“Forget” + 

In the middle of that night Wolf was aroused to consciousness by the voice of Gerda anxiously soothing him; and even in his confusion he was aware at that moment of something exceptionally tender in her tone, something protective, something different altogether from a young creature’s spontaneous alarm at being disturbed in its sleep! It was as if all the agitations of that last fortnight had unfolded some psychic bud or frond within her being, changing her from a capricious child into a full-grown sweet-natured woman. + 

“What did I say?” he asked, as his head fell back upon the pillow. + 

“ ‘I shall break between you,’ you cried. ‘I shall break between you!’ And then, when I said, ‘Between who, Wolf?’ you said, ‘Between them! Can’t you see? Between those two men!’ ” + 

“Men, Gerda? Did I say men?” And then suddenly, like a retreating image in a deep mirror, he remembered what his dream had been. He was himself a brittle stick, a piece of dead brushwood. At one end of him was the Waterloo tramp. At the other end of him was that complacent old man with the white cat. He had awakened in terror because he felt himself beginning to crack, as those two antagonists tugged. + 

After caressing Gerda with an emotional relaxation, such as the self-pitying weakness of a fever might have left, he settled himself again to sleep. His final thoughts were concerned with the meaning of his dream; but beyond a fumbling association of the Waterloo waif with the loss of his “mythology,” and the sleek cat-man with an acceptance of life on its lowest terms, the riddle remained unsolved. + 

He awakened next morning to a vivid awareness that this Friday was the eve of Darnley’s wedding. He recalled his first encounter with his friend in that tearoom of the Lovelace Hotel; and his mind reverted to the waiter who was now a beggar. “Stalbridge,” he thought. “A good man. I wish I’d given him that half-a-crown.” + 

As he shaved himself at the familiar looking-glass, he entered upon a cheerful discussion with Gerda as to what they had better decide to do on the following day. Gerda displayed no hostility to Mrs. Solent’s company, but indicated that it would please Mr. Torp if she went with him rather than with them; and as for their return to Blacksod after the wedding-feast, that could be left to chance! + 

“There’ll be lots of carriages coming and going,” she said, “and it’ll be fun to see what happens! I shan’t mind,” she went on, “if we all walk home in a crowd. But I would enjoy going with Father. It’ll be like the old days, when I used to go to funerals with him. He likes to go to places with me when I’m all dressed up.” + 

“I suppose Darnley will be at school today just as usual,” said Wolf; “but they’ve given him a week off. They’re going to Weymouth. Did I tell you that?” + 

“To lodgings?” enquired Gerda. “We all took lodgings once, Wolf; one Whitsun⁠ ⁠… in Adelaide Crescent.” + 

“No; it was an hotel, I think,” said Wolf. + 

“The Burden?” she cried excitedly. “Oh, how I’d love to stay at the Burden! I’ve never stayed in an hotel in my life. I’ve never been into an hotel except the ‘Three Peewits.’ ” + 

Wolf was silent for a second. Then he said slowly, contemplating his half-shaven face in the mirror with as much detachment as if it had been a cat’s saucer of milk, “Well, we might go in to see them next Saturday. They wouldn’t be leaving till the afternoon, I suppose. We could all have lunch at the Burden.” + 

“Wolf,” she cried, sitting up straight in bed⁠—a movement that brought her head into the square of his mirror⁠—“Wolf! Why can’t we spend some of our money in a weekend at the Burden? Not this week, of course; but next week, just as they’re coming back! Oh, I would love that so much!” + 

A wave of sadness swept over him. It was on the tip of his tongue to reply to her in her own words of last Sunday⁠—“It’s too late, my dear, it’s too late!” For that beach in front of Brunswick Terrace came back to him, with the cries of the fish-sellers, with the dazzling sun-path on the breaking sea, with the wet planks and the painted boats. Ay, how he would love to see it all again⁠—but who was he to see it? Hollow! Hollow! A drifting husk, empty of purpose and hope! + 

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t do just as you say, sweetheart. But let’s get through tomorrow first, before we decide. But I don’t see why we shouldn’t stay one night, at any rate, at the Burden.” + 

He caught her eyes in the glass, and they were radiant. She was actually clapping her hands, as she heard him; and the cry of delight she gave seemed to him to have the sound of whistling in it! + 

Yes, even if he were doomed to drift now like a purposeless automaton, it was something to be able to cause such childish exultation. + 

Gerda wanted to be free that day from the trouble of preparing a midday meal, so it was arranged that he should get a bread-and-cheese lunch at the Three Peewits. Perhaps Darnley would be ready to share it with him! At any rate Gerda should be left to her own devices until teatime. + 

All that morning, as he supervised his boys’ lesson, his mind ran upon what she had said about Weymouth. How strange that he had himself proposed to Christie that they should go down there this very Sunday⁠ ⁠… quite independently of the Burden Hotel! Everything in his life seemed gravitating just then towards Weymouth⁠—towards that birthplace of his murdered “mythology”⁠—but too heartless was he now to care a straw! + 

“I won’t spoil Gerda’s happiness by breathing a word about this Sunday,” he said to himself; “and very likely, anyway, Christie will have forgotten. Olwen has cut me out. That’s the long and the short of it. Olwen has cut me out!” + 

As he stared at the ink-stains on the wall, he found himself selecting one particular stain to serve as a raft in the dead-sea drift of his trouble. This stain was an elongated one; and before he knew what he was doing, he had turned it into a road⁠—a road like that road in the Gainsborough picture. + 

As one boy after another came up to his desk with some sort of written answer to the tedious historic question he had propounded to them, his mind began to envisage, with a rapid bird’s-eye glance, all the years of his life, and the dominant part that had been played in them by this ideal road. He seemed to be able, as he stared at that elongated ink-stain, to recall fragments of old memories such as he had not thought of even once during the last twelve months! The longer he stared at that mark upon the wall the more rapidly those memories crowded in upon him. A village-green where a hollow tree had its roots in a duck-pond⁠ ⁠… two high banks covered with patches of purple clover and yellow rockrose, where the dusty highway under his feet led to the top of a hill, from which he knew, by a sure instinct, the sea was visible⁠ ⁠… a deserted garden at the crossing of one thoroughfare with another, outside some cathedral-town, where nettles mingled with currant-bushes and where an old woman was shouting to an old man across a brook full of watercress⁠ ⁠… images of this kind, like mystical vignettes in the margin of an occult biography, kept passing and repassing along the road of his life⁠—that is to say, along that elongated ink-stain. + 

So fast did such memories crowd in upon him that he grew consciously surprised at their presence, as a drowning man might be surprised at the concentration of a whole life’s experience into a second of time! + 

He even remembered one particular occasion, in the outskirts of London, when he had made up his mind that those glimpses of things seen under a certain light were the sole purpose of his existence! He recalled the exact spot where he reached that conclusion. It was upon a bench, somewhere beyond Richmond, under some enormous lime-trees. He remembered how he had decided then that these particular episodes, snatched out of the flowing stream of visual impression, were more charged with the furtive secret of life than any contact with men and women. He remembered how he had pulled up a cool dark-green tuft of grass by the root, so excited had that conclusion made him; and how afterwards he had busied himself for some while in a conscientious attempt to replant it, using his stick as a trowel, greatly to the amusement of a flirtatious pair of shopgirls, who regarded him from a recumbent position under one of those trees. + 

It was ironical that at this very moment, when the power of his enjoyment of it had been killed, he seemed able to articulate his philosophy of the ideal road more definitely than he had ever done before. What it really had meant, this philosophy, was a power of seeing things arranged under a certain light⁠ ⁠… a light charged with memories of the past⁠ ⁠… a light capable of linking his days in flowing continuity! Well, it was all lost now⁠ ⁠… lost because it implied a certain kind of Wolf who was enjoying it; and that kind of Wolf was stone dead. + 

“Harrison Minor, what are you thinking of? You’ve cribbed this straight from Martin Major!”⁠ ⁠… + 

His voice must have assumed something of the harsh bitterness of his mood; for a lot of heads were raised from the desks, and there was a hurried whispering in Harrison Minor’s corner. + 

“Reality has beaten me,” he said to himself. “What I feel now must be exactly what religious people feel when they believe themselves to be damned! They can talk of other matters; they can respond when you approach; but while they are chatting with you of this and that, there is always perdition lying at the bottom of their thoughts!” + 

“Every boy whose paper has been marked must go on quietly, please, with the Restoration!” + 

“Olwen has cut me out. That’s the long and short of it. It was all in vain, that day in the cornfield! ‘Mind touching mind, without need of words,’ did we say? But she’ll be happy with Olwen. Mattie will have to let her have Olwen.”⁠ ⁠… + 

When he met Darnley, after that heavy morning was over at last, he learnt that Jason too would be at the Three Peewits. Darnley was silent and preoccupied as they walked through the streets; and Wolf set himself to accept the fact that they were destined to go on drudging at this School, side by side, sans intermission, to the end of their days! Precisely as they walked through these streets today, between School and Tavern, so would they be found walking twenty, thirty years hence, each meditating his own secret cares! + 

