in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he
perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by
one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at
his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and
selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember
how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private
and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there
were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his
sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down
and still sinking.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening
when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he
was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully
certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking