Not in Utter Nakedness
then gone to sleep again. Something within him, some voice he had never felt before, seemed to be groping its way blindly up from his heart, and trying to express itself. He wanted to say something—to sing it—but he could find no words that would fit. He felt suddenly as if he had wings, and that he could drift airily up and down in blue ether far above the earth. He was so happy he felt that he must sing as nobody had ever sung in all the world before. But he could find no lines for the song, and only stretched his thin arms out helplessly into the warm patch of yellow sunlight.
Then a sudden terrible, mysterious loneliness stole over him. It seemed as if he had been alone all his life, and that everything was grey around him, and that the silence was so beautiful that he dare not speak to break it. He wondered if he could tell it all to the Nurse, and if she would understand. Then he knew she would n't, because he would not know how to begin, and it was one of those things Other People never understood. But the birds were singing again
205
