Wine + 

The three autumn months that followed the School-Treat became for Wolf, as the days shortened and darkened, like a slowly rising tide, that, drawing its mass of waters from distances and gulfs beyond his reach, threatened to leave scant space un-submerged of the rugged rock-front which hitherto he had turned upon the world. Something in the very fall of the leaf, in the slow dissolution of vegetation all about him, made this menace to the integrity of his soul more deadly. He had never realized what the word “autumn” meant until this Wessex autumn gathered its “cloudy trophies” about his ways, and stole, with its sweet rank odours, into the very recesses of his being. Each calamitous event that occurred during those deciduous months seemed to be brewed in the oozy vat of vegetation, as if the muddy lanes and the wet hazel-copses⁠—yes! the very earth-mould of Dorset itself⁠—were conspiring with human circumstances. + 

It was during many a lonely walk among the red-berried hedges and old orchards, where the rotting cider-apples lay wasp-eaten in the tangled swathes of grass, that these events worked their wills upon him. Sunday after Sunday, as September gave place to October and October gave place to November, he would lean upon some lichen-covered gate and struggle to give intelligible form to these “worries” of his. Threaded in and out of such ponderings were a thousand vivid impressions of those out-of-the-way spots. The peculiar “personality” of certain century-old orchards, of which the grey twisted trunks and the rain-bent grass seemed only the outward aspects, grew upon his mind beyond everything else. How heavily the hart’s-tongue ferns drooped earthward under the scooped hollows of the wet clay-banks! How heavily the cold raindrops fell⁠—silence falling upon silence⁠—when the frightened yellowhammers fled from his approach! He felt at such times as though they must be composed of very old rain, those shaken showers; each tremulous globe among them having reflected through many a slow dawn nothing but yellow leaves, through many a long night nothing but faint white stars! + 

He certainly had anxieties enough this Autumn to bring down his happiness to a very muted key. The head and front of these “whips and scorns of time” had been a complete break with Urquhart. The Squire’s obsessions had got upon his nerves to such an extent that he had just recklessly revolted⁠—flung up his work on this detestable history of Dorsetshire scandals⁠—and, cutting his coat to suit his cloth, fallen back upon a rigid monotony and economy between Preston Lane and the School. + 

The results of this quarrel might have been much more serious than they were, if he had not, by Darnley’s diplomatic help, obtained both more work and more income at the Grammar School. But this piece of good luck had been followed by a second calamity; for his mother, in her reckless, irresponsible fashion, had also annoyed Urquhart, and had consequently been compelled to give up Lenty Cottage and join him in Blacksod. Twenty-five pounds, therefore, of his increased salary had to go now to pay for a room she had taken a few doors from them in Preston Lane. Here she lodged in the house of that very Mrs. Herbert, whose name was already familiar to him. She had managed to obtain, however, a job for herself in the town, and was highly amused and extremely pleased by her unexpected success in the conduct of it. But this also was attended by an unpleasant consequence, her business being nothing less than the managing of a teashop belonging to Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill! Wolf would have been quite resigned to this development, if his mother had not, in her gay, ironic manner, cast a magnetic spell over the bull-necked farmer and entered into some sort of humorous flirtation with him. + 

As far as those two perturbing figures in the background of their days were concerned⁠—Bob Weevil and Christie⁠—matters relapsed during these long autumn months into a curious state of suspension. He would go to tea with Christie; and once or twice Gerda spoke of a visit from Bob. But as winter set in, and the nights lengthened to the December solstice, it seemed as if the burden of his monotonous work in the classroom, and the rigid economies practised by Gerda in the house, had undermined the spirit of adventure in both their natures. + 

He was surprised at his own obstinate patience in the tedious routine of teaching history to the Blacksod tradesmen’s sons. What supported him were the moments of ecstasy he derived from his long weekend walks. He had the whole of Saturday free, as well as Sunday, and sometimes with Gerda, and sometimes alone, he would follow the wraithlike vapours of autumn as they drifted over the lanes and hills, and give himself up, with a large forgetfulness of everything else, to his sensuous-mystical mythology. + 

If it had not been for this secret refuge and for the sensations accumulated in these walks, Wolf’s first winter in Dorset would have culminated in a miserable inertia, resembling that of the luckless Redfern. For one thing, Gerda seemed completely to have lost her miraculous power of bird-whistling. He caught her making the attempt; but recently, as far as he could tell, she had given the thing up. He suspected, too, that Darnley and Mattie were unhappy; but, ever since that day at the School-Treat, both those reserved beings had remained completely uncommunicative as to their relations with each other, though on all other topics he found them as affectionate and spontaneous as ever. + 

There had been little frost and no snow before Christmas. Gloomy, damp days had succeeded one another all through the month; and now, on the last Sunday of the old year, it seemed to Wolf, when he awoke in the darkness, that the air smelt of deep pools of rain. He awoke that morning long before his companion; and once awake he lay thinking intensely and excitedly for several hours. It was of his mother he thought. She had dropped a hint, while he was at Mrs. Herbert’s on the previous night, that she would like to start a teashop of her own, and that she thought of borrowing the money for this project from her present employer. Wolf was startled at the depth of the hurt to his pride that this information dealt him. In the early hours of that rain-smelling morning he made a drastic resolution. He would go back to Urquhart! What did it matter how he outraged his conscience over that accursed book, so long as his mother got this help from him rather than from the owner of Willum’s Mill? Oh! And what pleasure to be able to hand over a little solid money to Gerda after her long, miserable economies! He knew so well the list of desirable purchases in the girl’s mind⁠—from the silver sugar-tongs to a grandfather’s clock! It always touched him, the way Gerda put things for the house above things for her own person. Yes! That is what he would do: run round to his mother’s after breakfast, find out how the land lay with regard to the teashop project, and then set off for King’s Barton. Urquhart would most certainly be at home on Sunday morning; and he knew exactly how he would deal with the man. He would ask him point-blank for a cheque for two hundred pounds. He would ask for this on the understanding that he should finish the book for him in three months⁠—finish it, in fact, by the anniversary of his first arrival in Dorsetshire! + 

He was so excited by the idea of this daring move that it was with difficulty he refrained from jumping out of bed; but Gerda being sound asleep, and to wake her a couple of hours before her usual time being likely to make her cross for the whole morning, he restrained his impulse and continued to lie still.⁠ ⁠… + 

It was early enough, however, when finally he rang the bell of Mrs. Herbert’s house; for the landlady, evidently just returning from eight-o’clock Mass, came up to her door at the same moment. + 

“Good morning, Mrs. Herbert,” he said, as pleasantly as he could. But when the woman had let him in and was proceeding to announce him, a faded picture of The Bombardment of Alexandria, hanging in her hall, brought to his mind all the lodging-houses he had ever entered! It was as if from each of these places some polished bannister-knob, some vase of dead bulrushes, some dusty ornamental chair, some vague odour of Indian spice or of dried-up seaweed, added its quota to the accumulated memory. + 

“Oh, it’s you, Wolf!” exclaimed his mother, without rising from her antimacassared chair, where, with a volume of The Trumpet-Major open on her tea-tray, she was sipping her tea. “How grave you look, my son!” + 

She gave him a glowing smile as he sat down opposite her. But he plunged at once into the dangerous waters. + 

“Are you really thinking of borrowing money from that brute, Mother? You know it’s been worrying me a lot.” + 

She regarded him with eyes that gleamed with mischief. + 

“Why not?” she said. “I think the good man has grown quite attached to me. I think he likes elderly ladies!” + 

Wolf was too agitated to keep his seat. He began walking up and down the room. Suddenly he stopped in front of her. “Are you as happy down here, Mother, as you were in London?” he said, looking down on that mocking, invulnerable face. + 

