Gerda + 

The first sensation to which Wolf awoke in a morning of rainy wind and drifting clouds, was a sensation of discomfort. As his mind began concentrating on this discomfort, he realized it proceeded from those two heavily-framed pictures which gave to his chamber a sort of reading-room or clubroom aspect. Harmless enough in themselves had they awaited him in the parlour of an hotel, they seemed no less than an outrage upon his senses when associated with this simple and quiet bedroom. He resolved to issue an ultimatum at once. He hadn’t come to Dorsetshire to be oppressed by the ponderous labours of Royal Academicians. And he would also make it clear that his bedroom was to be his sanctuary. No night-shirted intruder should run in and out at his pleasure! + 

He leapt from the bed and proceeded to turn to the wall both of the mid-Victorian masterpieces. That done, he lay down again and gave himself up to the rainy air, full of the smell of young leaves and wet garden-mould. Lying stretched out upon his back, he set himself with a deliberate effort to gather up his recent impressions and relate them as well as he could to the mood of yesterday’s drive. With clear awareness of most of the things that had happened to him since he left his mother at the door of their little flat in Hammersmith, he was oddly conscious that all his deepest instincts were still passive, expectant, waiting. He was like a man who recovers from the shock of a shipwreck, and who, drying himself in the security of some alien beach, hesitates, in a grateful placid lethargy, to begin his hunt for berries or fruits or fresh water. + 

Detail by detail he reviewed the events of the previous day; and as the images of all these people⁠—of Miss Gault, of Darnley, of Mr. Urquhart⁠—passed in procession before him, he was surprised at the light in which he saw them, so different from the way in which they had appeared only some eight or nine hours ago. The importance of material objects⁠—their mystical importance⁠—had been his last impression before sleeping; but now everything appeared in a cold, unmystical light. It was always thus when he awoke from sleep; but the fact that he recognized the transitoriness of the mood did not diminish its power. He was never more cynically clairvoyant than on these occasions. He surveyed at such times his dearest friends through a sort of unsympathetic magnifying-glass in which there was not one of their frailties that did not stand out in exaggerated relief. The porthole, so to speak, of the malign consciousness through which he saw them was at the same time telescopic and microscopic. It was surrounded, too, by a thick, circular obscurity. He was abnormally sensitive at such times, but with a curtailed and reduced sensibility. Each particular thing as it presented itself dominated the whole field of vision. Nor was this sensitiveness itself an altogether normal receptivity. It was primarily physiological. It had few nervous chords; and no spiritual or psychic ones. Everything that approached it approached it on the bodily plane, as something⁠—even if it were a mental image⁠—to be actually grasped with the five senses. + 

And so, as he lay there, knowing that a long while must pass before he would have any chance of breakfast or even of a cup of tea, he made a stronger effort than usual to get his thoughts into focus. The wet airs blowing in through the open windows helped him in this attempt. It was as if he stole away from that little round porthole and shuffled off to some upper deck, where he could feel the wide horizons. His mind kept reverting to what he had felt during the drive with Darnley, and he tried to analyze what sort of philosophy it was that remained with him during all the normal hours when his “mythology”⁠—his secret spiritual vice⁠—lay quiescent. He fumbled about in his mind for some clue to his normal attitude to life⁠—some clue-word that he could use to describe it, if any of his new friends began questioning him; and the word he hit upon at last was the word fetish-worship. That was it! His normal attitude to life was just that⁠—or nearer that than anything else! + 

It was a worship of all the separate, mysterious, living souls he approached: “souls” of grass, trees, stones, animals, birds, fish; “souls” of planetary bodies and of the bodies of men and women; the “souls,” even, of all manner of inanimate little things; the “souls” of all those strange, chemical groupings that give a living identity to houses, towns, places, countrysides.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Am I inhuman in some appallingly incurable manner?” he thought. “Is the affection I have for human beings less important to me than the shadows of leaves and the flowing of waters?” + 

He gazed intently at the windowsills of his open windows, above which the tassels of the blinds swayed to and fro in the damp gusts of wind. He thought of the grotesque and obsessed figure of Selena Gault, as she pulled up plantains from his father’s grave. No! Whatever this fetish-worship might be, it certainly was different from “love.” Love was a possessive, feverish, exacting emotion. It demanded a response. It called for mutual activity. It entailed responsibility. The thrilling delight with which he was wont to contemplate his mother’s face under certain conditions, the deep satisfaction he derived from the sight of Miss Gault and her cats, the pleasure with which he had surveyed the blue eyes and pointed beard of Darnley Otter⁠—these things had nothing in them that was either possessive or responsible. And yet he lost all thought of himself in watching these things, just as he used to do in watching the mossy roots of the chestnuts and sycamores in the avenues at Hampton Court! It seemed then that what he felt for both things and people, as he saw them under certain lights, was a kind of exultant blending of vision and sympathy. Their beauty held him in a magical enchantment; and between his soul and the “soul,” as it were, of whatever it was he happened to be regarding, there seemed to be established a tremulous and subtle reciprocity. + 

He was pleased at having thought of the word “fetish-worship” in this connection. And it was in the pleasure of this thought that he now leapt out of bed and, putting on his overcoat, began hurriedly to shave himself, using as he did so the cold water in his jug. + 

He had not got very far with this, however, when there was a sound in the passage outside that reminded him of the rattle of the milk-cans on the Longborne Port platform. This was followed by a gentle knock at his door. Opening it cautiously, he was surprised to see Mrs. Otter herself standing there, while beside her was a wide tin bath and a can of hot water. + 

“I was waiting till I heard you move,” she said. “Darnley has had his breakfast and gone. He goes to Blacksod early. Jason does not get up till late. Dimity and I will be ready for you when you come down.” + 

Wolf hovered at the door, his face lathered, his safety-razor in his hand. He suddenly felt no better than a lout in the presence of this faded old lady. + 

She smiled at him pleasantly. “I hope you’ll be happy with us,” she said. “You’ll get used to us soon. Poor Mr. Redfern got quite used to us before he died.” + 

“Mr. Redfern?” + 

“The gentleman who helped the Squire with his book. But you must have your bath now. Do you think you can be ready in about half-an-hour?” + 

Wolf bowed his lathered face and she went off. While he was dragging the bath into his room, she turned at the head of the stairs. + 

“Would you like a cup of tea at once, Mr. Solent, or will you wait till you come down?” + 

“I’ll wait, thank you! Thank you very much!” he shouted; and jerking both bath and can into his fortress, he shut the door and prepared to wash and dress. + 

The whole process of his ablution and his dressing was now a mechanical accompaniment to absentminded fantastic thoughts on the subject of the dead Mr. Redfern. + 

“This was the fellow’s room, no doubt,” he said to himself. “I suppose he died here. A nice death, with those monstrous pictures lying like lead on his consciousness!” + 

It was on Mr. Redfern’s behalf now that Wolf scowled at the backs of these pictures, as he sponged himself in the tin bath. Mr. Redfern dominated that half-hour, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Wolf saw him lying stone-dead on the pillows he himself had just quitted. He saw him as a pale, emaciated youth, with beautifully moulded features. He wondered if he had been buried by the person Mr. Urquhart called “Tilly-Valley.” He decided he would look for his grave in the King’s Barton churchyard. His dead face took during that half-hour the most curious forms. It became the soap. It became the sponge. It became the spilt water upon the floor. It became the slop-pail. It became the untidy heap of Wolf’s dress-clothes. Wolf was not relieved from it, in fact, till he found himself drinking delicious cups of tea and eating incredibly fresh eggs under the care of his hostess in their pleasant dining-room. The pictures here were of the kind that no philosopher could quarrel with. Old-fashioned prints, old-fashioned pastels, old-fashioned engravings, gave the room a spirit that seemed to emerge from centuries of placidity and stretch out consolatory hands to every kind of wayfarer. + 

“This is my room,” said Mrs. Otter, looking very pleased when Wolf explained to her what he felt about it. “These things came from my own home in Cornwall. The best things in the house belonged to my husband. They’re in the drawing-room; very valuable things. But I like this room myself and I’m glad you do. Mr. Redfern used to love to read and write at this table. I believe if he’d done all his work here he’d never have got that terrible illness. That library of Mr. Urquhart’s was too learned for him, poor, dear, young man! And he was so good-looking! My son Jason used to call him by the names of all the heathen gods, one after another! Jason was extremely upset when he died so suddenly.” + 

The visitor to King’s Barton found his attention wandering several times after this. Mrs. Otter began to drift into rambling stories about her native Cornwall, and it was only Wolf’s power of automatically putting a convincing animation into his heavy countenance that prevented her from realizing how far away his thoughts had flown. + 

Hostess and guest were interrupted in their rather one-sided tête-à-tête by the sound of footsteps descending the stairs. Mrs. Otter jumped up at once. + 

“It’s Jason!” she cried. “We must have disturbed him. I was talking too much. I’ll go and tell Dimity she need not clear away. I expect Jason will like to have a smoke with you.” + 