Chance had ordered it that not only was Jason awaiting them in the Three Peewits dining-room. There, in the best window-seat, with a bottle of Burgundy in front of him, sat Mr. Urquhart himself! Jason was drinking beer from a two-handled pewter flagon and helping himself with relish from a large rook-pie, covered with a crust of flaky pastry, that stood before him. + 

Both he and Urquhart had an air of having been established in their places for many hours. They were, however, as far removed from each other as two guests in the same dining-room could possibly be! Wolf and Darnley went across to the squire and shook hands with him; and then, sitting down at Jason’s table, they both ordered the same brand of Dorchester Ale, but in lesser proportion. + 

“There’s enough for you two,” said Jason, referring to the pie before him. “You’re allowed second helpings here. I’ve had mine.” + 

“How did those rogues make ’ee come in to town today, Otter?” remarked Mr. Urquhart, pulling his chair round, but keeping his elbow on his table and his fingers on the stem of his wineglass. + 

“They’ve given me all next week off,” replied Darnley. + 

“I’ve been saying that I ought to have a holiday too, just in his honour,” threw in Wolf, feeling as if there were a pail of ashes in his belly that nothing he drank could so much as moisten. + 

This intercourse between the two ends of the room seemed to displease Jason. His face assumed its most stony expression, and he bent low over his plate. + 

“They’ve good custards here,” he remarked, after a pause. “Custard’s much better than those puddings that your friend Mrs. Stone makes.” + 

“Don’t call her Mrs. Stone, Jason,” murmured Darnley, with a peevishness unusual to him in addressing his brother. “Wolf’s as much a friend of Dimity as any of us.” + 

For half-a-second Jason’s brows contracted ominously; and then his whole countenance relaxed into a thousand humorous wrinkles. + 

“He’ll be a better friend to her still, when he’s tasted those wedding-pasties of yours, Darnley!” he said, holding up his tankard and making a sly motion with one eyelid and one shoulder in the direction of Mr. Urquhart, to whom his back remained turned. + 

There was a moment’s interruption at this point, while the waiter was laying in front of the newcomers the beer and cheese they had ordered. + 

“You needn’t look like that at my pie,” said Jason. “Everyone isn’t going to be married tomorrow!” + 

“Hurry up with your new poems,” retorted Darnley, “and then you’ll be able to treat us all to these luxuries.” + 

But Jason had turned his sardonic eye upon Wolf. + 

“Solent can tell you what marriage is. He can tell you! You needn’t think a person doesn’t know what you’ve got in your head as you see me enjoying myself.” + 

“What have I got in my head, Jason?” asked Wolf. His tone was meek enough; but the black bile of reciprocal malice was seething in the veins of his throat. + 

“Abuse of me, because of these rooks,” chuckled the other. “You’re longing to spoil my pleasure by telling everyone about their cawings and their proud nests. But you’d like a taste as well as anyone⁠ ⁠… if there were no one here to see you!” + 

These words of Jason’s, and the look that accompanied them, caused Wolf a discomfort that resembled the squeezing of a person’s tongue against a hidden gumboil. It was impossible for him to help endowing with glossy, outspread wings the unctuous morsel into which the poet just then dug his fork! He felt the blood pricking him under his cheekbones. He thought of Miss Gault. He began to suffer from that old, miserable sensation that his body was a lump of contemptible putrescence, on the top of which his consciousness floated. This was the sort of occasion when in former days he used to summon up his “mythology.” Well, that was all over now. He felt as disintegrated as the remnants on the poet’s plate. He was those remnants. Dorsetshire had eaten him up! + 

The voice of Mr. Urquhart became audible to him. The squire was explaining in a querulous voice that the man Monk had been so truculent that morning that he had set the whole household by the ears. “Mrs. Martin came to me like a virago and threatened to give notice,” he said. “I thought it best to beat a retreat. Always beat a retreat when servants mutiny, eh? What?” + 

As Wolf blinked at him across the foam of his beer-mug, he began to feel as if that vigil of his at the church-window had been a pure hallucination. “Redfern’s grave will look the same as it always has,” he thought, “when I next see it.” + 

“Did you enjoy your walk this morning, Jason?” enquired Darnley, pulling at his beard. His brother regarded him with a long, sad, intent look. + 

“The clouds were like gentle spirits,” he repeated slowly. “They were coming from eternity and could not stay. The fields were wet with dew for them. But they could not stay. The hazel-bushes were sobbing with sap for them. But they could not stay. The daisies were white with love for them. But they could not stay.” + 

As the man spoke, he placed his knife and fork carefully side by side, drank what was left of his great tankard, and replaced it on the table as scrupulously and softly as if it had been a living thing. + 

“They were going to eternity,” he added in a low voice. And then, while his melancholy grey eyes assumed a look of such abysmal sorrow that Wolf wondered to behold it, “God comes and God goes,” he said, “but no one feels Him except moles and worms. And they are blind and can’t see. They are dumb and can’t speak. I thought this morning, Darnley, that my poetry is no better than the tunnels of moles and worms.” + 

“What’s that your brother’s saying, Otter,” came the voice of Mr. Urquhart across the room. “Is he making rhymes about the waiter? Do ’ee tell him to be careful! Lovelace says a man was kicked out of his club in town for doing less than that; and besides⁠ ⁠… in this room, you know⁠ ⁠… though we’ve got⁠—” + 

He was interrupted by the clatter of a horse’s hooves outside the windows, and Wolf could just see, out there, the corner of a nursery-gardener’s cart crowded with blue hyacinths. + 

As Wolf stared at those flowers, he caught Urquhart’s eye. + 

“It’s nothing to you, Solent, I suppose,” he remarked, “but the proofs of my book came from Bristol this morning!” + 

Wolf murmured his congratulations; but into his mouth rose the sensation of the colour brown. + 

“He has got his wish over Redfern,” he thought, “and now he’s got his book too.” + 

Mr. Urquhart was addressing the young waiter. + 

“Didn’t know I was an author, Johnnie, did you? Mr. Solent there and I have just brought out the very book for a sly rogue like you! I’ll send ’ee a copy, me boy! Don’t forget, now! Ask me for it, if you don’t get it soon!” + 

What Wolf felt, as he listened to this, was that all the mysterious evil that he had associated with this man was in reality nothing more than senile perversity. Jason was right. But if Jason was right with regard to Urquhart, wasn’t he likely to be right with regard to Wolf Solent? To Jason’s mind⁠ ⁠… to Jason’s peculiar satisfaction⁠ ⁠… evil was no more than a thin-drifting, poisonous rain, that seeped through into everything. Nothing was free from it, except perhaps the passionate heart of Olwen! But it was just a slimy rain. It had no spiritual depths. Mr. Urquhart and himself had been playing together a pleasant theatrical drama⁠ ⁠… all gesture, all illusion! Upon Jason’s plate of well-cleaned rook-bones lay the fragments of their high Satanic play! + 

Mr. Urquhart had called the young waiter to his side now. Darnley and Jason were talking in low voices about the arrangements for tomorrow.⁠ ⁠… + 

It was then that an incredibly sweet fragrance came in through the open window! It may have been only the hyacinths; but, as Wolf breathed it in, it seemed to him much more than that. It seemed to come from masses of bluebells under undisturbed green hazels! + 

This happy sensation, however, was not permitted to him for long. In a second there followed a vibrant, penetrating drumming⁠ ⁠… an aeroplane!⁠ ⁠… With the beat of a demon’s sharded wings this sound drew nearer⁠ ⁠… steadily nearer and nearer.⁠ ⁠… + 

Mr. Urquhart turned his head. + 

“Those young airmen are fine lads,” he remarked. “I’d let any one of those chaps carry me to Tibet or Cambodia if he’d give me the chance.” + 

Wolf noticed a strange light of excitement come into Darnley’s blue eyes; and it was Darnley who spoke now. + 

“Yes⁠ ⁠… to fly!” he cried. “To clear your soul of all the earth-horrors! To wash your mind clean, in a blue bath of air! Think of it! To fly over land and sea till you realize the roundness of the earth! To feel your mind changing⁠ ⁠… becoming a purer instrument⁠ ⁠… as you leave this cluttered world!” + 

The drumming of the aeroplane was now accompanied by the harsh snorting and snarling of a large motorcar. + 

“Whether it’s by air or by road,” observed Jason, in the tone of a very old hermit, “these young men come down upon us; and it’s best to win favour of the Lords of Science.” He glanced sideways at the waiter. “They come by sea too, sometimes,” he added, hunching his shoulders in mock-alarm. “This young man looks like a chief engineer on a liner,” he went on, lowering his voice to a whisper, and glancing at his brother. + 

Wolf began to feel as if he were stranded alone on a high, exposed platform, hooted and shrieked at by thousands of motors and aeroplanes.⁠ ⁠… + 

Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. It was as if he searched in vain for any escape into the silences of the earth. No escape was possible any more! He was combed-out, raked-over, drained of all sap! His destiny henceforth must be to groan and creak in the wind of others’ speed.⁠ ⁠… + 

“It’s a miracle,” repeated Darnley, “to be able to transform the whole bias of the mind by turning away from land and water and making the air our element!” + 

