He had a bitter pain in his heart, for he knew that she was still a stranger to him and his hungry love was destined to ever remain unsatisfied.
Being back in England together with Ethel, Lawson’s sense of relief is disturbed by her sudden change of behavior. She becomes silent and reclusive. Right before she is about to leave him, he witnesses her taking a bath at a local place, just like she did back on the Samoa, on the secluded pool where he met her. He realizes that she will always remain a stranger to him, because that moment reminds him of the time he first met her, but this time, it evokes a feeling of dread.
He thought of her not as a woman, but as something not of this earth.
Lawson’s infatuation with Ethel goes beyond any sense of reason, and it is the main source of incoming issues. He doesn’t see her as a woman, but a magical spirit, immediately indicating that he will fail to understand her and her actions. His otherworldly infatuation prevents him from moving on with his life, from making decisions to protect himself, which ends fatally for him.
I was a link with the world he regretted and a life that he would know no more.
Upon the narrator’s first conversation with Lawson, he notices that the man desperately tries to converse about literature and art, and all the things that remind him of the modern world of England. The narrator immediately realizes that he and the conversation provide comfort for the broken man filled with regrets.