She disappeared through the door into the kitchen at the very moment when her elder son entered the room. Wolf was astonished at the difference between the figure he had seen the night before and the figure he rose to shake hands with now. Dressed in neat, dark-blue serge, Jason Otter had the quiet, self-composed air of a much-travelled man of the world. His clean-shaven face, framed by prematurely grey hair, was massively and yet abnormally expressive. Forehead and chin were imposing and commanding; but this effect was diminished and almost negated by the peculiar kind of restless misery displayed in the lines of the mouth. The man’s eyes were large and grey; and instead of glancing aside in the way Darnley’s did, they seemed to cry out for help without cessation or intermission. + 

He and Wolf sat opposite each other at Mr. Redfern’s favourite table, and, lighting their cigarettes, looked each other up and down in silence. Jason Otter was decidedly nervous. Wolf saw his hand shaking as he lit a match. + 

There was, indeed, something almost indecent about the sensitiveness of this man’s lined and indented face. It made Wolf feel as though at all costs the possessor of such a countenance must be protected from nervous shocks. Was it in taking care of him that Darnley’s blue eyes had acquired their curious expression? Jason’s own eyes were not tragic. They were something worse. They were exposed; they were stripped bare; they seemed to peer forth helplessly from the human skull behind them, as though some protective filaments that ought to have been there were not there! + 

“I saw you’d turned our pictures to the wall,” he began, fixing his pleading eyes upon Wolf’s face as if asking for permission to humble himself to the ground. “I’ll have them taken away. I’ll have them put in the privy or in the passage.” + 

“Oh, it’s all right, Mr. Otter,” returned Wolf. “It’s only that I never can sleep in a room with large pictures. It’s a peculiarity of mine.” + 

No sooner had Jason heard this expression, “a peculiarity of mine,” than his whole visage changed. A childish mischievousness illuminated his pallid physiognomy, and he chuckled audibly, nodding his head. + 

“A peculiarity? That’s excellent. That’s what Bluebeard used to say. ‘It’s a peculiarity of mine.’ I think that’s one of the prettiest excuses I’ve ever heard.” + 

This explosion was so surprising to Wolf that all he could do was to open his mouth and stare at the man. But the humour passed as quickly as it had come. The face unwrinkled itself. The eyes became supplicatory. The mouth tightened in solemn misery. + 

“I don’t want anyone to be bothered about the moving of those pictures, Mr. Otter,” said Wolf; for he seemed to see with terrible distinctness the devoted lady of the house struggling alone with those heavy frames. “You must allow me to do it myself. In fact,” he went on, in what he tried to make a casual, airy tone, “I’m going to beg Mrs. Otter to let me treat that room as if it were an unfurnished flat of my own.” + 

The head opposite him was so grey that he felt as if he were addressing this hint to Mrs. Otter’s husband rather than to her son. + 

Very gently, moving delicately, like Agag before Samuel, Jason rose to his feet. “I think we’d better get those pictures changed now,” he whispered earnestly, in a grave, conspiring voice. + 

Wolf tried to retain his airy, casual manner in the face of this gravity. + 

“I’ll do it like a shot,” he said, rising and moving towards the door. “Just tell me where to put them!” + 

The two men went up together, and under Jason’s directions the Landseer and the Alma-Tadema were deposited in a vacant room at the back of the pantry. + 

“Come upstairs for a minute,” said Mr. Otter, when this transaction was completed; and stepping softly and quietly, as if there were a dead person somewhere in the house, he led the way into his own room. + 

Wolf felt the same uneasy sensations in this chamber as he had experienced the evening before. Sinking into a luxurious armchair and accepting a cigarette, he found himself bold enough to make a faint protest against his host’s Arundel prints, whose ceremonious piety he found so distasteful. + 

“I couldn’t work in this room,” he murmured⁠—and felt as he spoke that his tone was cantankerous and impolite. + 

But Jason Otter showed not the least annoyance or even surprise at his guest’s rudeness. + 

“I expect not! I expect not!” he cried cheerfully. “There are few people who could. I myself could work in a church or in a museum. I welcome anything that acts as a shield. It’s like having a band of retainers, a sort of papal guard, to keep the populace at bay.” + 

As he spoke, he looked proudly and complacently round the room, as if conscious of the protection of the antique French chair in which he had ensconced himself. There was a Boule table at his side, and he proceeded to dust it with a large silk handkerchief. + 

“I suppose you’ve never read any books on Hindu mythology?” he said suddenly. + 

The word “mythology” gave Wolf an uncomfortable shock. He felt as a Catholic might feel if he heard a Methodist refer to the Virgin Mary. + 

He shook his head. + 

“I’ve only read one myself,” went on the poet, with a chuckle; “so you needn’t feel a fool. It was by that man who went to Tibet. But in it he mentions Mukalog, the god of rain.” + 

“The god of rain?” responded Wolf, beginning to feel reassured. + 

“That’s what the man says,” continued the other. “Of course, we know what these travellers are; but he had a lot of letters after his name, so I suppose he passed some examination.” Jason put his hand in front of his mouth as he said this; and his face was wrinkled with amusement. “He knows Latin, anyway. He brings it in on the first page,” he added. + 

“It sounds like a real idol⁠ ⁠… Mukalog, the god of rain⁠ ⁠…” murmured Wolf. + 

Jason’s countenance suddenly grew solemn and confidential. “I’ve got it here,” he whispered. “I bought it for thirty shillings from Mr. Malakite, the bookseller. He bought it at a sale from some fool who thought it was nothing.⁠ ⁠… It’s brought me all my luck.⁠ ⁠…” He lowered his voice still further, so that Wolf could scarcely hear him. “These priests look for God in the clouds, but I never do that.⁠ ⁠… I look for Him⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I beg your pardon?” questioned Wolf, leaning attentively forward. “You say you look for Him⁠ ⁠… ?” + 

There was a pause; and the expression of the man changed from extreme gravity to hobgoblinish humour. + 

“In the mud!” he shouted. + 

Then, once more grave, he rose to his feet and fetched from its pedestal a hideous East Indian idol, about six inches high, and placed it in the middle of the Boule table, just opposite Wolf. + 

“It’s his stomach that makes him so shocking,” said Jason Otter; “but the ways of God aren’t as dainty as those of the Bishop of Salisbury. In this world Truth flies downward, not upward!” + 

Hardly aware of what he was doing, so occupied was his mind with the whole problem of his host’s personality, Wolf rose, and, leaning over the table, picked up Mukalog, the god of rain. Holding it absentmindedly in his fingers for a while, he finally made a foolish schoolboy-like attempt to balance it upside-down on the flat skull of its monstrous head. + 

This proceeding brought a flash of real anger into Jason’s eyes. He snatched the thing away with a nervous clutch, and, hurrying to the back of the room, replaced it on its jade pedestal, which Wolf noticed now, with no great surprise, was standing near a carved brazier containing some still-smouldering ashes⁠—doubtless the ashes of that very incense which had to be “ordered from the Stores”! + 

While his host returned in silence to his French chair and in profound dejection took out his cigarette-case, Wolf, still staring in a sort of hypnotized trance at the “god of rain,” set himself to wonder why it was that the kind of evil which emanated from this idol should be so much more distasteful than the kind of evil that emanated from Mr. Urquhart. + 

He came to the conclusion that although it is impossible for any living human being to obliterate all elements of good from itself, it is possible for an artist, or for a writer, or even for the anonymous creative energy of the race itself, to create an image of evil that should be entirely evil. + 

But why should this Hindu idol seem so much more sinister than any Chinese or Japanese monster? Was it because in India the cult of spirituality, both for good and evil, had been carried to a greater length than anywhere else in the world? + 

“You’d better not listen to any tales about me that old Urquhart tells you,” said the poet suddenly, fixing his sorrowful eyes upon the visitor. + 

The name of his employer made Wolf rise hurriedly from his armchair. + 

“Certainly not,” he said brusquely, moving to the door. As he placed his hand on the door-handle, he felt as though the evil spirit of Mukalog were serpentining towards him over the poet’s shoulders and over the smooth Boule table. + 

“I’m not one to listen to tales from anyone, Mr. Otter,” he said as he went out. + 

He crossed the landing and entered his own room. Now that he was alone, he fell into a very grave meditation, as he slowly laced up his boots. “No wonder,” he said to himself, “that poor chap Redfern committed suicide! What with this man’s demon and Mr. Urquhart’s devilish History, this place doesn’t seem a paradisal retreat. Well! Well! We shall see what we shall see.” + 

He carried his coat and hat quietly downstairs and managed to get out of the house unobserved by either Mrs. Otter or the old servant. + 

The current of his mood was running more normally and gently by the time he found himself being escorted by his eccentric employer to the great isolated library which was now to be the scene of his labours. His dream of the writing-table by a mullioned window “blushing with the blood of kings and queens” turned out to be a literal presentiment. The view he got from his seat at that window surpassed the Gainsborough itself. The manor-garden melted away into herbaceous terraces and shadowy orchards. These in their turn faded into a green pastureland, on the further side of which, faint in the distance, he could make out the high ridge of ploughed fields along the top of which ran the main road from Blacksod to Ramsgard. + 

