionate. She found herself all at once playing the part of the grande amoureuse, the impassioned de Lespinasse, playing it spontaneously and without the least difficulty. 'I could hate you,' she said resentfully, 'for making me love you so much.'

'And what about me?' said Calamy, thinking of his freedom. 'Haven't I a right to hate too?'

'No. Because you don't love so much.'

'But that's not the question,' said Calamy, neglecting to record his protest against this damning impeachment. 'One doesn't resent love for its own sake, but for the sake of what it interferes with.'

'Oh, I see,' said Mary bitterly. She was too deeply wounded even to desire to pull his hair. She turned her back on him. 'I'm sorry I should have got in the way of your important occupations,' she said in her most sarcastic voice. 'Such as thinking about your hand.' She laughed derisively. There was a long silence. Calamy made no attempt to break it; he was piqued by this derisive treatment of a subject which, for him, was serious, was in some sort sacred. It was Mary who first spoke.

'Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?' she asked submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows one's pride and surrenders. 'Will you tell me?' she repeated, leaning over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain.

'Why do you make me so unhappy?' she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.

'Make you unhappy?' echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. 'But I don't. I make you uncommonly happy.'

'You make me miserable,' she answered.

'Well, in that case,' said Calamy, 'I'd better go away and leave you in peace.' He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were really preparing to go.

But Mary enfolded him in her arms. 'No, no,' she implored. 'Don't go. You mustn't be cross with me. I'm sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me, please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested. Really, really.' She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at the Royal Institution lecture.

Calamy couldn't help laughing. 'You've succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,' he said. 'I'd find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.'

'Please, please,' Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves...

'You've made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,' Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly--for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath--he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious.

'Well, you see,' he started hesitatingly, 'it's like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist--my hand, for example.'

'I see,' said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see.

'It's extraordinary,' Calamy went on, 'what a lot of different modes of existence a thing has, when you come to think about it. And the more you think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes. What seemed solid vanishes; what was obvious and comprehensible becomes utterly mysterious. Gulfs begin opening all around you--more and more abysses, as though the ground were splitting in an earthquake. It gives one a strange sense of insecurity, of being in the dark. But I still believe that, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might somehow come through, get out on the other side of the obscurity. But into what, precisely into what? That's the question.' He was silent for a moment. If one were free, he thought, one could go exploring into that darkness. But the flesh was weak; under the threat of that delicious torture it turned coward and traitor.

'Well?' said Mary at last. She moved closer to him, lightly, her lips brushed across his cheek. She ran her hand softly over his shoulder and along his arm. 'Go on.'

'Very well,' he said in a business-like voice, moving a little away from her as he spoke. He held up his hand once more against the window. 'Look,' he said. 'It's just a shape that interrupts the light. To a child who has not yet learned to interpret what he sees, that's all it would be, just a shaped blotch of colour, no more significant than one of those coloured targets representing a man's head and shoulders that one learns shooting on. But now, suppose I try to consider the thing as a physicist.'

'Quite,' said Mary Thriplow; and from the movement of a floating tress of her hair which brushed against his shoulder he knew that she was nodding her head.

'Well then,' Calamy went on, 'I have to imagine an almost inconceivable number of atoms, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of units of negative electricity whirling several million times a minute round a nucleus of positive electricity. The vibrations of the atoms lying near the surface sift out, so to speak, the electro-magnetic radiations which fall upon them, permitting only those waves to reach our eyes which give us the sensation of a brownish-pink colour. In passing it may be remarked that the behaviour of light is satisfactorily explained according to one theory of electro-dynamics, while the behaviour of the electrons in the atom can only be explained on a theory that is entirely inconsistent with it. Inside the atom, they tell us now, electrons move from one orbit to another without taking any time to accomplish their journey and without covering any space. Indeed, within the atom there is neither space nor time. And so on and so on. I have to take most of this on trust, I'm afraid, for I understand next to nothing about these things. Only enough to make me feel rather dizzy when I begin to think about them.'

'Yes, dizzy,' said Mary, 'that's the word. Dizzy.' She made a prolonged buzzing over the z's.

'Well then, here are two ways already in which my hand exists,' Calamy went on. 'Then there's the chemical way. These atoms consisting of more or fewer electrons whizzing round a nucleus of greater or lesser charge are atoms of different elements that build themselves up in certain architectural patterns into complicated molecules.'

Sympathetic and intelligent, Mary echoed: 'Molecules.'

