Stephen, letter in hand, looked across space and time at the land of his birth. From afar it loomed up immense, mysterious—and mute. He was afraid of it. He was afraid of the silent dawn of life, he who sought amongst the most perfect expressions of matured thought the word that would fling open the doors of beyond. Not there! Not there! ... He wrote to his brother: "I cannot return. You would not understand if I tried to explain. But, believe me, to return now they are dead would be worse than suicide which is the unpardonable crime. I want to know ... don't ask what—what some others knew and died without telling. Till I know I cannot come back. I think I dare to hope that when the word is spoken, I shall understand. Do not wonder at what I say. It is useless. You are right. There is no country like our country and no people like us—peasants. We are God's children. Little children yet. If we were like the men are around me now I could not speak to you as I am speaking. We are Brothers. We are different, but we love without understanding one another—and we trust. Do not be angry. If there is money tell me how much there is for me for I must arrange my life. I could also earn it—but then I would have to give up my hope. Many men had to do it. It wouldn't matter—but still I am anxious to know. Cherish our land—preserve in your heart the simplicity God's mercy has put there—think of me often".

The brother returned a puzzled but a resigned answer. Into business matters he went thoroughly with great clearness and Stephen found himself almost rich or, at any rate, in very comfortable circumstances. He had recovered somewhat from the terrible shock of his loss. The black violence of grief faded after a time into a cold greyness: the pale and unwilling dawn of another short day of uncertain respites. In that ashy light in which at that time he lived Stephen saw his phantom companions return, beckon, smile, point onwards with shadowy arms; and he heard the ghostly whisper of alluring words shaped by their beautiful and unreal lips. He must go! He had paid an enormous price for the privilege of a hopeless strife! Was it hopeless? ... As he lay on a couch, with half-closed eyes, in the silence of his studio, the shadows of the evening closed round him. The day was attuning itself slowly to the sorrowful note of his heart. He got up, walked irresolutely about. The big room was under the roof which, over a part of it, came low down, with glazed openings that resembled slanting and luminous trap-doors. He walked there bending low and put his head out of the window by the simple process of standing up again. He saw the blurred waste of jumbled roofs and, further on, the rectilinear contours of a distant building shamming under a clouded sky the dignity of some Greek temple. Just beyond, the rounded masses of clumps of trees in the park with here and there a poplar shooting up like a spire, seemed to protest emotionally, with an indignant tremble of all their curves, against the rigid purity of that lie. Round his head, innumerable sparrows twittered aggressively, hopping amongst chimney-stacks. The world appeared ugly, colourless and filled with the impertinent, personal chatter of small impudences. He drew back abruptly as if to avoid a damaging contact. For a long time he meditated, sometimes striding slowly, at times standing motionless amongst canvasses where the advancing night had erased the vestiges of his persevering attempts to disclose his soul to himself and to others. He thought: It is dark now but tomorrow is another day. I have found no living teacher—and the dead will not speak. Why? ... I have offered to them the awful sacrifice of two human hearts. Is it not enough? Am I unworthy? Who knows? And yet, and yet I feel.... "Very well," he muttered with a wave of his hand towards the sham temple where immortal masterpieces kept their secret, unmoved before the insincere ecstasies of the blind. "Very well. Be mute. Yours would have been, after all, but a human voice. I will go to the source from which you spring—to the origin of all Inspiration...." After a while he murmured indistinctly: "Nature", as if he had been ashamed of using the profaned word—the word bedraggled on so many lips—to clothe the august form of the terrible, of the immense and tormenting Idea.

He left suddenly, without seeing anybody, without making even an attempt to shake the ever-ready hands of casual companions; whereby he caused his departure to be much discussed and the qualification of "a beastly plutocrat" added to every mention of his name, for about a week or so—in fact till he became utterly forgotten. He was not a man to leave a mark on the minds of his contemporaries; for he, strange monster, had not been provided with that touch of commonplace which makes us all brothers—and some of us illustrious. His work lay yet in the future, his lips were mute—and he pushed his aimless way through youthful crowds leaving no trail: unless a faint sense of hostility, awakened in some well ordered minds, may be put down to his account for a memorable distinction.

Again he travelled south. But this time he left the towns aside and looked at the uncovered face of the world. From the windows of commodious hotels he looked at the mountains and loathed them. They repelled him. They seemed to him senseless and wicked like magnificent monuments erected to the frenzied violences of some dark and terrible past. In the valleys he could not breathe and the sunrises seen from lofty summits he had climbed in his search disclosed to his sight only a disorderly mob of peaks whose shapes were as fantastic and aimless as a fevered dream. The Creator had tossed and jumbled that tormented bit of universe with an angry hand into a hopeless wilderness: forbidding and dumb.

Stephen left the mountains and sought Nature in other aspects. And he saw her washed, brushed, fenced in, tricked out; artificially harmonious or artificially dishevelled, such as a super-civilized actress personating a gypsy, with the scent of manufactured perfumes lingering under the dainty and picturesque rags. Even in the most remote and wildest places where he set up his easel, the hand of man seemed to raise an unscalable wall between him and his Maker. He was discouraged. At last he turned his face to the west, towards the sea.

There, the opening of a wide horizon touched him as an opening of loving arms in a welcoming embrace touches a wayworn and discouraged traveller. For many succeeding days he dwelt on the shore drinking in the infinitely varied monotony of greatness. He was moved by the thought that there, at last, he stood on the threshold of the dwelling place of sublime ideas. He made his own the fleeting beauties of sunrises and sunsets with the avidity of a thief, with the determination of a buccaneer. He thought nobody could see in them what he saw and the snatching before the eyes of men of profound impressions had for him all the harsh joy of unlawful conquest. On hazy evenings after watching the last vestige of a rayless fire sink in the violet distances of the sea he would remain, listening anxiously, through gathering darkness, to the measured clamour of the surf. He believed that in that presence the word would come, the word desired, prayed for, invoked; the word that would give life, that would give shape, to the unborn longings of his heart. But the weeks passed wearing out the poignant delight of his hope. The great, the unreserved, the illimitable had a reserve and a limit for him; and after speaking for a while in tones of thunder fell into an austere and impenetrable silence. He waited patiently, humbly. At last with a sigh of: "Not here! Not here!" he turned his back upon the capricious sea.

He felt sad, cast down, unsecure; as a man betrayed by the most loved of friends would feel. He began to mistrust the whole creation—and naturally he thought of the undesirable security of perfect solitude. He dreamed of vast deserts, but—apart from the difficulty of living there—he had a fear of their deception. They also would speak in glorious promises only to cast him down at last from the pinnacle of his expectations. He would not expose himself again to a trial almost too heavy to be borne, to a disappointment that would, perhaps, forever rob him of the last vestiges of his faith. Cold silence, absolute silence, is better than the unfinished melodies of deceived hopes. He resolved to return to the cities, amongst men; not because of what the poet said about solitude in a crowd; but from an inward sense of his difference from the majority of mankind. He would withdraw into the repugnance he inspired to men and live there unembittered and pacific. He liked them well enough. Many of them he liked very much but he never felt the sense of his own quality (whatever it might be—he did not in any way think himself superior—only different) as when in contact with the latent hostility of his kind. He made up his mind to try Paris—and started at once.