of the
house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters
and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed
somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and
arm that mode of descent. If there had been some such uncanny thing as
he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of
notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a
proof--well, of his present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the
question stood, a little in vain, and even--at the end of he scarce knew,
once more, how long--found it, as by the action on his mind of the
failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It
seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush;
the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and
down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness
and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced
houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever
spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great
crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small
hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective
negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the
break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a
night he had made of it.

He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-values (he
had taken hours for minutes--not, as in other tense situations, minutes
for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak, the
sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His
choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life,
and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet while so
deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denoting--at least
by his present measure--extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps
to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last
pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his
own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his
reason, which over-mastered for the moment everything else. There was
the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw
himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present