The Three Peewits
They got rid of Lobbie at the corner of Chequers Street, and moved on, side by side, past the lighted shopwindows. It was a further revelation to him of the ways of girls, to notice that Gerda repeatedly stopped him, with a childish clutch at his coat-sleeve, before some trifle in those lighted windows that attracted her attention. Her eyes were dreamy with a soft languorous happiness; while her little cries of pleasure at what she saw made ripples in the surface of her mental trance like the rising of a darting shoal of minnows to the top of deep water.
As for his own mood, the lights of the town, its traffic and its crowds, threw him upon a rich, dark, incredible intimacy with her, whose sweetness reduced everything to a vague reassuring stage-play. Everything became a play whose living puppets seemed so touchingly lovable that he could have wept to behold them, and to know that she was beholding them with him!
When they reached the door of the Malakite bookshop, however, he became conscious of so deep an unwillingness to face the look of Christie’s steady brown eyes that he impetuously begged off.
“I can’t do it tonight,” he said; “so don’t ’ee press me, my precious!”
Their farewell was grave and tender; but he left her without looking back.
It was then that hunger came upon him; and making his way to the Three Peewits, he ordered a substantial supper, beneath the not altogether sympathetic gaze of Queen Victoria.
He remained for nearly two hours lingering over this meal, while at the back of his mind the ditty about Shaftesbury-town and Yellow Bracken mingled with the fragrance of the old hostelry’s old wine. When at last he rose from the table, it occurred to him that Darnley Otter had mentioned on the previous day that both the brothers might be here this night. Led by a mysterious desire, just then—not quite understood by himself—for masculine society, he entered the little inner parlour of the Three Peewits. Here he found himself in a thick cloud of tobacco-smoke and a still thicker murmur of men’s voices. The change from his erotic musings into so social and crude an atmosphere was more bewildering to his mind than he had expected. He gazed round him, befogged and blinking.
But Darnley Otter rose at once to greet him, leading him to an aperture in the wall, where drinks were served. Standing there by Darnley’s side, he made polite, hurried bows to the different members of the company, as his friend mentioned their names, and while his glass was filled and refilled with brandy, he found his eyes turning inevitably to the place where Jason sat—sat as if he had been doing nothing else since he came into that room but wait for Wolf’s arrival. The man was watching him intently now, and without a trace of that whimsical humour with which he had departed from him to walk round the edge of Lenty Pond.
Wolf began at once summoning up from the recesses of his own nature all the psychic power he could bring to bear, to cope with this new situation. As he chatted at that little counter with Darnley, in the midst of a rambling, incoherent flow of talk from all parts of the room, he deliberately drank glass after glass of brandy, amused at the nervousness with which Darnley observed this proceeding, and growing more and more determined to fathom the mystery of that self-lacerated being on the other side of the room.
It seemed to him now that Jason’s head, as he saw it across that smoke-filled space, resembled that of some lost spirit in Dante’s Inferno, swirling up out of the pit and crying, “Help! Help! Help!” It was curious to himself how ready he felt just then to respond to that cry. “I must have drunk up this new strength from possessing Gerda,” he thought to himself.
Darnley’s trim beard continued to wag with gentlemanly urbanity, as he laughed and jested with various people in different parts of the room, but Wolf could see that he was growing more and more nervous about his brother. Nor was this nervousness without justification. Jason had turned his face to his neighbour, who was a grim farmer from Nevilton, and was uttering words that evidently seemed to startle the man, if not to shock him; for his face grew grimmer than ever, and he kept shifting his chair a little further away.
Things were at this pass when the door opened with a violent swing, and there came in together Mr. Torp, Mr. T. E. Valley, and a tall handsome browbeating individual, who was presently introduced to Wolf as Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill.
The vicar of King’s Barton seemed to have been drinking already; for he staggered straight up to the counter, pulling the plump stonecutter unceremoniously after him by the lapel of his coat. The heavy-jowled Mr. Manley moved across the room and seated himself by the side of the farmer from Nevilton, whom he addressed loudly and familiarly as Josh Beard. Wolf noticed that Mr. Beard, in a very sour and malicious manner, began at once repeating to this newcomer whatever it had been that Jason Otter had just said to him; while Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill proceeded with equal promptness to cast looks of jocose and jeering brutality at the unfortunate poet.