She settled herself in her chair, stretching out her arms with an almost feline gesture of physical well-being. + 

“I live in hope of greater happiness yet,” she murmured, with a contented yawn. “Your mother’s an unregenerate woman,” she went on, her words rising on the breath of her yawn like fins on a smooth wave. “She doesn’t take life as seriously as her ugly duckling of a son!” + 

He sighed and sat down again. + 

“But it’s a disgrace I can’t support you properly, Mother.” + 

“As well as your wife, Wolf? Sons who have to support wives can’t tackle mothers too. You ought to have thought of that six months ago.” The shamelessness of her words was relieved by the ironic glint in her eyes. “But you must have come to your mother’s defense at any rate over that young lady of yours; for, when I met her on the street three weeks ago, she stopped and talked quite pleasantly to me! She told me you were still friends with that bookseller girl; and I told her she was far too pretty to be jealous of that melancholy little shadow.” + 

Wolf frowned, picked up The Trumpet-Major, put it down again, and began nervously scratching its cover with his fingernails. He thought to himself: “It’s absolutely impossible to talk of any woman to another woman without betraying the absent one. They must have blood! Every word you speak is a betrayal. They’re not satisfied otherwise.” + 

To turn the conversation from Gerda he launched out at random. + 

“I wish Darnley would try and support a wife as well as his mother! I hate to see anyone as decent as he is, getting so little pleasure.” + 

“Mattie, eh? What a boy you are! Legitimate⁠ ⁠… illegitimate⁠ ⁠… you’re ready to look after them all! I daresay you’re only waiting till my new flame, Mr. Manley, starts me in my own shop, to give my twenty-five pounds to this deserving couple!” + 

“What’s your idea, Mother, of how things are at Pond Cottage? I don’t believe I’ve ever asked you that.” + 

“What do you mean⁠ ⁠… how they are? A good but very plain young woman and a good but very handsome young man⁠ ⁠… isn’t that the whole situation? She’s in love with him, of course; and he enjoys it. He’d do more than enjoy it if her nose wasn’t so awfully like yours!” + 

“Will they marry in the end, do you suppose?” + 

“Why not? Didn’t we agree he’s a good man? What’s the use of a man being good if he can’t make a plain face happy? Besides”⁠—and the brown eyes laughed with the gayest wickedness⁠—“your sister’s got very pretty legs!” + 

Wolf made a faint grimace and plunged into a different topic. + 

“Did you really tell Urquhart, Mother, that Monk had threatened to kill him?” + 

Mrs. Solent laughed aloud. “Don’t start me on those two, Wolf, or I’ll talk all the morning. Why, they set on me as if they’d been a pair of savage goats that I’d tried to separate. Monk was rude. Mr. Urquhart wasn’t rude; but he’ll never forgive me.” She laughed again, the gay, mischievous, rippling laughter of a young girl. “I had the best hit all the same; and I’m glad I did!” + 

“What did you say, Mother?” + 

“I told him he ought to set a trap for that fox in the churchyard!” + 

“Why was that a hit, Mother?” + 

“Oh, you know! Anything about Redfern.⁠ ⁠… It bothered him that he couldn’t tell what I’d heard or what I hadn’t heard. As a matter of fact, Roger Monk told me there wasn’t a night he didn’t go rambling about. I don’t think anything of that. I like night-walking myself. But I knew it would be a hit!” + 

Wolf looked at his mother with frowning brows. + 

“But, Mother, Mother; don’t you ever take anything seriously?” + 

“I take my teashop seriously,” she said, with a mock-tragic air. + 

Wolf sighed. “Sometimes I’ve fancied, Mother, that you’d got some secret philosophy of your own that made you wiser than anyone⁠ ⁠… wise as some great sorceress.” + 

“Your father thought me a hard, selfish, conventional woman, without an idea in her head. And that’s what I probably am at bottom, Wolf!” She paused, and her face grew flinty. “I can never forgive him for destroying our life. What’s the use of that sort of folly? What’s the use of tilting against conventions? It’s more amusing, it’s more interesting, to play with those things. They’re as real as anything else.” + 

“What do you actually want out of life, then, Mother?” His tone was naive and pedantic. And he felt naive and pedantic, as he looked at this woman, the contours of whose countenance were as defiant to ordinary emotions as dark, slippery rocks to the wash of the sea. + 

She startled him then by suddenly rising to her feet with a movement that seemed to shake off twenty years as if they were nothing. “I want happiness!” she cried. “I want a lovely, thrilling, beautiful life. I want adventures, travel, noble society. Oh, I don’t want to be shut up all day long in Preston Lane, Blacksod!” + 

She turned her back upon him and surveyed her own face in the little plush-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. + 

“Our friend Selena used to tell me I was a woman of the world⁠ ⁠… and I am! I am! What else should anyone be, I should like to know?” + 

She put her fingers to her cheeks and began tracing their lines as if she were an angry sculptor, feeling for the mistakes of her work. + 

“I want to drive down the streets of Vienna! I want to float down the canals of Venice! I want to see Paris, Amsterdam, Constantinople!” + 

Wolf stared at the strong back in its neat tailor-made jacket. He stared at the loose coils of wavy grey hair; and an odd sensation went through him, as if this extraordinary person were a complete stranger to him. He began to feel that the moment was tense and even dangerous. What a fool he’d been to disturb such ocean-deep waters! + 

Presently she swung round upon him. “I suppose you never thought,” she cried in a high-pitched voice, “that I wanted anything more than to be the mother of a well-meaning ninny!” + 

“Mother dear⁠ ⁠… my dear mother⁠ ⁠…” he faltered, dominated so completely by the woman’s formidable paroxysm as to feel as if she were towering above him in that funny little room, and above the whole of Blacksod. + 

But she controlled herself now with a suddenness as unexpected as her outburst had been. + 

“It’s all right, Wolf. I only wanted to be petted up a little,” she murmured gently, moving to the table and beginning with agile fingers to pile the breakfast-things on her tray. “I expect I’ve worked myself into a fuss by reading Thomas Hardy! One day you shall take me down to Weymouth and we’ll walk over to the White Horse and the Trumpet-Major’s village. Yes, and we’ll go in and see who’s living in Penn House now, where your grandmother was. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” + 

Wolf nodded; but he did not smile. “If I give her every penny of what I get from Urquhart, will it be enough?” he thought. + 

“Listen, Mother,” he said aloud. “I’m going to walk over to King’s Barton presently to call on the Squire. You’ll smile, but I have practically decided to finish that book for him. I can work at it at home with the notes he’s made. I could get it done in about three months. It’s absurd to be too⁠—” He stopped abruptly, irritated, in spite of his anticipation of that very thing, by the gleam of sardonic mischief upon his mother’s face. + 

“The truth is, Mother,” he went on, “I’d much sooner get this money for you from Urquhart than that you should fall under this brute’s thumb!” It was the teasing indulgence in her smile that made him use this crude expression. The sight of the malicious glint still radiating from her eyes drove him to add, “Will two hundred be enough, Mother?” + 

Her expression became so extremely mock-sentimental at this, that he was completely nonplussed. She even tilted her head a little to one side, just as she had done when she quoted the “Pot of Basil” by Redfern’s grave. Then she laid down her tray and rested one of her hands upon the chimneypiece. + 

“Perhaps⁠ ⁠… it would⁠ ⁠… be⁠ ⁠… enough,” she said slowly, giving him a long, hard, penetrating look, out of which all sentiment had fled. Then she added, while a dusky red spot appeared in each of her cheeks, “Don’t you see that I’ve got it in me to make a success of this thing and stand on my own feet?” + 

