"But for how long will you settle down--?" he asked.

"Oh, only the winter. I am a vagrant really: or a migrant. I must migrate. Do you think a cuckoo in Africa and a cuckoo in Essex is one AND the same bird? Anyhow, I know I must oscillate between north and south, so oscillate I do. It's just my nature. All people don't have the same needs."

"Perhaps not," said Aaron, who had risen and was sitting on the side of the bed.

"I would very much like to try life in another continent, among another race. I feel Europe becoming like a cage to me. Europe may be all right in herself. But I find myself chafing. Another year I shall get out. I shall leave Europe. I begin to feel caged."

"I guess there are others that feel caged, as well as you," said Aaron.

"I guess there are."

"And maybe they haven't a chance to get out."

Lilly was silent a moment. Then he said:

"Well, I didn't make life and society. I can only go my own way."

Aaron too was silent. A deep disappointment was settling over his spirit.

"Will you be alone all winter?"

"Just myself and Tanny," he answered. "But people always turn up."

"And then next year, what will you do?"

"Who knows? I may sail far off. I should like to. I should like to try quite a new life-mode. This is finished in me--and yet perhaps it is absurd to go further. I'm rather sick of seekers. I hate a seeker."

"What," said Aaron rather sarcastically--"those who are looking for a new religion?"

"Religion--and love--and all that. It's a disease now."

"Oh, I don't know," said Aaron. "Perhaps the lack of love and religion is the disease."

"Ah--bah! The grinding the old millstones of love and God is what ails us, when there's no more grist between the stones. We've ground love very small. Time to forget it. Forget the very words religion, and God, and love--then have a shot at a new mode. But the very words rivet us down and don't let us move. Rivets, and we can't get them out."

"And where should we be if we could?" said Aaron.

"We might begin to be ourselves, anyhow."

"And what does that mean?" said Aaron. "Being yourself--what does it mean?"

"To me, everything."

"And to most folks, nothing. They've got to have a goal."

"There is no goal. I loathe goals more than any other impertinence.

Gaols, they are. Bah--jails and jailers, gaols and gaolers---"

"Wherever you go, you'll find people with their noses tied to some goal," said Aaron.

"Their wagon hitched to a star--which goes round and round like an ass in a gin," laughed Lilly. "Be damned to it."

Aaron got himself dressed, and the two men went out, took a tram and went into the country. Aaron could not help it--Lilly put his back up.

They came to a little inn near a bridge, where a broad stream rustled bright and shallow. It was a sunny warm day, and Aaron and Lilly had a table outside under the thin trees at the top of the bank above the river. The yellow leaves were falling--the Tuscan sky was turquoise blue. In the stream below three naked boys still adventurously bathed, and lay flat on the shingle in the sun. A wagon with two pale, loving, velvety oxen drew slowly down the hill, looking at each step as if they were going to come to rest, to move no more. But still they stepped forward. Till they came to the inn, and there they stood at rest. Two old women were picking the last acorns under three scrubby oak-trees, whilst a girl with bare feet drove her two goats and a sheep up from the water-side towards the women. The girl wore a dress that had been blue, perhaps indigo, but which had faded to the beautiful lavender-purple colour which is so common, and which always reminded Lilly of purple anemones in the south.

The two friends sat in the sun and drank red wine. It was midday. From the thin, square belfry on the opposite hill the bells had rung. The old women and the girl squatted under the trees, eating their bread and figs. The boys were dressing, fluttering into their shirts on the stream's shingle. A big girl went past, with somebody's dinner tied in a red kerchief and perched on her head. It was one of the most precious hours: the hour of pause, noon, and the sun, and the quiet acceptance of the world. At such a time everything seems to fall into a true relationship, after the strain of work and of urge.

Aaron looked at Lilly, and saw the same odd, distant look on his face as on the face of some animal when it lies awake and alert, yet perfectly at one with its surroundings. It was something quite different from happiness: an alert enjoyment of rest, an intense and satisfying sense of centrality. As a dog when it basks in the sun with one eye open and winking: or a rabbit quite still and wide-eyed, with a faintly-twitching nose. Not passivity, but alert enjoyment of being central, life-central in one's own little circumambient world.

They sat thus still--or lay under the trees--for an hour and a half.

Then Lilly paid the bill, and went on.

"What am I going to do this winter, do you think?" Aaron asked.

"What do you want to do?"

"Nay, that's what I want to know."

"Do you want anything? I mean, does something drive you from inside?"

"I can't just rest," said Aaron.

"Can't you settle down to something?--to a job, for instance?"

"I've not found the job I could settle down to, yet," said Aaron.

"Why not?"

"It's just my nature."

"Are you a seeker? Have you got a divine urge, or need?"

"How do I know?" laughed Aaron. "Perhaps I've got a DAMNED urge, at the bottom of me. I'm sure it's nothing divine."

"Very well then. Now, in life, there are only two great dynamic urges--do you believe me--?"

"How do I know?" laughed Aaron. "Do you want to be believed?"

"No, I don't care a straw. Only for your own sake, you'd better believe me."

"All right then--what about it?"

"Well, then, there are only two great dynamic urges in LIFE: love and power."

"Love and power?" said Aaron. "I don't see power as so very important."

"You don't see because you don't look. But that's not the point. What sort of urge is your urge? Is it the love urge?"

"I don't know," said Aaron.