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.
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