She paused and stared into the fire, biting her underlip in concentrated thought, and drawing two of her fingertips along the edge of the mantelpiece. Then she suddenly burst out: + 

“Don’t you see it’s a life of my own I want, now you’ve deserted me? I’ve lived in the thought of something exciting that you’d do for both of us, but”⁠—and she made a dramatic gesture with her strong shoulders⁠—“you won’t do anything⁠ ⁠… any more than he did.” + 

“Well, Mother,” said Wolf slowly, when her final outburst had spent itself and a tender whimsical smile had settled down upon her face, “I’m off now, anyway, to see Urquhart. That’s something to have decided upon, at any rate, isn’t it? Oh, I shall get more competent and more unscrupulous, if you give me time. Well, I’m off, so goodbye, Mother.” + 

It was at this juncture, after a hurried tap at the door, that Mrs. Herbert appeared upon the scene, to carry off her lodger’s tray. + 

“Can you manage it?” Wolf said politely, balancing a forgotten sugar-bowl among the rest of the things. But his mother came towards him, and, standing with her back to the landlady, made a whimsical grimace. As he bent forward to embrace her, there was a furtive exchange between them of that rapid blood-understanding which human beings share with the animals; but even as she kissed him she whispered in his ear: “Don’t you think any more about the money, Wolf, for I won’t have it! And look me up tomorrow, if you have time, either here or at the shop. Goodbye! Don’t you bother, Mrs. Herbert! I’ll open the door.” + 

As he made his way through the quiet Sunday morning streets, Wolf found that he had already decided, in the secret places of his mind, to look in at Christie’s before he started for King’s Barton. This decision quickened his steps, but it did not prevent him from being stared at with the usual vapid curiosity by the few lethargic idlers he encountered. + 

He tried to analyze, as he went along, the cause that intensified this curiosity, in certain particular eye-encounters, to a malignant hostility. He came to the conclusion that this occurred only when his own mind was especially harassed. It must be, he decided, the same psychic instinct that makes a flock of fowls attack the one that happens to be hurt or sick. Mentally, at such times, he was hurt⁠—he was actually bleeding invisible blood⁠—and it might easily be that this wounded “aura” excited some mysterious irritation in those who caught it. + 

When he reached the Malakite shop he determined to ring the side doorbell; and he entered the little alleyway with this purpose. A certain shrinking from the critical moment that would decide whether Christie were in the house or not led him to gain time by strolling forward into the small garden at the alley’s end. + 

The little enclosure was entirely surrounded by walls; and at that time of year the only greenery visible was a few patches of parsley at the further end. Wolf walked towards those patches, though the soaked earth-mould clung heavily to his boots. Under the wall he did find a couple of dilapidated chrysanthemums, little, drooping, daisy-like blooms, that seemed to have had their very souls washed out of them. Glancing upward above these, he observed a projecting stone in the wall, which was covered by a species of vividly green moss, small and velvety, that seemed enjoying a vernal prime of its own, in the midst of the universal dissolution. In a moment, like a rush of warm summer air, there came sweeping over his mind the memory of certain old pier-posts at Weymouth, covered with small green seaweed⁠ ⁠… and simultaneously with this he heard a sound that made him turn hurriedly towards the house. + 

It was the opening of the side-door. And there was Christie, emerging in her out-of-doors attire! + 

He called her name loudly before he knew what he was doing, and she turned and looked at him. + 

With the poignance of that vision of pier-post and green seaweed still in his brain, the sight of her figure there, so quaint and pitiful, in her old-fashioned cloak and tightly-pulled-on gloves, stirred in him a sudden sense of something so beautiful in life, that it melted the bones within him. She herself seemed startled and overjoyed at seeing him; and tossing aside her accustomed reserve, she hurried towards him, heedless of the rain-soaked soil under her feet, heedless of any windows that might be overlooking them, her arms impetuously stretched out and her mobile little face working under her tremulous emotion like a ruffled leaf in a gusty wind. + 

Once in possession of her hand he defiantly retained it; and together they moved close up to the wall at the end of the enclosure, where, on their rain-battered stalks, drooped those miserable chrysanthemums. + 

“I’ve come to the conclusion, Wolf,” she said, as they stood there side by side, looking down at those forlorn survivals, “that I must be more frank, as well as more philosophical, about what I feel for you.” + 

His heart began to beat wildly. The fantastic idea flashed through his mind that she was going to suggest⁠—she herself⁠—that he should come to her one of these nights when the old man was asleep! + 

“What exactly do you mean, Chris?” he asked, as she dropped his arm and faced him with her steady stare. + 

“I’m going to keep my feminine nature in control after this,” she said. “We know what we are to each other⁠ ⁠… and what apparently we have to be⁠ ⁠… so I’ve decided not to allow any insurrection of my feelings. I’ve even thought of a coup d’état to keep them in their place!” + 

Quite unconsciously she had lifted her free hand to his coat and was twisting round and round in her gloved fingers one of its buttons. + 

An electric vibration of understanding quivered between them like a shivering cord stretched between two boats balanced each on its own wave-crest. And then, with incredible swiftness, a deliciously mocking smile came into her face. “Shall I tell you something, Wolf?” she said. “I’ve started writing a story! I began it at one o’clock last night, when I decided to conquer all feminine equivocations. It’s about someone quite different from me, but⁠ ⁠… very philosophical. It was the philosophical part I began last night. I wrote page after page⁠ ⁠… quick as that!” And releasing his coat, she made a characteristically girlish gesture with her fingers. + 

“I believe you could write a wonderful book,” said Wolf earnestly; and then, almost before he was aware of it, as they stood together, the indescribable entrancement of that green seaweed he had visualized a moment ago, and the salty taste of spray, and the touch of sun-warmed sand that had come with it, associated themselves with the delicious peace into which her presence threw him, and he began to abandon himself to the ecstasy of his “mythology.” + 

He was stupid enough to dream that he could give himself up unobserved to this egoistic satisfaction. It was therefore with something of a shock that he caught the faint sound of a sigh upon the air. + 

“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “I’ve got to get something for Father’s dinner that I forgot yesterday, and there’s only one little shop round here that’s open on Sunday morning. But don’t let me drive you away if you’re happy in my garden. Stay as long as you like!” + 

She was holding out her hand now and upon her face was a candidly humorous smile. He knew perfectly well that she had discovered, without the passage of a sign between them, that his mind had plunged their paradisic moment into some undersea of its own, where she could not follow. But he saw that she accepted this with complete indulgence; just took it for granted as a masculine peculiarity⁠ ⁠… a different way from hers of being happy! + 

“When am I to see you again?” he asked. “Our school-holiday will soon be over⁠ ⁠… and then⁠ ⁠… well, we know how it goes!” + 

Christie turned her head away from him, and, with puckered forehead and drooping underlip, fell into a fit of deep pondering. + 

“Now’s the time for you to practise your new philosophy, Chris, of being frank with your lover!” + 

Wolf uttered this lightly, but his heart was beginning to beat again. Something had made him give to her confessed “decision” a meaning directly the reverse of what her words implied. Wicked, satyrish thoughts flashed through his mind like darting fish through disturbed water. Her frown deepened at his speech and her lip drooped still more. Then, with heightened colour, she turned quickly and faced him. + 

“Will⁠ ⁠… you⁠ ⁠… be⁠—” she began slowly. “I mean, will Gerda be⁠—” She hesitated; and then, speaking rapidly, and with wide-open eyes fixed steadily upon his: “Will you be free tomorrow night, Wolf? Father is going down to Weymouth tomorrow, on some affair of his own, and is going to stay the night there. So, if you like, I could get you supper, and we’d have everything to ourselves.” + 

