Slate + 

All through January and February Wolf lived out his life with obstinate, stoical acceptance. He led his pupils at the Grammar School patiently and thoroughly through the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. + 

His interviews with Christie had grown gentler and tenderer, though in some ways sadder, since that night of “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth”; and whatever deception of Gerda they still implied, Gerda herself gave no sign of suspicion with regard to them. His mother’s new teashop, furnished with money borrowed at reasonable interest from Mr. Manley, had already proved itself a most promising venture; and Mrs. Solent’s spirits, as the weeks passed by, were steadily rising. Wolf had worked at top-speed during those two months at Mr. Urquhart’s book, writing every day between tea and their late supper at the little card-table by their parlour-fire, while Gerda read a series of romantic tales. + 

Almost to his own surprise⁠—and certainly to Mr. Urquhart’s⁠—the History of Dorset showed signs of drawing to its close. Writing day after day from seven o’clock to ten o’clock, Wolf had come to hit upon a style of chronicling shameful events and disconcerting episodes that cost him less and less effort, as the weeks advanced. What really gave him impetus was a trick he discovered of diffusing his own resentment against the Power behind the universe into his commentaries upon these human aberrations unearthed by his employer! The more disgust he felt for his task, the more saturnine his style became and the faster he wrote! Some of his sentences, when he revised them in cold blood, struck him as possessing quite a Swift-like malignity. He astonished himself by certain misanthropic outbursts. His habitual optimism seemed to fall away at such times, and a ferocious contempt for both men and women lay revealed, like a sullen, evil-looking, drained-out pond! + 

It was a surprise to him to find that this business of writing “immoral history” lent itself as well as it did to his natural method of expression. Each time he carried his new quota of pages up to King’s Barton Manor, Mr. Urquhart seemed more delighted than the time before. “Stick to the facts⁠ ⁠… yellow Menelaus⁠ ⁠… stick to the facts⁠ ⁠… and we’ll show ’em for all time⁠ ⁠… eh, me boy?⁠ ⁠… what our ‘wold Darset’ is made of!” + 

As February drew to an end, it became more and more probable that the anniversary of his reappearance in his native land⁠—the third day of March⁠—would be, as he wished to make it, the date of the book’s completion. + 

As to Mr. Urquhart’s cheque for two hundred pounds, it still remained where Wolf had first placed it⁠—under the stomach of Mukalog at the bottom of that unused dresser-drawer in Gerda’s kitchen. + 

Several events of importance occurred during those two months of exhausting work. One of these was the acceptance, under Lord Carfax’s patronage, of a small volume of Jason’s poetry by a well-known publishing-house. Not only were these poems accepted, but Jason received⁠—so highly were they praised by the inner circles of London taste⁠—the sum of fifty pounds as an advance royalty, an event which, when it occurred, a few weeks after the book was taken, seemed to impress the author himself a great deal more deeply than the many tactful letters that reached Pond Cottage from “that lord of yours in London.” + 

Even more pleasing to Wolf than the success of Mr. Valley’s suggestion about Jason’s poetry was the upshot of his own advice to Darnley about his relations with Mattie. These two were definitely going to be married on the first Saturday in March, a day that happened to occur just one day after the anniversary of his own appearance on the scene. T. E. Valley had already begun reading their banns in the church; and on the strength of his approaching marriage, Darnley had obtained a small rise of salary at the Blacksod Grammar School. + 

On Saturday, February the twenty-fifth, Wolf awoke, after writing very late into the night, to a happy consciousness that Mr. Urquhart’s finished manuscript lay on the card-table in their parlour! + 

Saturday was a “whole holiday” for the Blacksod boys, although for Ramsgard it was only a “half,” so that Wolf had a solid expanse of forty-eight hours before him of delectable idleness before his work began again on Monday. The following Friday, the third of March, was the eventful day when, just a year ago, he had arrived in Dorset; and on the day after that, a week from this morning, Darnley and Mattie were to be married. Wolf surmised that there must have been some eventful conversation wherein Darnley had “explained everything”; and it was apparently accepted at Pond Cottage that the rise in Darnley’s salary⁠—little as it was⁠—would smooth over every new economic strain. + 

“I shall take the book to Urquhart after breakfast,” were the first words Wolf addressed to Gerda when she opened her eyes. + 

“And then we can change that cheque!” responded the girl, excitedly. “I’ve not teased you about it, Wolf; because I know what men are like. But now it’s done! Now it’ll be just the same as if he gave it to you today, won’t it? We can change it at Stuckey’s this afternoon, if you get back in time. No, I forgot. It’s Saturday. Well, we can change it on Monday, anyhow. Oh, Wolf, what a good thing your mother didn’t need this money! I’m going to buy a new carpet for the parlour and a set of dinner-plates and a new frying-pan and two pairs of sheets and a set of silver spoons⁠—oh, and something else that I’ve always wanted, Wolf, and that’s a grandfather’s clock for the kitchen⁠—same as Mother has!” + 

Wolf’s face clouded. “I’m sorry you brought up that cheque, honey,” he said. “I’ve not made up my mind about it. I’ve got an odd feeling about it. In fact, I have an idea that we’ll all be much happier, much more lucky, if I just tear it up and hand back the pieces to him!” + 

Gerda jerked herself up on her elbow and looked at him with flashing eyes. “Wolf! How can you think or dream of such nonsense? Of course we must change that cheque! You’ve worked for it. You’ve earned it. Do you think I’d have been so good and quiet about it if I’d thought you were going to act like this at the end? I said nothing when you told me it was for your mother. I’ve got my pride, though you may not think so; and I’d have sooner bitten off my tongue than for her to have said I stopped you from giving her money! But you never did give it to her. You just kept it. So I made sure it was only that you didn’t want to be paid till you’d finished the job. And now you go and talk like this!” + 

Wolf’s mind was so bewildered and nonplussed by this unexpected outburst, that he just stupidly straightened out the sheet, which had got rolled into a weft under his chin, and slipped slowly out of bed. He certainly had, as she said, completely misunderstood her silence about the cheque. Well, here was a new complication. But he must gain time to think. Perhaps, sooner than disappoint her as much as this, he would relinquish his idea of “getting even” with his employer. + 

After all, he would be glad enough, himself, to have two hundred pounds at his disposal! He had already spent a third of all his and Gerda’s savings in the purchase of a cut-glass decanter and a set of wineglasses for Darnley and Mattie. It would be riches to have such a sum as this added to their account in the Post Office! All he knew was that ever since he had wrapped the cheque about the belly of Mukalog he had been profoundly unwilling to touch it. The thing seemed unholy to him⁠ ⁠… unholy. It was a sort of blood-money for the sale of his “mythology.” He had pilfered back this precious possession⁠ ⁠… desperately, cowardly, meanly done so⁠ ⁠… by his equivocal behaviour to Christie. To fling down the torn bits of the cheque upon Urquhart’s table would be an equivalent for many snakelike turns and twists! + 

But in spite of these thoughts he felt at that moment an uneasy stirring of self-reproach. He had treated Christie abominably the night before. Was he going to treat Gerda still worse today? “It’s all very well,” he said in his heart, “to follow these niceties of honour for my own sake. But how arbitrary, how monstrous, to snatch this money from Gerda when it means so much to her!” + 

“There’s something in what you say, sweetheart,” he muttered aloud; and he began wrapping himself in his dressing-gown and tightening it round him in the way he liked to do, preparatory to opening the door. “Don’t get the idea I’m going to be silly or obstinate!” he added. “We’ll discuss it all later.” + 

There seemed to be a cold wind from the east that morning; and Wolf, when he reached the kitchen, was glad enough to find the stove still alight. But just for the sake of getting into the air he unbolted the backdoor and shuffled in his slippers across the yard. “I’ll fetch two or three pieces of wood,” he thought. The shock of the east wind cutting at his lean frame and whistling past it as if it had been the post of a clothesline, roused a grim and yet an exuberant feeling in him that sent him back to the kitchen in high spirits. + 

“Ay!” he thought, “how it all depends on these little things! What was that that Mother told me about Carfax? That he used to ‘play’ with these accidents, like a fisherman with a trout, making ’em serve his sensations!” + 

Back by the side of the stove he gave himself up to enjoying the flames that came out of that round iron hole. “Jason was certainly right when he said that to have a roof over you, and a fire to get warm by, and three meals a day, was enough to be grateful for in this world.” And what about the straight, sweet, flexible body of Gerda? Wouldn’t he be a fool if he let his craving for Christie kill every element of natural pleasure? And after all, he had Christie. Had her, at any rate, in a sense that was as important to his imagination as Gerda’s body was to his senses! + 

He covered up the iron hole with the bigger of their two kettles. This extra-large kettle was a recent present from Gerda’s mother; and Wolf suspected, perhaps unfairly, that the gift was an insult to their hand-to-mouth household! He ran upstairs after adjusting this kettle, and with his back to Gerda, who still lay supine, with the blankets tight under her throat, he began his slow process of shaving, while a thin inrush of bitter cold through an inch of open window kept alive the taut stoicism of his mood. + 

“You needn’t think I’ll get up while the room’s as cold as this,” cried Gerda crossly. + 

“All right, sweetheart,” he said; “don’t get up. It doesn’t matter.” But he thought in his heart: “Unselfish or selfish, we are all forced to fight for our own hands! If I’m selfish in being happy this morning, if I’m heartless in enjoying this heavenly east wind, I can’t help it! If no one were allowed to be thrilled by anything, as long as someone is made wretched by something, the life of the whole planet would perish!” + 

But his blessedness, whatever its nature was, was brought speedily to an end by Gerda’s voice from the bed behind him. + 

“If you don’t change that cheque, Wolf,” came her words, “I simply won’t live with you any more! I’m tired of the life we lead⁠ ⁠… and it seems to me that it gets worse and worse, instead of better!” + 

At his own image in the glass Wolf made a vicious grimace. But he held his tongue. What a different looking-glass this was from the one inherited from the woman who “believed in spirits”!⁠ ⁠… But he held his tongue; and by various crafty tricks he turned her thoughts to other channels. It was not till the middle of their breakfast that he deemed it advisable to refer again to the two hundred pounds. + 

“I’m afraid I must take that cheque back to Urquhart,” he remarked abruptly. “I have to live with myself, Gerda, as well as with you; and I couldn’t endure myself if I thought I’d been paid for a thing like that book.” + 

She put down her porridge-spoon and stared at him. + 

“Why did you do it, then, if not for the money⁠ ⁠… working every night and not speaking a word! Do you think this is any life for a girl?” + 

He made a stupendous effort to put a caressing tone into his voice. The justice of her outcry had, however, hit him pretty shrewdly; and feeling ashamed of himself he began to lose his temper. + 

“It’s hard, I know,” he said, “Gerda honey, to make you understand. I felt on my mettle to get the thing done. And I wanted to do it. And in the way I’ve done it, it isn’t such an awful thing.” + 

“I don’t care what it is!” she cried. “It’s not the book I’m thinking about. It’s the money. Oh, I do so want to get those plates and that clock! Do be reasonable, Wolf darling!” + 

She must have made as great an effort as he had done, to take this gentle tone, and he recognized fully the pathetic justice of her appeal; but something obscurely and dangerously obstinate in his nature seemed to rise up against her, something that he could actually feel, like a physical pressure, at the back of his windpipe. + 