“My friend Mr. Torp was in the barroom; so I brought him in,” said T. E. Valley, shaking hands with Wolf as if he had not seen him for years.
“ ’Tis no impertinence, I hope, for I to come in,” said the stonecutter, humbly; and it struck Wolf’s mind as a kind of mad dream—not a nightmare, but just one of those dreams where men and houses and animals and trees are all involved and interchanged—that this grotesque figure of a man should be the father of Gerda!
“Mr. Torp and I are old friends,” said Wolf, with cordial emphasis, “and I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again, Vicar! Will you let me order you something? The brandy here seems to me uncommonly good.”
In answer to Wolf’s appeal, the barmaid, whose personality, as she appeared and disappeared at that square orifice, grew more and more dreamlike, brought three large glasses of the drink he demanded, two of which he promptly handed to Valley and Torp, while the third he appropriated for himself.
“ ’Tis wondrous,” remarked Mr. Torp, receiving his glass with unsteady hand; “ ’tis wondrous for a man what works with chisel and hammer all day, to sit and see what folks be like who never do a stroke. I bain’t one o’ they myself who do blame the gentry. What I do say be this, and I don’t care who hears it. I do say that a man be a man while he lives; and a gent be a gent while he lives. Durn me if that ain’t the truth.”
“But when we’re dead, Mr. Torp,” called out the voice of Jason from the further end of the room, “what are we when we’re dead?”
“Evenin’, Mr. Otter, evenin’ to ’ee, Sir! Dead, say ’ee? I be the man to answer that conundrum. Us be as our tombstones be! Them as has ‘Torp’ writ on ’um in clean, good marble, be with the Lord. They others be with wold Horny.”
Several mellow guffaws greeted this speech, for Gerda’s parent was evidently a privileged jester among them; but to the dismay of his brother, who was now talking in a quiet whisper to Wolf, the hollow voice of Jason floated once more across the room.
“Ask that drunk priest over there why he took young Redfern from a good job and turned him into a pious zany.”
There was a vibration in his tone that at once quieted the general clatter of tongues, and everyone looked at Mr. Valley.
“I don’t … quite … understand your … question … Mr. Otter,” stammered the little man.
The bull-like voice of Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill broke in then.
“His reverence may be hard of hearing. Shall I do the asking of him?” And the great bullyboy hesitated not to roar out in thundering tones: “Mister Otter here be asking of ’ee, and this whole company be waiting to know from ’ee, what god-darned trick you played on young Redfern afore he died.”
“I must beg you, Mr. Manley,” said Darnley Otter, whose face, as Wolf watched it, had become stiff as a mask, “I must beg you not to make a scene tonight.”
“I am still quite … quite … at a loss … a loss to understand,” began the agitated clergyman, moving forward a step or two towards his aggressor.
But Mr. Torp interrupted him. “Ask thee bloody questions of thee wone bloody millpond and don’t lift up thee’s roaring voice among thee’s betters!”
There was a considerable hum of applause among the company at this; for Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill was universally disliked.
But the farmer took no heed of this manifestation of public opinion.
“Do ’ee hear what Jack Torp be saying?” he jeered, stretching out his long legs and emptying his glass of gin-and-bitters. “He’s sick as Satan wi’ I; and I’ll tell ’ee the cause for’t.”
There was a general stir in the room and a craning forward of necks. The seasoned cronies of the Three Peewits had long ago discovered that the most delectable of all social delights was a quarrel that just stopped short of physical violence.
“The cause for’t be,” went on the master of Willum’s Mill, “that I ordered me mother’s grave proper-like from Weymouth, ’stead of ferretting round his dog-gone yard, where there bain’t naught but litter and rubbish and paupers’ monuments.”
Having thrown out this challenge, the farmer drew in his legs, placed his great hands upon his knees, and leaned forward. There was a dead silence in that ale-embrowned atmosphere, as if the “private bar” itself, the very walls of which must have been yellow with old leisurely disputes, were aware of something exceptional in that spurt of human venom.
Mr. Torp gave a quick sideways glance to see how the “gentry” were behaving. But Wolf was discreetly occupied in ordering more drinks—he had already had to tell the barmaid to “put down” what he ordered, for his pockets were empty—and Darnley was merely pulling at his beard and keeping his eye on the Vicar.