It was Wolf’s turn now to look away; but he answered her easily and lightly, as if it were quite a small matter. “Why, Chris, that would be wonderful! I’ll snatch at such a chance as that, whatever’s in the way. Besides, there’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t come to supper tomorrow. So let’s consider it settled. No, I mustn’t stay longer now; and I mustn’t try and help you with your Sunday shopping! I’m off to Barton to see if I can’t catch Urquhart at home.” He paused for a second. “I’m thinking of finishing that book for him, you know⁠ ⁠… after all⁠ ⁠… if he’ll pay me in advance.” + 

Perhaps never in his life had Wolf’s mind moved as rapidly as it moved now. His consciousness at this moment became like a wild horse stung by a gadfly or like an ox driven crazy by the eating of some “insane root.” Those words of hers, “Father is going to stay the night there,” took to themselves a sweet-shivering identity of their own. But his cheeks were flushed with a queer sense of discord within himself. “What I feel now,” he thought, “is not happiness at all. What is it?” And then, as the two of them moved away over the wet sods of earth to the alley’s entrance: “That green moss⁠ ⁠… that green seaweed⁠ ⁠… was happiness; but this is something else. This is something that will kill my ‘mythology’ if I let it.” + 

He was taking her hand now to say goodbye. “What does she care,” he thought, “about my doing Urquhart’s book?” And there came over him, as he looked into her brown eyes, a cold shudder of deadly loneliness. “She would never understand,” he thought, “what I am risking by going back to Urquhart.” + 

“Well, goodbye, Chris, till tomorrow night!” And then, as they released each other’s hands, “You’re not to look round now!” he added querulously. + 

“I’ve never looked round in my life!” retorted Christie Malakite, as she gave him her parting nod. + 

It was still about half-an-hour before church-time when he reached the gate of King’s Barton Vicarage. And there was T. E. Valley himself, in his ragged brown ulster, scraping with a hoe at one side of the drive! + 

For a moment Wolf found himself enjoying the lot of this little clergyman. He had no worries about girls. He had no worries about money. He had no mother but the Mother of God. + 

Wolf advanced slowly up the drive. The click of the hoe on the gravel made so much noise that his approach was unobserved. + 

Mr. Valley’s green-tinted trousers⁠—he thinks nothing of Sunday, thought Wolf⁠—covered such lean flanks, as he stooped, that it was as if the trousers were doing the weeding rather than the man. + 

“Good morning, Valley! Not started ringing your bell yet, then?” + 

A twinge of physical discomfort, as he resumed his upright position, crossed the priest’s face. He rubbed his spine with the back of his left hand, as he offered his right to his visitor. + 

“Stiff. I feel rather stiff, Solent. You must excuse my being stiff.” + 

Wolf sighed wearily. “I’ve been envying you, you irresponsible monk.” He turned his head and surveyed the result of Mr. Valley’s labour. A small path had been made free of weeds along the edge of the great overgrown drive. + 

“People won’t follow your path, Valley, even if you carry it to the gate. They’ll just walk straight up the middle.” + 

Disregarding this remark, the clergyman screwed up his eyes as if thinking of some important matter. Then he leaned forward and said gravely: + 

“By the way, Solent, do you know any literary people in London?” + 

Wolf surveyed him in astonishment. + 

“Yes, a few,” he said. + 

A smile like a tiny crack in grey pond-ice crossed Mr. Valley’s pallid features. + 

“Why don’t you get them to publish Jason’s poems, then? They’re good, aren’t they? He won’t show them to me. You know what he is! He thinks I’d steal the ideas for my sermons. But if your London friends were to see them⁠—” + 

Wolf felt sheer amazement at the perspicacity of the little man. What a fool he’d been not to have ever thought of this! Of course, it must be exceedingly difficult to get anything published. Carfax might⁠—he had an interest once in a publishing-house. And they are⁠— + 

“I’ll talk to Jason about it,” he said gravely. “Well, I must be off now. I’m going to see Urquhart. By the way, Valley, I am going to finish that book of his.” + 

Mr. Valley’s face crumpled into woeful disorder, as if he had received a blow. He turned up his shirtsleeves and resumed his weeding, without a word. + 

Wolf experienced extreme discomfort. + 

“You think I’m making a mistake, Valley?” he said. + 

There was no answer. + 

“You think the less I see of Urquhart the better, Valley?” + 

Still there was no answer. + 

“Don’t work at that job too long, Valley, and forget about the service!” + 

The man gave him an extraordinary sideways glance without lifting his head or ceasing his work. But not a word did he utter. + 

“Well, goodbye⁠ ⁠… and I will do something about Jason’s poems!” + 

“I wonder if I am making the greatest mistake I ever made in my life!” he said to himself, as he emerged into the road. He began to feel almost startled by the blind desire he had to erect this money as an impassable barrier between his mother and Mr. Manley. “It’s only his money. Of course it’s only his money. She couldn’t like a brute like that!” + 

In spite of the lowering clouds hanging like toppling bastions above High Stoy⁠—as if the Cerne Giant himself were heaping up earthworks there⁠—not one single drop fell till Wolf reached the shelter of the Manor. He began to feel there was something uncanny about the way the rain threatened to descend and yet did not descend. + 

“What’s the time, Roger?” he asked, nervously, as he followed Monk up the old Jacobean staircase to the familiar library. + 

“Must be near church-time, I believe, Sir; though I haven’t heard the bells yet. Squire’ll be main glad to see ’ee, Sir,” the man went on, as he opened the library-door; “glad as a hernshaw Squire’ll be!” + 

“He wants to get his book done, Monk, I suppose?” + 

“ ’Tis all he thinks of, Sir. Night and day, ’tis all he thinks of.” + 

“Why doesn’t he advertise for another secretary?” + 

Roger Monk made a deprecatory grimace and then hurriedly placed his large first-finger upon his lips. + 

“Squire’s had enough of secretaries,” he whispered, “and so, by Grimey, have I!” + 

His voice resumed its normal tone when they were well inside the room. + 

“You’ll find your old seat just as comfortable as it used to be, Sir. Them big logs warms the whole place.” + 

On the servant’s departure Wolf went over at once to the table by the window. How well he recalled the thrill he used to get from the asters and lobelias, down there in that round flowerbed, so dark and bare today! + 

There was a book, lying with others upon the table, that caught his attention at once. He picked it up. The particular pencil-marking in the corner of the flyleaf indicated to him that it had come into Urquhart’s possession through the agency of Mr. Malakite. The volume had no connection at all with the rambling chronicles and scandalous County-Trials out of which Urquhart’s History was being framed. It was the kind of book the debased purpose of which is simply and solely to play upon the morbid erotic nerves of unbalanced sensuality. The Malakite shop had, it appeared, inexhaustible resources of this nature, distinct altogether from any merely bawdy local folklore. + 

He turned over the pages. At once that old wicked shiver, drunken, indescribable, ran through his veins. It was an abominable book! A peculiar tremulousness took possession of the pit of his stomach, and a mist swam before his eyes. The atrocious attraction of a single page that he had encountered drew him towards a region of unspeakable images. Through an iridescent vapour, with the blood rushing to his head, he followed those images. He sank down into the chair, with the book clutched between his trembling fingers. He read voraciously. All those drops of deadly nightshade which, four months ago, had distilled themselves into his nerves as he fled from the school-treat field, began to seethe and ferment again in his secretest veins. Every now and then he was compelled to wipe away the salt sweat that clouded his eyesight. His knees knocked together beneath the table in his absorbed emotion. + 

It was while he was thus engaged that the library-door opened upon him and Mr. Urquhart presented himself in the doorway. The Squire advanced towards him across the polished oak floor, limping and muttering, his cane striking the echoing boards resoundingly at each step. + 