“I won’t say I’ll tear it up, Gerda, and I won’t say I won’t tear it up. I know you do want those things, and I want you to have them.” + 

The middle of their breakfast seemed likely to be the end of it too; for both of them, with simultaneous instinctive movements, pushed back their empty porridge-bowls and got up from their chairs, facing each other across the table. + 

“I do want you to have them!” he repeated. “And you’re not playing fair if you think I don’t! It⁠ ⁠… it goes much deeper than plates or carpets or clocks!” + 

His voice had risen now, and to his own surprise he found his lip trembling. What he felt was: “How can she force my hand when she sees it’s so serious to me? How can she do it when she sees that it’s a matter of life and death to me how I act with Urquhart? How can she care so little whether I’m tortured by this cheque or not?” That particular word “tortured” seemed to form itself into a wicked pellet in his throat, rising up from the nameless pressure at the back of his gullet. + 

“I never thought,” she cried, “that you weren’t going to be paid! And I sitting so quietly every night and having no life at all!” + 

Then, as he only fumbled with his unused knife and stared heavily at her, “It’s just what I expected from you, Wolf,” she went on, a hard, mocking smile coming to her lips. “I’ve always known you were the most monstrously selfish man any girl could live with!” + 

That ugly pellet in his throat became a rough piece of gravel that he had to spit out or it would choke him. + 

“How can you care nothing about my deepest feelings, Gerda?” he cried loudly, while the trembling of his fingers made the knife he held rattle against the porridge-bowl. “Don’t you see it’s torture to me⁠ ⁠… torture⁠ ⁠… torture⁠ ⁠… torture⁠ ⁠… to change that cheque?” The nervous emotion he suffered from had grown to something out of all proportion to the occasion. + 

Frightened by his outburst, but supported still by her burning sense of just indignation, Gerda⁠—still a practical housewife, even at the moment she felt like rushing from the house⁠—went off to the stove to move aside from the fire the saucepan in which their eggs were boiling. Wolf, still shaking from head to foot, strode round the table, and, advancing to the dresser-drawer, flung it noisily open. His movement brought Gerda flying to his side. What ensued then was all so violent and instinctive that it hardly seemed to register itself as a real occurrence at all in his agitated brain.⁠ ⁠… Their clock in the parlour had, however, barely ticked two hundred seconds before he found himself standing breathless and shaky on the pavement before Mrs. Herbert’s house-door, the manuscript of Mr. Urquhart’s book clutched tightly in a hand that seemed to be all one single beating wrist-pulse! + 

“I must see Mother,” a voice seemed to cry out from some long-obliterated bruise in the pit of his stomach⁠—some navel-string nerve of prenatal origin.⁠ ⁠… “I must see Mother!” + 

He went to the door, and Mrs. Herbert promptly answered the ring. + 

“She’s still at breakfast,” whispered the woman confidentially, when she’d closed the door behind him. “She had a visitor last night,” she added. Wolf hung up his coat and hat on one peg in the little hall, and his stick upon another peg. Each of these pegs looked like the head of Mukalog, as he used them. He received a vague impression that the landlady had jerked an insulting and libidinous thumb towards his mother’s room before she went off down the passage! + 

He knocked, heard his mother’s indolent reply, and entered. + 

She welcomed him radiantly. She was fully dressed and looked surprisingly young. + 

“Sit down, my dear one,” she said, “and smoke while I finish my coffee.” + 

He felt she must have perceived his agitation, but she made no sign of that knowledge; and as they chatted, easily and freely, about her new teashop, his heart and his two wrists began to stop their wild dance. + 

By degrees, under her hypnotic power, he even began to feel that he had made too much of the whole incident. Mentally he qualified and softened both his own anger and Gerda’s anger. “I’ll run in and speak to her before I start,” he thought. And then: “No! I’d better not begin it all over again! But maybe, after all, I will come back with the cheque changed!” + 

His attention gradually became given up, free-mindedly, to his mother’s affairs. But he remained touchy and nervous; and when after a time the talk drifted round to Mr. Manley, this touchiness reached a climax. + 

“I can’t make you out, Mother,” he said. “Either that fellow wants to get social prestige by persuading you to marry him, or you are just exploiting him⁠ ⁠… playing on his infatuation and using him. Whichever way it is, I don’t like it.” + 

Instead of replying to him directly, Mrs. Solent glanced at the great manuscript-packet, which he had put down carelessly between her coffeepot and her loaf of brown bread. + 

“What’s that you’ve got there, Wolf?” she asked; and, though apparently innocent, her question carried for him a mischievous implication. + 

“His book, Mother⁠ ⁠… Urquhart’s book. I finished it last night.” + 

Her eyes glittered like those of a triumphant witch, and her bright cheeks glowed like a couple of russet apples. + 

“A compromise with Satan, little Wolf! Have you forgotten all you told me when you left him? All that about his book being simply naughty scandal? Will you never face the facts of life, my son? Can’t you accept once for all that we all have to be bad sometimes⁠ ⁠… just as we all have to be good sometimes? Where you make your great mistake, Wolf”⁠—here her voice became gentler and her eyes strangely illuminated⁠—“is in not recognizing the loneliness of everyone. We have to do outrageous things sometimes, just because we are lonely! It was in a mood like yours when you came in just now that God created the world. What could have been more outrageous than to set such a thing as this in motion? But we’re in it now; and we’ve got to move as it moves.” + 

She lifted the cold dregs of her coffee-cup to her lips and drained them with a sigh. + 

“Go on, Mother,” he said. + 

She smiled at him⁠—a swift, mysterious smile, neither bitter nor ironical, but proud and contemptuous, like the dip of a falcon’s wing in a farmyard-tank. + 

“Every movement we make must be bad or good,” she said: “and we’ve got to make movements! We make bad movements anyhow⁠ ⁠… all of us⁠ ⁠… outrageous ones⁠ ⁠… like the creation of the world! Isn’t it better, then, to make them with our eyes open⁠ ⁠… to make them honestly, without any fuss⁠ ⁠… than just to be pushed, while we turn our heads round and pretend to be looking the other way? That’s what you do, Wolf. You look the other way! You do that when your feet take you to the Malakite shop. You’re doing that now, when you carry this naughty book back to that old rogue. Why do you always try and make out that your motives are good, Wolf? They’re often abominable! Just as mine are. There’s only one thing required of us in this world, and that’s not to be a burden⁠ ⁠… not to hang round people’s necks! My Manley-man, whom you hate so, at any rate stands on his own feet. He gives nothing for nothing. He keeps his thoughts to himself.” + 

Wolf was listening to his mother at this juncture very much as an unmusical person listens to music, making use of it as a raft whereon his thoughts are free to cross far horizons. It was when he heard her say “your father” that this voyaging stopped abruptly. + 

“Your father never once,” she said, striking a match with so sweeping a stroke to light one of her favourite “Three Castles” cigarettes that he felt as if she’d struck it on that skull itself, “never once stood on his own feet! He clung to me. He clung to the Monster. He clung to Lorna.” + 

Wolf might have interrupted this invective, if a portion of his mind had not slipped off again to Gerda’s kitchen. What did she mean by what she said at the end? + 

“He shirked everything,” his mother went on. “He lapped up the cream of those silly women’s love like a leering cat. He laughed at people who did anything in life. He wasn’t afraid of being broken, because there wasn’t anything in him hard enough to break. He oozed and seeped into women’s hearts like bad water into leaky pipes. And he justified himself all the time. He never said, ‘This is outrageous, but I’m going to do it.’ He said⁠—” But at this point Wolf began wondering why his mother kept her window shut when the wind was in the east. + 

“East wind is different from all other winds,” he thought. “Something to do with the roll of the earth, I suppose.” And he imagined his soul shooting like a projectile out of that closed window⁠—shooting, whizzing, darting against the sharp wind, till it reached the wind’s home. And he visualized the wind’s home as a promontory like St. Alban’s Head. But his mother was still going on abusing his father. “How she must have loved him,” he thought, “to hate him like this after twenty-five years!” + 

“There was no hardness in him, Wolf, no ambition, no pride, no independence! He didn’t know what it was to feel alone! He sucked up women’s lifeblood like an incubus; and nothing would make him confess it⁠—nothing would make him say, ‘Yes⁠ ⁠… it is outrageous!’ He justified himself all the time.” + 

Wolf looked away from those fierce brown eyes, out of Mrs. Herbert’s front-room window, into the cold iron-coloured sky, a sky swept clean of all softness by the east wind. + 

“I’m not going to quarrel with you, Mother, about him,” he said heavily. “I suppose I’m more like him than like you. But you’re wrong if you don’t think I feel alone!” + 

“My dearest one!” she murmured, with a rich gusto of tenderness in her voice; and stretching out her rounded arm, she stroked the back of one of his hands. As she did this her formidable lineaments assumed the warm, amorous playfulness of a dusky-skinned puma, dallying with its firstborn in a sunlit glade of the jungle! + 

“How much healthier-minded she is,” he thought, “than I am! But so was he, too, after his fashion. It’s the mixture of them in me, I suppose, that creates these miseries of indecision!” + 

“Well, Mother darling,” he said aloud, as he got up from his seat, and, taking her head between his hands, kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I won’t tease you about Willum’s Mill, if you won’t tease me about the Malakite shop. We’ll agree to be indulgent to each other’s outrageous behaviour! I’ll try and learn your philosophy and accept my badness as part of the game. Goodbye, dear one! I’ll come in sometime tomorrow.” And with that he snatched up the manuscript from the table and took himself off. + 

He looked back at her window, however, when he was in the road⁠—and there her figure was, smiling and kissing her hand to him! “The truth of it is,” he thought, as he moved away, “she was intended to be a grande dame, with a house and servants and guests, with a salon, too, perhaps, where political magnates came that she could chaff and fool and put in their place! It’s action she enjoys. I can see it all now like a map! Life’s simply tedious to her when she isn’t stirring. How I must have disappointed her! How she must have hoped against hope in those London years!” + 

His mother’s personality filled his mind completely, as he passed Pimpernel’s and steered his way through the Saturday crowds in High Street. “Her nature’s never had its proper fling,” he thought. “No wonder she treats people carelessly and ironically. She’s like a great lioness whose only food for years has been rats and mice and skimmed milk! The mere brutality of that fellow appeals to her. At least it’s something formidable and positive. I wonder”⁠—here he paused on the pavement, just as he debouched into Chequers Street⁠—“whether she lets the brute kiss her.” As this thought began to transform itself into an impious, unseemly image, he pushed a sprig of greenery of some kind that someone had dropped there, with the end of his stick, along the pavement, till he got it into an empty little space behind some railings, where a patch of grass was growing. “God!” he said to himself as he recognized this spot; “this is where I read her letter the day I ate Yorkshire pudding at the Torps’, and she first spoke about coming down here! If I hadn’t sat by Gerda that day and eaten that Yorkshire pudding and taken her up to Poll’s Camp⁠ ⁠… I’d have been free now⁠ ⁠… to⁠ ⁠… to⁠—” At that point he tossed his thought away from him. “It’s no good,” he said to himself. “When Chance has once started things, a sort of fate sets in that a person has to accept!” He moved on again down Chequers Street, observing, as he did so, however, that a small single leaf still lay on the pavement. His consciousness of this leaf worried his mind after he had taken only a few steps. He endowed it⁠—thinking to himself, “I believe it’s a myrtle-leaf”⁠—with nerves like his own. He thought of it as being separated from its companions and doomed to be trodden underfoot alone. “Damn my superstition!” he muttered, and forced himself to walk on. But then he thought, “They’ll be treading on it just at the time I’m talking to Urquhart!” This brought him to a standstill, while indecision took him by the throat. He slipped his fingers into his waistcoat-pocket. There was Urquhart’s cheque! After that unthinkable scene with Gerda he had taken it from under the stomach of Mukalog. + 