“Thee’s mother’s stone!” snorted the monument-maker, with resonant contempt. “ ’Twere ready and beauteous, gents all, ’twere ready and beauteous, thik stone! All what passed down street did stop for to see ’un, and did say to theyselves, ‘Thik fine stone be too good for a farmer’s old woman! Thik fine stone be a titled lady’s stone!’ ”
The farmer’s gin-dazed wits could only reply to this by a repeated, “ ’Twere a pauper’s throwaway; ’twere a workhouse six-foot and nothing!”
Mr. Torp’s voice rose higher still. “This Manley here were afeared to leave his mother in ground for a day without a stone on her. He were afeared the poor woman would come out on’s grave to tell tales on him, the old goatsucker! So while thik fine stone were lying in yard getting weathered-like, as is good for they foreign marbles, this girt vool of a nag’s head what must ’a do but drive hay-wagon to Chesil, and bring whoam a silly block o’ Portland, same as they fish-folk do cover their bones wi’, what have never seed a bit o’ marble!”
Under the impact of this eloquent indictment, which excited immense hilarity throughout all the company, Mr. Manley rose unsteadily to his feet and moved towards his enemy. But Mr. Torp, ensconced between Darnley Otter and T. E. Valley, awaited his approach unmoved.
To the surprise of all, the big bully skirted this little group, and, joining Wolf at the liquor-stained counter, bellowed harmlessly for more gin.
It was at this point in the proceedings that more serious trouble began; for Jason Otter, pointing with a shaky forefinger at the Reverend Valley, screamed out in a paroxysm of fury:
“It’s you who talk about me to Urquhart and Monk. … I’ve found it out now. … It’s you who do it!”
The Peewit cronies must have felt that this unexpected clash between two of their “gentry” rose from more subtle depths than those to which they were accustomed; for they were stricken into a silence, at this juncture, which was by no means a comfortable one.
“Mr. Otter here,” broke in the owner of Willum’s Mill, “Mr. Otter here have been telling pretty little tales of the high doings what go on up at King’s Barton. Mr. Otter says Squire Urquhart have sold his soul to that black son-of-a-gun who works in’s garden, and that ’tis bookseller Malakite here in Blacksod whose books do larn ’em their deviltries!”
“I think … there … is … some great … mistake … in your … in your mind, Mr. Manley.”
The words were uttered by T. E. Valley in such shaky tones that Wolf was relieved when he saw Darnley take the parson reassuringly by the arm.
“Mistake?” roared the farmer. “I bain’t one for to say what I ain’t got chapter nor text for saying! My friend, Josh Beard here, of Nevilton, County of Somerset, be as good a breeder of shorthorns as any in Darset; and ’a do say ’a have heerd such things tonight such as no man’s lips should utter; and heerd them, too, from one as we all do know.” And he turned round and leered at Jason Otter with the leer of a tipsy hangman.
“Hold thee’s tongue in thee’s bullick’s-head!” cried the indignant monument-maker. “A gent’s a gent, I tell ’ee; and when a quiet gent, like what’s with us tonight, be moderate wambly in’s head, owing to liquor, ’tisn’t for a girt bullfrog like thee to lift up voice.”
“Bullfrog be ⸻” grumbled the big farmer, hiding his inability to contend in repartee with Mr. Torp under an increased grossness of speech. “What do a son-of-a-bitch like thee know of the ways of the gentry?”
“Malakite?” muttered the breeder of shorthorns. “Bain’t Malakite the old beggar what got into trouble with the police some ten years since?”
“So ’twere,” agreed the grateful tenant of Willum’s Mill, “so ’twere, brother Beard. ’A did, as thee dost say, get into the devil’s own trouble. ’Twere along of his gals; so some folks said. ’A was one of they hoary wold sinners what Bible do tell of.”
“ ’Twere even so, neighbour; ’twere even so,” echoed Mr. Beard. “And I have heerd that old Bert Smith up at Ramsgard could tell a fine story about thik little job.”
Wolf’s mind was too flustered with brandy just then to receive more than a vague shock of confused ambiguity from this startling hint; but the next remark of the man from Nevilton cleared his brains with the violence of a bucket of ice-cold water.
“Bert Smith may sell his grand school-hats all he will; but they do tell out our way—though I know nought of that, seeing I were living at Stamford Orcus in them days—that thik same poor wisp o’ bedstraw dursn’t call his own gal by his own name, whether ’a be in shop or in church.”