The man’s singular-looking eyes were literally translucent with excitement. + 

“I’m afraid it’s not of Mattie he’s thinking,” said Wolf to himself. + 

But Mr. Urquhart had just made some remark to his ex-secretary that Wolf had been too absorbed in his thoughts to hear. “I beg your pardon, Sir!” he murmured. + 

“That’s the value of a book like ours, eh, me boy?” cried the Squire. “It’ll be kept on newspaper-stands on the top of great iron landing-stages for people to pick up as they start for Australia or Siberia! It’ll tickle their fancy, eh? What? By Jove it will⁠ ⁠… to learn what lecherous snakes their ancestors were.” + 

“I didn’t tell you, did I, Solent,” said Darnley innocently, “that when I called at the Malakites’ to let Olwen know I’d take her home this evening, the little minx refused to budge? She swears she won’t leave Christie for a single night! There’d have been tears if I’d insisted. Well! It’ll be⁠ ⁠… perhaps⁠ ⁠… easier”⁠—he spoke pensively and slowly now⁠—“if she does remain⁠ ⁠… where she is.” + 

“Girls are all the same,” remarked Jason. “They all like sugar and spice. Old Malakite probably buys more tasty sweets for her in this town than she gets with us.” There was something about this speech that was more than Wolf could bear. He rose abruptly to his feet. + 

“Sorry, Darnley,” he said. “I forgot something I have to do before afternoon school! It won’t be more than that, will it⁠ ⁠… what I’ve had?” and he laid down a shilling and three pennies upon the table. A grotesque consciousness of the way his quivering upper-lip projected and the way his hands shook, filled his brain as he spoke; but he bowed to Mr. Urquhart as he went out, and nodded civilly at Jason. “We’ll meet later,” he said, giving Darnley one rapid reproachful look as he left the room. + 

Once in the street, he paused, hesitating. He felt as if he were as much exposed to the gaze of the crowd as if he had been one of the featherless birds of Jason’s pie! + 

Instinctively he began to make his way through the crowd towards the Malakite shop. Recognizing the import of this movement, he mentally confronted the only alternative to it⁠ ⁠… that of hanging about for half-an-hour in his deserted classroom. No! That would be misery too great! But when he reached the shop and had rung the bell in the side-alley, he felt tempted to bolt. The presence of Olwen seemed to change the whole situation. It was as if the little girl were clinging to both Christie’s hands, held behind her back; so that she lacked the power⁠ ⁠… whatever her will may have been⁠ ⁠… to help him at this crisis! + 

He could not recall ever having waited so long at that door as he waited now. What a lovely day it was! But that balmy spring air⁠ ⁠… and he could see several clumps of pale jonquils in the little backyard⁠ ⁠… floated over him as if he had been a dead man, as if he had really been drowned last night in Lenty Pond. + 

Here she was, running rapidly down the narrow staircase.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Wolf! I’m in such trouble! I’ve been thinking and thinking what to do.⁠ ⁠… I prayed that anybody might come⁠ ⁠… and now it’s you! Oh, I’m so glad!” + 

He followed her into the house and she shut the door; and they stood close together in the little, dark entrance. Unaware of any conscious impulse, he hugged her tightly to his heart and held her there⁠ ⁠… his brain a complete blank to everything except the sense of holding her. + 

But this relief from reality was not destined to be permitted to him for long. The girl plucked at his wrists, turned her head away from him, struggled to release herself. + 

“Don’t, Wolf! Not now, Wolf! I want your help⁠ ⁠… don’t you understand? I don’t want that now.” + 

He sighed heavily, but let her go, and stood by her side, clutching the bannisters. + 

“What’s the matter, Chris?” he murmured humbly. + 

“Olwen wants to stay with me⁠ ⁠… to live with me⁠ ⁠… you knew that, didn’t you? But this morning she’s been fretting about Mattie. Ever since she woke up she’s been fretting. And now she says she’ll be quite happy with me again if only she can go to the wedding and see them married! She wants to go tonight, Wolf. That’s what she wants⁠ ⁠… to have a last night with Mattie⁠ ⁠… and come back here when they leave for Weymouth; but, you see, I had no way of reaching Darnley. Is Darnley at school today, Wolf? I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t⁠—” + 

She was interrupted by a sound in the bookshop; and Wolf saw her stiffen and lay her finger on her lip, and turn a tense, concentrated, narrow-lidded stare at the door leading into the shop. + 

Wolf did not like the manner of this intense listening. He had liked still less the tone in which she had welcomed his appearance, not for his own sake, but as a means of reaching Darnley! The truth began to deepen upon him that between Olwen and the old man Christie’s world had never been more occupied, had never promised less free space for him and for his affairs. + 

The sounds within the shop, whatever their nature, ceased now, and she turned, smiling. She laid two small fingertips, light as that feather in her Urn-Burial, upon his coat-sleeve. + 

“I won’t ask you to come up now, Wolf. You always excite her so, and I’ve just got her quiet.” She paused and hesitated; and in the faint light of that little passage he could see she was anxious as to just how he would react under her appeal. “Will you see Darnley?” she murmured. He moved back a step and nodded gravely. + 

“Well, listen, Wolf dear!” she went on. “Bring him to tea here, will you? And ask him to hire a trap at the hotel, so he can take her out there tonight. You’ll be able to bring her back tomorrow, won’t you, Wolf⁠ ⁠… when the wedding’s over?” + 

He promised submissively to do exactly what she wanted; and opening the door to let him out, she closed it quietly behind them both and stood by his side in the narrow alley. + 

Once more Wolf was aware of the humming of an aeroplane above the roofs of Blacksod! Those aeroplanes were becoming a kind a devilish chorus to his comic tragedy! + 

The girl lifted her head, trying to get a glimpse of it, while he himself stared obstinately at the narrow velvet band that encircled her waist. “Damn these machines!” he muttered bitterly. “It’ll never be the same world again!” + 

She lowered her chin and looked into his face. The sound of the aeroplane had actually brought⁠—or so he thought to himself in his stubborn resentment⁠—the same gleam into her eyes as into those of Darnley. All were against him now⁠ ⁠… all, all, all! These demons were ensorcerizing every soul he knew. The Powers of the Air! No, he would never yield to them! While a single grass-blade grew out of the deep earth, he would never yield to them! + 

“Oh, Wolf, you are wrong, my dear!” she cried fervently. “It is a new world! It is! It is! But it’s a beautiful world. It means a new kind of beauty: glittering steel, gleaming wings, free spaces⁠—” She stopped suddenly. He thought afterwards she must have seen something in his expression that troubled and puzzled her. + 

“I must go to Olwen,” she murmured; and then, just as she had done before, she snatched at his hand and raised it to her lips. “Don’t mind about the machines, Wolf dear. Bring Darnley to tea, won’t you? And tell him to order a trap. She could walk, I know. But I don’t want her to get Mattie all tired out. Au revoir, my dear!” And she slipped away into the house, giving him, as she went, one of those especial smiles of hers that were always so baffling. + 

Back at his desk again, Wolf was compelled to bestow so much attention upon his boys that it was only once in all the afternoon that he fixed his eyes upon the mark on the wall, and gave himself up to his sullen meditations. + 

“This is the kind of thing,” he thought, “that I’ve got to endure for the rest of my days, unless Mother, with her teashop money, pensions me off! I could bear it! I know well enough I could bear it, if only⁠—It’s nice making Gerda laugh. It’s nice doing what Christie tells me. But it’ll be hard to go on in this room for thirty years.” + 

He had occasion to denounce a couple of boys, ere the lesson was over, for a flagrant case of cribbing; and the way in which the elder of these boys⁠—a great hulking lubber-head called Gaffer Barge⁠—took all the blame upon himself, struck his imagination far more than he permitted that poor, sweet-natured lout to discover! When the clock finally struck the hour, and he found himself free, he stopped Gaffer Barge as the lad was slouching off. + 

“Barge,” he said, “I wonder if you would be so awfully good as to do a little errand for me on your way home?” + 

There came into the boy’s face, on hearing these words, a smile of such sheer, innate sweetness and goodness, that Wolf was staggered. He had been, if anything, rather abrupt and distant with the fellow in their daily relations, and the pleasure with which the boy responded to this unexpected request struck him in his present mood as no less than astonishing. It was as if in this desert of grim reality upon which he had been dropped from the back of his divine steed, he had heard the most heavy-humped camel utter melodious words. + 

“How good of you, Gaffer!” he cried eagerly, using the lad’s nickname to indicate his appreciation of this response. “One minute, then; and I’ll write a note.” + 

He incontinently scribbled a line to Gerda, telling her not to expect him home till after tea. This missive he folded up and directed to “Mrs. Wolf Solent, Thirty-Seven, Preston Lane.” + 

“Here you are, Barge,” he said, handing it to him. “It’s not much out of your way. But I’m really most extremely grateful to you.” Whereat the lad slipped off, as shyly exultant as if he had made a hundred runs in a cricket-match. + 

There arose no obstacle, in the sequence of events that now occurred, to upset Christie’s prearranged plan. With the fly from the Three Peewits safely ordered for seven o’clock, Darnley and Wolf took their places at the Malakite tea-table; and a situation that certainly possessed elements of awkwardness flowed forward as smoothly and easily as if the girl had possessed a social genius worthy of the subtlest adepts of high society. + 