“How can I expect the gods to give me luck,” he said to himself, “when I leave living things to be trodden underfoot?” He stood quite still now, paralyzed by as much hesitation over this leaf as if the leaf had been Gerda herself. + 

“If I go back and pick up that leaf,” he said to himself, “I shall be picking up leaves from these Blacksod pavements till next autumn, when there’ll be so many that it will be impossible!” He began to suffer serious misery from the struggle in his mind. + 

“If I force myself to leave it there⁠ ⁠… with the idea that I ought to conquer such superstitions⁠ ⁠… won’t it really be that I’m getting out of rescuing it from mere laziness and making this ‘ought’ just my excuse to avoid trouble and bother? I’ll pick it up now,” he concluded, “and think out the principles of the affair later on!” Having made this decision, he hurried back, picked up the leaf, and flung it over the railings after its parent-twig. + 

But he had forgotten the east wind. That unsympathetic power caught up the leaf, and, whirling it high over Wolf’s head, flung it down upon the rear of a butcher’s cart that was dashing by. + 

“That wouldn’t have happened,” he thought, “if I’d left it where it was.” + 

The sight of the butcher’s cart made him think of Miss Gault. “I wonder what that woman feels,” he said to himself, “now Mattie is to be married instead of going to a Home in Taunton? Does she realize the amount of old bitterness that underlies her meddling? But she does think herself into the nerves of animals in slaughterhouses just as I do into the nerves of leaves on pavements.” + 

As he moved on he seemed to see the whole universe crowded with quivering sentiences suffering from untimely mishaps, and nothing done to help. “I don’t care if she is a bad woman,” he thought. “I don’t care if she is revengeful without knowing it. The more people become aware of what goes on, the fewer living things will be tortured. I hope she’ll never stop putting her nerves into animals. I love her for it; even if she does want Lorna’s child to go to a Home in Taunton, instead of being married to Darnley!” + 

He arrived now at the Torp yard. It seemed hard at that moment to hurry by, as he usually did when he came that way, for fear of a lengthy delay. He glanced across the yard at the covered shed where the work was done. In a second he met the eyes of Mr. Torp, who was resting from his labours with an air of “Requiescat in pace.” + 

His father-in-law beckoned him to come in. + 

“Well, how be?” was his greeting as they shook hands. “ ’Tis long since Mr. Solent has stepped into me yard. Though us have seen ’ee, traipsing by, coat-flying as you might say from hell to wold Horny!” + 

“Rather a sharp wind today, don’t you think so?” said Wolf genially, stroking with his hand the surface of a large uninscribed tombstone hewn from a block of Ham Hill stone. + 

“May be. May be. But I be wondrous sheltered in yard from they cruel winds. ’Tis het I do fear more’n cold, mister; though I have heard tell that wind be turble rough on pavement out yonder.” + 

Mr. Torp smiled complacently and pulled at his pipe. He talked of “out there” with the superiority of a man who lived, sleek and snug, in the company of aristocratic tombstones. But this slyness and aplomb soon changed, as he led his son-in-law into the interior of his shed; and the two men sat down together on a bench covered with stone-dust. + 

“Say, mister,” John Torp began, “ ’twere only yesterday that I thought deep about ’ee, dang me if I didn’t! I were out, passing the sweet of the evening, wi’ old man Round, to Farmer’s Rest, and who should drop in for a game of draughts or summat but that there Monk from up at Squire’s. They be a couple o’ devil’s own, when liquor’s aboard, them two; and ’twere good I be the man I be, with a headpiece what no small beer, brewed by the likes o’ they, can worrit, if ’ee knows my meaning?” + 

Wolf nodded sagaciously, resting his manuscript on his knees. + 

“ ’Twere along o’ young Redfern them two sly badgers got to talking, and maybe them forgot I were thee’s missus’s Dad, or maybe they forgot I were there at all, for I sits quiet as stone, ’sknow, when I be out from home. Anyway, they was talking; and what must thik girt bugger from they Shires say but that since you’ve gone back to Squire, and have took young Redfern’s place, that poor lad’s sperrit have been quieted down wonderful. He were taunting the life out o’ they, seems so, that boy’s ghostie! But since you’ve gone back, Mister, like a dog to’s vomit, if you’ll excuse the word, thik sperrit have let they three parties sleep soft as babes.” + 

Mr. Torp paused and glanced nervously round him. He then took several long, meditative pulls at his pipe. + 

“ ’Tweren’t pretty,” he said, looking sideways at Wolf with half-closed eyes; “ ’tweren’t pretty to hear what they did say about ’ee.” + 

“What did they say, Mr. Torp? Come on! You must tell me now!” + 

The stonecutter looked about for some imaginary spittoon and then spat with extraordinary clumsiness upon the face of the big unlettered headstone in front of him. Wolf watched the white spittle slowly trickling down the yellowish surface, and he thought: “What things there are in the world that have a definite place in Time and Space! There’s Mr. Torp’s ‘gob,’ as the Ramsgard boys would say⁠ ⁠… and there’s that big round tear from Gerda’s eyes that I saw this morning on the back of my hand as we quarrelled about the cheque⁠ ⁠… and then there’s that leaf on the butcher’s cart! Ailinon! Ailinon! What things there are in the world!” + 

“They said,” the stonecutter proceeded, “that ’twould be thee wone self what would go next. They said the thing what made thik poor lad’s sperrit bide where ’a ought to bide were the comfort of another party going his way. ’Tweren’t pretty to hear ’un say that, Mister; and ’twere well I do sit quiet, in the sweet of me cups, or they never would have spoke such words. But that’s what they said; and so now I’ve told ’ee.” + 

He paused and sighed heavily. + 

“You’ve always been what a gentleman should be to Gerda’s mother and me! But that’s what them chaps said.” And Mr. Torp fixed a somewhat gloomy eye upon his own spittle as it descended the uninscribed headstone. “A scholar like what you be,” resumed the monument-maker, “won’t give no credit to the wambling words of plain men like they. But I bain’t no scholar; and they notions taunt me mind. ’Tis all very well for gentlemen to put down their thumbs at Providence. Them whose brains be work-sodden have to guard theyselves from He. If ’twere only plagues and pestilences He showered down, it might be all one. ’Tis they lightnings, murders, and sudden deaths what send we to cover⁠ ⁠… same as the poor beasties in field!” + 

Wolf shifted the manuscript upon his knee into an easier position. + 

“I confess I did notice,” he said gravely, “about New Year, I think, that when I went back to Mr. Urquhart both Round and Monk picked up their spirits. I had thought Round’s wits had gone for good and all. And I had thought Monk was getting much more nervous. But, as I say, I did notice that my going back there seemed to cheer them all up quite astonishingly! So⁠ ⁠… you see, Mr. Torp, I’m not at all ungrateful for your warning.” He got up as he spoke, and thrust his burden under his arm. “But the point remains,” he concluded, with an hilarity that was a little forced, “the point remains, what ought I to do to propitiate Providence and escape those terrible occurrences?” + 

Mr. Torp moved slowly to a mason’s shelf at the back of the shed and returned with his chisel. Then, armed with his professional weapon, the good man tapped the great slab of Ham Hill stone. + 

“ ’Tis no comfort,” he remarked, “though I be the man I be for cossetting they jealous dead, to think that ‘in a time and half a time,’ as Scripture says, I’ll be chipping ‘Rest in the Lord’ on me wone son-in-law’s moniment. But since us be talking smug and quiet, mister, on this sorrowful theme”⁠—Mr. Torp’s voice assumed his undertaker’s-tone, which long usage had rendered totally different from his normal one⁠—“ ’twould be a mighty help, mister, to I, for a day to come, if ye’d gie us a tip as to what word⁠—out of Book or out of plain speech⁠—ye’d like best for I to put above ’ee?” + 

The plump rogue looked up so grave, as he said this, touching the stone with the point of the tool and staring at his interlocutor, that Wolf hadn’t the heart to treat it as the man’s form of humour. + 

“I’ll leave it entirely to you, Mr. Torp,” he pronounced with equal gravity, as he bade him goodbye. “I’m surprised Redfern hasn’t been content with all you’ve done for him. I assure you I shall be! But we’ll hope that empty stone will have to wait a long time yet⁠ ⁠… for Gerda’s sake! Well, goodbye, Mr. Torp. I won’t forget your warning, though. I’ll fight shy of ‘murders and sudden deaths’!” + 

He walked off along Chequers Street, chuckling rather grimly. Absurd though it all was, he was superstitious enough not to be able to treat that drunken chatter at Farmer’s Rest with the contempt it deserved. + 

His mind began now to revert to that final scene with Gerda. She had actually used physical force against him as he took the cheque from under Mukalog, a thing she had never done before. Her last words, from within the open door, as he went off, had been uttered from a countenance streaming with tears. “You’ll be sorry for this, Wolf! You’ll be sorry for this!” + 

What had she meant by that, he wondered. Bob Weevil again! But he had discounted Bob Weevil altogether. It was just unsatisfied lechery with that boy; and Gerda’s own words, referring to her coldness to him, had had the very ring of truth. But one never knew, in these things! Perhaps at this very moment she was writing a letter summoning Weevil to their home. + 

He had reached the turn to Babylon Hill now, and for a moment he wondered whether he wouldn’t take this road and turn off to King’s Barton by those larches! But he decided against it and walked on. When he got to the place where the lane leading down to the bookshop was, he found himself stopping again. “What the devil’s the matter with me?” he thought. “I feel as if a lot of invisible wires were pulling me back to this town! Don’t the spirits want me to take Urquhart’s manuscript to him? Am I like William of Deloraine, in Scott’s poem, with the wizard’s volume under my arm?” + 

He looked at his watch. It was already half-past eleven. It would be after twelve when he got to the Manor; and the squire would undoubtedly want to keep him for lunch. “He’d want to do that all the more if I gave him back his two hundred! He’d be in a royal good temper with me.” + 

He stood hesitating at this familiar point, where he had so often hesitated before. This, however, was the first time he had done so on leaving Blacksod. “I don’t think it would seem absurd to Christie,” he said to himself, “if I went in for half-an-hour before going out there? I don’t suppose it would make her feel that anything was wrong in Preston Lane?” He put these questions to himself while he stood facing the east wind, turning up his collar with one hand, as he clutched stick and manuscript with the other; and as he did so he thought once more of William of Deloraine burdened with the magician’s book. + 

It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship’s rudder, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk’s habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity⁠—so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy⁠—of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery, and his resolve, as far as his own life was concerned, to outwit this modernity⁠—not merely to resist it, but to outwit it⁠—by a cunning as subtle as its own! + 