Mr. Urquhart, however, seemed in a fussy, preoccupied, fidgetty mood that morning. He kept bringing books from the shelves and placing them on his secretary’s table; and then, after he had opened them and read a passage or two, muttering “That’s good, isn’t it? That’s the kind of thing we want, isn’t it?” he would return them to the shelves and bring back others. Wolf was not very much helped by these manoeuvres. In fact, he was teased and nonplussed. He was anxious to find out exactly how much of a free hand he was going to be allowed, and he was also anxious to find out what definite ideas the Squire of King’s Barton already had. This erratic tumbling about of old folios, this hunting for nothing but whimsical and scandalous passages, seemed waste of time on that first morning. + 

“Have you any plan, any synopsis made out, Sir, such as I could enlarge upon?” + 

These words greeted Mr. Urquhart, when, with a satyrish leer on his face and a thick folio pressed against his stomach, he came limping up to the table for the fourth or fifth time. + 

“Eh? What’s that? ‘Plan’ did you say? ‘Synopsis’ did you say? By Jove! my young friend, I mustn’t make such a tosspot of ’ee again the night before we set to work. Didn’t I make it clear to you that our book was going to develop along organic lines, not along logical lines? Didn’t I make it clear that what we had to aim at was something quite new, an altogether new genre; and that it was to represent the pell-mell of life? It’s a sort of Diary of the Dead we’re aiming at, Solent. Your plans and your skeletons would spoil it utterly. What I want you to do is to saturate yourself with Dorset Chronicles, especially the more scandalous of them⁠—the old houses, Solent, the old houses!⁠—and then, when you’ve got the drift of it in your blood, what we’ll aim at shall be a sort of West Country ‘Comédie Humaine.’ Do you get my meaning? What you’ve got to do now, Solent, is to help me collect material and to take notes. I’ll show you my notes tomorrow. They’ll make my meaning clearer. The last thing we must think of is arrangement. My book must grow like a living thing, till it frightens us by its reality.” + 

Wolf listened patiently and dutifully to this discourse. What he thought in his mind was: “This whole business is evidently just an old man’s hobby. I must give up any idea of taking it seriously. I must play with it, just as he’s playing with it.” + 

With this intention in his mind, as soon as he was alone in his window, he spread open before him that monument of scurrilous scandal, The History of the Abbotsbury Family, and gave himself up to leisurely note-making. He transcribed in as lively a way as he could the most outrageous of the misdeeds of this remarkable race, as they are narrated by the sly Doctor Tarrant. He exaggerated, where it was possible, the Doctor’s unctuous commentaries, and he added a few of his own. He began before long to think that the Squire was not so devoid of all sagacity in this unusual method as he had at first supposed. + 

Half the morning had already passed in this way when Mr. Urquhart came limping in in a state of impetuous excitement. + 

“I must send you off at once to Blacksod,” he began. “Eh? What? You don’t mind walking a few miles, eh? Roger says he can’t spare the trap. You can lunch in the town at my expense. I’ve got a bill at the Three Peewits; and you can come back at your leisure. You don’t object, eh? It’s nothing for a young man like you, and there’s very good ale at the Peewits.” + 

Wolf folded up his notes and replaced Doctor Tarrant’s History. He expressed himself as more than delighted to walk to Blacksod, and he enquired what it was that Mr. Urquhart wanted done. + 

“Well, there are two things that have come up, both of them rather important. I’ve just heard from my bookseller down there. You’ll easily find him. His name’s Malakite. He’s in Cerne Street. He says he’s got hold of the Evershot Letters. That’s the book for us, Solent! Privately printed and full of allusions to the Brambledown Case! He says there’s a man in London after it already. That may be a lie. You’ll have to find out. Sometimes Malakite’s let me have the use of a book and then sold it afterwards. You’ll have to find out, Solent. Eh? What? You’ll have to be a diplomatist, a Talleyrand, and that sort of thing, eh?” + 

Wolf composed his countenance as intelligently as he could and enquired what the other thing was. + 

Mr. Urquhart lifted his eyebrows, as if the question had been impertinent. + 

“The other thing?” he murmured dreamily. + 

But the next moment, as Wolf leaned back against the arm of his chair and looked straight into the man’s eyes, there was a startling change in that supercilious face. A flicker, a shadow, a nothing, passed from one to the other; one of those exposures of secret thoughts that seem to bring together levels of consciousness beyond rational thought. It was all over in a moment; and with a quick alteration of his position, and a shuffling of his stick, the lame man recovered his composure. + 

“Ah yes,” he murmured, with a smiling inclination of his head that resembled the bow of a great gentleman confessing a lapse of memory. “Ah yes, you are perfectly right, Solent. There was another little thing that you might as well attend to while you’re about it. It’s not of any pressing importance; but, as I say, if you have time, and feel energetic, it might be a good thing to jolt the memory of Mr. Torp. Eh? What’s that? Torp, the stonecutter. Torp of Chequers Street. You’ll easily find the fellow. He’s a jack-of-all-trades⁠—does undertaking and grave-digging as well as stone-cutting.” + 

Mr. Urquhart became silent, but the expression upon his face was like that of some courtly prince-prelate of old times, who desired his subordinate to obey instructions that he was unwilling to put into vulgar speech. + 

“Mr. Torp?” repeated Wolf, patiently and interrogatively. + 

“Just a little matter of a headstone,” went on the other. “Tilly-Valley’s quarrelled with our sexton here. So I’ve had to use Torp as both sexton and undertaker. He has been disgracefully dilatory.” Mr. Urquhart shuffled to the bookcase, leaning heavily on his stick. He changed the position of one or two of the books; and as he did so, with his back to his secretary, he finished his sentence. “He’s been as dilatory about Redfern’s headstone as he was about digging his grave.” + 

Once more there was a silence in the library of King’s Barton Manor. But when the Squire turned round, he seemed in the best of spirits. “It’s not your job, of course, this kind of thing. But I’m an old man and I don’t think you’re touchy about trifles. Jog the memory of the good Torp, then, will you? What? Jolt the torpid Torp. That’s the word, eh? Tell the beggar in good clear English that I’ll go to Dorchester for that stone if he doesn’t set it up within the week. You can do that for me, Solent? But it’s not important. If it’s a bother, let it go! But have a good luncheon at the Three Peewits anyway! Make ’em give ’ee their own ale. It’s good. It’s excellent. That individual down at Pond Cottage gets drunk on it every night, Monk tells me.” + 

Turning again to the bookcase, Mr. Urquhart made as though the conversation had terminated; and Wolf, after a moment or two of that awkward hesitation which a subordinate feels when he is uncertain as to what particular gesture of parting is required, went straight out of the room, without a word, and ran downstairs. + 

He had found his hat and stick, and was on the point of letting himself out of the house, when the little side-door leading to the kitchen hurriedly opened, and Roger Monk made himself visible. He did this with the precipitation of a man reckless with anxiety, and he plunged at once into rapid speech. + 

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Solent, for troubling you, but the truth of the matter is, Sir, that this house will be upset by breakfast-time tomorrow, unless you⁠—unless you⁠—would be so kind, Sir, as to help Mrs. Martin and myself.” + 

“What on earth is coming now?” thought Wolf. “These King’s Barton servants seem pretty hard put to it.” + 

“ ’Tisn’t as though I didn’t know that it’s above my province to speak,” went on the agitated man. “But speak I must; and if you’re the kind of young gentleman I think you are, you’ll listen to my words.” + 

Wolf contemplated the swarthy giant, who, dressed in his gardener’s-clothes, with bare throat and bare arms, had the torso of a classical athlete. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his great sunburnt hands made weak fumbling gestures in the air. + 

“Certainly, Roger. By all means, Roger. I shall be delighted to help you and Mrs. Martin in any way I can. What is it I can do for you?” + 

The tall servant’s face relaxed instantaneously, and he smiled sweetly. His smile was like the smile of some melancholy slave in a Greek play. His voice sank into a confidential whisper. + 

“It’s sausages, Sir, asking you to excuse me, it’s sausages. Mr. Urquhart has to have ’em these days for breakfast, and there ain’t none of ’em in the house; and I am too set out, what with horses to clean and artichokes to plant and pigs in the yard to feed, to go to town myself.” + 

Wolf smiled in as grave and well-bred a manner as he could. “I’ll be very glad to bring you home some sausages, Monk,” he said amiably. + 

“At Weevil’s,” cried the other, full of relief and joy. “At Weevil’s in High Street. And be sure you get fresh ones, Mr. Solent. Tell Bob Weevil they’re for me. He knows me and I know him. Don’t mention Squire. Say they’re for Mr. Monk. He’ll know! Two pounds of sausages; and you can tell Weevil to put ’em down. Thank ’ee more than I can say, Sir, for doing this. It eases a man’s mind. I was downright distraught in thinking of it. Squire’s like that. What he puts his heart on he puts his heart on, and none can turn him. I’ve been with other gentlemen⁠—mostly in stable-work you understand⁠—but I’ve never worked for one like Squire. Doesn’t do to contravene Squire when his heart is fixed, and so I thank ’ee kindly, Mr. Solent.” And the man vanished with the same precipitation with which he appeared. + 