Wolf rose and met the man with extended hand; but his flushed cheeks, hot forehead, and excited eyes must have betrayed his preoccupation. + 

“Glancing at our last purchase, eh? What? Can’t keep these pretty little books out of you young people’s hands! You’ll be snatching, by hook or by crook.⁠ ⁠… You’ll be snatching, you rogues, eh?” And he dropped Wolf’s fingers, only to nudge him familiarly in the ribs. + 

Mr. Urquhart looked that morning as if something had inordinately refreshed and cheered him. “Well?” he muttered interrogatively. “Well?” + 

Wolf retreated a step or two, and mechanically placed the book he had been reading on the top of another volume, adjusting it evenly and neatly. Then, with his clenched hand resting on the table, and leaning a little forward, “I’ve been thinking, Sir,” he began gravely, “a good deal lately about that book of yours; and I’ve thought I’d like to see you again to find out if we could come⁠ ⁠… if we could come⁠ ⁠…” + 

“To business, me boy!” threw in the other. “Quite right. I’m your man. I’m ready to bargain with ’ee.” + 

Wolf’s eyes fixed themselves upon the ebony stick upon which his late employer propped himself. “As it happens, Sir,” he began resolutely, “my mother is just now in need of a sum of money⁠ ⁠… two hundred pounds in fact⁠ ⁠… to start a new teashop in Blacksod. She wants this at once. She’s been thinking of borrowing it from⁠ ⁠… from a friend. What I had in my mind, Sir, was⁠ ⁠…” He relaxed the tension of his muscles a little at this point, and, in place of leaning heavily on the table, he found himself scratching with his thumbnail a zigzag pattern upon it in the shape of an architectural ornament. “What I thought was,” he went on, “that if you could see your way to give me a cheque for this sum⁠ ⁠… now at once⁠ ⁠… I would pledge myself, in any form you suggest, to get the book finished within the next three months⁠ ⁠… by March, in fact, when I first began it. What you’ll be doing, Mr. Urquhart, is to pay me in advance for this three months’ work on condition that I finish the job in that time⁠ ⁠… but I must be free”⁠—his voice became quite steady now, and he found himself looking at last into the Squire’s face⁠—“I must be free to do this work at home and in my own way, using your notes, of course, as my material. I mean, that with my school-teaching I can’t come over here regularly. But if I haven’t finished it by the end of March you’ll have the right to demand the repayment of this two hundred.” + 

He paused, a little breathlessly; and, as was his wont in any crisis, he put his hand into his side-pocket, produced his cigarettes, and lit one with punctilious deliberation. + 

“Come over to the fire, Solent,” said Mr. Urquhart. Wolf followed him, as he limped across the room; and they sat down in the two leather chairs against the open hearth, the smouldering logs of which the Squire proceeded to stir up with the end of his stick. + 

Wolf’s heart was now beating fast. “I shall have the two hundred,” he thought. “I shall have the two hundred!” He became aware that the vision of himself handing over this cheque to his mother was melting now into a vague, delicious sweetness that had nothing to do with either Mrs. Solent or with Mr. Urquhart. It hung quivering⁠—this drop of maddening sweetness⁠—on the edge of those words of Christie’s, “He will stay the night at Weymouth!” + 

“I’m not a rich man, Solent. You know that, I suppose?” + 

Wolf nodded sympathetically; but he caught no more than the general drift of his companion’s words, as the Squire rambled on. + 

“She’s a plucky woman, your mother, and a darned good-looking one still, me boy, if you’ll let an old man say so. Shame you had to desert her. But you nympholepts are all crazy. It’s beyond me what you can find⁠—But there! It’s a matter of taste. But I don’t see why you need have bought the filly as well as ridden her. Torp’s a reasonable man; though he is such a fool. But there. We all have to pay for our little vices. Well! About the two hundred, me boy⁠—I suppose you must have it. Yes, by Jove, Solent, and you shall have it! And what’s more, we’ll drink a glass of my old Malmsey to wash the business down!” + 

While these words were reaching him across the smoke of the stirred-up logs, Wolf’s own consciousness was sounding the depths of an unexpected mental crisis. Intensely did he realize the relief with which he would fling this cheque into his mother’s lap. It was against his conscience; but the moment had come when he must sacrifice his conscience! In an irresistible salt-tide, overcoming all barriers, the idea of sacrificing his conscience rushed in full force now over the portion of his mind where the words, “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth,” lay like a drowned sea-reef! And then, as he stared at Mr. Urquhart, it became clear to him in a flash of cruel illumination that these two things⁠—today’s bargain with the Squire and tomorrow’s visit to Christie⁠—would be the end of his peace of mind. To these two things had he been brought at last. This was the issue; this was the climax of the mounting wave of his life in Dorset. He had to outrage now⁠—and it was too late to retreat⁠—the very core of his nature! That hidden struggle between some mysterious Good and some mysterious Evil, into which all his ecstasies had merged, how could it go on after this? + 

“Do ’ee hear, me boy?” The Squire’s voice came clear and straight now into his agitated consciousness. “Will you do me the favour of ringing the bell? There! Just in front of ’ee!” + 

Wolf rose and rang the bell, and sank down once more into the depths of the leather chair. As he did so he was aware of a rattling at both the mullioned casements. The wind was rising, then? Let it rise! Let the rain pour down. It would please Mukalog, in his kitchen-drawer over there, to hear this sound. + 

The tall gardener had his black coat on when he entered the room, and his air was the air of a privileged majordomo in a noble house. + 

“Get my paper and pens, Roger, and my chequebook, out of my study, please. Oh, and one thing more! Here, you’ll want my keys for that”⁠—and he began fumbling in his pockets. + 

“A bottle of port, Sir?” suggested the servant. + 

“Where the devil are my keys?” murmured the Squire petulantly. + 

“In your dressing-gown, I expect, Sir. I’ll look for them, Sir. Is it the 1880 port that I’m to get?” + 

“Listen, Monk,” said Mr. Urquhart gravely. “How many bottles of my father’s Malmsey have I got left?” + 

The man straightened his back with a jerk, and Wolf noticed that his eyebrows went up as if some extravagant and very foolish transaction were in the air. + 

“Some half-a-dozen, Sir. Them what’s in the walnut chest are the last. We locked them up, sir, after Candlemas night, when you and young Mr. Redfern looked at they portfolios of antiquities.” + 

Mr. Urquhart gave Wolf a rapid but very complicated glance as he answered the man. + 

“Never mind about the antiquities, Monk. Mr. Solent doesn’t care for antiquities. Get a bottle of the Malmsey, and bring my chequebook.” + 

Half-an-hour later, over the same fireplace, Wolf found himself drinking the most nectareous wine he had ever tasted in his life. A cheque for two hundred pounds on Stuckey’s Bank lay securely in his waistcoat-pocket; and on the silver tray between Mr. Urquhart and himself, a corner of it beneath the decanter to keep it in its place, was his own acknowledgement of the money and of the obligation which it entailed. + 

“Fifteen chapters would be a good round number, Mr. Urquhart.” + 

“Fifteen⁠ ⁠… thirty⁠ ⁠… fifty!” cried the other. “I don’t care how many! Order it as you please. My facts, my little facts, are the main thing⁠—that future generations should have all the biting, pricking, itching, salty little facts about our ‘wold Dorset’ that can be put together!” + 

“I won’t have any of your ‘facts,’ Sir, that I can’t turn into decent English. This book may carry your name, but it will have my soul between its⁠—” + 

He broke off abruptly. “What’s amusing you, Mr. Urquhart? By God, I will hear what’s amusing you! Have I said anything ridiculous?” + 