Damn these indecisions! This accursed difficulty of deciding, of deciding anything at all, seemed to have grown into an obsession with him. To have to decide⁠ ⁠… that was the worst misery on earth! + 

He felt a strong reluctance to see Christie just after he had quarrelled with Gerda. What hit him now most of all was not her streaming face at the end, nor that mysterious threat, which he supposed referred to Weevil, but the single big tear he had glimpsed on the back of his hand when he shut their dresser-drawer. + 

What he fooled himself now into believing to be his motive when he did tear himself from that fatal parting of the ways and hurried down towards the shop, was his unwillingness to be landed for lunch with Urquhart. “I’ll catch him about two,” he thought. “That’s the lowest pulse of the day! And I’ll get home to tea and make it up with Gerda at the highest pulse of the day!” + 

An instinctive desire to avoid setting eyes on Mr. Malakite led him to go straight to the side-door. What was his surprise when he found that little postern wide open! There was the narrow flight of stairs leading straight up to Christie’s room! + 

This time he did not hesitate. Stick in one hand, manuscript in the other, he ran up those stairs. There was Christie’s door, also wide open! He entered and called her name, softly and tenderly. No answer! He passed through the alcove into her bedroom. The cold grey light lay upon her counterpane like the first light of the morning upon a smoothed-out winding-sheet. + 

As he came out, he caught a glimpse of himself in that Merlinish mirror, and the expression upon his face gave him an unpleasant shock. Returning to her room, he softly closed the door. Then he went to the fire and stood in front of it, warming his hands. There was a tiny bowl of white violets on the mantelpiece, with two primroses among them, one fully out, the other in bud. + 

He bent forward and smelt this fragile bunch of flowers, and it was as if he had inhaled the very fragrance of its owner’s soul. Then, led on rather by a nervous restlessness than by curiosity, he began wandering about the room, turning over books and papers. Suddenly, as he ran the tips of his fingers along the familiar books on her shelves, he came upon a large, thin exercise-book wedged in between Spinoza and Hegel. This he pulled out and mechanically opened, his mind still thinking more of Gerda and the two hundred pounds than of what he was doing. But after glancing at a sentence or two in an idle fashion, all at once he began reading furtively and guiltily, standing motionless where he was, and turning the pages with the feverish excitement of a sacrilegious thief. + 

He had not failed to remark the word “Slate” written in large printed letters on the first page of the exercise-book; but what he was now reading was in the middle of the book, and it was one particular paragraph that caused him to draw in his breath with a faint rasping suction. It read more like notes for a book than anything else; but that might be her style. + 

“Shame? She felt nothing of the kind! Human tradition meant little to her. Sacred guilt. Forbidden thresholds. Just custom! Just old moss-covered milestones of custom! But the silence that followed when his footsteps died away? Drops; one, two, three, four⁠ ⁠… four drops. Drops of acid on the grooves of a waxed pattern. A girl’s excited senses rousing desire in old age. What a curious thing! Filmy butterfly-wings waving and waving; and old cold lust responding. Curious, not terrible. A chemical phenomenon. Interesting in a special way. The opposite of tedious routine! Something startling and primeval. But how curious that a girl’s senses, excited from one direction, should wave signals in another! Unconscious. Totally unconscious. Butterfly-wings quivering. Do thoughts come and go in some strange ‘substance’ called mind⁠ ⁠… or are they all there is? Memory. What is memory if there’s no ‘substance’?⁠ ⁠… She slid down the old slippery groove into the old deep hole. Forgetting. A girl dissecting memory and forgetting her shame! Why shouldn’t she forget? He was a very old man. In a few years, perhaps in less than a year, she would be looking at his dead face. A few years more and somebody else would be looking into her dead face. ‘To live so as to regret nothing!’ It must have been a young man who said that. A man, anyway. Remorse as man’s prerogative! Nature. It was in Nature that girls hid themselves and covered their heads. Nature has no remorse. Nature has no ‘substance’ behind her thought. Thoughts without ‘substance.’ One⁠ ⁠… two⁠ ⁠… three⁠ ⁠… Three drops of acid in a grooved, waxed pattern? The girl smiled into her mother’s mirror. Thoughts without ‘substance.’ Butterfly-wings quivering. Unconscious signals. Little fool: The old man meant nothing at all. It was all your⁠—” + 

Wolf was interrupted in his reading by the sound of a door slamming below and by quick steps upon the stairs. He closed the exercise-book and thrust it back. In his haste, however, he put it a shelf higher. Not only so, but he left it lying on the top of books instead of among them. Then he went over to the fireplace.⁠ ⁠… + 

Christie came rushing in, her arms full of packages, her face glowing with the self-satisfaction of a girl who has done some adroit shopping. + 

“Wolf!⁠ ⁠… You frightened me!” She panted a little and laid down her parcels on the table. Then she snatched off her hat and dropped it on the top of the books. + 

“I’m so sorry, my dear!” he said lightly, taking her by the shoulders and kissing her hot forehead; “but I found the door open and came up. You don’t mind, Chris, do you?” + 

He was dismayed to see her eyes turn, like the needle of a compass, straight to the bookcase. + 

“You’ve been reading it!” she cried, breaking away from him and rushing to the shelf. Hurriedly she possessed herself of the exercise-book. Twisting the thing in her fingers till it became a veritable trumpet of judgement, she struck the table with the end of it. “Wolf!” she cried, “I’m ashamed of you! I knew I’d left it out! I always put it away because of Father; but I knew I’d left it out! Directly I saw the door was shut, I thought, ‘Father’s in there, and I’ve left it out!’ And now it’s you who’ve done it! Oh, Wolf, how could you, how could you?” + 

Perhaps never in his life⁠—not even when he had to appear before that College Board in London to be reprimanded for his crazy malice-dance⁠—had he felt so humiliated. + 

“I’m sorry, Christie!” he blurted out. “It was wrong of me. I did it somehow⁠ ⁠… I don’t know!⁠ ⁠… without meaning to.” He made a feeble movement towards her, where she stood by the edge of the table, her chin raised high, her eyes literally flashing, the curved lines of her lips much redder than usual! He had never seen her look so beautiful. But her anger frightened and paralyzed him. + 

“I only read a word or two, Chris⁠ ⁠… just one sentence⁠ ⁠… that’s all.” + 

She swept the table with her doomsday-trumpet. Backwards and forwards she swung it, as if drawing a furrow in windy sand; and under its stroke the little volume of Hydriotaphia went whirling to the floor, where it lay face-downwards at Wolf’s feet. + 

Wolf shuffled backwards, expecting at any moment to see his own manuscript follow Urn-Burial. The thought of the heron’s feather rushed through his mind; but he didn’t dare to move lest he should vex her further. Foolishly he clenched and unclenched his fingers and stared at the band round her waist. + 

“I’d like to go away from you both!” she cried passionately. “I’d like to go away, far from everyone, where no one could find me!” + 

“I’m very sorry, Christie,” he repeated helplessly. + 

“To read it,” she began again, “when I wasn’t there and when you knew what I felt!” Her voice grew husky now and choked in the utterance. Then a shiver went through her and her slight frame stiffened. With a long, scrutinizing look she seemed to stare right through his fumbling, bewildered consciousness. + 

“I’ll go, Christie,” he murmured. “Don’t be too angry. I say I was wrong to do that. I’ll go now. I only came in for a minute.” + 

She dropped the exercise-book upon the table; and pressing both hands upon her face, she drew them apart, against her cheeks and eyebrows, stretching the soft skin tight in a grotesque distortion. When her hands fell, after this, he noticed that the anger had gone out of her. Her expression had become gentle and sad. + 

“What’s that?” she said, in a low voice, pointing to Mr. Urquhart’s manuscript. Wolf hurriedly stooped down and picked up Hydriotaphia. He caught sight of the feather, lying safe between the leaves, as he put it on the table. + 

“The History of Dorset,” he said eagerly. “That awful book, you know.” + 

He tried to speak facetiously. + 

“I gave the old chap’s lechery a twist in my own direction. It’s still pretty awful, but it’s not just pure bawdiness any more. In fact, I’d like some people I know to read it. It’s ferocious. It’s like Swift.” + 

Over Christie’s expressive face, its whiteness blotched by faint red marks from the violent usage she had given it, flitted a tender, ironical smile. + 

“You’re like Swift, Wolf,” she murmured, “coming into people’s rooms and poking among their things.” + 

“There, Chris! See what you think of it,” he cried, pushing the great parchment-bound book towards her. + 

But she only mechanically turned over its pages. + 

“It’s nearly a year since I began it, Chris. It’ll be a year ago next Friday, when I arrived⁠ ⁠… going by the date, that’s to say.” + 

She bent her head above the white parchment-covered book⁠—it was really a form of ledger-book, that he had bought at the stationer’s in High Street, but he preferred it to a pile of loose sheets⁠—and when she lifted her face again, she had an expression exactly like a young archaic priestess. + 

“Next Saturday, then,” she said, “isn’t only your sister’s wedding-day! It’s the anniversary of your first coming to this room⁠ ⁠… of our first meeting.” + 

He made a second rather nervous movement towards her. But she repelled him by taking up the parchment-book again. + 

“I’m glad you went back to this,” she said thoughtfully. “I always had an instinct that Urquhart would do you some harm if you didn’t do what he wanted.” + 

Wolf laughed a forced laugh. “You unscrupulous little thing! What if Urquhart were the Devil⁠ ⁠… ought I to go back to him just the same?” + 

Christie shrugged her thin shoulders. “My mother used to tell me,” she said, “that all angels could turn into demons, and all demons could turn into angels.” + 

“Merlin and his mother!” he threw out; but his face was as grave as her own. “Christie!” he cried suddenly, after a pause, “why couldn’t you and I have a day off together, away from here somewhere? Couldn’t we go down to Weymouth, for instance? Say next Sunday, when the wedding’s over? Gerda’s mother always likes to have her come round sometime on Sunday; so we shouldn’t feel she was⁠—” + 

He was interrupted by a querulous voice calling Christie’s name from the bottom of the stairs. + 

After what he had read in that exercise-book he had a funny shyness about catching the girl’s eye. But she swept this aside with sublime unconsciousness. He couldn’t tell whether she even felt his embarrassment. + 

“Goodbye, my dear!” she said with a perfectly candid and affectionate smile. “Father’s getting impatient for his dinner. Poor Father! He’ll have to wait three-quarters of an hour⁠ ⁠… well, perhaps forty minutes!” Thus speaking, she drew Wolf by the hand to the door. He had already snatched up all his belongings. “Off with you!” she whispered. “Quick! Quick! Quick! Father would want you to stay; and I don’t like dinners à trois!” + 

He could hear her moving the saucepan over her stove in the alcove, as he ran down the shaky backstairs. His desire to escape from her room without seeing Mr. Malakite was stronger now than it had been to reach her room without seeing him. + 

Little did he notice of the people or of the things he passed, as he walked away from the bookshop! Once out of Evershot Road, however, his feet dragged slowly. What he had read in Slate⁠—those short, compact sentences⁠—passed through his mind like depraved choirboys in white surplices. “Have I done what she hinted?” he said to himself. “Have I troubled her senses by my advances and retreats, until she’s lost something that it’s essential for a girl to have?” + 