Wolf set out down the drive in extremely good spirits. Nothing suited him better than to have the day to himself. It seemed to extend before him, this day, and gather volume and freedom, as if it were many days rolled into one. It didn’t worry him that it was Friday. The nature of the day, its cloudiness, its gustiness, its greyness, suited his mood completely. It seemed to carry his mind far, far back⁠—back beyond any definite recollections. The look of the oak palings; the look of the mud; the look of the branches, with their scarcely budded embryo leaves swaying in the wind⁠—all these things hit his imagination with a sudden accumulated force. He rubbed his hands; he prodded the ground with his stick; he strode forward with great strides. + 

This melancholy day, with its gustily blown elm-branches, seemed to extend itself before him along a road that was something more than an ordinary road. Fragmentary images, made up out of fantastic names⁠—the name of Torp, the name of Malakite⁠—hovered in front of him, mingled with the foam of dark-brown ale and the peculiar, bare, smooth look of uncooked sausages. And over and above such images floated the ambiguous presence of his father, William Solent. He felt as if everything that might chance to happen on this grey phantom-like day would happen under the direct influence of this dead man. He loved his father at that moment, not with any idealistic emotion, but with an earthy, sensual, heathen piety which allowed for much equivocal indulgence. + 

At the foot of the drive he turned into Lenty Lane, passing at the corner a trim little cottage, whose garden of rich black earth was full of daffodils. He stopped for a moment to stare at the window of this neat lodge⁠—thinking in his mind, “That must be where Roger Monk lives”⁠—and without being seriously disturbed, he was a little startled when, by reason of some impish trick of light and shade, it seemed to him that he saw an image of himself standing just inside one of the lower windows. + 

But he walked on in undiminished good spirits, and in about a quarter of an hour found himself in the centre of the village of King’s Barton. + 

All the cottages he saw here had protective cornices, carved above windows and doors, chiselled and moulded with as much elaboration as if they were ornamenting some noble mansion or abbey. Many of these cottage-doors stood ajar, as Wolf passed by, and it was easy for him to observe their quaintly furnished interiors: the china dogs upon the mantelpieces, the grandfather’s-clocks, the highly-coloured lithographs of war and religion, the shining pots and pans, the well-scrubbed deal tables, the deeply indented wooden steps leading to the rooms above. Almost all of them had large flagstones, of the same mellow, yellowish tint, laid between the doorstep and the path; and in many cases this stone was as deeply hollowed out, under the passing feet of the generations, as was the actual doorstep which rose above it. + 

Beyond these cottages his road led him past the low wall of the parish-church. Here he stopped for a while to view the graves and to enjoy the look of that solid and yet proud edifice whose massive masonry and tall square tower gathered up into themselves so many of the characteristics of that countryside. + 

Wolf wondered vaguely in what part of the churchyard his predecessor’s body lay⁠—that hiding-place without a headstone! He also wondered whether by some stroke of good luck he should get a glimpse of that submissive clergyman, satirically styled “Tilly-Valley,” pottering about the place. + 

But the church remained lonely and unfrequented at that midmorning hour. Nothing moved there but a heavy rack of dark-grey, windblown clouds, sailing swiftly above the four foliated pinnacles that rose from the corners of the tower. Close to the church he perceived what was evidently the parsonage; but there was no sign of life there either. + 

The cottages grew more scattered now. Some of them were really small dairy-farms, through the gates of whose muddy yards he could see pigs and poultry, and sometimes a young bull or an excited flock of geese. + 

At last he had passed the last house of the village and was drifting leisurely along a lonely country road. The hedges were already in full leaf; but many of the trees, especially the oaks and ashes, were yet quite bare. The ditches on both sides of the road contained gleaming patches of celandines. + 

As Wolf walked along, an extraordinary happiness took possession of him. He seemed to derive satisfaction from the mere mechanical achievement of putting one foot in front of the other. It seemed a delicious privilege to him merely to feel his boots sinking in the wet mud⁠—merely to feel the gusts of cold air blowing upon his face. + 

He asked himself lazily why it was that he found nature, especially this simple pastoral nature that made no attempt to be grandiose or even picturesque, so much more thrilling than any human society he had ever met. He felt as if he enjoyed at that hour some primitive life-feeling that was identical with what these pollarded elms felt, against whose ribbed trunks the gusts of wind were blowing, or with what these shiny celandine-leaves felt, whose world was limited to tree-roots and fern-fronds and damp, dark mud! + 

The town of Blacksod stands in the midst of a richly green valley, at the point where the Dorsetshire Blackmore Vale, following the loamy banks of the river Lunt, carries its umbrageous fertility into the great Somersetshire plain. Blacksod is not only the centre of a large agricultural district; it is the energetic and bustling emporium of many small but enterprising factories. Cheeses are made here and also shoes. Sausages are made here and also leather gloves. Ironmongers, saddlers, shops dealing in every sort of farm-implement and farm-produce, abound in the streets of Blacksod side by side with haberdashers, grocers, fishmongers; and up and down its narrow pavements farmers and labourers jostle with factory-hands and burgesses. + 

After walking for about two miles, Wolf became conscious that this lively agglomeration of West Country trade was about to reveal itself. The hedges became lower, the ditches shallower, the blackbirds and thrushes less voluble. Neat little villas began to appear at the roadside, with trim but rather exposed gardens, where daffodils nodded with a splendid negligence, as if ready in their royal largesse to do what they could for the patient clerks and humble shop-assistants who had weeded the earth about their proud stems. + 

Soon there began to be manifested certain signs of borough traffic. Motorcars showed themselves and even motor-lorries. Bakers’ carts and butchers’ carts came swiftly past him. He overtook maids and mothers returning from shopping, with perambulators where the infant riders were almost lost beneath the heaps of parcels piled up around them. He observed a couple of tramps taking off their boots under the hedge, their long brown peevish fingers untwisting dirty linen, their furtive suspicious eyes watching the passersby with the look of sick jackals. + 

And then he found himself in an actual street. It was a new street, composed of spick-and-span jerry-built houses, each exactly like the other. But it gave Wolf a mysterious satisfaction. The neatness, the abnormal cleanliness of the brickwork and of the wretched sham-Gothic ornamentation did not displease him. The little gardens, behind low, brightly painted, wooden palings, were delicious to him, with their crocuses and jonquils and budding polyanthuses. + 

He surveyed these little houses and gardens⁠—doubtless the homes of artisans and factory-hands⁠—with a feeling of almost maudlin delight. He imagined himself as living in one of these places, and he realized exactly with what deep sensual pleasure he would enjoy the rain and the intermittent sunshine. There would be nothing artistic or over-cluttered there, to prevent every delicate vibration of air and sky from reaching the skin of his very soul. He loved the muslin curtains over the parlour-windows, and the ferns and flowerpots on the windowsills. He loved the quaint names of these little toy houses⁠—names like Rosecot, Woodbine, Bankside, Primrose Villa. He tried to fancy what it would be like to sit in the bow-window of any one of these, drinking tea and eating bread-and-honey, while the Spring afternoon slowly darkened towards twilight. + 

He roused himself presently from these imaginations to observe that some of the real business of the town was becoming manifest. The little houses began to be interspersed with woodsheds and timber-yards, by grocers’ shops and coal-yards. He became alert now⁠—that faint sort of “second-sight,” which almost all contemplative people possess, warning him that Mr. Torp’s establishment was not far off. He knew he was in Chequers Street. It only remained for him to keep his eyes open. He walked very slowly now, peering at the yards and shops on both sides of the road; and as he walked, a curious trance-like sensation came over him, the nature of which was very complicated, though no doubt it had something to do with the emptiness of his stomach. But it took the form of making him feel as if he were retracing some sequence of events through which long ago he had already passed. + 

Ah! There it was! “Torp, Stonecutter.” He gazed with interest at the various monuments for the dead, which lay about on the ground or stood erect and challenging against the wall. It produced a queer impression, this crowd of anonymous tombstones, the owners and possessors whereof even now cheerfully walking about the earth. + 

“I must get this Torp to show me what he’s done for poor Redfern,” he thought, as he passed on to the door of the house. + 

He knocked at the door and was so instantaneously admitted that it was with a certain degree of confusion that he found himself in the very heart of the stonecutter’s household. + 

They had evidently just finished their midday meal. Mrs. Torp, a lean, cadaverous woman, was clearing the table. The stonecutter himself, a plump, lethargic man, with a whimsical eye, was smoking his pipe by the fire. A handsome boy of about eleven, who had evidently just opened the door to let himself out, fell back now and stared at the stranger with a bold impertinence. + 

