Free Born in Exile by George Gissing Page B

Twybridge was
some five-and-twenty miles. Well and good. At the rate of four
miles an hour it would take him from half-past eleven to about six
o'clock. He could certainly reach home in time for supper.
    At Dent station, ashamed to ask (like a tramp) the way to so
remote a place as Twybridge, he jotted down a list of intervening
railway stoppages, and thus was enabled to support the semblance of
one who strolls on for his pleasure. A small handbag he was obliged
to carry, and the clouded sky made his umbrella a requisite. On he
trudged steadily, for the most part by muddy ways, now through a
pleasant village, now in rural solitude. He had had the precaution,
at breakfast time, to store some pieces of bread in his pocket, and
after two or three hours this resource was welcome. Happily the air
and exercise helped him to get rid of his headache. A burst of
sunshine in the afternoon would have made him reasonably cheerful,
but for the wretched meditations surviving from yesterday.
    He pondered frequently on his spasmodic debauch, repeating, as
well as memory permitted, all his absurdities of speech and action.
Defiant self-justification was now far to seek. On the other hand,
he perceived very clearly how easy it would be for him to lapse by
degrees of weakened will into a ruinous dissoluteness. Anything of
that kind would mean, of course, the abandonment of his ambitions.
All he had to fight the world with was his brain; and only by
incessant strenuousness in its exercise had he achieved the
moderate prominence declared in yesterday's ceremony. By birth, by
station, he was of no account; if he chose to sink, no influential
voice would deplore his falling off or remind him of what he owed
to himself. Chilvers, now—what a wide-spreading outcry, what
calling upon gods and men, would be excited by any defection of
that brilliant youth! Godwin Peak must make his own career, and
that he would hardly do save by efforts greater than the ordinary
man can put forth. The ordinary man?—Was he in any respect
extraordinary? were his powers noteworthy? It was the first time
that he had deliberately posed this question to himself, and for
answer came a rush of confident blood, pulsing through all the
mechanism of his being.
    The train of thought which occupied him during this long trudge
was to remain fixed in his memory; in any survey of the years of
pupilage this recollection would stand prominently forth,
associated, moreover, with one slight incident which at the time
seemed a mere interruption of his musing. From a point on the
high-road he observed a small quarry, so excavated as to present an
interesting section; though weary, he could not but turn aside to
examine these strata. He knew enough of the geology of the county
to recognise the rocks and reflect with understanding upon their
position; a fragment in his hand, he sat down to rest for a moment.
Then a strange fit of brooding came over him. Escaping from the
influences of personality, his imagination wrought back through
eras of geologic time, held him in a vision of the infinitely
remote, shrivelled into insignificance all but the one fact of
inconceivable duration. Often as he had lost himself in such
reveries, never yet had he passed so wholly under the dominion of
that awe which attends a sudden triumph of the pure intellect. When
at length he rose, it was with wide, blank eyes, and limbs partly
numbed. These needed half-an-hour's walking before he could recover
his mood of practical self-search.
    Until the last moment he could not decide whether to let his
mother know how he had reached Twybridge. His arrival corresponded
pretty well with that of a train by which he might have come. But
when the door opened to him, and the familiar faces smiled their
welcome, he felt that he must have nothing to do with paltry
deceit; he told of his walk, explaining it by the simple fact that
this morning he had found himself short of money. How that came to
pass, no one inquired. Mrs.