He groaned aloud as he walked, and trailed his stick along the ground. “What will the upshot be if that old man has begun persecuting her like that?” + 

Bitterly now he reverted to his childish fancy, that his stick was like William of Deloraine’s spear. As he shuffled along, he began a deadly interior survey of his mental state. Like a black fly crawling upon walls and ceiling, his consciousness set off to explore its own boundaries. “I have no certainty,” he thought. “I don’t believe in any reality. I don’t believe that this road and sky are real. I don’t believe that the invisible worlds behind this road and sky are any more real than they are! Dreams within dreams! Everything is as I myself create it. I am the wretched demiurge of the whole spectacle.⁠ ⁠… Alone⁠ ⁠… alone⁠ ⁠… alone! If I create loveliness, there is loveliness. If I create monstrosity, there is monstrosity! I’ve got to move this creaking machinery of my mind into the right position; and then all follows. Then I can stop that old man from persecuting Christie. Then I can make Gerda happy without the two hundred!” + 

A bleak, saturnine disgust with the primary conditions of all human life took possession of him. The insane fancy took possession of him that he knew something at this moment of what the guilty, lonely Power behind Life knew, as it drove towards its purpose. Was he himself, then, in league with this merciless thing, that from his deepest heart he cursed? Did he know what It felt, confronted by all these shadow-worlds, dream within dream, each of them unstable as smoke and reflecting only thought⁠ ⁠… nothing but circles of thought? + 

Just as when his “mythology” was upon him he felt life surging with magical streams of sweet green sap, so now it seemed as if he could sink through world after world and find them all blighted, all poisoned, all corroded by some perverse defect. The only comfort was that they were all equally phantasmal! Nothing was real except thoughts in conscious minds; and all thoughts were corrupted. + 

Had Gerda really meant by those final words that she would renew her relation with Bob Weevil? His mind visualized Bob Weevil now with an obsessed intensity. He saw his face, his clothes, his yellow boots. He saw his heavy gold watch-chain. Did the saints teach that one ought to love, as well as pity, every living soul? He could pity Bob Weevil. Bob Weevil had not asked to be born any more than he himself had. But to love the Bob Weevils of the world? Well! The great saints could do that. They could see the tragic necessity of birth branding the forehead of each child of Adam with a ghastly uniqueness! But it was too much to ask of him⁠ ⁠… too much.⁠ ⁠… + 

It was at this moment in his abstracted progress that Wolf was confronted by nothing less than the entrance to the little driveway⁠—pompously entitled “private lane”⁠—that led to the villa of Bob Weevil’s father. + 

“It must have been this,” he thought to himself, “that, like a letter at the door, brought the water-rat to my mind!” + 

Led by a sudden impulse that he made no attempt to explain to himself, he proceeded to walk up this “private lane.” The east wind moaned forlornly through the laurel-bushes on either side of the path. “He’s invaded my privacy often enough,” he thought. “Why shouldn’t I invade his for once?” + 

“Is Mr. Weevil⁠ ⁠… Mr. Bob Weevil⁠ ⁠… at home?” he enquired of the maid who opened the door. She had friendly blue eyes, this maid, but she looked amused and astonished to see him. + 

“I’ll go and see if Mr. Bob has come in,” she said. “Will you take a chair, sir?” + 

She went off, and Wolf sat down obediently. The place was certainly the coldest, the most cheerless, the most forbidding entrance-hall he had ever waited in. “I prefer the Mrs. Torp kind of house to this!” he thought, as he fidgeted upon his glacial chair and shifted his shoulders to avoid its pseudo-antique mouldings. + 

Wearily he fixed a lacklustre eye upon a heavy marble slab that stood opposite him, supported by carved alabaster columns. “I suppose,” he thought savagely, as he struggled against a wave of overpowering gloom, “I suppose Bob Weevil hardly extends his interest in ladies’ legs to alabaster sphinxes!” + 

Not a single object in this entrance-hall pleased him. As for the gryphon-clawed feet upon which those alabaster ankles rested, he could feel them raking and combing at his very bowels! He hugged his parchment-book; he clutched his stick; but he no longer felt like William of Deloraine. He felt more like the knight’s dwarf, who vanished from sight altogether at last, calling out, “Lost! lost! lost!” + 

Nothing mellow or friendly, nothing either rustic or urbane, seemed to have touched, even remotely, the devastating pomposity of this furniture. There was a tiny, shapeless curl of dust at the side of one of those gryphon-claws; and he looked at it with positive relief! There was something reassuring about it. It might have been in a cottage, in a shed, in his own parlour! It was a sign that he had not been transported into a place from which there was no outlet. + 

But even this bit of dust⁠—dust being something that at least had an authentic place in human history!⁠—failed to support him just then in what threatened to become a veritable dissolution of his being! The spiritual “aura” emanating from the Weevil mansion attacked him like a miasma of desolation, blending itself with Gerda’s anger, with what he had read in Christie’s exercise-book, and with the thought of having to face Mr. Urquhart. The strength seemed to ebb out of him. Slowly he rose to his feet; and turning his eyes from the marble slab, he stared now at a gilded table, with a fringed mat upon it, supporting a bronze tray containing a solitary black-edged calling-card. + 

He leaned upon his stick and contemplated that card in an hypnosis of misery. Life seemed entirely composed of weeping faces, old men sneaking up bedroom-stairs, tombstones with spittle trickling down, and black-edged calling-cards. He felt as if the First Cause of the Universe were a small, malignant grub, radiating a deadly blight in withering, centrifugal airwaves! + 

He shifted the weight of the book a little. He shifted the balance of his stick. He felt as if, with stick and book, he were journeying through space; while the malicious grub, out of whose ill-humour time and space were born, aimed a sour-smelling squirt at him. + 

At this moment Bob Weevil himself came hurrying down the staircase. Wolf moved across the hall to meet him, thinking in his heart, “The simpleton must have been tricking himself out all this while!” for certainly the suit, the tie, the collar, the socks, the shoes, worn by the “water-rat” this Saturday afternoon, were at the very top of Blacksod fashion! + 

The young man hurriedly apologized for keeping his visitor waiting. Mr. Weevil Senior, it appeared, was already eating his midday meal, but Bob had ordered an extra place to be set, and would Mr. Solent honour them with his company? + 

The lunch or dinner that followed was something that fixed itself indelibly in Wolf’s memory. He decided afterwards that it was only his preceding struggle with the inert malice of the inanimate in that appalling hall, that gave him the power to carry the thing through! Carry it through, however, he certainly did, and with an adroitness that amazed himself. For he received a startling shock at the very beginning. The presence of the old dotard at the head of the table, mumbling and spluttering over his food with imbecile gluttony, did not prevent Bob Weevil from laying every one of his “cards,” if so they could be called, flat down before his successful rival! It appeared that Lobbie Torp had turned up half-an-hour ago⁠—“when I was with Christie!” thought the visitor⁠—with a note from Gerda inviting Bob to go for a walk with her that afternoon, “as Mr. Solent was away and she felt lonely.” Bob Weevil communicated this occurrence shamelessly, as if it were all natural enough. “I suppose,” thought Wolf, “it’s perfectly natural to him. It’s probably not the first time she’s sent for him like this!” It also struck him that Bob Weevil was propitiating him by introducing a note of humorous, masculine camaraderie, while at the same time he was letting it be clearly seen that he regarded this unexpected event as a personal triumph. + 

“Can it have been, after all,” Wolf thought, “just a piece of incredibly subtle cunning, worthy of the father of all water-rats, that chat about the maddeningness of girls’ legs? And had Gerda too, after her fashion, fooled him, as men have been fooled since the beginning of the world?” + 

Following Bob Weevil presently into his own “den,” Wolf thought he had never seen so many actresses’ photographs as he now beheld; and it gave him a reaction in favour of Mr. Urquhart’s vice, as he tried to avoid this concentrated feminine ogling from every wall!⁠ ⁠… However! He was soon stretching himself out in a low deck-chair comfortably enough, while his mind, as he listened to his host’s excited volubility, took its soundings of the situation. + 

Things were always returning upon him, he thought, in great irrevocable curves. A year ago he had found Gerda and Weevil in close association. A year ago he had been introduced by that old man to his daughter; and now, after all the intervening changes and chances, Mr. Malakite was there still, at Christie’s side, and Mr. Weevil was here still, tricked out in his best, ready for a walk with Gerda! It gave him a disconcerting feeling, all this, as if he had been wasting his time in a maze, that perpetually led him round and round to the same point! + 

He wondered that it didn’t strike Mr. Weevil as somewhat odd, that Gerda should be talking of “loneliness” and “Mr. Solent being away,” when here was Mr. Solent, drifting casually round, up “private drives,” within half-a-mile of her! But apparently Mr. Weevil felt that Saturday was a day dedicated to the erratic wanderings of desire-driven humanity! At any rate he took it all for granted, with the easiest facetiousness, when Wolf finally shook hands with him in the “private road” and made off towards King’s Barton. + 

It was with many queer sensations that he stood at last under that well-known historic porch, waiting for the answer to his ring. A year ago next Friday he had come to this place! How hard it was to think of it all as only a year! It seemed to him as if something in this Dorset air had the power to elongate the very substance of Time. + 

Roger Monk opened the door to him. Wolf could see at once that something unusual was in the wind. The eye of the man “from the Shires” was hunted and startled. + 

“What’s wrong, Roger? Has anything happened?” He put all the nonchalance he could muster into this question, but in his heart he felt discomfortable misgivings. Roger Monk carefully and gravely bolted the great door. He had the air of a man who bars out an army of enemies. + 

“He’s up there with him. He’s been giving him a bottle of that Malmsey, same as he gave you, Sir, but I don’t like it when he drinks with any strange party, saving of course yourself and his lordship.” + 

“Who’s with him? Who are you talking about?” enquired Wolf. + 

Mr. Monk bent his head down a little, so as to bring his face nearer to his interlocutor. + 

“I don’t like the way he’s talking to Squire,” he whispered. “I’m glad you’ve a-come, Sir. Maybe you’ll be able to do something to stop him.” + 

“Who is he?” asked Wolf again. + 

“Mr. Otter, Sir,” said the servant, straightening his back. “Not your Mr. Otter, if I may say so⁠ ⁠… the other gentleman, Sir.” + 

“Jason, you mean?” + 

The man nodded. + 

“He’s been using words to Squire such as I never thought to hear spoke to he by a human lip.” + 

“What’s Jason been saying, Monk? I don’t see that it’s any good my going up there, if they’re both drunk? I know how strong that wine is.” + 

The man’s face showed consternation. + 

“Oh, Mr. Solent, you wouldn’t desert us when you’ve come back to us?⁠ ⁠… come back at the moment we need you as never was! Let me have your coat, sir. I’ll take your parcel, Sir.” And he laid an almost compulsory hand upon the manuscript-book, which Wolf was still clutching. + 

“I’ve brought this book for Mr. Urquhart,” said Wolf, submitting to have his coat and stick taken away; “but what’s the use, if he’s⁠—” + 

“His book, sir? His book? Is that his book?” cried the agitated giant, throwing Wolf’s coat down on an oaken chest and approaching him as if he held a precious animal in his arms. “Ghost of Jesus! What a day is this day! Writ and copied by handiwork! Ghost of Jesus! But I’m glad to see this day!” + 