“What can I do for ’ee, Sir?” said Mr. Torp, not making any attempt to rise, but smiling amiably at the intruder. + 

“Get on! Get off! Don’t worry the gentleman, Lob!” murmured the woman to the spellbound boy. + 

And then it was that Wolf became aware of another member of the family. + 

No sooner was he conscious of her presence than he felt himself becoming as speechless with astonishment as the boy was at his own appearance. She sat on a stool opposite her father, leaning her shoulders against the edge of a high-backed settle. She was a young girl of about eighteen, and her beauty was so startling that it seemed to destroy in a moment all ordinary human relations. Her wide-open grey eyes were fringed with long, dark eyelashes. Her voluptuous throat resembled an arum lily before it has unsheathed its petals. She wore a simple close-fitting dress, more suited to the summer than to a chilly day in spring; but the peculiarity of this dress lay in the way it emphasized the extraordinary suppleness of her shoulders and the delicate Artemis-like beauty of her young breasts. + 

“I’ve come from King’s Barton,” began Wolf, moving towards the stonecutter. “I believe I have the honour to have taken the place of the gentleman for whom you have just designed one of your monuments.” + 

“Sit ’ee down, Mister. Sit ’ee down, Sir!” cried the man cheerfully. “Give the gentleman a chair, Missus!” He spoke in a tone that implied that his own obesity must be accepted as a pleasant excuse for his retaining a sitting-posture. + 

But Mrs. Torp had already left the room with a tray; and Wolf, as he seated himself with his face to the girl, could hear the woman muttering viciously to herself and clattering angrily with the plates behind the kitchen-door⁠—a door she seemed to have left open on purpose, so that she might combine the pleasure of listening to the conversation with the pleasure of disturbing it. + 

“Missus be cantiferous wi’ I ’cos them ’taties be so terrible rotted,” remarked the man, in a loud, hoarse whisper, leaning forward towards his guest and confidentially tapping his knee with his pipe. “And them onions what she been and cooked all morning, she’ve a-boiled all taste out o’ they. Them onions might as well be hog-roots for all the Christian juice what be left in ’un.” + 

Wolf, who had found it difficult to keep his eyes away from the girl by the settle, now suddenly became aware that she was fully conscious of his agitation and was regarding him with grave amusement. + 

“I suppose you don’t do any of the cooking?” he said, rather faintly, meeting her gaze. + 

She changed her position into one that emphasized her beauty with a kind of innocent wantonness, smiled straight into his eyes, but remained silent. + 

“She?” put in her father. “Save us and help us! Gerda do the cooking? Why, Mister, that girl ain’t got the gumption to comb her own hair. That’s the Lord’s own truth, Mister, what I’m telling ’ee. She ain’t got the durned consideration to comb her own hair; and it be mighty silky, too, when it be combed out. But her mother have to do it. There ain’t nothing in this blessed house what that poor woman hasn’t to do; and her own daughter sitting round, strong as a Maypole.⁠—Now you be off to school, Lob Torp! Don’t yer trouble the gentleman.” + 

This last remark was due to the fact that the handsome boy had edged himself quite close to Wolf and was gazing at him with a mixture of admiration and insolence. + 

“What be that on your chain?” he enquired. “Be that a real girt seal, like what King John throwed into the Wash?” + 

Wolf put his arm round the child’s waist; but as he did so, he looked steadily at Gerda. At that moment Mrs. Torp reentered the room. + 

“Well, John?” she said. “Aren’t yer going into the yard? That stone for Mr. Manley’s mother’s been waiting since Sunday. He comes to see ’un five times a day. He’ll be a crazed-man like, if ’tisn’t up afore tomorrow.” + 

Wolf rose to his feet. + 

“What shall I tell Mr. Urquhart about the headstone for Mr. Redfern?” + 

He uttered these words in a more decided and less propitiatory tone than he had yet used, and all the family stared at him with placid surprise. + 

“Oh, that!” cried Mr. Torp. “So you came about that, did yer? I had thought maybe you knowed some wealthy folk out in country what had a waiting corpse. Do ’ee come from these parts, Mister, or be ’ee from Lunnon, as this ’ere Redfern were?⁠ ⁠… Lunnon, eh? Well, ’tis strange that two young men same as you be should come to Blacksod; and both be Lunnoners! But that’s what I tells our Gerda here. Maids what won’t help their mothers in house, maids what do nought but walk out wi’ lads, had best be in Lunnon their own selves! That there Metropolis must be summat wonderful to look at, I reckon. I expect they makes their own moniments in them parts?” + 

Wolf nodded, with a shrug of his shoulders, to imply that there was little need at present for Mr. Torp to think of extending his activities. + 

“Could you show me what you’ve done for Redfern?” he asked abruptly. + 

“Well, there ain’t no harm in that, is there, Missus?” said the stonecutter, looking appealingly at his wife. + 

“Best show him,” said the lady briefly. “Best show him. But let ’un understand that Mr. Manley’s mother is what comes first.” + 

The obese stonecutter rose with an effort and led the way into the yard. Wolf stepped aside to permit the girl to follow her father; and as she passed him, she gave him a glance that resembled the sudden trembling of a white-lilac branch, heavy with rain and sweetness. Her languorous personality dominated the whole occasion for him; and as he watched her swaying body moving between those oblong stones in that cold enclosure, the thought rose within him that if his subterranean vice couldn’t find a place for loveliness like this, there must be something really inhuman in its exactions. + 

With an incredible rapidity he began laying plots to see this girl again. Did Mr. Urquhart know of her existence? Had Darnley Otter ever seen her?⁠ ⁠… He was roused from his amorous thoughts by an abrupt gesture of Mr. Torp. + 

“There ’a be!” said the carver. “ ’Tis Ham Hill stone, as Squire Urquhart said for’n to be. I does better jobs in marble; and marble’s what most of ’em likes. But that’s the order; and the young gent what it’s chipped for can’t help ’isself.” + 

Wolf regarded the upright yellow slab, upon the top of which was a vigorous “Here Lies,” and at the foot of which was an even more vigorous “John Torp, Monument-Maker.” + 

“You haven’t got very far, Mr. Torp,” he remarked drily. + 

“Won’t take me more’n a couple o’ afternoons to finish it up,” replied the other. “And you can tell Mr. Urquhart that as soon as Mr. Manley be satisfied⁠—Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill, tell ’un!⁠—I’ll get to work on his young friend and make a clean job of he.” + 

There did not seem any excuse just then for prolonging this interview. Wolf’s mind hurried backwards and forwards like a rat trying to find a hole into a pantry. He thought, “Would they let her show me the way to the Three Peewits?” and then immediately afterwards he thought, “They’ll send the boy, and I’ll never get rid of him!” + 

In the end he went off with an abruptness that was almost rude. He patted Lob on the head, nodded at the stonecutter, plunged into the eyes of Gerda as a diver plunges into water, and strode away down Chequers Street. + 

It was not long before he was seated at a spotless white cloth in the commercial dining-room of the famous West Country inn. In front of him rose a massive mahogany sideboard, which served as a sort of sacred pedestal for the ancient silver plate of three generations of sagacious landlords. In the centre of this silver were two symbolic objects⁠—an immense uncut ham, adorned with a white paper frill, and a large half-eaten apple-tart. + 

Wolf was so late for luncheon that he and a solitary waiter had the whole dusky, sober room entirely to themselves. They were, however, looked down upon by the ferocious eye of a stuffed pike and by the supercilious eye of Queen Victoria, who, wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter, conveyed, but only by the flicker of an eyelid, her ineffable disdain for all members of the human race who were not subjects of the House of Hanover. + 

And as he lingered over his meal, drinking that dark, foamy liquor that seemed the dedicated antidote to a grey March day, he permitted his fancy to run riot with the loveliness of Gerda Torp. How remarkable that she had never once opened her lips! And yet in her silence she had compelled both that room and that yard to serve as mere frames to her personality. He tilted back in his chair, and pressed the palms of his hands against the edge of the table, revolving every detail of that queer scene, and becoming so absorbed that it was only after a perceptible interval that he began to taste the cigarettes which he went on unconsciously smoking. + 

The girl was not the particular physical type that appealed to him most, or that had, whenever he had come across it, the most provocative effect upon his senses; but the effect upon him of a beauty so overpowering, so absolute in its flawlessness, was great enough to sweep out of sight all previous predilections. And now, as he conjured up the vision of what she was like, it seemed that nothing more desirable could possibly happen to him than to enjoy such beauty. + 

He made up his mind that by hook or by crook he would possess her. He knew perfectly well that he could not, properly speaking, be said to have fallen in love with her. He was like a man who suddenly finds out that he has suffered all his life from thirst, and simultaneously with this discovery stumbles upon a cool cellar of the rarest wine. To have caught sight of her at all was to be dominated by an insatiable craving for her⁠—a craving that made him feel as if he had some sixth sense, some sense that must be satisfied by the possession of her, and that nothing but the possession of her could satisfy. + 