Mr. Malakite was himself unusually voluble during the earlier part of the meal, and Wolf’s attention was thoroughly arrested by the drift of the old man’s loquacity. + 

“And so Urquhart wrote to him,” the old bookseller was saying, “and I got his reply yesterday⁠ ⁠… by the second post. Olwen met the postman and brought it to me in the shop. You weren’t afraid of your old granddad, were you, my chick?” He looked round the table, as he said this, with an expression of crafty triumph. + 

“We mustn’t bore Darnley with our business-affairs, Father,” interrupted Christie, “on the very eve of his wedding-day.” + 

But Darnley too had caught the unusual quiver of excitement in the old man’s voice, and had fixed his blue eyes intently upon him. + 

“No, no,” he said. “Please go on, Sir; please go on.” + 

“It’s a relative of yours, Mr. Solent, as well as of the squire’s, so he tells me,” continued the bookseller. “He knew I wanted to sell out, and he sent this gentleman my catalogue, and now I’ve got his reply⁠ ⁠… by the afternoon post. Olwen gave it to me while I was on the ladder, didn’t you, my pet? You didn’t know your granddad could climb a ladder, did you, my pretty?” + 

Wolf experienced an intense distaste for the tone the old man adopted in thus addressing his daughter’s child. He couldn’t resist a furtive glance at Christie. But the girl was staring with one of her fixed, inscrutable looks at Darnley; and all he could interpret of her feelings depended upon a certain disturbing droop of her underlip. Like a flash there shot through his mind a startled doubt as to the wisdom of the human race in allowing family-life to be so unapproachable, so fortified, so secretive. In spite of what he had often said to Gerda, it came over him now that there was something rather ghastly in letting this girl and this child be shut up with this senile nympholept. + 

“From London, by the afternoon post,” insisted Mr. Malakite. And Wolf, nervously receptive of every psychic current just then, felt more uneasy still at this imbecile repetition of so unimportant a detail. + 

“Is it Lord Carfax you are talking about?” he hazarded⁠—thinking to himself, “How oddly that fellow keeps up his role in my life!” + 

But the bookseller nodded eagerly. “Did you write to him too about my stuff?” + 

Christie turned her head sharply at this. “I’ve never told Wolf anything at all about your catalogue, Father,” she cried. “He doesn’t approve of our selling”⁠—she hesitated a moment, and then smiled her most mischievous smile⁠—“the sort of books we do sell!” + 

This identification of herself with the worst aspect of her parent’s business was a new shock to Wolf. He looked at her reproachfully; thinking of the nature of that book from Paris compared with which the lewdest court-trials in Dorset history were a mere pinch of honest dirt; but the girl’s head was held high, and her eyes were flashing ominously. + 

“His lordship says he’ll take the whole lot!” concluded her father triumphantly. “So that means, my pretty ones, that your silly old man has done the best stroke of business of his whole life!” He turned his eye defiantly upon Wolf as he spoke, as if challenging the whole world to interfere with him. “I shall be able to retire from work after this,” he added, with an unpleasant complacency, “and we’ll go and live at Weymouth, won’t we, my treasures? The silly old man will sit on the esplanade all the morning, and play bowls all the afternoon!” + 

Christie got up at this point and moved round to the little girl’s elbow. While she was spreading a slice of bread for her, Wolf muttered something about goat-carriages. The child was all attention at once. + 

“Did Cinderella’s coach have goats to pull it?” she asked. “Do goats go faster than donkeys?” + 

“I’ll just run down and see if I can see anything of your fly,” said Christie suddenly. And she slipped from the room with a movement as swift, and almost as imperceptible, as a breath of that day’s soft wind. + 

The old man took advantage of her absence to begin retailing to Darnley the names, editions, and prices of some of his most curious and expensive volumes. Olwen, at this, left her bread-and-jam, slipped out of her chair, and, coming round to Wolf’s side, scrambled up upon his knees and demanded a story. + 

Wolf felt sure that, in spite of her ranging herself so definitely on her father’s side, Christie was embarrassed by the old man’s excitement; and he had an inkling that she would remain down there in the doorway, looking for the carriage, until it actually drew up. + 

“Well, sweetheart,” he whispered, “I’m not very good at stories; but I’ll try.” He clasped the child closely to him and shut his eyes so as to collect his thoughts. + 

“At the very moment,” he began, “when we were all waiting for the cab to come, you and I saw an enormous swallow⁠ ⁠… the ancestor of all swallows⁠ ⁠… big as a golden eagle, hovering close to the window.” Olwen twisted round her head at this, in order to see the window. + 

“Without a moment’s hesitation,” he went on, “we opened the window together and got on the bird’s back.” + 

“Leaving everyone, Wolf?” + 

“Certainly. Leaving everyone! This great swallow carried us then over Poll’s Camp and over the Gwent Lanes toward Cadbury Camp. It let us get down off its back at Cadbury Camp⁠ ⁠… which really is Camelot⁠ ⁠… and you and I drank at Arthur’s Well there; and the effect of drinking that water was to turn us both into swallows, or into some strange birds like swallows. We sat, all three, in a row, on a sycamore-branch above the valley; and we wondered and wondered where we’d fly to. And a lovely wind, blowing over the dark rain that is held in the hollows of old trees, ruffled our feathers; and we knew, being birds, the language of the wind; and it said to us, ‘The cuckooflowers have come out down by the Lunt!’ And it said to us, ‘If you stop chattering, you silly birds, and listen, you will hear the earth murmuring to itself as it sweeps forward through space.’ ” + 

“What did I say to it then, Wolf?” whispered the little girl, glancing anxiously at the door. + 

But he continued to hug her closely to him; and with his eyes still tightly shut, he went on in the same low tone: “You said to it, ‘Blow us all towards Weymouth, wind, and be quick about it. I want to dig in the sand!’ ”⁠ ⁠… + 

“Wolf!” It was Darnley who was addressing him across the table. + 

He opened his eyes, and, as he did so, he became aware that his friend was looking at him with that same appealing glance that had arrested his attention when they first met at the Lovelace Hotel. + 

“Yes, Darnley?” + 

“Mr. Malakite was alluding to your father just now; and it just occurred to me that I’ve never told you what my father used to say when I had to go back to school. He used to say to me, ‘Man can bear anything, if it only lasts a second!’ ” + 

Something behind his friend’s mackerel-coloured eyes seemed at that moment of time to be reaching out to his inmost soul and crying to it for some answering signal. The fact that Mattie only yesterday had called upon her mother, so long dead, and that Darnley was now reverting to a father he had never even mentioned before, struck Wolf’s mind as an ominous glimpse into the central nerve of life upon earth. He felt at that moment an out-rushing wave of intense affection for Darnley. But what could he do? Olwen refused to let him so much as even smile at the yellow beard across the table. She turned his head towards her with one of her sticky little hands. + 

“What did the wind say then?” she cried. “What did it say to me when I told it to blow me to Weymouth?” + 

“It said, ‘You want too much!’ ” he went on. “It said, ‘I’m afraid you’re not a real bird at all! If you were a real bird you wouldn’t care what you did or where you went, as long as you were flying. You’d hover over Dorset, looking at everything⁠—looking at every cuckooflower in the Lunt fields, and every nest in the Gwent Lanes. You’d hover⁠—’ ” + 

“Where is Christie?” came the voice of Mr. Malakite from across the table. + 

Wolf had to reopen his closed eyes at this. “Downstairs, I suppose,” he responded brusquely. And then, catching hold of the child’s hot hand as it clutched at his chin, “The wind,” he went on, “lifted all three birds from off the branch and carried them northeast, where not one of them wanted to go! Over hill and dale it carried them, towards Stonehenge. And when it had let them sink down upon the highest stone of Stonehenge, it said to them⁠—” + 

He was interrupted by Christie’s reappearance. + 

“The fly’s here, Darnley!” she cried. “Come, Olwen; let me put on your things.” + 

“It said to them,” Wolf concluded, “I can only take one of you to the house of my father. You must decide among yourselves which it is to be!” + 

There was a general hush in the room as these words fell. + 

“Don’t let it be me!” whispered Olwen hurriedly, clapping her hand over his mouth. + 

But Wolf’s half-muffled voice must have been audible to them all. + 

“ ‘Let the one who can best bear to be alone, be the one to go,’ cried the swallow. And as he spoke, he snatched up the trembling Olwen-bird with his beak and claws, and spread his great, pointed wings for flight. Over Wilton he flew, over Semley, over Gillingham, over Templecombe, over Ramsgard, over King’s Barton! And as he flew, the Olwen-bird’s feathers were so ruffled by the speed, that she turned into a little girl again; and when he set her down at last on the windowsill, and she clambered back into the room, and called down the stairs to Christie and Darnley, it seemed as if she had never been out of the house at all.” + 

Wolf was almost embarrassed by the grave hush that followed his conclusion. + 

“Heavens! I didn’t know you were such a storyteller,” murmured Darnley, as he picked up his overcoat. + 

“Did the wind take you to its house?” panted Olwen, flushed and fidgeting now, as Christie buttoned round her a grey-blue jacket with a rabbit-fur collar and proceeded to smooth down her hair under a small, stiff Russian cap; “and did you like being taken away from everybody, Wolf?” + 