His excitement was so great that he ran his fingers along the surface of the great ledger, stroking it as if it had a head and a tail! + 

“Come along upstairs, Mr. Solent! This is what my master has need of. Come along upstairs, Mr. Solent!” + 

Wolf followed his enormous figure as he strode up the stately Jacobean ascent, his hand on the carved balustrade. When they were outside the library-door, the man paused and whispered in an inaudible voice. + 

“I beg your pardon?” repeated Wolf; for behind that closed door he began to catch the murmured sound of voices. “I can’t hear what you say, Roger!” + 

The man raised his voice a little with a nervous sideways glance at the closed door. + 

“I took the liberty of asking you, Sir, whether you’d step into the kitchen before you leave us. Old Man Round’s down there with Miss Elizabeth. They caught some lad or other fishing out o’ season in Lenty Pond, and they’ve come to show Squire a monstrous large perch this lad hooked up. I dursn’t say nothing, because of he in there”⁠—and the man jerked his thumb towards the door⁠—“but maybe they’d like for you to see the fish. I only mention it, as Miss Martin and our maid be gone to Weymouth for the day⁠ ⁠… so if you’d walk straight in on us, Sir, afore you leave, ’twould be a kindness!” + 

“Certainly I will, Roger. I’ll be very glad to⁠ ⁠… as long as I don’t have to eat that fish!” + 

Monk displayed a more earnest gratitude in his gipsy-eyes than the occasion seemed to warrant; and then, opening the door wide with a sudden jerk, he announced in a louder voice than usual, “Mr. Solent to see you, Sir!” + 

As the door shut behind him Wolf had a momentary feeling that the man was there still, holding fast to the handle, to bar any panic-stricken retreat. But what he saw now swept Monk and his movements completely out of his consciousness. + 

Hurriedly he moved forward towards the two figures at the fireplace. + 

They were in the same position as he himself and the squire had been on that memorable day of the contract; but now, with this finished book under his left arm and the two-months-old cheque in his right pocket, the curve of recurrence leered at him with a sly difference. + 

Between the two men was the same table, with the same empty decanter upon it; and the logs upon the hearth seemed to glow with the same light. But Jason, instead of being seated, was standing erect, his fingers tapping the table’s edge and his eyes burning with a black intensity. + 

“The Malmsey,” thought Wolf, “has loosened his tongue. He looks like an avenging demon.” + 

What gave Wolf an especial shock was the way Mr. Urquhart himself was sitting. He sat, indeed, bolt-upright, but he had twisted himself in some odd fashion to the side of his chair, against the arm of which his back was pressed hard. His thin legs were at an acute angle to his Napoleonic paunch, a distortion that endowed both stomach and legs with a disturbing separate identity. + 

The final token of abnormality in the man’s appearance was not connected with his body, however, but with his head; for to Wolf’s consternation the glossy black hair upon his scalp had moved, moved about an eighth of an inch, pushing the parting over to the wrong place. + 

Mr. Urquhart’s mouth was open; but this was not all, for his thin lips were inward-drawn over the rims of his gums, and there was a staring intensity of outrage in his face, worthy to be compared with that peculiar expression which the sculptor Scopas used to lay upon the hollow eye-sockets of his figures! + 

Both men were far too engrossed with what was occurring to do more than turn their eyes towards Wolf as he approached. Mr. Urquhart gave a perceptible shrug with his left shoulder. Jason’s cheek flushed duskily. But not another sign did either make to greet him. + 

“You think you are different from other people,” Jason was saying, as Wolf came and stood by Mr. Urquhart’s side. “You think you have deeper feelings, because you own this big house and keep these servants! You think your ideas are wonderful, because you’ve got a great library. You think you have more respect than other people, because you’ve got money to buy it. You only asked me here and gave me this wine because those London newspapers praised me. You’ve always hated me. You’ve paid your man to spy on me. You’re not a bit different from your friend Round. You like good meals. You like watching boys bathe. You like warming your feet by your fire and thinking how great you are because your father left you some foreign wine! You’re exactly the same as everyone else, except that you’ve got an uglier face. You make a mystery of your life, when there’s nothing in it to boast about except worrying people with your nasty fancies! You think your life is grand and devilish, when all you are is a silly old man with a boy’s death on your conscience. Yes, on your conscience; but no more on your conscience than on anyone else’s! He wasn’t upset by you. He hardly gave you a thought. You weren’t his friend. He used to laugh at you with his real friends! He only thought of you as a silly old man who liked his meals and his glass, just as everyone does. That’s all you are. You’re no wonderful, mysterious man of evil. You’re an ugly-faced pantaloon⁠ ⁠… just greedy and stupid. That’s what he thought of you, when he gave you any thought at all! Why did you ask me to come here today? Only because you heard that Lady Lovelace had been to see me, and that there was an essay about me and my art in the Illustrated London News! You think it’s grand to have a head-gardener as a servant, so that you can say, ‘Ring the bell, if you please! Get me a bottle of foreign wine, if you please!’ Everyone knows the real reason you pay that man to hang around. Only because you like to feel gentlemanly and refined in comparison with a great bully like that! Here’s your new assistant come to ask for his pay, for copying out your liquorish tales! Do you think he takes any interest in you really, or cares a farthing for your writing? Not a jot; not a jot⁠ ⁠… not any more than⁠—” + 

Wolf interrupted him at this point by flinging down the great white ledger-book on the table. The two glasses tinkled. One of them hit the side of the decanter with a silvery reverberation. Jason turned a stony face towards him. Mr. Urquhart blinked his eyes, moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue, closed his mouth, and shot at him a look like that which an experienced trapper, his right arm in the jaws of an infuriated bear, might cast towards a faithful dog! + 

“There’s your book, Sir!” cried Wolf, completely disregarding Jason. “I finished it last night and brought it straight up to you. It’s really something⁠ ⁠… this⁠ ⁠… that we’ve done together! If we can get it printed I believe it’ll make an impression⁠ ⁠… even on Otter’s attention.” + 

“Otter’s attention” seemed, certainly at that moment, paralyzed by the great parchment-covered volume, lying on the Malmsey-stained table. + 

Very slowly he bent down and opened it at random, letting half the pages lean against the decanter. “You write like a person who knows Greek,” he said gravely to Wolf. Wolf bowed. + 

“I know Greek too well,” he replied significantly. + 

“He means he knows what’s made you abuse me like this, eh? what, Solent?” And the squire jerked himself into a normal position, straightening out his legs under the table and leaning back with a deep sigh of relief. + 

Wolf felt an absurd, an almost sentimental desire to lay his hand on his employer’s head and adjust that unnatural parting. So it was a wig he wore, after all; at least some of it was a wig! + 

Jason bent down still lower over the book, holding the pages back with two of his fingers while his lips mutely repeated the paragraph he had chanced upon. + 

“I hope you haven’t brought me into this history of yours,” he remarked, after a pause. “I don’t like to be abused any better than Mr. Urquhart does.” He straightened himself and placed his hands behind his back. “I expect,” he went on, “I wouldn’t have talked to you like that, Mr. Urquhart, if you hadn’t given me your best wine. For your second-best wine I’d probably have flattered you as much as Solent does!” + 

The Squire disregarded this completely. With a caressing and rapturous hand he began himself turning the pages, running his forefinger along certain sentences, as if he were blind and the letters stood out in relief. + 

“Are you tired with your walk?” Jason remarked, addressing Wolf, and politely offering him his chair. “I ought not to have abused anyone like that; especially anyone who has such good wine,” he added, in a low meditative voice. + 

“You’ll see how I’ve managed, Sir, about the way it ends,” said Wolf, still itching to play barber to Mr. Urquhart’s disorganized poll. “It ends with the Puddletown incident; but I’ve added a sort of conclusion⁠ ⁠… rather a bitter one, I fear, but I thought you wouldn’t mind?” + 

“Wanted the last word, eh, me boy? It ain’t the first time you’ve wanted that! No, no, no, no⁠ ⁠… Gad! I have no objection!” As he spoke, the Squire lifted his head and stared haughtily at Jason. + 

“Otter,” he said. And his tone caused dismay to Wolf; for he thought, “They’ll burst out again in a moment!” “Otter,” he said, “I wish you’d do me the favour of opening that window over there.” + 

To Wolf’s surprise Jason made no bones at all about obeying this request. He went off at once with firm, steady steps to one of the great mullioned windows. He went to the nearest one, not the one above Wolf’s old place of work, but one much nearer; and when he got to it he turned round, and, with something almost resembling a friendly chuckle, he called out: “I can’t work the machinery of these grand windows of yours! Shall I just unfasten it and let it swing out?” + 

Mr. Urquhart threw a most whimsical look at Wolf⁠ ⁠… he seemed to have recovered from Jason’s tirade very much as a piece of elastic that has been stretched to the breaking-point but has been released in time sinks back comfortably to its former state. + 

“Unfasten it, my good man!” he cried. “Never mind what happens! Unhook it and let it go!” + 

Jason shrugged his shoulders, and, seizing the window-catch, did exactly as he was bid. The leaded casement swung heavily on its hinges, was caught by the wind, and was blown wide open. + 

Into the room rushed such a blast of cutting east wind, that Jason came hurrying back to the fire, chuckling, hunching his back, and making a grimace as if pursued by demons. The pages of the open book upon the table fluttered like burdock-leaves in a storm. Wolf closed the volume and placed the empty decanter on top of it. + 

“Now’s the moment,” he thought, “to give him back the cheque.” + 

Jason pulled a third chair towards the fire. Mr. Urquhart settled himself deep in his seat, complacent and imperturbable, crossing his legs and swinging one of his slippered feet up and down in a manner that indicated complete self-assurance. + 

Wolf looked across the table at him. “Yes, now’s the moment to do it,” he repeated to himself. As he made this decision, he thought of Bob Weevil, dressed in his smart suit, sitting with Gerda in their parlour. “They’ll never go for a walk,” he thought, “in this bitter wind.” + 

The whole library seemed full just then of a nipping air; and he noticed that both Jason and his host began turning up their coat-collars. But the cold was rapidly sobering them. That was one good thing! It was certainly the moment to do it now; for the Squire’s expression had an ironical aplomb that indicated the return of sobriety, and Jason had poured out apparently all his reservoir of black bile. + 

But, oh, how hard it was to do it! He thought of Gerda’s longing for the pots and pans, the silver spoons, the carpet, the kitchen-clock. He thought intensely of his own desire for a dozen bottles of Three Peewits gin. Damn it all! The whole idea of giving it back was fantastic and superstitious. Yes, that’s what it was⁠—superstitious. And it was pure selfishness too. Gerda was doing everything for him⁠—what right had he to rob her of their earnings? Those quiet evenings she’d given him for the last two months were what had finished the job. + 

“They’ve asked me to send them another volume of my writings,” remarked Jason suddenly. “What do you two advise me to say I’ve got to have, before I send it? Darnley thinks a hundred pounds wouldn’t be too much.” + 

“Two hundred,” murmured the Squire, with a sly glance at Wolf. + 

“Let’s have your opinion, Solent,” continued Jason. “You’re one of these cunning dogs who know what’s what!” + 

