In Ursula the sense of the unrealised world ahead triumphed over
everything. In the midst of this profound darkness, there seemed to
glow on her heart the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised.
Her heart was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey of
darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a light which was not shed on
the world, only on the unknown paradise towards which she was going, a
sweetness of habitation, a delight of living quite unknown, but hers
infallibly. In her transport she lifted her face suddenly to him, and
he touched it with his lips. So cold, so fresh, so sea-clear her face
was, it was like kissing a flower that grows near the surf.
But he did not know the ecstasy of bliss in fore-knowledge that she
knew. To him, the wonder of this transit was overwhelming. He was
falling through a gulf of infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging
across the chasm between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he
was plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift. What was
beyond was not yet for him. He was overcome by the trajectory.
In a trance he lay enfolding Ursula round about. His face was against
her fine, fragile hair, he breathed its fragrance with the sea and the
profound night. And his soul was at peace; yielded, as he fell into the
unknown. This was the first time that an utter and absolute peace had
entered his heart, now, in this final transit out of life.
When there came some stir on the deck, they roused. They stood up. How
stiff and cramped they were, in the night-time! And yet the paradisal
glow on her heart, and the unutterable peace of darkness in his, this
was the all-in-all.
They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness.
This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the
peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not
quite the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was
enduring.
Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx
into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the
raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and
hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught
sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the
darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness
through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English,
then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly
as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier,
along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the
vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral
people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in
peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags,
then scrawling a chalk-mark.