And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!

—Tennyson, Maud (1855)

And now, having brought this fiction to a thoroughly tradi-tional ending, I had better explain that although all I have described in the last two chapters happened, it did not hap-pen quite in the way you may have been led to believe.

I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although per-haps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow.

Charles was no exception; and the last few pages you have read are not what happened, but what he spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen. To be sure he did not think in quite the detailed and coherent narrative manner I have employed; nor would I swear that he followed Mrs. Poulteney’s postmortal career in quite such interesting detail. But he certainly wished her to the Devil, so it comes to almost the same thing.

Above all he felt himself coming to the end of a story; and to an end he did not like. If you noticed in those last two chapters an abruptness, a lack of consonance, a betrayal of

Charles’s deeper potentiality and a small matter of his being given a life span of very nearly a century and a quarter; if you entertained a suspicion, not uncommon in literature, that the writer’s breath has given out and he has rather arbitrarily ended the race while he feels he’s still winning, then do not blame me; because all these feelings, or reflections of them, were very present in Charles’s own mind. The book of his existence, so it seemed to him, was about to come to a distinctly shabby close.

And the “I,” that entity who found such slickly specious reasons for consigning Sarah to the shadows of oblivion, was not myself; it was merely the personification of a certain massive indifference in things—too hostile for Charles to think of as “God”—that had set its malevolent inertia on the Ernestina side of the scales; that seemed an inexorable on-ward direction as fixed as that of the train which drew Charles along.

I was not cheating when I said that Charles had decided, in London that day after his escapade, to go through with his marriage; that was his official decision, just as it had once been his official decision (reaction might be a more accurate word) to go into Holy Orders. Where I have cheated was in analyzing the effect that three-word letter continued to have on him. It tormented him, it obsessed him, it confused him. The more he thought about it the more Sarah-like that sending of the address—and nothing more—appeared. It was perfectly in key with all her other behavior, and to be de-scribed only by oxy-moron; luring-receding, subtle-simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing. The Victorian was a pro-lix age; and unaccustomed to the Delphic.

But above all it seemed to set Charles a choice; and while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice. He had not the benefit of existen-tialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom—that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.

So let us kick Sam out of his hypothe............