Reduce, Reuse, Re-CYCLE

SHEARWATER sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingling like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel. It was his business to get hot. He did get hot. From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on. Inside that little wooden house, which might have reminded Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of mind, of the box in which gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate life where the same every time he looked in. Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle of the nightmare bicycle, pedalling, pedalling. The water trickled over the brake. And Shearwater sweated.Great drops of sweat came oozing out from under his hair ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like rain drops. His thick bull-neck was wet; his whole naked body, his arms and legs steamed and shone. The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the center of the sheet at the focal point where all its slopes converged. Lancing would tap at the window. And Shearwater who kept his eyes fixed straight befor him, as he pedalled slowly and unremittingly along his nightmare road, would turn his head at the sound.
"All right?" Lancing's lips moved and his eyebrows went up enquiringly.
Shearwater would nod his big round head and the sweatdrops suspended on his eyebrows and his moustache.
"Good," and Lancing would go back to his thick German book.

Constant as the thermometer Shearwater peddalled steadily and slowly on. With a few brief halts for food and rest, he had been pedalling ever since lunch-time. At eleven he would go to bed on a shake-down in the laboratory and at nine tomorrow morning he would re-enter the box and start pedalling again. He would go on all tomorrow and the day after; and after that, as long as he could stand it. One, two, three, four. Pedal,pedal, pedal. . . . He must have travelled the epuivalent of sity or seventy miles this afternoon. He would be getting on for Swindon. He would be nearly at Portsmouth. He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford. He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling through the green and golden valleys where Constable used to paint. He would be at Winchester by the bright stream. He would have ridden through the beech woods of Arundel out into the sea. . . .
In any case he was far away, he was escaping. And Mrs. Viveash followed, walking swayingly along on feet that seemed to tread between two abysses, at her leisure. Pedal, pedal. The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood. . . .
Formidably, calmly, her eyes regarded. The lids cut off an arc of those pale circles. When she smiled, it was a crucifixion. The coils of her hair were copper serpents. Her small gestures loosened enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her voice they had fallen in ruins about him. His world was no longer safe, it had ceased to stand on its foundations. Mrs. Viveash walked among his ruins and did not even notice them. He must build up again. Pedal, pedal. He was not mearely esacping; he was working a building machine. It must be built with proportion with proportion, the old man had said. The old man appeared in the middle of the nightmare road in front of him, clutching his beard. Proportion, proportion.
On the nightmare road he remained stationary. The pedals went round and round under his driving feet , the sweat ran off him. He was escaping and yet he was also drawing nearer. He would have to draw nearer. "women, what I have to do with you?" Not enough; too much.
Not enough-he was building her, in a great pillar next to the pillar of work.
too much-he was escaping. If he had not caged himself here in this hot box, he would have run out after her, to throw himself-all in fragments, all dissipated and useless-in front of her. And she wanted none of him.
the old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard, crying out, "proportion, proportion." He trod and trod at his building machine, working up the pieces of his life.
In the annex of the laboratory the animals devoted to the service of physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden irruption of light. The rats who were being fed on milk from a London dairy came tumbling from their nests whith an anxious hungry squeaking.

In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up hist storong light dome of light. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time flowed darkly past.
"And Now," Said Mrs. Viveash, straightening herself up and giving herself a little shake, "now we'll drive to Hampstead and have a look at Piers Cotton."