The touch had an almost hypnotizing effect on her.
He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and
unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were
unlighted. He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard
him in the bathroom.
Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings,
dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects
before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a
world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He
did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer
immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he
wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was a
certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to
move in him like a tide lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things
darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen
object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to
remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness
substituted itself in him.
The rich suffusion of this state generally kept him happy, reaching its
culmination in the consuming passion for his wife. But at times the flow
would seem to be checked and thrown back. Then it would beat inside him
like a tangled sea, and he was tortured in the shattered chaos of his own
blood.
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