He
had not come back this time with the vanity of that question, his
former worrying "What, WHAT?" now practically so spent. Yet he
would none the less never again so cut himself off from the spot;
he would come back to it every month, for if he did nothing else by
its aid he at least held up his head. It thus grew for him, in the
oddest way, a positive resource; he carried out his idea of
periodical returns, which took their place at last among the most
inveterate of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough,
was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death
gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most
live. It was as if, being nothing anywhere else for any one,
nothing even for himself, he were just everything here, and if not
for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John
Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan
like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and
there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life,
there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself.
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