Drugged and dazed with the Three Peewits’ ale and with these amorous contemplations, Wolf sat on beneath that picture of Queen Victoria in a species of erotic trance. His rugged face, with its high cheekbones and hawk-like nose, nodded over his plate with half-shut lecherous eyes. Every now and then he ran his fingers through his short, stiff, fair hair, till it stood up erect upon his head. + 

“Well, well,” he said to himself at last, “this won’t do!” And rising abruptly from his chair, he gave the waiter, who, in his preoccupation had been to him a mere white blur above a black coat, an extravagant tip⁠—half-a-crown, in fact⁠—and, taking up his hat and stick, told them to put down his meal to Mr. Urquhart’s account, and stepped out into the street. + 

The cold, gusty wind, when he got outside, cleared his brain at once. He made up his mind that he would leave the bookseller to the last; and, stopping one of the passersby, he enquired the way to Weevil’s grocery. + 

Never did he forget that first lingering stroll through the centre of Blacksod! The country people seemed to be doing their shopping as if it were some special fête. Parsons, squires, farmers, villagers⁠—all were receiving obsequious and yet quizzical welcome from the sly shopkeepers and their irresponsible assistants. The image of Gerda Torp moved with him as he drifted slowly through this animated scene. Her sweetness flowed through his senses and flowed out around him, heightening his interest in everything he looked at, making everything seem rich and mellow, as if it were seen through a diffused golden light, like that of the pictures of Claude Lorraine. + 

And all the while over the slate roofs the great grey clouds rushed upon their arbitrary way. His spirit, drunk with the sweetness of Gerda and the fumes of the Three Peewits’ ale, rose in exultation to follow those clouds. + 

Whirling along with them in this exultant freedom of his spirit, while his human figure with its oak walking-stick tapped the edge of the pavement, he felt a queer need, now, to carry this maddeningly sweet burden of his to that mound in the Ramsgard cemetery. + 

“He would chuckle over this,” thought Wolf, as he recalled that profane deathbed cry. “He would push me on to snatch most scandalously at this girl, let the result be as it may!” + 

His mind dropped now like a leaden plummet into all manner of erotic thoughts. Would her silence go on⁠ ⁠… with its indrawing magnetic secrecy⁠ ⁠… even if he were making love to her? Would that glaucous greyness in her eyes darken, or grow more luminous, as he caressed her? Gerda certainly couldn’t be called a “peeled willow-wand,” for her limbs were rounded and voluptuous, just as her face had something of that lethargic sulkiness that is seen sometimes in ancient Greek sculpture. + 

It was just at this point that, looking round for a suitable person to enquire of again concerning the sausage-shop, he felt himself jerked by the elbow; and there, in front of him, smiling up into his face, was the handsome, mischievous countenance of Lob Torp. + 

“I see’d ’ee, Mister!” burst out the boy breathlessly. “I see’d ’ee long afore ’ee could see I! Say now, Mister, have ’ee any cigarette-pictures on ’ee?” + 

Wolf surveyed the excited child thoughtfully. Surely the gods were on his side this day! + 

“If I haven’t, I soon will have,” he brought out with a nervous smile, searching hurriedly in his pockets. + 

It appeared that he did have a couple of half-used packages, containing the desired little bits of stiff, shiny paper. + 

“There, there’s two, at any rate!” he said, handing them over. + 

Lob Torp scrutinized the two cards with a disappointed eye. “They ain’t Three Castles,” he said sadly. “Them others bain’t as pretty as they Three Castles be.” He meditated for a moment, with his hands in his pockets. “Say, Mister,” he began eagerly, with radiant eyes. “Tell ’ee what I’ll do for ’ee. I’ll sell ’ee the photo of Sis what I be taking down to Bob Weevil’s. He were a-going to gie I summat for’n, but like enough it’ll be worth more to a gent like yourself. Come now, mister, gie I a sixpence and I’ll gie ’ee the picture and say nought to Bob.” + 

The ingratiating smile with which Lob uttered these words would have been worthy of an Algerian street arab. Wolf made a humorous grimace at him, under the mask of which he hid annoyance, uneasiness, curiosity. + 

The boy continued: “ ’Tis a wonderful pretty picture, Mister. I tooked it me own self. She be ridin’ astride one of them wold tombstones in Dad’s yard, just the same as ’twere a girt ’oss.” + 

“I don’t mind looking at it,” said Wolf, after a pause, pulling the boy into the door of a shop. But Lob Torp was evidently an adept in the ways of infatuated gentlemen. + 

“Threepence for a look, Mister, and sixpence for to keep,” he said resolutely. + 

It was on the tip of Wolf’s tongue to cry, “Hand it over, boy. I’ll keep it!” But an instinct of suspicious dignity restrained him, and he assumed a noncommittal, negligent air. But under this air the ancient, sly cunning of the predatory demon began to fumble at the springs of his intention. “I’ll get Bob Weevil to show it to me,” the Machiavellian monitor whispered. “I shall have it in my hands then without being indebted to this rascally little blackmailer!” + 

He turned to the boy and took him by the arm. “Come on, youngster!” he said. “Never mind about the picture. Much better give it to your friend! I’m going to Weevil’s shop now myself, and you can show me the way. I’ll give you your sixpence for that!” He pulled the child forward with him and made him walk by his side, his arm thrown lightly and casually round Lobbie’s neck. But all this sagacious hypocrisy no more deceived the cynical intelligence of Gerda’s brother than did the unction of that arm about his shoulder! + 

The child slipped out of his grasp like a little eel. “Don’t ’ee hold on to I, Mister. I ain’t going to rin nowhere. I ain’t a-gived school the go-by for to play marbles. I be goin’ fishing with Bob Weevil, present. He lets I hold his net for’n.” + 

“Oh, is there any fishing about here?” enquired Wolf blandly, accepting his defeat. The boy skipped a pace or two like a young rabbit. + 

“ ’Tain’t what you’d call fishing, Mister. Nought but minnies and stickles, ’cept when us do go to Willum’s Mill. Woops-I! But them girt chub be hard to hook. And Mister Manley he likes to keep them for the gentry. ’Tis when us be down to Willum’s of an evening, when farmer be feeding ’isself, that Bob and me do a bit of real fishing.” + 

Wolf surveyed the good-looking urchin with benevolent irony. “Have you ever landed any of those big chub?” he asked. And then he suddenly became conscious that the nervous, hunted eye of a very shabby clergyman was observing them both, with startled interest, from the edge of the pavement. + 

“We’re near where us wants to go now, Sir,” was the boy’s irrelevant response, uttered in a surprisingly loud voice. + 

When they had advanced a little further, the child turned round to his companion and whispered furtively. “Yon Passon were the Reverend T. E. Valley, Mister, from King’s Barton. ’Ee do talk to I sometimes about helping he with them holy services up to church; but Dad he says all them things be gammon. He’s what you might call blasphemious, my Dad is; and I be blasphemious, too, I reckon; though Bob says that High Church be a religion what lets a person play cricket on Sundays. But I takes no stock o’ that, being as cricket and suchlike ain’t nought to I.” + 

“Tilly-Valley! Tilly-Valley!” muttered Wolf under his breath, recalling the contemptuous allusion of Mr. Urquhart. + 

“Here we be, Mister!” cried Lobbie Torp, pausing before a capacious old-fashioned shop, over which was written in dignified lettering, “Robert Weevil and Son.” + 

They entered together, and the boy was at once greeted by a young man behind the counter, a young man with black hair and a pasty complexion. + 

“Hullo, Lob! Come to see if there’s fishing tonight?” + 

Wolf advanced in as easy and natural a manner as he could assume. “I must propitiate my rival,” he said grimly to himself. “My name is Solent, Mr. Weevil,” he said aloud, “and I come on behalf of Mr. Urquhart of King’s Barton.” + 

“Yes, Sir, quite so, Sir; and what can I do for you, Sir?” said the young man politely, bowing with a professional smirk over the polished counter. + 

“The gentleman’s been to see Dad,” put in Lobbie, in his high treble. “And he saw Sis, too, and Sis seed him, too; and I rinned after him and showed him the way!” + 

“And what can I do for you, Sir, or for Mr. Urquhart, Sir?” repeated the young grocer. + 

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Weevil, it was Monk, the man up there, who asked me to come to you. It appears he’s run out of sausages⁠—your especial sausages⁠—and he begged me to take back a pound or two for him.” + 

“I’ll do them up at once for you,” said the grocer benignantly. “I’ve just had a new lot in.” + 

It was not very surprising to Wolf to notice that his young guide hurriedly followed Mr. Weevil into the recesses of the shop. From where he stood he could see the two of them quite clearly through an open door, the dark head and the fair head close together, poring over some object that certainly was not sausages! + 

A shameless and scandalous curiosity seized him to share in that colloquy. The various paraphernalia of the shop, the piled-up tins of Reading Biscuits, the great copper canisters of Indian teas, the noble erections of Blacksod cheeses⁠—all melted⁠—all grew vague and indistinct. + 