He made no answer to the child’s question. A deadly sadness had suddenly descended upon him; and through this sadness, as if through a screen of Mukalog’s most disastrous rain, he fancied he caught an odiously possessive look shot forth upon Christie’s bending figure out of the old man’s narrowed eyelids.⁠ ⁠… + 

A few minutes later, as the faded vehicle drove off, with Olwen’s thin little arm protruded from its side, like a white stalk out of a black bag, and he turned to Christie in the doorway to bid her good night, he found an expression upon her face that sent a queer shiver through his nerves. + 

“I must go, Wolf dear,” she whispered. “Don’t forget all about me in the excitement of tomorrow.” + 

They remained silent for a second, side by side, as if the physical chemistry of their two frames had its own occult understanding, beyond anything that could be said or done by either. Then she hurriedly touched his hand, turned from him, and entered the house without another sign. + 

For some mysterious physical reason, the familiar sour smell of the pigsty, when he finally reached Preston Lane, brought to his mind that incredibly beautiful look, of sheer, native goodness, on the face of Gaffer Barge. + 

That look had surged up from the depths to greet him when he was in his worst danger of being swamped by “reality.” Gaffer Barge was certainly too unimaginative to blow any ideal bubble! Not even that old rascal with the white cat was more embedded in actuality than was this generous lout. + 

Wolf paused for a moment and ran the end of his stick along the railing of the pigsty as an unmusical man might draw his thumb across the strings of a violin. + 

He crossed the road and opened the gate into his puny garden. To his surprise, as he moved up to the door, he saw that their front-room was brilliantly illuminated. Hurriedly he let himself in; and he was no sooner in the hall than he was aware of youthful laughter proceeding from the parlour. + 

He burst in upon them, his hat and stick still in his hand. But it was only Lobbie Torp and Gerda, engaged in a vociferous game of cards! + 

Gerda’s cheeks were burning and her eyes were brilliant. + 

“Lobbie’s brought us a real pack, Wolf!” she cried excitedly. “They’ve got pictures on ’em, same as they have at Farmer’s Rest!” shouted Lobbie in an ecstasy, pushing a card into Wolf’s hand. + 

“Why haven’t we ever thought of buying such nice ones, Wolf?” echoed Gerda. + 

“A pretty sort of game for a schoolboy to bring into my sober house,” began Wolf smiling; “but you two are certainly enjoying yourselves.” + 

“Well, we must stop now,” said Gerda, in her most grave housekeeping tone. “I’ve got to get supper. He can stay to supper, can’t he, Wolf?” she added, throwing into her voice a cajoling little-girl inflection. + 

“Oh, don’t let’s stop, Gerdie! Don’t let’s stop!” cried Lob Torp. “Why can’t we take sides again, with him joining in?” + 

But Wolf’s presence had already produced a certain restraint; and Gerda did not find it difficult to slip away into the kitchen. + 

Wolf took off his coat, and, throwing it upon a chair, flung his hat and stick on top of it. He noted in his mind that this was the first time he had ever dispensed with his habitual hanging-up of these objects upon the pegs outside. + 

He lifted the table out of the way, and the two of them sat down by the fire. A couple of cards on the floor made Wolf recall, as he stooped to pick them up, that game of draughts he had intruded upon between Gerda and Bob Weevil. + 

“How’s your friend Weevil?” he asked Lobbie at random. + 

“Pining for Gerdie,” was the boy’s startling answer. “I went long o’ he to Willum’s Mill last Tuesday night when Mr. Manley were out courtin’; but he were too lonesome to put a worm on a hook! He said Gerdie never liked they wriggling worms and he weren’t never going to disturb they again. He said he reckoned them had their feelings, same as other folk. I told ’e ’twere all a girl’s foolishness, and that we were men; but he said he had sworn a girt oath to do everythink what our Gerdie wanted, though he reckoned he’d never set eyes on she again.” Lobbie paused, and, feeling about in his pocket, produced a packet of peppermints, one of which he put in his mouth and another he handed to Wolf, who accepted it gravely. + 

“He made a vow,” the boy repeated, staring solemnly into the fire, as if completely weighed down by the strange aberrations of human passion; “a vow like what King Harold did make, on they unknown bones.” + 

“Have you seen him since, Lobbie?” enquired Wolf. + 

The boy hesitated and glanced rather uneasily at his host. + 

“ ’Tisn’t that I haven’t seen him,” he murmured obscurely. “If you must know,” he burst out, “ ’twas when I asked he to come to Grassy Mound, out Henchford way, where the girls do enjoy theyselves, rolling down thik bank. And do ’ee know what he said to I?” Lobbie fixed a portentously dramatic look upon his hearer, the undissolved peppermint in his cheek increasing rather than diminishing its impressiveness. “He said there weren’t no pleasure in ’em! ’Twas upsetting to a person to hear him; but that’s what he said⁠ ⁠… ‘no pleasure in ’em’⁠ ⁠… meaning, you know what!” + 

“Your friend is in love with our Gerda, I’m afraid,” said Wolf coldly. + 

“ ’Tisn’t Adultery, be it,” enquired Lobbie, “for he to carry on so about another man’s wife?” + 

In place of answering this question, Wolf escorted his brother-in-law into the kitchen. There the boy’s youthful spirits, as he helped his sister dish up the supper, left Wolf time to slip out into the yard and possess his “soul,” such as it was, in five minute’s solitude. + 

Actuated by one of those capricious motions which he habitually obeyed, he moved over to the stunted laburnum-bush by the wall. On one branch only were there any buds; whereas their neighbour’s lilac, growing in the pig-man’s backyard, was covered with embryo leaves. He laid his hand on the trunk of this abject tree and looked up at the great velvet-black concavity above him, sprinkled with its minute points of light. + 

It was then that he distinctly heard, just as if the trunk of that little tree were a telegraphic receiver, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” uttered in Christie’s voice, but with an intonation twisted out of her normal accent by some desperate necessity. + 

As he heard these words he seemed to see her face, exactly as he had seen it at that open doorway a couple of hours ago, only with a look upon it that forced him to make an immediate drastic decision. + 

He went back into the kitchen. + 

“Come on, Wolf!” cried Gerda, “we are ready to begin.” + 

Not for one single second did he doubt the truth of what he had heard under that tree. “I must get away without upsetting them,” he thought. “I must get away without their guessing that anything’s wrong!” He nodded his head with a forced grimace. + 

“Sit down and start, my dear! I’ve got to run out for a minute to get something.” By the light of the parlour-fire he pulled on his overcoat. His fingers shook so much, as he tightened the collar round his neck, that it was not easy to button it. Then he went into the kitchen again. The brother and sister were seated at the table now, laughing and jesting with absorbed hilarity. “There’s something important I have to get, Gerda! Keep my plate hot for me, will you? And enjoy yourselves till I come back. Don’t wait dessert for me! But I’ll come back all right⁠ ⁠… before long.” Throwing these words among them in a voice full of exaggerated cheerfulness, he snatched at his stick and was out of the house before they had time to realize what he was doing. + 

Like a stage-group in a charade, just glimpsed by some hurried messenger through an open doorway, as he rushes on his way, those two laughing faces at the table lined themselves against his agitation. He even retained enough detachment, as he strode along, to note how easily these children of Dorset made a natural circle for their festivity, from which he was inevitably excluded. Still there arose no flicker of doubt in his mind as to the truth of the summons he had received. It tugged at him so hard that before he reached the bookshop he was actually running.⁠ ⁠… + 

God! There was a man talking to Christie at her door. + 

He approached them breathless, his heart beating violently. He felt the complete confusion which a person feels when he sees some utterly alien object in possession of a familiar spot! + 

The stranger was talking in authoritative tones to Christie, who herself stood exactly as he had seen her last. + 

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” the man was saying. “But if he should regain consciousness before that, you must let me know. You’ve got someone to send, haven’t you?” He remained for a moment hesitating, his bowler-hat in one hand and his black bag in the other. His countenance was illuminated by a faint flicker from behind the form of the girl. She must have laid down her candle upon a step of the staircase. + 

The first impression Wolf received was of an old photograph-album in his grandmother’s drawing-room in Brunswick Terrace; the second, one of a certain hospital-entrance in a street in London. It was later that these impressions explained themselves. The man had the drooping mustache and unintelligent wooden forehead of an old-fashioned army-officer. About his person hung a smell of laudanum or chloroform. + 

“What is it?” cried Wolf as he approached. “Can I help? Can I do anything?” + 

Dark as it was, Wolf was conscious that the fellow gave him a look of frigid suspicion as he bowed himself off. “You can send for me if anything⁠—otherwise in a couple of hours,” were his final words as he moved away.⁠ ⁠… + 

Christie led him then up the well-known staircase. “He is dying,” she said, as they entered the bedroom of Mr. Malakite, a room whose existence was barely known to him. Then there commenced a strange vigil beside the unconscious form of that old man. + 

Christie herself sat on a chair on the left of her father’s bed; he, on a similar one on the right. In broken whispers the girl told him how her father had fallen backwards, down that narrow staircase, soon after he and she had been left alone. + 