“That’s God’s own truth you’ve a-heerd, Josh Beard,” echoed the triumphant Mr. Manley. “ ’Tisn’t safe for that poor man to call his own daughter daughter, in the light o’ what folks, as knows, do report. If I didn’t respect any real gentleman”—and to Wolf’s consternation the gin-bemused stare of the farmer was turned upon himself—“and if I weren’t churchwarden and hadn’t voted Conservative for nigh thirty years, I would show this here stone-chipper the kind of gallimaufry these educated gents will cook for theyselves, afore they’re done!”
Wolf’s wits, moving now, in spite of the fumes of smoke and alcohol, with restored clarity, achieved a momentous orientation of many obscure matters. He recalled certain complicated hints and hesitations of Selena Gault. He recalled the reckless and embittered gaiety of his mother. With a shaky hand he finished his last glass and laid it down on the counter. Then he looked across the room at the two farmers.
“I don’t know whose feelings you are so careful of, Mr. Manley,” he said. “But since I happen to be myself one of these unfortunate ‘educated’ people, and since Mr. Solent, my father, came to grief in this neighbourhood, I should be very glad indeed to hear anything else you may be anxious to tell us.”
His voice, heard now by the whole company for the first time, had a disquieting tone; and everyone was silent. But Jason Otter rose to his feet, and, in the midst of that silence and under the startled attention of all eyes in the room, walked with short quick steps across the floor till he came close up to Farmer Manley, who was leaning his back against the little counter and who had his hands in his pockets; and there he stopped, facing him. No one but Wolf could see the expression on his countenance; and there were all kinds of different versions afterwards as to what actually happened. But what Wolf himself knew was that the excited man was no longer under the restraint of his natural timidity.
His own intelligence was so clairvoyantly aroused at that moment, that he could recall later every flicker of the conflicting impulses that shot through him. The one that dominated the rest was a categorical certainty that some immediate drastic action was necessary. What he did was to take Jason by the shoulders and fling him backwards into an old beer-stained chair that stood unoccupied against the neighbouring wall. In the violence of this action an earthenware jug of water—and Wolf had time to notice the mellow varnish of its surface—fell with a crash upon the floor. There was a hush now throughout the room, and most of the company leaned excitedly forward. Jason himself, huddled limply in a great wooden chair, turned his devastated white face and lamentable eyes full upon his aggressor.
“I … I … I didn’t mean …” he gasped.
“It’s all right, Solent,” whispered Darnley, accepting a chair by Jason’s side, which its owner willingly vacated. “You couldn’t have done anything else.”
“I don’t know about that, Otter,” Wolf whispered back. “I expect we’re all a little fuddled. Sit down, won’t you, and when he’s rested we’ll clear out, eh? I’ve had enough of this.”
All the patrons of the private bar were gathered now in little groups about the room; and before long, with sly inquisitive glances and many secretive nudges and nods, the bulk of the company drifted out, leaving the room nearly empty.
“I can’t … understand. … I didn’t see. … Was he going to bite you?”
The words were from T. E. Valley; and Wolf was so astonished at the expression he used, that he answered with a good deal of irritation:
“Do you bite people, Mr. Valley?”
The priest’s feelings were evidently outraged by this. “What do you mean?” he protested querulously.
“I mean,” began Wolf. “Oh, I don’t know! But to a stranger down here there does seem a good deal that’s funny about you all! You must forgive me, Mr. Valley; but, on my soul, you brought it on yourself. Bite? It’s rather an odd idea, isn’t it? You did say bite, didn’t you?”
They were interrupted by Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill, who, with Mr. Joshua Beard in tow, was steering for the door.
“Did you hurt the gentleman, Sir?” said Mr. Manley to Wolf, in the grave, cautious voice of a drunkard anxious to prove his sobriety.
“You drove the gentleman into fold, seems so!” echoed Mr. Beard.
In thus approaching Wolf it was inevitable that the two worthies should jostle the portly frame of Mr. Torp, who, leaning against the back of a chair, with an empty pewter beer-mug trailing by its handle from one of his plump fingers, had fallen into an interlude of peaceful coma.
“Who the bloody hell be ’ee barging into?” murmured Mr. Torp, aroused thus suddenly to normal consciousness.