“Mounted astride of a girt tombstone,” he repeated to himself; and the thought of the cool whiteness of that girl’s skin and its contact with that chiselled marble reduced everything else in the world to a kind of irrelevance, to something that fell into the category of the tedious and the negligible. + 

There came at last an outburst of merriment from the back of the shop that actually caused him to make a few hurried steps in that direction; but he stopped short, interdicted by his sense of personal dignity. “I really can’t join in libidinous jesting with the Blacksod populace just at present!” he thought to himself. “But there’s plenty of time. I’ve no doubt William Solent would have had no such hesitation!” And the thought came over him how ridiculous these dignified withdrawings of his would appear to that grinning skull in the cemetery. + 

But the youth and the boy came back again now gravely enough to the front of the shop. + 

“There you are, sir!” said Bob Weevil, handing him a lusty package, and puffing out his cheeks as he did so. “I think Mr. Urquhart will find those to his taste.” He paused and gave Wolf’s companion a glance of complicated significance. “Don’t tell Gerdie what I said about that picture, Lob, will you?” he added. + 

There was a tone in this remark that caused Wolf’s face to stiffen and his eyebrows to rise. “And now perhaps you can tell me,” he said, “where I can find Malakite’s, the bookshop?” + 

The two friends exchanged a puzzled and baffled glance, not unmixed with disapproval. Books were evidently something for which they both entertained a hostile suspicion. But the young grocer gave him detailed instructions, to which Lob Torp listened with satiric condescension. “See you both again soon!” murmured Wolf, with dignified amiability, as he left the shop. + 

He walked very slowly this time along the Blacksod pavements, and he found himself buttoning his overcoat tightly and turning up his collar; for the wind had veered from northwest to due north, and the air that blew against his face now had whistled across the sheep-tracks of Salisbury Plain. + 

Ah! There was the secondhand bookshop, with the single curious word, “Malakite,” written above it. He paused for a second to gaze in at the window, and was both surprised and delighted by the number and rarity of the works exposed there for sale. The house itself was a solidly constructed, sturdily built Mid-Victorian erection, with a grey slate roof; and there was a little open passage at one side of it, leading, he could see, into a small walled-in garden at the back. + 

He pushed open the door and entered the shop. At first he found it difficult to see clearly; for it was already nearly four o’clock, the sky heavily overcast, the place ill-lighted, the gas-jets unlit. But after a moment of suspense, he made out a tall, gaunt, bearded, old man, with sunken cheeks, hollow eye-sockets, closely cropped grizzled hair, seated in a corner of the shop upon a rough, faded horsehair chair, with a little round table in front of him, carefully gumming together the loose leaves of a large folio which he held upon his knee. The old man’s head was bent low over his work, and he made no sign of having heard anyone enter. + 

“Mr. Malakite?” said Wolf quietly, advancing towards him between rows of books. His approach was so easy and natural in that dim light, that his astonishment may be imagined when the old man let the folio fall to the ground, and stumbled to his feet with such agitated violence that the round table collapsed also, tossing the glue-pot upon the floor. In that twilit place it was almost spectral to see the eyes in that old furrowed face staring forth like black holes burnt in a wooden panel. + 

“I startled you, Sir,” muttered Wolf gently, drawing back a little. “It’s a dark, cold afternoon. I’m afraid I disturbed you. I am very sorry.” + 

For one second the old bookseller seemed to totter and sway, as if to follow his folio to the ground; but he mastered himself, and, leaning against the arm of his horsehair chair, spoke in a dry, collected voice. His words were as unexpected to his visitor as his agitation had been. + 

“Who are you, young man?” he said sternly. “Who were your parents?” + 

Not Dante himself, when in the Inferno he heard a similar question from that proud tomb, could have been more startled than Wolf was at this extraordinary enquiry. + 

“My name is Wolf Solent, Mr. Malakite,” he answered humbly. “My father’s name was William Solent. He was a master at Ramsgard School. My mother lives in London. I am acting now as Secretary for Mr. Urquhart.” + 

The old man, hearing these words, gave vent to a curious rattling sigh, deep down in his throat, like the sound of the wind through a patch of dead thistle-heads. He made a feeble gesture with one of his long, bony hands, half apologetic, half sorrowful, and sank back again upon his chair. + 

“You must forgive me, Sir,” he said after a pause. “You must forgive me, Mr. Solent. The truth is, your voice, coming suddenly upon me like that, reminded me of things that ought to be⁠—reminded me of⁠—of too many things.” The old man’s voice rose at the words “too many,” but his next remark was quiet and natural. “I knew your father quite well, sir. We were intimate friends. His death was a great blow to me. Your father, Mr. Solent, was a very remarkable man.” + 

Wolf, on hearing these words, moved up to the bookseller’s side, and with an easy and spontaneous gesture laid his hand upon the hand of the old man as it rested upon the arm of his chair. + 

“You are the second friend of my father’s that I have met lately,” said he. “The other was Miss Selena Gault.” + 

The old man hardly seemed to listen to these words. He kept staring at him, out of his sunken eye-sockets, with deprecatory intensity. + 

Wolf, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, bent down and occupied himself by picking up the fallen table, the glue-pot, and the folio. As he did this he began to grow aware of a sensation resembling that which he had felt in Mr. Urquhart’s library⁠—the sensation of the presence of forms of human obliquity completely new in his experience. + 

He had no sooner got the folio safe back upon the table, than the shop-door swung open behind him and closed with a resounding noise. He glanced round; and there, to his surprise, stood Darnley Otter. This quiet gentleman brought in with him such an air of ease and orderliness, that Wolf felt a wave of very agreeable reassurance pass through his nerves. He was, in fact, thoroughly relieved to see that yellow beard and gracious reticence. The man’s reserved manner and courtly smile gave him a comfortable sense of a return to those normal and natural conventions from which he felt as if he had departed very far since he left the tearoom of the Lovelace Hotel yesterday. + 

The two young men exchanged greetings, while the owner of the bookshop observed them with a sort of patient bewilderment. He then rose slowly to his feet. + 

“It’s time for tea,” he said, in a carefully measured voice. “I generally lock the place up now and go upstairs. I don’t know⁠—” He hesitated, looking from one to the other. “I don’t know whether it would be asking too much⁠—if I asked you both to come upstairs with me?” + 

Wolf and Mr. Otter simultaneously expressed their extreme desire to drink a cup of tea with him. + 

“I’ll go and warn my daughter, then,” he said eagerly. “You know, Mr. Otter, I feel as if this young gentleman and myself were already old friends. By the way, this folio, Sir”⁠—and he turned to Solent⁠—“is the book I wrote to Mr. Urquhart about. I think I shall have to trust it with you. It’s a treasure. But Mr. Urquhart is a good customer of mine. I don’t think he’ll want to purchase it though. Its price is higher than he usually cares to give. Will you excuse me, then, gentlemen?” + 

So saying, he opened a door at the rear of the shop and vanished from view. The two men looked at each other with that particular look which normal people exchange when an extraordinary person has suddenly left them. + 

“A remarkable old chap,” observed Wolf quietly. + 

Darnley shrugged his shoulders and looked round the shop. + 

“You don’t think so?” pursued Solent. + 

“Oh, he’s all right,” admitted the other. + 

“You don’t like him, then?” + 

The only reply to this was an almost Gallic gesture, implying avoidance of an unpleasant subject. + 

“Why, what’s wrong?” said Solent, pressing him. + 

“Oh, well,” responded the Latin-teacher, driven to make himself more explicit. “There’s a rather sinister legend attached to Mr. Malakite, in regard to his wife.” + 

“His wife?” echoed Wolf. + 

“He is said to have killed her with shame.” + 

“Shame? Do people die of shame?” + 

“They have been known to do so,” said the schoolmaster, drily, “at least in classical times. You’ve probably heard of Oedipus, Solent?” + 

“But Oedipus didn’t die. That was the whole point. The gods carried him away.” + 

“Well, perhaps the gods will carry Mr. Malakite away.” + 

“What do you mean?” enquired Wolf, with great interest, lowering his voice. + 

“Oh, I daresay we make too much of these things. But there was a quarrel between this man and his wife, connected with his fondness for their daughter, this young Christie’s elder sister⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… well⁠ ⁠… there was a child born, too.” + 

“And the wife died?” + 

“The wife died. The girl was packed off to Australia. It seems she couldn’t bear the sight of her child, and it was taken away from her. I can’t tell you whether the case got as far as the law-courts, or whether it was hushed up. Your friend Miss Gault knows all about it.” + 

Wolf was silent, meditating upon all this. + 

“Not a very pleasant background for the other daughter!” he brought out at last. + 

“Oh, she’s a funny little thing,” said Darnley, smiling. “She lives so completely in books, that I don’t think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She always seems to me, when I meet her, as if she’d just come out of a deep trance and wanted to return to it. She and I get on splendidly. Well, you’ll see her in a minute, and can judge for yourself.” + 