“I think I lost my head, Wolf. I think I ran crying into the street. Anyway, people came round⁠ ⁠… a lot of people⁠ ⁠… and they fetched Doctor Percy. Father’s been like this ever since. Doctor Percy examined him. It’s some internal injury, he thinks. He says he thinks his spine is hurt in some way; but the worst injury is internal. He thinks”⁠—here the girl spoke in a voice that startled Wolf a good deal more than the meaning of her words⁠—“that he’s bleeding to death inside.” + 

Each five minutes that passed in this singular interlude seemed as long as twenty minutes of any ordinary time-flow. Christie was completely different from her ordinary self. She avoided Wolf’s eyes. She repelled his touch. She seemed reluctant to resume anything approaching their old intimacy. + 

He longed to ask her whether she had actually called out his name aloud, or whether that psychic summoning had conveyed its message independently of either of their two conscious minds. But he was too troubled by this unusual look upon her face and this unnatural reserve, to ask any questions. He longed to enquire how the old man had come to have such an accident at all; but he dared not refer to it. There emanated from the girl an ice-cold barrier of inflexible pride, setting him at such a distance that no real exchange of feelings was possible. + 

Every now and then she would get up and move the bedclothes under the old man’s chin, as if fearful lest he should be suffocated. But the particular way she did this struck Wolf as having something unnatural in it, for she did it exactly as if the old man were already dead. She touched him differently from the way she would have done it had he merely been unconscious. Her attitude seemed to display the shrinking abhorrence that living people experience at contact with inanimate flesh. + 

To Wolf, who was both ignorant and very unobservant in matters of this sort, it did begin to present itself at last, as he watched the old man’s face, that he really was dead⁠ ⁠… had died, in fact, while Christie and he had been watching over him! Incontinently he muttered something to Christie, and, bending over the bed, inserted his hand beneath the clothes and felt for the old man’s heart. What he actually said to Christie was, “I’ll find his heart, shall I?” But in all the agitation of that moment he was still shockingly aware of the girl’s avoidance of his eye. + 

“I can’t feel it. I don’t believe he’s breathing!” he blurted out. “Look at his lips!” + 

The girl did not answer him. She bent low down over her father’s face; so low, that a loose tress of her hair fell against the old man’s closed eyes. + 

Then she straightened herself up with a jerk, and Wolf pulled his hand away from under the bedclothes. He felt inert, utterly unable to deal with this crisis. Stupidly he watched her across the old man’s stiff figure. He had been by degrees noting the aspects of this room which was so completely strange to him. Mr. Malakite’s bedroom! He had even permitted himself to wonder what kind of spiritual “eidola”⁠ ⁠… the creation of the thoughts of this singular old man⁠ ⁠… lived and moved, like invisible homunculi, in this bare room! For the room was absolutely bare. With the exception of a small framed picture, in staring colours, of Raphael’s Transfiguration, propped up upon the mantelpiece, there was nothing upon the walls. The only thing to be seen in the room now was death⁠—death upon the bed, and the daughter of death standing at the window! + 

Mr. Malakite’s bedroom-lamp was of a very different appearance from that old green one in Christie’s room. It was a small ship’s-lantern; and her father was wont to read deep into the night, so Christie had once told him, with this lantern balanced upon his knees as he lay in bed. + 

The ship’s-lantern did not throw a very strong light; and Wolf, as he laid his fingers on the old man’s forehead, with a vague notion of establishing the fact of life’s extinction, was aware of Christie’s figure at the window as a taut bowstring of quivering feeling. + 

“He does not breathe. It must be the end, Chris,” he murmured gently. + 

The girl turned abruptly and came back. Twice, as she crossed that little space between the window and the bed, he saw her straighten herself up, hold back her head, and shut her eyes, clenching her fingers tightly as she did so, and making an odd little indrawn gasp, as if she were swallowing the very dregs of all human bitterness. + 

“Shall I go and fetch Doctor Percy?” he asked, moving round the foot of the bed. + 

He caught her eye for a moment then, and it was like the eye of a wild bird imprisoned in a boy’s hand. She huddled herself against the wall at the bed’s head, her head bowed upon her folded arms, her body as rigid as the form on the bed. + 

Something about the nape of her small neck, as she hung there, with drooping head and tense, taut limbs, hit Wolf through the heart. + 

“Don’t you mind, O my dear truelove! Don’t you mind!” he whispered desperately, clasping and unclasping his fingers, but not daring to approach her. His consciousness of her mood was so intense that when he thought of trying to take her in his arms he saw her wild white face and flashing eyes turned upon him⁠—turned against him with terrible words! + 

“Do you want me to go for that doctor, Chris?” he repeated, in a dull, flat, wooden voice. + 

A long shiver passed through her body, and she turned round, her arms hanging limp by her sides. + 

“I’d⁠ ⁠… rather go⁠ ⁠… myself,” she said, in a low, heavy tone. “Go⁠ ⁠… myself,” she repeated. + 

With stiff, leaden movements, after that, she went into her own room and came back in her loose winter coat and woollen cap. + 

“O Chris!” he cried, as he saw her there, hovering in the doorway; “O little Chris!” + 

But she made a movement with her hands, as he approached her, that was almost peevish⁠—the sort of movement with which a little girl beats down the jumping and barking of an excited dog. + 

“I’ll be back in about twenty minutes, Wolf,” she said calmly. But he noticed that not one glance did she cast at the form on the bed, not one glance at him. The words she uttered, natural and commonplace as they were, were addressed to that gaudy rendering of the Transfiguration on the mantelpiece. + 

And then she was gone⁠ ⁠… melting away, so it seemed to him, as if she had actually been a spirit. The sound of the opening and closing of the street-door affected him like an everlasting farewell. He recognized in that second that something had happened in his own heart that was like a wall falling outwards⁠ ⁠… outwards⁠ ⁠… into an unknown dimension. + 

In addition to the bookseller’s ship’s-lantern, which stood on a small table, there were two candles on the bare chest of drawers, one on each side of a faded leather case, containing two hairbrushes. Wolf sat down again and watched his own shadow sway, with the flicker of those two candle-flames, across the countenance upon the bed. + 

Very faintly, from the parlour on the other side of the landing⁠—for the door was still wide open⁠—came the ticking of Christie’s clock. + 

His consciousness, like the man at watch on a ship that has been submerged in some terrific wave and rises to the surface cloudy with salt-foam, turned instinctively to his lost “mythology,” turned to it as to something lying dead on the floor of his soul. And it came over him, by slow degrees like a cold glimmer of morning upon a tossing sea, that the abiding continuity of his days lay, after all, in his body, in his skull, in his spine, in his legs, in his clutching anthropoid-ape arms! Yes! that was all he had left⁠ ⁠… his vegetable-animal identity, isolated, solitary⁠ ⁠… hovered over by the margins of strange thoughts! + 

The intense reality of Mr. Malakite’s figure beneath those bedclothes, of his beard above them, of his nostrils, his old-man’s eyelids, his ugly beast-ears, narrowed the reality of his own life, with its gathered memories, into something as concrete, tangible, compact, as the bony knuckles of his own gaunt hands now resting upon his protruding knees! Thought? It was “thought,” of course! But not thought in the abstract. It was the thought of a tree, of a snake, of an ox, of a man, a man begotten, a man conceived, a man like enough to die tomorrow! With what within him had he felt that shrewd thrust just now about his truelove Chris? Not with any “glassy essence.” Simply with his vegetable-animal integrity, with his life, as a tree would feel the loss of its companion⁠ ⁠… as a beast the loss of its mate! + 

His thoughts focused themselves mechanically upon the white lips of the man on the bed and upon his wrinkled eyelids, but they were no longer occupied with these things. His mind reviewed the loss of his life-illusion. How many chances and casualties, how many little crisscross patterns, puffs of aimless air, wandering shadows, unpredictable wind-ripples, had combined to disintegrate and destroy it! + 

“I must not let slip what I found out just now,” he thought. And then, as a triangle of tiny wrinkles upon one of Mr. Malakite’s closed eyes wove itself into his mental process, “Whatever,” he said to himself, “Christie may feel, I know that she, and no other, is my real truelove! Yes, by God! And I know that my ‘I am I’ is no ‘hard, small crystal’ inside me, but a cloud, a vapour, a mist, a smoke, hovering round my skull, hovering round my spine, my arms, my legs! That’s what I am⁠—a ‘vegetable-animal’ wrapped in a mental cloud, and with the willpower to project this cloud into the consciousness of others!” + 

As he articulated this thought he gave himself up to a vivid awareness of his body, particularly of his hands and knees, and, with this, to a vivid awareness of his mind as a cloudy projection, unimpeded by material obstacles, driven forth in pursuit of Christie. + 

“I command that she shall be all right!” he muttered audibly, addressing this word to the universe in general. + 

All these thoughts raced through his head while, for no earthly reason, he transferred his gaze to the bookseller’s eyelashes. + 

“But if I send my mind after her, where is the will that sends it? In my hands and my knees?” + 

But with the help of Mr. Malakite’s eyelashes, which were of a yellowish white, he decided to suppress all those logical ambiguities. “The great thing is to have a feeling of my identity that I can strengthen, whatever happens! Perhaps my will is in my knees and my hands. It doesn’t matter where it is, as long as it can drive forth my mind to look after Christie!” + 