“Paupers’ moniments!” jeered the farmer. “Nought but paupers’ moniments in’s yard; and ’a can still talk grand and mighty!”
The stonecutter struggled to gather his wandering wits together. In his confusion the only friendly shape he could visualize was the form of Mr. Valley, and he promptly made all the use he could of that.
“The Reverend here,” he said, “can bear witness to I, in the face of all thee’s bloody millponds and hay-wagons. The Reverend here do know what they words, ‘Torp, Moniment-Maker, Blacksod,’ do signify. The Reverend here did see, for his own self, thik girt stone what I did put up over first young man.” He now removed his bewildered little pig’s-eyes from Mr. Valley and fixed them upon Wolf. “And here be second young man who can bear witness to I; and, darn it, thee’d best do as I do say, Mr. Redfern Number Two, for thee’s been clipping and cuddling our Gerda, ’sknow, and I be only to tell Missus on ’ee, and fat be in fire.”
Had not the whole scene become to him by this time incredibly phantasmal, such an unexpected introduction of Gerda’s name, on this night of all nights, might have struck a villainous blow at his life-illusion. As it was, however, he could only wonder at the perspicacity of drunken fathers, and pull himself together for an adequate retort.
“My name is Solent, my good sir, as you ought to know,” he said. And then he turned to the two farmers, who were nudging each other and leering at him like a couple of schoolboy bullies. “Mr. Torp and I are the best of friends,” he remarked sternly.
“Friend of Torp,” chuckled Mr. Manley.
“Torp’s friend,” echoed Mr. Beard.
“Thee’d best keep thee’s daughter in house, Jack!” continued Mr. Manley. “Lest t’other one rumple her, same as first one did,” concluded Mr. Beard.
Wolf, beyond his conscious intention, clenched the fingers of his right hand savagely; but his wits were clear now, and he mastered the impulse. “Whatever happens, I mustn’t make an ass of myself tonight,” he thought.
“You’d better go out into the air, gentlemen,” he said quietly, “and cool your heads, or you’ll get into trouble. Come, Mr. Torp. You and I must have a last glass together; and you, too, Vicar.” And he led them away towards the little counter.
The farmers moved slowly toward the door.
“Redfern Number Two, ’a called un,” Wolf heard Mr. Beard saying. “Now what be the meaning o’ that, me boy?” He couldn’t hear the big farmer’s answer; but whatever it was, it ended in a sort of bawdy rhyme, of which all he could catch was the chanted refrain, “Jimmie Redfern, he were there!” And with that the door swung behind them.
He had just time to obtain three more drinks from the barmaid before she pulled down the little wooden slide and indicated in no equivocal manner that eleven o’clock had struck.
Simultaneously with this a serving-boy entered and began to turn down the lights. “We ought to be starting for home,” said Darnley Otter, from where he sat by his brother, whose great melancholy eyes were fixed upon vacancy. “And it’s none too soon, either!”
“I’ll be getting home-along me own self, now this here lad be meddling with they lights;” remarked Mr. Torp, emptying his glass. “Good night to ’ee all,” he added, taking down his coat and hat from a peg; “and if I’ve exceeded in speech to any gent here”—and he glanced anxiously at Wolf and Mr. Valley—“it be contrary to me nature and contrary to me profession.”
“I … suppose … you won’t mind …” murmured the voice of T. E. Valley, who had remained at the counter, sipping the drink, to which Wolf had treated him, as if it were the first he had tasted that night, “if I come with you? I don’t want to get on anybody’s nerves”—and he looked at Jason Otter, who without being asleep seemed to have drifted off into another world—“but I don’t like that walk alone at night.”
“Of course you must come with us, Valley,” said Darnley. “Though what you can find so frightening in that quiet lane I can’t imagine.” Saying this he pulled his brother up upon his feet and helped him into his overcoat.
Half-an-hour later they were all four making their way past the last houses of Blacksod. Darnley and Jason were walking in front; Wolf and T. E. Valley about six paces to the rear. They were all silent, as if the contrast between the noisy scene they had just left and the hushed quietness of the way were a rebuke to their souls.
In one of the smaller houses, where for some reason neither curtain nor blind had been drawn, Wolf could see two candles burning on a small table at which someone was still reading.