In a flash Wolf had jumped to his feet. + 

“Mr. Urquhart,” he cried, pulling the bit of paper from his pocket and spreading it out before the squire, “here’s that cheque you gave me! I haven’t cashed it and I’m not going to cash it. I’ve done your work for my own pleasure. I don’t want a penny for doing it! You see it’s the same cheque, don’t you? Well⁠ ⁠… here goes!” + 

As he spoke he crumpled up the precious slip in his fingers; and, just as if he were retreating to make some tremendous leap, he stepped back a pace or two from the table. + 

The east wind was whirling round and round the room; and both of the men, sitting huddled by the fire, lifted their heads to look at him over their turned-up collars. + 

But as Wolf jumped back, crumpling the cheque, what he looked at was not the face of the Squire, but the face of Jason. + 

As he lifted his hand, something at the very bottom of his soul fought for release. Jason’s face at that moment was a thing he had to challenge, to defy, to surmount. The man’s eternal derision of him had suddenly swollen up, towering, toppling, tremendous⁠ ⁠… like an ice-wall. It had been gathering weight, this wall, for months and months; and here it was! His impressions moved more rapidly at that moment than light-waves travelling from Betelgeuse or from Algol; and one of these vibrations, flashing through his mind, hinted to him that the menace to his “mythology” which Dorsetshire had brought, came through Jason and not through Mr. Urquhart.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Well⁠ ⁠… here goes!” And he flung the crumpled-up bit of paper over the table, between the two men’s heads, straight at the blazing logs! + 

His action would have fulfilled his intention to a nicety, if he had not neglected, for the second time that day, to take into account the power of that east wind. + 

The little ball of paper was caught midway, whirled in an ellipse, and neatly and accurately⁠—with what might have seemed demonic intent⁠—deposited in the centre of the squire’s stomach! Mr. Urquhart secured this unintended missile as it rolled down between his legs, and laid it with a careless gesture upon the table in front of him. + 

Wolf made a dash forward, but stopped abruptly; and very deliberately the squire unfolded the cheque and smoothed it out before him. + 

“That’s just silly, me boy,” he remarked calmly. “No need to insult a person, when you’ve picked him out of the ditch! That’s just rude and uncivil. That’s unkind. There you are!” And with a gesture as grandiose and princely as if he were returning a rapier to a disarmed antagonist, he raised his arm and stretched out the thing for Wolf to take back. + 

Without a word Wolf submitted⁠—received the slip of paper from that outstretched hand and replaced it in the identical pocket where it had lain since morning. + 

As he did so, he was conscious of two dominant feelings, a sensation of sickening shame, as if he had been caught stealing a piece of silver from the communion-plate, and a puerile thrill of delight to think of Gerda’s pleasure over the carpet, the clock, and the new spoons! + 

As this event occurred, the countenance of Jason Otter relaxed into a thousand wrinkles. Up went his hand to his mouth, to hide a chuckle worthy of Mukalog himself. But the only comment he uttered was a murmured “Boss-eye!”⁠ ⁠… a preparatory-school expression that had not entered Wolf’s ears since his childhood in Ramsgard. + 

“May I ask you to close that window again, Otter?” said Mr. Urquhart in his silkiest tone, removing, as he did so, with the tip of his finger, a drop of wine that had trickled down from the outside of the decanter upon the cover of the manuscript. + 

While Jason was fumbling with the window, Wolf had begun a series of preoccupied pacings, up and down, across and back, over the expanse of the room. + 

When the window was closed he stopped and spoke. + 

“Monk tells me that Mr. Round is in the kitchen and has brought a fish to show you⁠—a large perch⁠—caught out of season. Do you mind if I run in and see it before I go? I’m afraid I must be off now. I’m glad you’re pleased with the look of our book, Sir! And I thank you for this money. It was ridiculous of me to⁠—” He broke off. “I shall change it at Stuckey’s on Monday. It’ll keep the pot boiling splendidly, Sir.”⁠ ⁠… + 

The time that passed between his utterance of that final word “splendidly” and the entrance of all three of them into Mr. Urquhart’s kitchen did not present itself to him in the form of the passing of so many minutes. It presented itself as one shattering question, addressed by Wolf Solent to Wolf Solent, as to whether this crowning defeat over the cheque had really done at last the thing he dreaded! Would he find, when he took up his life again, that his “mythology” was stone-dead⁠ ⁠… dead as Jimmy Redfern? + 

Beautiful in their blue-black intensity, the great dark stripes over the metallic scales of the perch⁠—caught out of season⁠—brought back to Wolf’s mind a certain inland pool, near Weymouth backwater, where he had once hooked a small specimen of this particular fish, which his father had made him throw back again. As it had swum away through the aqueous dimness, between two great branching pickerelweed stalks, he had had an ecstasy in thinking of that lovely, translucent underworld, completely different from his, in which, however, the pale-blooded inhabitants knew every hill and hollow, just as intimately⁠—nor with such very different associations either⁠—as he knew his own world. + 

Spacious and noble was the kitchen at Barton Manor; but somehow, as Wolf took that fish into his hands and entered into the overpowering emanation of its dead identity⁠—its pale blood-drops, its sticky iridescent scales, its mud-pungent smell⁠—he was seized with a sudden shock of intense craving for that barren, brackish country around Weymouth where his “mythology” had first been revealed to him. “Which of us five men,” he thought, “is most like a fish? It’s the best symbol of the Unutterable that there is!” + 

Laying the fish down, while Mr. Round explained to the squire and Jason how his niece had caught the poacher⁠—and it turned out, as the innkeeper went on, that this poacher was none other than Lobbie Torp, who had been over there soon after dawn⁠—Wolf stood aside, conversing with Miss Elizabeth. + 

“I congratulate you on your uncle’s recovery,” he said. “I often felt so sorry for you after that day we met at the pond.” + 

The “automatic young lady” wetted her lips with the tip of a little snakelike tongue and whispered something almost inaudibly. Wolf drew back further with her till they were out of hearing of the rest. + 

“I don’t know why I should tell you this, Mr. Solent,” she said, with an air of sentimental hesitation. + 

“I’m afraid I didn’t hear,” he replied rather coldly. + 

“I don’t often tell strangers anything,” she went on. “But seeing your lady’s brother, at that time in the morning, and finding him with this fish and everything, put it in my head to tell you⁠ ⁠… and then I heard you were here.” + 

“I am sure I’m much obliged to you, Miss Round,” he said, with a lack of curiosity that verged on impoliteness. “It’s⁠ ⁠… very kind of you⁠ ⁠… to⁠ ⁠… remember me.” + 

But as he lifted his fingers to brush away a fly from his face, Miss Round, Mr. Urquhart, Jason, Monk⁠—all receded and faded before him, till they became small, insignificant, wavering shadows! The smell of the dead fish, as he caught it from his raised hand, touched that spacious kitchen and turned it into thin air. In its place there appeared the hot, powdery sands by the King’s statue at Weymouth, the tethered donkeys, the goat-carriages, the peaked bathing-machines. In its place appeared the grass-green seaweed clinging to the black posts of half-obliterated breakwaters. In its place appeared the bow-window of the drawing-room in Brunswick Terrace, where, in those early mornings, as he watched his grandmother’s maid shake the duster over the sill, there always hung a peculiar odour of sun-dried woodwork, mingled with the salt of the open sea! + 

“Your wife’s father was there, Sir,” was what he heard now, with at least a quarter of his mind. “But he had been drinking and was all so mazed-like that he couldn’t hear what uncle and Monk were saying. But I heard them, though they didn’t know I heard them. And oh, Mr. Solent, they’re all after you; they’re all watching you like dogs at a rabbit-hole! They’re just pushing you on to it⁠ ⁠… and that’s God’s truth!” + 

She had been whispering all this with flushed cheeks and an intense gaze fixed upon him. + 

Wolf’s attention began to return. + 

“Pushing me on to what?” he replied, in equally low tones. + 

“I were born in Barton,” the girl whispered. “I know every stick and stone of the place; but I didn’t know ’twere as bad as I learned it that day.” + 

“What do you mean?” he murmured. + 

“They said,” she continued rapidly, “that every Urquhart what’s lived at House since Noll Cromwell’s reign has drove some young man into Lenty Pond! They said ’twere only the Reverend Valley’s league with Jesus what made young Redfern die in’s bed, stead of drowning hisself! They said for certain sure you’d be the one to go next. All the aged folk in village do be watching for it, they said⁠—them as is wise in what was and must be! They said ’twere a good day for King’s Barton when you came here, foreign as you be! Uncle said there were Scripture for it. He first knew there were Scripture for it, he said, when Mr. Valley drove his voices away from his poor ears and he stopped worrying. ‘Some must go that way,’ he said, ‘while pond be pond. And if it ain’t I, ’twill be he,’ he said. I knew who ’twere they were talking of by their fleering nods.” + 

The girl paused. Wolf noticed that her eyes had grown liquid and soft. A feeling of undeniable discomfort rose up within him. “What a superstitious idiot I am!” he thought. “The automatic young lady has taken a fancy to me, that’s all it is! This is her way of starting an intimacy.” + 

“Well, Miss Round,” he said gravely, “I think it’s very nice of you to be so concerned about me. But you can set your mind at rest. All villages have these legends. Besides⁠ ⁠… who knows?⁠ ⁠… I may be such a crafty scapegoat that I’ll bear the burden without turning a hair!” + 

She opened her mouth; she opened her blue eyes wide; she distended her little round nostrils. + 

“Go back where you came from, Mr. Solent dear!” she whispered. “Go back to London afore anyone can push you to it! I shivered in my breasts, for fear for ’ee, when I saw how bitter cold that pond were in the horns of dawn! ’Tweren’t only the sight of Lobbie Torp fishing against the law what made me shake. I’ve thought of you and dreamed of you, Mr. Solent, yes I have; and I’m not ashamed of it, ever since I first set eyes on you!” + 

Wolf glanced nervously across the kitchen; but what he heard and saw reassured him. His singular interview with Miss Bess seemed totally disregarded by the others. Jason was evidently propitiating Roger Monk with the most fawning civility; while the Squire and the innkeeper were occupied in weighing the perch. + 

Wolf was impressed more than he could have foreseen by the girl’s manner; nor had he missed that poetical expression of hers⁠—“the horns of dawn.” He began a humble and equivocal answer to her startling outburst, trying to explain to her the subtle manner in which these wild rumours, drawing their sap from the human passion for the supernatural, gathered weight in the countryside. He was a little dismayed, however, by the reckless response in his own fingers, which seemed to be reciprocating the ardent pressure of hers, as he bade her goodbye! Had he lost all integrity of emotion, he asked himself, as he went across to take leave of the others? Had his retention of that cheque undermined the whole dignity and self-control of his nature? Or was it that what he had accidentally discovered as to the Lesbianism of this strange girl appealed to something perverse in his imagination? + 

Once out of the house, however⁠—once clear of the bare raked-over flowerbeds, beds whose patches of yellow crocuses and jonquil-buds seemed shrinking back into the earth under that biting wind⁠—he threw those feelings from him and took the shortest way to the Blacksod road! This led him past the churchyard and the vicarage-gate; and he scarcely knew whether his jarred nerves sympathized more vibrantly with the frostbitten population under the grass, or with the obsessed little priest drinking his brandy amid all the trash in that desolate study! + 