Wolf was silent again. He was thinking of the friendship between this old man and his father. He pondered in his mind whether or not to reveal to Darnley the unexpected agitation which his appearance had excited. For some reason he felt reluctant to do this. He felt vaguely that his new closeness to his cynical progenitor committed him to a certain caution. He was on the edge of all manner of dark entanglements. Well! He would use what discernment he had; but at any rate he would keep the whole problem to himself. + 

“I went to Torp’s yard,” he remarked, anxious to change the subject. “The fellow doesn’t seem to have got very far with Redfern’s headstone.” + 

Darnley Otter lifted his heavy eyelids and fixed upon him a sudden piercing look from his mackerel-blue eyes. + 

“Did Urquhart talk to you about Redfern?” he asked. + 

“Only to grumble at him for doing something about the book that didn’t suit his ideas. Did you know him? Did he die suddenly?” + 

Mr. Otter, instead of replying, turned his back, put his hands in his pockets, and began pacing up and down the floor of the shop, which seemed to get darker and darker around them. + 

He stopped suddenly and pulled at his trim beard. + 

“I cursed my wretched schoolwork to you yesterday,” he said. “But when I think of the misery that human beings cause one another in this world, I am thankful that I can teach Latin, and let it all go. But I daresay I exaggerate; I daresay I exaggerate.” + 

At that moment the door at the back of the shop opened, and the old bookseller, standing in the entrance, called out to them in a calm, well-bred voice. + 

“Will you come, gentlemen? Will you come?” + 

They followed him in silence into a little unlit passage. Preceding them with a slow, careful shuffle, he led them up a flight of steps to a landing above, where there were several closed doors and one open door. At this open door he stood aside and beckoned them to enter. + 

The room, when they found themselves within it, was lighted by a pleasant, green-shaded lamp. There was a warm fire burning in the grate, in front of which was a dainty tea-table with an old-fashioned urn, a silver teapot, some cups and saucers of Dresden china, and a large plate of thin bread-and-butter. + 

From beside this table a fragile-looking girl who might have been anything between twenty and twenty-five rose to welcome them. Darnley Otter greeted this young person in the manner of a benevolent uncle, and while Wolf and she were shaking hands, retained her left hand affectionately in his own. + 

Solent had received, since he left King’s Barton, so many disturbing impressions, that he was glad enough to yield himself up now, in this peaceful room, to what was really a vague, formless anodyne of almost Quakerish serenity. What he felt was undoubtedly due to the personality of Christie Malakite; but as he sank down in an armchair by her side, the impression he received of her appearance was confined to an awareness of smoothly parted hair, of a quaint pointed chin, and of a figure so slight and sexless that it resembled those meagre, androgynous forms that can be seen sometimes in early Italian pictures. + 

For several minutes Wolf permitted the conversation to pass lightly and easily between Darnley and Christie, while he occupied himself in enjoying his tea. He did not, however, hesitate to cast every now and then surreptitious glances at the extraordinary countenance of the old man, who, at a little distance from the table, was reposing in a kind of abstracted coma, his bony hands clasped around one of his thin knees, and his eyes half-closed. + 

Then, all in a moment, Wolf found himself describing his visit to the stonecutter’s yard, and without the least embarrassment enlarging upon the hypnotic charm that had been cast upon him by the loveliness of Gerda. + 

It appeared, for some mysterious reason, that he could talk more freely to these two people than he had ever talked in his life. + 

He had come, little as he had yet seen of him, to have a genuine regard for Darnley Otter, a regard that he had reason to feel was quite as strongly reciprocated. And in addition to this there seemed to be something about the pale, indefinite profile of the girl by his side, the patient slenderness of her neck, the cool detachment of her whole attitude, that unloosed the flow of his speech and threw around him an unforced consciousness of being at one with himself and at one with the general stream of life. + 

Darnley rallied him with a dry shamelessness about his confessed infatuation for the stonecutter’s daughter; and Christie, turning every now and then an almost elfish smile toward his voluble talk, actually offered, as she filled his cup for the third or fourth time, to help him in his adventure by inviting the young woman herself, whom she said she knew perfectly well, to have tea with him any afternoon he liked to name! + 

“She is beautiful,” the girl repeated. “I love to watch her. But I warn you, Mr. Solent, you’ll have many rivals.” + 

“She’s worse than a flirt,” remarked Darnley, gravely. “She’s got something in her that I have always fancied Helen of Troy must have had⁠—a sort of terrible passivity. I know for a fact that she’s had three lovers already. One of them was a young Oxonian who, they tell me, was a terrific rake. Another, so they say, was your predecessor, young Redfern. But none of them⁠—forgive me, Christie dear!⁠—seems to have, as they say down here, ‘got her into trouble.’ None of them seems to have made the least impression upon her! I doubt if she possesses what you call a heart. Certainly not a heart that you, Solent”⁠—he smiled one of his gentlest ironic smiles⁠—“are likely to break. So go ahead, my friend! We shall watch the course of your ‘furtivos amores,’ as Catullus would say, with the most cold-blooded interest. Shan’t we, Christie?” + 

The young girl turned upon Wolf her steady, unprovocative, indulgent gaze. “Perhaps,” she said quietly, after a moment in which Wolf felt as though his mind had encountered her mind like two bodiless shadows in a flowing river⁠—“perhaps in this case it will be different. Would you marry her if it were different?” These words were added in a tone that had the sort of faint aqueous mischief in it, such as a water-nymph might have indulged in, contemplating the rather heavy earth-loves of a pair of mortals. + 

“Oh, confound it, that’s going a little too fast, even for me!” Wolf protested. And, in the silence that followed, it seemed to him as if these two people, this Darnley and this Christie, had managed between them, in some sort of subtle conspiracy, to take off the delicious edge of his furtive obsession. + 

“Damn them!” he muttered to himself. “I was a fool to talk about it. But there it is! None of their chatter can make the sweetness of Gerda less entrancing.” But even as he formulated this revolt with a half-humorous irritation, he was aware that his mood had in some imperceptible way changed. Under cover of the friendly badinage that was going on between Darnley and Christie, he once or twice encountered the silent observation of the old bookseller, who had now lighted his pipe and was watching them all with a cloudy intentness; and it occurred to him that it was quite as much due to the shock of what he had heard about the old man that this change had come, as to anything that these two had said. + 

“But to the devil with them all!” he muttered to himself, as he and Darnley rose to go. “I’ve never seen anything as desirable as that girl’s body and I’m not going to be teased into giving it up.” + 

Before he left the house, the old bookseller wrapped the folio in paper and cardboard and placed it in his hands, making, as he did so, an automatic reference to his professional concern about its well-being. But the expression in Mr. Malakite’s hollow eyes, as this transaction took place, seemed to Wolf to have some quite different significance⁠—some significance in no way connected with the History of the Evershot Family. + 

All the way back to King’s Barton, as the two men walked side by side in friendly fragmentary speech, Wolf kept making spasmodic attempts to adjust the folio and the sausages so as to leave his right hand free for his oak-stick. He rejected all offers of assistance from his companion with a kind of obstinate pride, declaring that he “liked” carrying parcels; but the physical difficulty of these adjustments had the effect of diminishing his response both to the influence of the night and to the conversation of his friend. + 

It was quite dark now; and the north wind, whistling through the blackthorn-hedges, sighing through the tops of the trees, whimpering in the telegraph-wires, had begun to acquire that peculiar burden of impersonal sadness, which seems to combine the natural sorrows of the human generations with some strange planetary grief whose character is unrevealed. + 

The influence of this dirge-like wind did by degrees, in spite of the numbness of his obstinate clutch upon his packages, come to affect Wolf’s mind. He seemed to rush backward on the wings of this wind, to the two human heads⁠—to the fleshless head of William Solent buried in the earth and to the despairing head of that son of perdition crouching at Waterloo Station. + 

He mentally compared, as he shouted his replies to his companion’s remarks against the blustering gusts, the sardonic aplomb of the skull under the clay with that ghastly despair of the living, and he flung over the thornhedge a savage comment upon the ways of God. + 

The trim beard of Darnley Otter might wag on⁠ ⁠… like a brave bowsprit “stemming nightly to the pole”⁠ ⁠… but the keel of every human vessel had a leak⁠ ⁠… it was only a question of chance⁠ ⁠… just pure chance⁠ ⁠… how far that leak would go⁠ ⁠… any wagging beard⁠ ⁠… any brave chin might have to cry, at any moment, “Hold, enough!”⁠ ⁠… + 

And suddenly, in the covering darkness, Wolf took off his hat and stretched back his head, straining his neck as far as it would go, so that without relaxing the movement of walking, his upturned face might become horizontal. In this position he made a hideous grimace into infinity⁠—a grimace directed at the Governing Power of the Universe. What he desired to express in this grimace was an announcement that his own secret happiness had not “squared” him.⁠ ⁠… + 

His mind rushed upwards like a rocket among those distant stars. He imagined himself standing on some incredible promontory on the faintest star he could see. Even from that vantage he wanted to repeat his defiance⁠—not “squared” yet, O crafty universe!⁠—not “squared” yet! + 