He touched Mr. Valley’s arm, and both the men stood for a time looking at that unconscious reader. It was an elderly woman who read there by those two candles, her chin propped upon one arm and the other arm lying extended across the table. The woman’s face had nothing remarkable about it. The book she read was obviously, from its shape and appearance, a cheap story; but as Wolf stared in upon her, sitting there in that commonplace room at midnight, an indescribable sense of the drama of human life passed through him. For leagues and leagues in every direction the great pastoral fields lay quiet in their muffled dew-drenched aloofness. But there, by those two pointed flames, one isolated consciousness kept up the old familiar interest, in love, in birth, in death, all the turbulent chances of mortal events. That simple, pallid, spectacled head became for him at that moment a little island of warm human awareness in the midst of the vast nonhuman night.
He thought to himself how, in some future time, when these formidable scientific inventions would have changed the face of the earth, some wayward philosopher like himself would still perhaps watch through a window a human head reading by candlelight, and find such a sight touching beyond words. Mentally he resolved once more, while to Mr. Valley’s surprise he still lingered, staring in at that candle-lit window, that while he lived he would never allow the beauty of things of this sort to be overpowered for him by anything that science could do.
He submitted at last to his companion’s uneasiness and walked on. But in his heart he thought: “That old woman in there might be reading a story about my own life! She might be reading about Shaftesbury-town and yellow bracken and Gerda’s whistling! She might be reading about Christie and the Malakite bookshop. She might be reading about Mattie—” His thoughts veered suddenly. “Mattie? Mattie Smith?” And a wavering suspicion that had been gathering weight for some while in his mind suddenly took to itself an irrefutable shape. “Lorna and my father. … The little girl said we were alike. … That’s what it is!”
He did not formulate the word “sister” in any portion of his consciousness where ideas express themselves in words, but across some shadowy mental landscape within him floated and drifted that heavy-faced girl with a new and richly-charged identity! All the vague fragments of association that had gathered here and there in his life around the word “sister,” hastened now to attach themselves to the personality of Mattie Smith and to give it their peculiar glamour.
“How unreal my life seems to be growing,” he thought. “London seemed fantastic to me when I lived there, like a tissue of filmy threads; but … good Lord! … compared with this!—It would be curious if that old woman reading that book were really reading my history and has now perhaps come to my death. Well, as long as old women like that read books by candlelight there’ll be some romance left!”
His mind withdrew into itself with a jerk at this point, trying to push away a certain image of things that rose discomfortably upon him—the image of a countryside covered from sea to sea by illuminated stations for airships, overspread from sea to sea by thousands of humming aeroplanes!
What would ever become of Tilly-Valley’s religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity. What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret “mythology,” in such a world?
Stubbornly he pushed this vision away. “I’ll live in my own world to the end,” he said to himself. “Nothing shall make me yield.”
And while a gasping susurration at his side indicated that he was, in his excitement, walking too fast for Mr. Valley, he discovered that that grey feather of Christie’s which served her as a marker in the Urn-Burial had risen up again in his mind.
And as he walked along, adapting his steps to his companion’s shambling progress, he indulged in the fancy that his soul was like a vast cloudy serpent of writhing vapour that had the power of overreaching every kind of human invention. “All inventions,” he thought, “come from man’s brains. And man’s soul can escape from them and even while using them treat them with contempt—treat them as if they were not! It can slip through them like a snake, float over them like a mist, burrow under them like a mole!”
He swung his stick excitedly in the darkness, while he gave his arm to Mr. Valley to help him along. He felt as though he were entering upon some desperate, invisible struggle to safeguard everything that was sacred to him against modern inventions. “It’s queer,” he thought to himself, “what the sight of that grey feather in the book, and that old woman with the candle, have done to my mind. I’ve made love to the limit; I’ve brawled in a tavern to the limit; and here I am, with a tipsy priest on my arm, thinking of nothing but defending I don’t know what against motorcars and aeroplanes!”
He continued vaguely to puzzle himself, as they lurched forward in the darkness, as to what it was in his nature that made his seduction of Gerda, his encounter with Jason, his discovery of Mattie, thus fall away from his consciousness in comparison with that feather and that candle; and he came finally to the conclusion, before they reached King’s Barton, that there must be something queer and inhuman in him. “But there it is,” he finally concluded. “If I’m like that … I am like that! We must see what comes of it!”