When he got clear of the village, he struck westward across the fields, so as to hit the upper road; and it was not till he reached Babylon Hill that he paused to take breath. There he decided to skirt the edge of Poll’s Camp and avoid the more familiar descent into the town. + 

“You two down there,” the demon within him began muttering, as his glance swept over Blacksod, from Preston Lane to the Malakite shop, “you two down there⁠ ⁠… when are you going to stop rending me and tearing my vitals?” This was not the first time lately that he caught himself coupling Gerda and Christie together. “These Bess Rounds,” he thought, “are a lot easier to manage than my two!” Repeating the syllables “my two” with all the more bitter relish because of his realization of their outrageousness, Wolf began descending the westerly slope of Poll’s Camp, with the intention of discovering some unorthodox way of striking Preston Lane without having to walk the whole length of the High Street. + 

When he reached level ground he found he had to cross several enclosed orchards, which he did by scrambling through three successive hedges. Pricked by thorns, stung by nettles, his hands smelling of the bitter sap of elder-twigs, he made his way through those ancient enclosures, noting how their lichen-covered branches reproduced almost exactly the colour of the grey sky. In spite of the bitter wind, he stopped in the middle of one of those orchards to crouch down over a patch of shining celandines. The valiant lustre of those starry petals in the dark-green grass gave him a confused hope. No scent had they in themselves; but, as he pressed his forehead into the cold roots of the grass around them, the smell of the earth, sucked up through mouth and nostrils, entered into the very nerves of his soul with a long, shivering, restorative poignance. + 

“Is it dead?” he said to himself. “Well, even if it is, I’ve still got some sensations left!” When he thought in this way about his “mythology,” it was queer how he always endowed it with a visible shape. He thought of it as “it,” and this “it” was always compelled to take the shape of large, succulent leaves, the leaves of a water-plant whose roots were hidden beneath fathoms of greenish-coloured water. + 

“Some sensations left, even if it is dead!” And he rose heavily to his feet and moved on. + 

He emerged into a narrow, unused cart-track between overgrown, neglected hedges. As he made his way down this path, treading on young nettles and upon old burdocks, he couldn’t help thinking how charged with a secret life of its own, different from all other places, a deserted lane like this was. “What a world it is in itself,” he muttered, “any little overgrown path!” + 

The curious satisfaction which this secluded cart-track gave him caused him to stand still in the middle of the path. The hedges sheltered him from the wind. The spirit of the earth called out to him from the green shoots beneath his feet. Faint bird-notes kept sounding from unseen places. The cold sky prevented them from completing their songs; but the stoicism of life in those feathered hearts refused to be silenced. + 

His consciousness, as he stood there, seemed to stretch out to all the reborn life in the whole countryside. “Good is stronger than Evil,” he thought, “if you take it on its simplest terms and set yourself to forget the horror! It’s mad to refuse to be happy because there’s a poison in the world that bites into every nerve. After all, it’s short enough! I know very well that Chance could set me screaming like a wounded baboon⁠—every jot of philosophy gone! Well, until that happens, I must endure what I have to endure.” + 

His mind returned again to the scene about him. “What a world it is, a little overgrown path, especially in the spring, when it isn’t choked up!” He tried to imagine what such a place must be to the rabbits, field-mice, hedgehogs, slowworms, who doubtless inhabited it. “Very much what Lenty Pond is to its frogs and minnows!” he thought. And then his mind, from visualizing those remote backwater-worlds, turned once more to Redfern. + 

“I’m Redfern Number Two,” he thought. “There’s no getting over that.” + 

The path he followed soon emerged into the back-premises of a small dairy-barton; and these in their turn opened out into one of the outlying streets of the town. + 

“Redfern must have been an idiot,” he thought, as he made his way towards Preston Lane, “to contemplate drowning himself over Urquhart’s manias. King’s Barton isn’t everything. King’s Barton isn’t a shut-off world, like that deserted path!” + 

He looked at his watch as he approached the door of his house. Just five o’clock! “Will she have got rid of him? Will she be away and the place empty? She knew I was coming back to tea. It will be the first time she’s ever done it, if she is away.” + 

As he fumbled with the latch of the gate, he found that once more he was associating Gerda and Christie together. + 

There were four purple crocuses and two yellow ones in the flowerbed on his left; and on his right, three impoverished hyacinth-buds, of a pinkish colour; and they all seemed to be doing their best to sink back into the earth out of a world that contained, among its possibilities, such a thing as this wind! + 

“Is Bob Weevil in there with her?” he thought, staring at the crocuses till they ceased to be crocuses. “He may not be⁠ ⁠… but one thing is absolutely certain, and that is that Christie and the old man are having tea together! If not now, they will be, soon. What more natural? ‘The dear father would with his daughter speak.’ ” + 

He did his best to peer into the parlour-window, but the afternoon was so dark that all he could make out was a faint glow from the firelight. + 

He looked at the closed door and made a step towards it; but a leaden weight seemed to oppress the muscles of his arm. He glanced down now at those wretched hyacinth-buds. How miserable they looked! The strange thing was that he had the feeling now that to open this door would be opening the other door too! + 

He stood hesitating, listening to the wind whistling along the rain-gutter upon the roof above him. At last, with a violent effort of his will, he lurched forward, opened the door with a jerk, and walked into the house. + 

The kitchen-door was open, and from the middle of the hallway he could see the kettle steaming upon the stove. The parlour-door, however, was shut. He hung up his coat and hat, and with a beating heart he opened the parlour-door. There, by a low red fire, with the tea-tray between them on the little card-table, sat Gerda and Bob Weevil, drinking their tea. + 

He was conscious, as he entered, of an atmospheric density in the room⁠—a density that seemed both material and psychic. + 

“The place smells of Bob Weevil’s new clothes,” he thought, moving forward towards them. + 

The young tradesman rose to greet him, but Gerda retained her seat. + 

“You were so late that I thought I wouldn’t keep Bob waiting for his tea,” she said; “but I’ve got your cup here, and it’s only just made.” + 

“Bob was good enough to give me lunch,” he remarked; “so you are right to treat him nicely. Sit down, Bob.” And pulling a third chair towards the table for himself, he held out his cup for Gerda to fill. + 

“Well,” he said, after he had tasted his tea, “I found Urquhart at home, and I met Jason there too⁠ ⁠… oh, and a friend of yours, too, Bob! Guess who that was!” + 

As he spoke, he tried to catch Gerda’s eye, but she successfully evaded the attempt. + 

“I don’t mix with any such swells,” remarked Weevil, with a facetious grimace. “I’ll try another piece of that cake, Mrs. Solent, if you don’t mind.” + 

The emphasis he laid on the words “Mrs. Solent” was jeering and impudent. + 

“It was Bess Round,” Wolf brought out grimly; “and the joke of it is she’d come with a great perch that she’d found our Lobbie catching out of season.” + 

Gerda flashed a glance at him that even in that dim light was like the blade of a knife. + 

“Bess is no friend of mine,” said Weevil. “She caught that fish herself, I’ve no doubt, and palmed it off on Lob. Lob don’t need to go as far as Barton for his fish⁠ ⁠… season or no season⁠ ⁠… does he, Gerdie?” + 

“I don’t know, and none of us here know either,” the girl rapped out. “Lob does what he likes these days when he’s out of school. He’s got to fish early, if he’s to fish at all.” + 

What came suddenly into Wolf’s head at that moment was an excited wondering why it was that a fish had once been a symbol for Christ. This thought, however, vanished as quickly as it arrived; and he soon found himself trying in vain to exchange an intimate look with Gerda. More and more strongly, as he sat there sipping his one bitter cup of tea⁠—he had no spirit to ask for a second, no spirit to ask for more hot water⁠—was the conviction growing upon him that something really serious had happened. Gerda had a look on her face utterly different from any he had ever seen there. It was a hard, reckless, unhappy look, resolute, reserved, indrawn. She looked five years older than when he had seen her asleep in her bed that morning. + 

He furtively felt in his pocket, to make sure that the cheque was there still. He had an uneasy feeling, after all those agitating occurrences, that he might have lost it. He longed for the moment of Weevil’s departure, that he might throw it into her lap! + 

“What did you think of my poor old Dad, Mr. Solent?” enquired the visitor, munching his cake with relish. Wolf was conscious of a ridiculously insistent wonder as to when it was that Gerda had run over to Pimpernel’s for this luxury. “He’s not much to look at when he’s at meals, or to hear from either,” went on this pious offspring; “but he takes notice after supper. Last night, for instance, if you’ll excuse my mentioning it, he began jawing away like a dissenting minister about my having no purpose in life. What’s your purpose in life, Gerdie?” + 

“Don’t talk nonsense, Bob,” replied the girl. + 

“What’s yours, Mr. Solent?” pursued the incorrigible young man, while Gerda was bending over the lamp. + 

Wolf had by this time become so certain that something fatal had happened, that in his nervousness it was very hard to restrain himself from a violent outburst. + 

“Purpose?” he repeated; and the word sounded pure nonsense. “She must have given herself to him,” he thought, “out of blind anger, just to spite me! If it isn’t that, what is it? Something’s happened. She’s either given herself to him or promised to!” + 

“Purpose?” he repeated aloud, turning the word over in his mind as if it were a stone or a shell. “I suppose, to get at reality through experience?⁠ ⁠… No! How shall I put it?⁠ ⁠… To enjoy reality through sensation? I expect that’s it. Through certain kinds of sensation.” + 

The illuminated lamp threw its light upon Gerda’s face as she resumed her seat. + 

“What would you describe as your purpose, Bob?” he went on, thinking to himself: “She’s gone through something that’s startled and shocked her⁠ ⁠… or she’s made up her mind to go through it. She’s not the same Gerda that I left this morning with her face drenched with crying.” + 

Bob Weevil rose to his feet. “My purpose is to get home to supper,” he said. “I told Dad last night that it was to serve my God, and he told me not to be so cheeky⁠ ⁠… so you see he’s not such a fool after all, the funny old chap!” + 

Gerda displayed no emotion of any kind on Weevil’s departure. As soon as the door was shut upon him, Wolf produced Mr. Urquhart’s cheque and pressed it into her fingers. “You shall have your clock and your carpet and your spoons; and everything else, honey,” he whispered, clutching her by the wrist. + 

They were back in the parlour now, and she smoothed out the crumpled piece of paper upon the tea-tray. Then she folded it up, as mechanically as if it had been a napkin, and handed it back to him, looking at his fingers, but not at his face. + 

“Do you want to wash up these things for me, Wolf?” she remarked coldly to him over her shoulder, as she took up the tray and carried it into the kitchen. + 

As she passed him again in a couple of seconds, moving with a candle in her hand, he made a tentative caressing gesture. “Don’t, Wolf!” she murmured, pushing his hand away. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.” + 

He followed her to the foot of the staircase and looked up at her as she walked upstairs. “You’ll be able to get all those things now, Gerda!” he cried. + 

Her face, as she held the candle level with her breast and turned to look at him, was white and set. For the first time that evening she stared straight into his eyes. + 

“It’s too late now,” she said quietly, and passed on into their bedroom. + 