At that point he was aware of a cold, sickening doubt with regard to Christie. Strange that he should only discover what love for her meant, at the moment when that closing door rang in his ears! + 

What a childish optimist he was! Were gorillas like that? Their identity, anyhow, was in their hands and knees! + 

A middle-aged gorilla, watching the dead face of an old gorilla⁠—such was his present situation.⁠ ⁠… + 

Suddenly the left eye of Mr. Malakite⁠—the one upon which Wolf’s gaze had so mechanically been fixed⁠—opened perceptibly and looked at him. + 

“She’ll be back soon, Solent,” said Mr. Malakite. + 

“Do you want anything? Can I do anything for you? Are you suffering, sir?” Wolf found himself on his knees at the side of this awakened eye. The lid kept flickering up and down, raising itself with difficulty and then closing again; but the amount of conscious intelligence revealed by that life-cranny when Wolf was able to peer into it, was terrifying. + 

“She pushed me down,” said Mr. Malakite. + 

A preposterous nursery-rhyme about an old man “who wouldn’t say his prayers” came into Wolf’s head. But he murmured gravely, “Can I get you a drink of water or anything?” + 

“Your father.” These two words came very faintly. The flickering eyelid sank down and stirred no more.⁠ ⁠… “I think I see your father.” This time the voice was almost inaudible. But the next word was clearer. “Good,” said Mr. Malakite. + 

Wolf had risen from his knees now and was hanging over the dying man, his face a few inches from his face, his hands, palms-down, pressed into his pillow.⁠ ⁠… + 

“And great.” These last two syllables seemed uttered rather by the old man’s spirit than by his lips; for the latter were closed as tightly as his eyes. + 

“He⁠ ⁠… will⁠ ⁠… for⁠—” The sound of this ghastly susurration seemed to come from under the bedclothes, from under the bed, from under the floor, from under the bookshop beneath the floor, from under the clay-bottom of Blacksod.⁠ ⁠… + 

“For⁠—” The repetition of the syllable seemed like the echo of an echo; but Wolf became aware of a shocking twitching in the muscles of the old man’s face. + 

“For⁠—”⁠ ⁠… + 

A wave of atavistic sentiment rose up in Wolf’s throat from countless centuries of Christian unction. He found the word “forgive” quivering on the tip of his tongue, and recklessly he let it descend, like a drop of consecrated oil, on the man’s dying. His idea was that Mr. Malakite was confusing the one person he had ever respected with some obscure First Cause. Then he found himself staggering back. + 

With a convulsion of his whole frame, the bookseller jerked himself to a sitting-posture. Spasmodically drawing in his legs, like a frog swimming on its back, he kicked off every shred of clothing.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Forget!” he shrieked; and his voice resembled the tearing of a strip of calico. He was dead when he sank back; and from one of the corners of his mouth a stream of saliva, tinged with a red stain, trickled upon the pillow. + 

Hurriedly Wolf pressed down those elevated knees and pulled the bedclothes up to the man’s chin. Then, taking out his handkerchief, he wiped the mouth with it, screwed it into a tight ball and wedged it between the blankets and the jaw of the dead. That done, he drew a long breath and stared at Mr. Malakite. But where was Mr. Malakite? The face above the stained handkerchief seemed a new phenomenon in the world⁠—something that had no connection with the old man he had heard crying the word “forget” just now. It was as if the thing he had known in his experience as Mr. Malakite had completely vanished; and from somewhere else had arisen this frozen simulacrum. + 

“Forget,” he murmured to himself; and then he felt a longing to convey at once to Miss Gault the news that a man upon his deathbed had confused William Solent with God! + 

But at the image of Miss Gault, tumbling over her milk-bottle upon his father’s grave, a sudden moisture seemed to flow into the cavities behind his eyeballs. + 

“It’s not for you,” he said grimly to the figure on the bed, as he recognized this tendency to tears. “It’s for Miss Gault.” And actuated by a queer desire to prove to the corpse that it was not “for him,” he laid the tips of his fingers on the bookseller’s forehead. “How soon do they get cold?” he said to himself.⁠ ⁠… + 

At this point he heard the door opening down below, and the sound of voices and footsteps. He hurried out of the room and met Christie on the stairs. + 

“He’s dead, Chris,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything.” This addition to his news sounded singularly foolish as soon as it was uttered. Even at that inadvertent moment, on the eighth step of those backstairs, he blushed to have spoken such a banality. + 

“It’s too late, doctor,” said she, turning her head towards the man behind her. + 

“I feared so,” said Doctor Percy. + 

“Poor old gentleman!” repeated Doctor Percy. “He is spared a great deal.” The tone in which this amiable epitaph echoed through that house and penetrated into the shop, with its shelves of perverse erudition, had an irritating effect upon Wolf’s nerves. + 

He felt a malicious desire, as he moved aside to let Christie pass, to catch the man by the sleeve of his neat coat and whisper in his ear something monstrous. “She had to throw him downstairs, you idiot; she had to throw him downstairs!” + 

Mr. Malakite’s daughter was standing by his bed’s head when the two men entered the room. Her arms, with the fingers clasped desperately inside the palms, hung down by her sides like torn tree-limbs in a deadly wind. Her head drooped upon her chest. He fancied for a moment that her profile was contorted with crying; but when she raised her head, her brown eyes were dull, abstracted, and completely tearless. + 

After bustling about the body for a minute or two, as if professional nicety required more evidence of death than nature in decency could afford, Doctor Percy bowed himself off. + 

“Come into the other room, Chris! No!⁠ ⁠… Come along! You must, my darling.” Holding her by one of her clenched hands⁠ ⁠… and she obeyed him like a somnambulist⁠ ⁠… he led her into her parlour, where he made her sit down on a chair, over the glowing heap of cinders. + 

He sat down close to her side; and without looking at her, but still holding tightly that small clenched hand, he began speaking rapidly, emphatically, monotonously. + 

“Chris, there’s nothing about all this that I don’t know as well as you do⁠ ⁠… nothing, my darling! It’s as if some crust were shattered for a moment and we looked through⁠ ⁠… into those horrors that are always there! It’s the same with us all, Chris! It’s the same with the whole world. There’s only one thing for us to do if we’re to endure life at all, Chris; and⁠ ⁠… and your father said the word himself before he died. Are you listening, Chris? He became conscious for a minute; and he said it to me like a message for you.⁠ ⁠… O Chris, little Chris, it was a message to both of us!” + 

She did not lift her head; but he knew, from the quiver in the fingers he held, that her attention was arrested. + 

“He said ‘forget,’ Chris⁠ ⁠… just that one word. O my love, my only love! From now on that is the word for us. We know what we know. We bear it together. Listen, little Chris! You’ve got to go on living, for Olwen’s sake. I’ve got to go on living for Gerda’s sake. When you went away just now, I knew, in one great flash, what you and I are to each other. We shall be that, my dear, dear love, till we both are dead! Nothing can change it any more. Nothing can come between us any more. As to everything else⁠ ⁠… are you listening, little Chris?⁠ ⁠… we’ve both got to ‘forget’⁠—just as he said. It’s the only way, my precious. When that crust breaks, as it did just now, it’s madness to dwell upon it. It’s the unbearable. No one can bear it and go on living. And you’ve got to live, Chris, for Olwen’s sake, just as I’ve got⁠—” + 

He was interrupted in the middle of his speech. The daughter of Mr. Malakite sprang erect upon her feet and uttered a piercing scream. Then she beat the air with her clenched hands. + 

“Damn you!” she cried. “Damn you! You talking fool! You great, stupid, talking fool! What do you know of me or my father? What do you know of my real life?” + 

Wolf drew away from her, his body bent forwards, his hands pressed against the pit of his stomach, his eyes blinking. + 

For a second he saw himself and his useless words exactly as she described them. He saw all his explanations as if they had been one prolonged windy bellow, covering the impervious grazing of a complacent ox! + 

But grim terror swallowed up this spasm of personal humiliation. What if this tragedy were to unsettle Christie’s wits? + 

He used his will now as if it had been a master mariner, giving rapid, desperate orders in a deafening storm! He deliberately smoothed out of his face every shade of feeling except a thundering anger. + 

“Stop that!” he cried, as if he had been speaking to Olwen. “Stop that, Christie!” And he made a step towards her. She had never seen him in such a mood, never heard such a tone from him. His nervous concern gave vibrancy to his pretended anger. Her contorted features relaxed, her clenched hands dropped down; she stood there before him like a solitary pier-post⁠—desolate but unbroken⁠—about whose endurance the last waves of the storm subsided in foamy rings. + 

Then, to his infinite relief, she burst into a flood of tears. He never afterwards forgot the extremity of those tears. Her face seemed literally to dissolve; it seemed to melt, as if the very stuff of it were changing from moulded flesh into streaming water! + 

She flung herself down on the sofa and buried her head in its faded embroidered roses. Approaching the back of the sofa, and leaning against it, he watched her huddled form lying on its bed of relief, very much as a master showman might watch the performance of a darling puppet, over whose form and gesture he had worked in secret, by the light of an attic candle, for many a long, starved month! + 