“Not⁠ ⁠… at⁠ ⁠… all⁠ ⁠… me boy!” gasped the Squire, suppressing his chuckling-fit. “Did you say your ‘soul’ between its pages? ‘Soul’ is good. ‘Soul’ is a good word. So you’ve got a soul, have you, Menelaus? Or you had before it strayed into my book? By Jove, that’s a pretty fancy, eh? Like a rose-leaf or a bit of white heather, such as the wenches put in their prayer-books!” + 

Wolf laid his hand on the stem of his wineglass and stared sombrely at the rich purplish umber of its contents. Never had he tasted such wine! He felt irritated with Urquhart for not letting him enjoy it in silence⁠—savour every drop of it⁠—draw it into his heart, his nerves, his spirit.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Not one fact left out⁠ ⁠… Menelaus⁠ ⁠… that’s in the bond, you know!” And Wolf, through that Malmsey-tinctured mist, saw his host tap significantly with his forefinger the sheet of paper that lay under the decanter. + 

A second gust of rising wind rattled the two window-casements; and this time there came with it the sound of a distant bell ringing. + 

“It’s Tilly-Valley,” said the Squire brusquely. “Hand me your glass, Solent.” + 

“Does he have it done when he’s saying Mass?” asked Wolf, watching the tilting of the decanter. Then he cried, “I like to hear it!” with a sudden, fierce emphasis. “I think I’ll open the window.” He rose with meticulous care and moved across the room, lifting his legs with cautious exactitude, as if they were heavy objects totally distinct from his personality. + 

He pushed open that familiar latched pane of the mullioned window. + 

“I say, Sir!” he cried excitedly. “It’s going to pour with rain. There’s an enormous black cloud out there!” + 

He strode gravely back to his place by the fire; and the wind followed him, making that paper he had signed rise up like a leaf and tap against the side of the decanter. + 

“It’s going to pour in a minute,” he repeated, emptying his glass. + 

But he now became aware that his companion’s wits had completely succumbed to the influence of the wine. Mr. Urquhart was engaged in a fatuous attempt to measure out the last few drops of the Malmsey equally between their two glasses. “Empty⁠ ⁠… quite empty⁠ ⁠…” he murmured, with a deep sigh; and then he began muttering something that sounded like “Who’ll toll the bell? ‘I’ said the bull, ‘because I can pull.’ ” + 

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Urquhart?” + 

His recognition that the man had sunk instantaneously through all the intervening stages and was now hopelessly drunk was a sobering shock to his own fuddled mind. + 

“It’s ringing still,” he remarked gravely. + 

“I’m the only magistrate round here,” cried the Squire. “What does Torp know of the law?” + 

Wolf contemplated with some concern the heavy lips in front of him, which were now gibbering incoherently. Valley’s Mass-bell had ceased. The wind was rattling all the windows. A wild gust, blowing down the chimney, drove a handful of bitter-tasting wood-ashes against both their faces. + 

“If I told you three feet was enough, what’s that to you? Three feet is deep enough for a boy not twenty-five. They sleep sound then. It’s different later. Three feet is a very good depth. Don’t throw in any more, I tell you! His skin was always soft. Three feet is more than enough. How do we know they don’t feel it falling on ’em? It’s clay, mind you. It’s thick Dorset clay.” + 

Wolf drew in his breath with a long-drawn sigh. “He’ll tell me everything soon, if only I can keep my wits clear.” + 

There was a sharp splash of rain against the open casement, and a violent shaking of the window-catch. + 

The Squire recommenced his mutterings. + 

“D’ye think it’s an easy thing to walk up and down on the earth with him lying down there? What would it be to stop thinking about it and just do it?⁠ ⁠… Foulness?⁠ ⁠… Abomination?⁠ ⁠… I don’t know about that.⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠… don’t⁠ ⁠… know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

His voice died away into complete incoherence. But suddenly it rose once more, shrill and strident. “It falls off⁠ ⁠… it falls off⁠ ⁠… the sweet flesh!” + 

Wolf stiffened himself in his chair and leant forward. Big drops of rain were descending the chimney, each one hissing with an angry hiss, as it touched the burning logs. + 

“The lips⁠ ⁠… the lips⁠ ⁠… where are his lips now?” + 

The man’s voice sank again; but Wolf seemed to catch a low, moaning sound coming from him, a strange, subhuman sound, that was ghastly to listen to. + 

Then there were more articulate words. “Nothing can make him not to be himself! And if he’s himself, and I’m myself, ’twould be like my life hugging my life to do it!” + 

He fell into a silence then; and lifting one of his arms from where it sprawled upon the table, he wiped the saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand. + 

“I’ll find out everything in a moment,” Wolf thought. “All I’ve got to do is to keep my brain clear.” + 

The windows had become so dark with rain that the room was in twilight. The upper portion of his companion’s face was almost invisible. Over the lower part of it, however, the smouldering fire threw a wavering illumination. It was this obscuring of the man’s eyes in the darkened room that made it a surprise to Wolf when, after a long pause, a voice came from him that was pitched in a completely different key⁠—that was, indeed, crafty and foxy in its sobriety! + 

“Drunk and chattering, eh, me boy? It’s when I think of Torp⁠ ⁠… that’s what it is⁠ ⁠… Torp and the mess he made of the grave out there! Couldn’t even dig it deep enough. Said he came upon an old coffin or something. Torp and his stupidity always upset me. A stonecutter is what the man is. I was a fool to let him meddle with grave-digging. Torp digging graves is absurd. You can see that for yourself, tow-pate, can’t you, even though you do go about with Lobbie? What was I saying just now? Oh, I know! That it was all crazy village-gossip when they talk of suicide. Don’t you listen to ’em, tow-pate! Don’t you listen to that ridiculous individual down at Pond Cottage either. He takes drugs, that man. You can smell ’em on his clothes. Suicide? Nonsense. It was pneumonia. If he’d stayed at Lenty, Tilly-Valley would never have got at him. They moved him against my wishes. D’ye hear, Solent? Against my wishes. That Lenty place of mine⁠ ⁠… your mother liked it, didn’t she?⁠ ⁠… was just right for that boy. What did they move him for? He wasn’t fit to be moved. He might have got well if they’d kept Tilly-Valley away from him and hadn’t moved him. That⁠ ⁠… was⁠ ⁠… wrong⁠ ⁠… to move⁠ ⁠… him.” + 

With these words Mr. Urquhart’s heavy head sank down till his chin rested against his chest. The shock of the jerk to his neck aroused him again, however; and with a crafty, wrinkled leer he glanced at the empty bottle. + 

“Empty⁠ ⁠… every drop,” he muttered. Then, with his elbow resting on the table, he supported his head with his hand. + 

“Torp’s the fellow who upsets me. Why, I can dig a grave better myself! But you must excuse me, Solent. I know you are mixed up with those people. Married the little boy, I mean the little girl, didn’t you? Your relative Torp is a prize fool, Solent. Don’t defend him! I tell you it’s no use. You’re⁠ ⁠… a sensible⁠ ⁠… boy⁠ ⁠… Menelaus⁠ ⁠… though you’re not as good-looking as your father⁠ ⁠… and the best thing you can do is to leave Torp to me. Stonecutter or undertaker, I understand him. I’ve known individuals of his kind all my life. He’s pure Dorset, is the good Torp. Leave him⁠ ⁠… to me⁠ ⁠… leave⁠ ⁠… him⁠ ⁠…” + 

His arm sank down upon the table and his head sank down upon his arm. A gust of wind from the open window swept across the room and lifted into a spiral dance the scattered wood-ashes that lay on the silver tray. Some of those ashes, as they subsided, fell upon the man’s glossy black hair and lay there where they fell; so that Wolf was reminded of the men of old time, who, in their grief, strewed ashes on their heads. + 

