The bank was
marshy, but a track of pounded oyster shells, visible against the mud,
led to a wharf extending into the solid, voiceless flow of the water.
Jasper Penny stood with Susan gazing into the blanketing gloom. A wan,
disintegrated radiance shone from a riding light in the rigging of a
vessel, and a passing warm blur flattened over the wet deck as a lantern
was carried forward. No other lights, and no movement, rose from the
river; no sound was audible at their back. The city, from the evidence
of Jasper Penny's sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his
consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or
hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious;
he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a
continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition. He had been swept,
he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking
of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud.
A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told
himself, ever written: "Before he was I am." Its vast implications
easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present
rapture--it was no less--lay beyond his grasp.
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