The lamp Christie always kept on the sewing-table in her parlour must have been burning steadily ever since they had had tea. The chimney was black now with soot; and Wolf moved across and turned the wick down a little. As he performed this small action, he received, to his astonishment, an inrush of furtive, stealthy satisfaction. + 

This was the first of such feelings that he had enjoyed for many a long day. “Mr. Malakite is dead.” Was it that particular collocation of words, as his mind visualized them, that gave him this physical thrill of relief? Or was it just the change of the girl’s mood? + 

He could see, even by that diminished lamplight, when he returned to the sofa, that her streaming tears had made a dark, wet stain upon that pink embroidery. Oh, she would be all right now! Whatever had passed between her and the old man⁠—whatever plague-spot of unspeakable remorse had appeared upon some sensitive fibre in her consciousness⁠—these tears would wash out everything! + 

How could there be so much saltwater in one tiny skull? + 

The tears of women! How from the beginning of time they had washed away every kind of evil thing, every kind of deviltry! Down the centuries had flowed those tears, clearing our race’s conscience from poisons, washing clean the mind of man from the torture of rational logic, washing it clean from the torture of memory, recreating it, fresh, careless, free, like a child new-sprung from the womb! But how could such a wide, dark, wet stain upon those pink roses have come from so small a skull! + 

He didn’t dare to speak to her as he pressed his hands upon the back of that familiar sofa and stared across her form, curved there like a dusky tree-root, into the dying fire. + 

As had happened once or twice before to him in his life, he fell at this crisis into a kind of waking-trance. That flood of tears became a river, swifter, deeper than the Lunt, and on its breast he was carried, so it seemed to him, into an imaginary landscape, far enough away from the corpse of Mr. Malakite and his ambiguous books! It was that same landscape which the Gainsborough picture had conjured up. But instead of a road there was this river; and the river carried him beyond the terraces and the gardens into less human scenery. There, between high, dark, slippery precipices was he carried, by the water of Christie’s weeping; and there he encountered in strange correspondency those same towering basaltic cliffs past which he had drifted in a similar hallucination nearly a year ago, as he waited for his mother’s train on the “Slopes” of Ramsgard! + 

He was brought back from this drugged condition by the sound of the street-door bell; but it was not at once that he realized that he was the one who had to answer this summons! Staring at the curve of Christie’s wet eyelashes on her drowned cheek, as that dark stain on the pink roses grew wider, he was startled by the idea that this particular grouping of material substances might be no more than reflections in a mirror. There, below this girl’s figure, below these darkened roses, was there not hidden some deep, spiritual transaction? The feeling passed away quickly enough; but as it passed, it left behind it a stabbing, quivering suspicion, a suspicion as to the solid reality of what his senses were thus representing, compared with something else, something of far greater moment, both for himself and for her! + 

All this while the street-door bell continued to ring; and it was ringing now with violent, spasmodic jerks. + 

He straightened his back, and, moving away from the sofa, stood motionless in the middle of the room, listening. + 

“I must go down,” he thought. “It’s most likely that doctor come back, to make sure once more that the old man’s dead!” + 

Again the bell rang, this time with a long, continuous, jerking pull.⁠ ⁠… + 

Wolf glanced at the back of the sofa. There was no movement there, nor any sign. He went out on the landing and waited for a moment at the door of the dead man’s room, which they had left wide open. How different was the immobility of that form from the motionlessness of the one he had just left! + 

He listened to the silence, waiting for the bell to ring again. “Why is it,” he thought, “that I find it so hard to go down?” He moved to the head of the stairs. “Why do sounds like this,” he thought, “hit corpses in the face and outrage them like an indecency? Does death draw up to the surface some new kind of silence, to disturb which is a monstrous abuse?” + 

Brought back to reality by the cessation of the ringing, and a little fearful as to what the doctor might do if thwarted in his professional zeal, Wolf ran down the stairs and flung open the street-door. + 

There, in his Sunday clothes, and with an expression of extravagant decorum upon his whimsical visage, was Mr. John Torp! + 

“Doctor told I, master⁠—” he began. + 

“Come in, Mr. Torp,” said Wolf helplessly, wondering vaguely what new process of pious science that stark figure upstairs was to expect. “Come in and sit down, will you, while I tell Miss Malakite you’re here?” He let his father-in-law into the house and closed the door. It was easier to tell Mr. Torp to sit down than to give him anything to sit upon. “I don’t know,” he began awkwardly. But Mr. Torp caught him by the sleeve with one of his plump hands. + 

“It came over I,” he whispered, “that Miss Malakite wouldn’t be wanting one of they arrogant death-women with her Dad. And as I were an undertaker meself afore I took to me stone-job, I thought I’d run round and help she out.” + 

“I’m sure it’s most kind of you, Mr. Torp,” murmured Wolf, noticing now for the first time that his father-in-law was carrying a heavy carpetbag. “I’ll go up and tell Miss Malakite you’re here. I expect she’ll be very grateful for your help.” + 

“Don’t ’ee say more than just that one word, Mister,” replied the other, in a tone of such unctuous slyness that Wolf made a grimace in the darkness. “Some relatives do like to use a common sheet. But I do say ’tis the corpse’s feelings what us have to reason with. These here shrouds”⁠—and he tapped Wolf’s knee with the carpetbag⁠—“be calculated to lie as soft and light on they, as lamb’s-wool on babes. ’Twas one of these here shrouds that thik bullfrog Manley cheated his wone mother of, by his dunghill ways; and her a woman too what always had a finicky skin. But don’t ’ee say more than just that one word, mister. Missy up there, ’tis only likely enough, will give no more attention to these here shrouds than if she were tucking her Dad in’s bed. But ‘Leave it to Torp’ is what thik corpse would say, were speech allowed ’un. They be wonderful touchy, they corpses be, if all were told; and it be worse when folks’ tongues run sharp upon ’un, as we know they do on he above-stairs. ’Twere me thoughts of that, mister, that made I reckon Miss Malakite would be glad to see I, sooner than they death-nurses, who be all such tittle-tattlers.” + 

It had by this time begun to dawn upon Wolf that his eccentric father-in-law had been genuinely actuated by a philanthropic impulse in making his appearance at this juncture. With this in mind he caught the man’s hand and shook it warmly. “I’m sure we’re much obliged to you, Mr. Torp,” he said. + 

“And don’t ’ee worry about your Gerdie,” concluded the worthy man. “Missus went round to she when I comed away. Our Lob runned in, ’sknow, with a tale of your leaving your vittles and the Lord knows what! So when doctor told I you was here, I let she go to Gerdie, and came round here me wone self. Ye knew, I reckon, that there were trouble in this house? Well⁠ ⁠… no matter for that! Every man to his wone concerns, be my motto.” + 

The rough tact of this little outburst of indulgent interpretation was the final touch in the winning of Wolf’s gratitude. + 

“I’ll go up and see Miss Malakite,” he said. “You wait here, Mr. Torp. I’m sorry there are only the stairs to sit on.” + 

He found Christie putting coal on the grate in the parlour. She had closed the door of her father’s room. She turned to him a face flushed by her struggle with the fire, but bearing the impress of her desperate crying in some fashion he could not just then define. At any rate she appeared in full control of herself; and he felt intuitively that as far as remorse went, her reason was clear and unpoisoned. + 

He shut the parlour-door and hurriedly explained Mr. Torp’s mission. + 

“He knew I was with you. Doctor Percy must have told him. He knew you’d want some undertaker’s woman to do what’s necessary⁠ ⁠… to ‘lay him out,’ as they call it. He knew what gossips these demons are. So he just came himself. It was nice of the old chap, wasn’t it?” + 

The psychic tension between them, as he hurriedly communicated all this, was so great that he found they were both on the verge of a childish giggling-fit. Wolf took advantage of this mood to tell her about the contents of the carpetbag. “Oh, Chris,” he found himself saying, with a queer chuckle in his voice, “when the old man used that particular word, I had such a weird sensation! I thought of the shroud in which Samuel appeared to Saul. I thought of the shroud in which Lazarus came out of his grave. I thought of the shroud that Flora MacIvor made for Fergus before he was executed. And then to see that carpetbag! It might have been a monstrous thing, eh, Chris? Nobody but this old fellow could have carried it off. Gad! but what a word it is! A shroud! Doesn’t it make you want to be drowned in water, Chrissie, or burnt into cinders?” He paused for a minute, struggling to keep back from her one of those forbidden thoughts to which he was so hopelessly subject. But their mood was too close. They were like a couple of excited starlings perched on a gallows that sways in the wind.⁠ ⁠… The love that was between them gave a mad gusto to that incongruous moment, with Mr. Torp waiting below-stairs to wash an incestuous old man with soap and water, and Christie’s parlour-door shut forever to Mr. Malakite! + 

“Isn’t it awful, Chris,” he whispered, “to think of what Redfern’s shroud must have looked like when they⁠—” He suddenly remembered that he had never told the girl a word about what he and Valley had seen; and he stopped abruptly. + 

“When they?” she echoed faintly. + 

“I’ll tell you another time, Chris,” he flung out; and he seized her fragile figure in the most self-effacing embrace he had ever bestowed on anyone since he was born. + 