'Now if, like Cranmer, I were to put my right hand into the fire, to punish it for having done something evil or unworthy (words, by the way, which haven't much in common with chemistry), if I were to put my hand in the fire, these molecules would uncombine themselves into their constituent atoms, which would then proceed to build themselves up again into other molecules. But this leads me on at once to a set of entirely different realities. For if I were to put my hand in the fire, I should feel pain; and unless, like Cranmer, I made an enormous effort of will to keep it there, I should withdraw it; or rather it would withdraw itself almost without my knowledge and before I was aware. For I am alive, and this hand is part of a living being, the first law of whose existence is to preserve its life. Being alive, this hand of mine, if it were burnt, would set about trying to repair itself. Seen by a biologist, it reveals itself as a collection of cells, having each its appointed function, and existing harmoniously together, never trespassing upon one another, never proliferating into wild adventures of growth, but living, dying and growing to one end--that the whole which they compose may fulfil its purpose--and as though in accordance with a preordained plan. Say that the hand is burnt. From all round the burn the healthy cells would breed out of themselves new cells to fill in and cover the damaged places.'

'How wonderful life is!' said Mary Thriplow. 'Life...'

'Cranmer's hand,' Calamy went on, 'had done an ignoble thing. The hand is part, not merely of a living being, but of a being that knows good and evil. This hand of mine can do good things and bad things. It has killed a man, for example; it has written all manner of words; it has helped a man who was hurt; it has touched your body.' He laid his hand on her breast; she started, she trembled involuntarily under his caress. He ought to think that rather flattering, oughtn't he? It was a symbol of his power over her--of her power, alas, over him. 'And when it touches your body,' he went on, 'it touches also your mind. My hand moves like this, and it moves through your consciousness as well as here, across your skin. And it's my mind that orders it to move; it brings your body into my mind. It exists in mind; it has reality as a part of my soul and a part of yours.'

Miss Thriplow couldn't help reflecting that there was, in all this, the stuff for a very deep digression in one of her novels. 'This thoughtful young writer..." would be quoted from the reviewers on the dust-cover of her next book.

'Go on,' she said.

Calamy went on. 'And so these,' he said, 'are some of the ways--and there are plenty more, of course, besides--these are some of the ways in which my hand exists and is real. This shape which interrupts the light--it is enough to think of it for five minutes to perceive that it exists simultaneously in a dozen parallel worlds. It exists as electrical charges; as chemical molecules; as living cells; as part of a moral being, the instrument of good and evil; in the physical world and in mind. And from this one goes on to ask, inevitably, what relationship exists between these different modes of being. What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges; between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress? It's here that the gulfs begin to open. For there isn't any connection--that one can see, at any rate. Universe lies on the top of universe, layer after layer, distinct and separate...'

'Like a Neapolitan ice,' Mary's mind flew at once to the fantastic and unexpected comparison. 'This witty young writer..." That was already on her dust-covers.

Calamy laughed. 'All right,' he agreed. 'Like a Neapolitan ice, if you like. What's true in the chocolate layer, at the bottom of the ice, doesn't hold in the vanilla at the top. And a lemon truth is different from a strawberry truth. And each one has just as much right to exist and to call itself real as every other. And you can't explain one in terms of the others. Certainly you can't explain the vanilla in terms of any of the lower layers--you can't explain mind as mere life, as chemistry, as physics. That at least is one thing that's perfectly obvious and self-evident.'

'Obvious,' Mary agreed. 'And what's the result of it all? I really don't see.'

'Neither do I,' said Calamy, speaking through an explosion of melancholy laughter. 'The only hope,' he went on slowly, 'is that perhaps, if you went on thinking long enough and hard enough, you might arrive at an explanation of the chocolate and the lemon by the vanilla. Perhaps it's really all vanilla, all mind, all spirit. The rest is only apparent, an illusion. But one has no right to say so until one has thought a long time, in freedom.'

'In freedom?'

'The mind must be open, unperturbed, empty of irrelevant things, quiet. There's no room for thoughts in a half-shut, cluttered mind. And thoughts won't enter a noisy mind; they're shy, they remain in their obscure hiding-places below the surface, where they can't be got at, so long as the mind is full and noisy. Most of us pass through life without knowing that they're there at all. If one wants to lure them out, one must clear a space for them, one must open the mind wide and wait. And there must be no irrelevant preoccupations prowling around the doors. One must free oneself of those.'

'I suppose I'm one of the irrelevant preoccupations,' said Mary Thriplow, after a little pause.

Calamy laughed, but did not deny it.

'If that's so,' said Mary, 'why did you make love to me?'

Calamy did not reply. Why indeed? He had often asked that question himself.

'I think it would be best,' she said, after a silence, 'if we were to make an end.' She would go away, she would grieve in solitude.

'Make an end?' Calamy repeated. He desired it, of course, above everything--to make an end, to be free. But he found himself adding, with a kind of submarine laughter below the surface of his voice: 'Do you think you can make an end?'

'Why not?'

'Suppose I don't allow you to?' Did she imagine, then, that she wasn't in his power, that he couldn't make her obey his will whenever he desired? 'I don't allow you,' he said, and his voice quivered with the rising mirth. He bent over her and began to kiss her on the mouth; with his hands he held and caressed her. What an insanity, he said to himself.

'No, no.' Mary struggled a little; but in the end she allowed herself to be overcome. She lay still, trembling, like one who has been tortured on the rack.