He rose quietly to his feet. “I’d better hunt for Monk before I go,” he thought, “and tell him to come up and see him.” + 

With this in his mind he stole across the polished floor, opened the door with the utmost caution, and let himself out. + 

The rain had stopped when he emerged into the manor-garden; and he decided that the best thing he could do would be to walk off the effects of the Malmsey and remain in the open air until teatime. Then he would drop in at Pond Cottage, where, no doubt, since it was Sunday, he would find all his friends together. + 

By the elimination of any lunch he would be all the hungrier to enjoy the homemade bread and flaky Scotch scones and honey-in-the-honeycomb which always made Mrs. Otter’s teas such solid and delicious repasts. + 

Feeling a longing for absolute solitude, he looked about for some unfrequented path. He had not passed, by more than two hundred yards, the well-known house inhabited by Roger Monk, when he came upon a cattle-drove leading due east, which was completely unfamiliar. This he decided to explore; and when it led him into a narrow, grassy lane, heading towards High Stoy, he made up his mind that he would follow this new direction and see what came of it. Every now and then, as he walked, he found himself thrusting his finger and thumb into his waistcoat-pocket to make sure the precious slip of paper was still safely there. + 

He had never been quite in the mood in which he struggled now. The thought of Christie’s invitation to him, the tone of her voice as she uttered the words about her father, the expression of her face as she described what she had been writing⁠—all these things fermented in his veins like drops from the sap of a deadly upas-tree. To die without ever having slept with Christie⁠ ⁠… No! He couldn’t submit to such a destiny! His heart beat fast as he gathered up his forces for this challenge to the gods. Between the bare branches of rain-soaked elms and the wet leaves of gleaming holly he strode along now like a centaur maddened by juniper-berries! And yet all the while, below this recklessness, lay a furtive, troubled, ghastly dread. Did not his “mythology” depend upon his inmost life-illusion⁠—upon his taking the side of Good against Evil in the great occult struggle? And if Urquhart’s book and “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth” killed his mythology, how could he go on living? What feelings does a man have when his inmost integrity is shattered? “You Dorset!” he murmured aloud, as he trailed his stick through a heap of dead leaves. “You’ve not beaten me yet, you Dorset! Ay! I’ll be a match for you yet, you dark rain-scented earth!” + 

But even as he spoke, the thought of holding Christie against his limbs, stripped of her clothes, brought him an intolerable spasm. The words, “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth,” ceased altogether to be words. They became tiny blue veins just above those slender knees! They became⁠—oh, he couldn’t give up such a chance! He couldn’t! + 

He had let Christie become a spirit to him. He himself, with his Pharisaic chatter about “Platonic,” had turned her into a spirit. Men of his type make their girls into anything. He had made her what he wanted her. He had satisfied his sensuality with the other one and gone to Christie for mental sympathy. He hadn’t considered her side of it at all. But now⁠—tomorrow night⁠—he would be a magician! He would turn this Ariel, this Elemental, into a living girl! His mind reverted to Gerda. “How pitiful that she should have lost her blackbird-song! That’s what I’ve done to her! I’ve become too solemn. I’ve wearied her with my pedantic, ponderous thoughts. She’s come to feel that I’m ‘heavy weather,’ a fellow without humour, without gaiety, a lumbering schoolmaster. That’s what it is. She’s turned to Weevil, for the simplest of all reasons⁠—for pleasant camaraderie!” + 

Suddenly, with a cynical frankness, he began comparing his feelings for these two girls. “The truth is,” he said to himself, “I love them both! I love Gerda because she’s so simple, and because I’ve slept with her all these months; and I love Christie because she’s so subtle, and because I’ve never slept with her!” + 

He paused by the lane-side, and, stepping over some dripping clumps of rank weeds, whose odour seemed like all the vague, anonymous scents that had hit his senses for the last four months, he leaned upon a disused gate and stared northward towards Ramsgard. + 

“Is that the Abbey?” he thought, as he heard faint chimes upon the heavy air. Hovering about the image of Aethelwolf’s coffin, his mind reverted to the idea of Christ. + 

“How extraordinary it would be,” he said to himself, “if there really were an incredibly tender and pitiful heart⁠ ⁠… tender to the craziest sentimentalities as well as to the most tragic dilemmas of humanity⁠ ⁠… just outside the circle of time and space!” If there were such a heart it would certainly turn all modern scientific theories into something trifling and unimportant. But did he want such a Being to exist? Not to want him⁠ ⁠… not even to want him⁠ ⁠… would seem an outrageous cruelty to all the Tilly-Valleys in the world. And, besides, such a Being would look after Gerda and after Christie⁠ ⁠… and settle all their dilemmas⁠ ⁠… ultimately⁠ ⁠… “And yet I don’t believe I do want Him!” he murmured aloud, as a sprinkling of cold raindrops fell upon his clasped hands from a tree above his head. + 

As he set himself to answer the question, why it was he didn’t “want Him,” there came into his mind one of Gerda’s recent hints, full of her primitive Blacksod mania for gross scandal, implying that the perverse tendencies of Mr. Malakite had not even yet been eradicated by old age. + 

“If I take her tomorrow night,” he thought, “there’ll exist⁠ ⁠… something⁠ ⁠… in common⁠ ⁠… between the old man and me⁠ ⁠… yes! if it’s only a⁠ ⁠… only a⁠ ⁠… Is that the reason why I don’t really want ‘Him’ to exist? For fear my feeling for Christie should have to be a thing purer even than ‘Platonic’?” + 

He stared frowningly at the stubble-furrows in front of him. One especial little pool of water caught his attention, between the melancholy stalks, into whose bosom at intervals single drops, from an extended branch above, kept splashing. So this was the inmost law of nature, was it; that if a man had more than one woman in his life he sank of necessity to such base compromises that he couldn’t want Christ to exist? + 

Well, he must content himself with thinking of the coffin of King Aethelwolf when he heard the chimes of Ramsgard! + 

In his defiantly heathen mood he suddenly found himself chuckling, as he stared at those little periodic water-tongues leaping up in that brown puddle; for he recalled the opinion that Bob Weevil had expressed to him recently, that girls’ legs were the most beautiful thing in the world. “Weevil and I are both lucky in one way,” he thought. “We both have the sort of intense life-illusion that protects human beings from the futility of the commonplace. But, oh God, oh God! I wish I hadn’t taken this two hundred pounds, and I wish Mr. Malakite wasn’t going to Weymouth tomorrow!” + 

He lifted his eyes from the wet stubble and let them roam at large across the green expanse of the great vale. And there swept over him an immense loathing for the furtive indecencies of human life and beast life upon the earth. “It would be so much better,” he thought, “if all men and all beasts were wiped out, and only birds and fishes left! Everything that copulates, everything that carries its young, how good if it vanished in one great catastrophe from the earth, leaving only the feathered and the finned!” + 

And he tried deliberately, as he moved away from that disused gate and strode further eastward along the lane, to visualize all this patient Sabbath landscape as it would be if it were indeed washed clean of all mammals! He imagined the vast cirque of Poll’s Camp, couchant like an heraldic lion, and befouled no more by the rabble of Blacksod. He saw Melbury Bub rising out of the calm rain-drenched fields, free from all the privies and dung-heaps and Farmer’s Rests and slaughter-sheds that so profaned its leafy purlieus. + 

The lane rose a little presently, following a slight undulation of the bed of the vale; and when he reached the top of this small eminence, the expanse of country that stretched before him assumed for his imagination that particular look of a land submerged under fathoms of transparent water, which, from his childhood up, had especially thrilled him. + 

To his left rose the corrugated trunk of an enormous elm-tree, about whose roots a thick covering of green moss held the fallen rain like a sponge. + 

The sight of this moss swept his mind back to Christie’s garden and thence to those slippery wharf-steps and wave-swept pier-posts that he associated with the first discovery of his mystic ecstasy. + 

So absolutely did he live in symbols of his mental life, that the two things which now threatened this ecstasy⁠—Urquhart’s book and a shy, slender Christie, stripped of her clothes⁠—transformed themselves into the wet, uneven bark of this trunk against which he now pressed his hand. “Two hundred pounds?” he thought. “What is that to spoil a whole life? A thin, bare figure held tight for a second⁠ ⁠… what is that to change a person’s whole idea of himself?” + 

As he went on pressing his bare palm against the wet corrugations of that inert trunk, it seemed to him imperative to make an attempt then and there to evoke his master-sensation. With a desperate straining of all the energy of his spirit, he struggled to merge his identity in that subaqueous landscape. He had, at that moment, a strange feeling, as if he were seeking to embrace in the very act of love the maternal earth herself! For, as he strained his spirit to the uttermost, the landscape before him ceased to be a mere assemblage of contours and colours. It became one enormous water-plant, of vast, cool, curving, wet-rooted leaves⁠—leaves that unfolded themselves, leaves that finally responded and yielded to the outflung intensity of his magnetic gesture! “Not dead yet!” he muttered aloud, as, with an exhausted sigh, he turned to retrace his steps. “Not dead yet!” + 

In the reaction from this desperate plunge into his mystic vice, Wolf found that he was beginning to feel extremely hungry. “I don’t want to have to wait a minute after I get there,” he thought. “I can’t cope with Jason till I’ve had my tea. So it’s no use walking too fast!” + 

His mind began fumbling then, puzzled and weary, around that question which always had such a curious interest for him, as to the inner nature of each person’s secret life-illusion⁠—that peculiar consciousness people build up as to their dominant “entelechy” or ultimate life-flowering. Thus it seemed to him now, that while his own life-illusion was his “mythology,” Christie’s must be those “Platonic essences” about which she was always pondering, Weevil’s the mystic beauty of girls’ legs, and Urquhart’s the idea of his shameless book. He could not help chuckling a little to himself when his exhausted thoughts, like weary gnats that sink down upon water, began hovering round the question as to what Jason’s life-illusion was. “He has none! He has none!” he cried aloud; and he found himself so excited by this explanation of Jason’s peculiarities that, not thinking what he did, he debouched into a field-path quite different from the one that had led him into this lane. + 

After walking nearly a mile, this newly discovered path conducted him, to his considerable surprise, into Lenty Great Field⁠—into the opposite side of the field to that of Pond Lane. Indeed, so unfamiliar did the field look from this direction, that it was only by the well-known willow-trees in the centre that he recognized Lenty Pond at all. + 

“Why, there is Jason!” he said to himself; “and the girl with him must be Mattie. Damn! How the devil shall I cope with this combination?” + 

Then in a flash he realized that it was only his mental preoccupation with Jason that had given these complete strangers, sitting on the bank of Lenty Pond, his shape and Mattie’s. Surely this man and this girl were completely unknown to him! But were they? The man certainly was. But the girl? Ah, he knew her! She was the “automatic young lady” of Farmer’s Rest! So that wizened old chap in a bowler-hat was her uncle⁠ ⁠… the unseen invalid he had heard calling out, “Jesus⁠ ⁠… Jesus⁠ ⁠… Jesus!” + 

As soon as he reached the side of the pond that was nearest to him, the two figures, who were seated on the opposite edge, stood up, the girl helping the man to his feet. He could see they were exchanging remarks about him; and knowing the condition of the man, he hesitated and looked away, flicking the dead reed-stalks with the end of his stick. + 

But as he hesitated there, he gave them a furtive sidelong glance, and he saw they had begun to come slowly along the side of the water, evidently intending to speak to him. + 

He advanced to meet them, and they met halfway round the circle of the pond. + 

“How do you do, Mr. Solent,” said the girl quietly. “This is my uncle, Mr. Solent.” Then she turned and raised her voice, as if speaking to a deaf man. “This is Mr. Solent, uncle; the gentleman I was telling you about.” + 

It gave Wolf a queer sensation to see this equivocal “Miss Bess” again. Was it Gerda who had told him that she was a friend of Bob Weevil’s? Little pleasure Mr. Weevil would get out of her, judging by that evening of the School-Treat! + 

But as she looked furtively into his eyes now, it was difficult for him to believe that the quiver of chemical attraction which for that single second united their nerves had no normal eroticism in it. + 

The girl was the first to drop her eyes. “Uncle here takes all the time I’ve got, these days,” she murmured; “uncle and the bar⁠—don’t you, you funny old man?” + 

Mr. Round’s countenance flickered all over with little wrinkles of complacent pride. + 

“She looks arter me as if she were paid to do it,” he remarked in a hollow voice. + 

“I’m sure she does,” Wolf responded absentmindedly, his gaze wandering to the surface of Lenty Pond. “I think you’re to be congratulated, Mr. Round, on having so capable a niece,” he added after a pause, with a little more emphasis. + 

Something about the landlord’s disordered physiognomy began to suggest to his mind the head of a decapitated criminal carried on a pole. It was just as he was wondering how he was going to slip away from these two, that there came into his head, as if from the lips of a goblin inside him, that queer tag of bawdy gibberish which Manley⁠—or was it Josh Beard?⁠—had chaunted so derisively that night at the Three Peewits. “Jimmy Redfern⁠ ⁠… he was there!” mocked this jibing voice. + 

But the man’s face had begun to expand with such maudlin satisfaction that it became absurdly puckered and puffed out, like a toy balloon composed of crocodile-skin. + 

“One who looks after you so well, Mr. Round⁠—” continued Wolf. + 

At that moment, however, he caught the eye of the automatic young lady fixed upon him so quizzically that he felt the colour mounting to his cheeks. + 

“Curse the baggage!” he said to himself. “She’s not one to be propitiated.” + 

“You chose a nice day to bring your uncle out,” he remarked humbly, turning his back upon Lenty Pond. + 

“She brought me out. That’s what she done. And she will take me in, present! We comes out and we goes in; but ’tis they what bides.” + 

“You’re in the right of it there, Mr. Round,” said Wolf, meeting the niece’s eye as boldly as he could. “But I don’t think it was very wise of her to let you sit down after all this rain.” + 

“I brought his shawl,” cried the girl, smiling. “Look, uncle! You’ve left it over there.” + 

The innkeeper turned his head. “Over there,” he repeated; and pulling at his niece’s sleeve, he began shuffling back. Wolf accompanied them round Lenty Pond, and Miss Bess picked up the shawl. Bits of rush-seed were adhering to it; and she shook it in the air. + 

“Goodbye!” Wolf brought out at this point. “I’m going to call at Pond Cottage before I walk back to Blacksod.” + 

“ ’Tweren’t either o’ they,” the innkeeper murmured hurriedly, “what drove him to it.” + 

Wolf looked questioningly at the girl. + 

“He’s worried,” she said laconically. “Here, uncle, lean on my arm and we’ll soon be home! Have you forgotten what I’ve got for your tea?” + 

The puckers and creases came wrinkling back. + 

“She’s got sardines for me tea,” he murmured confidentially. + 

“Capital!” cried Wolf. “I hope they’ll have sardines at Pond Cottage!” + 

He was on the point of leaving them, when the innkeeper suddenly stretched out his free arm towards the centre of the water. + 

“That’s where he do bide!” he murmured hoarsely. “Churchyard can’t hold he!” + 

The automatic young lady, to Wolf’s consternation, proceeded to shake her relative by both shoulders. + 

“Stop that, Uncle!” she cried angrily. “Stop that!” + 

The corners of Mr. Round’s mouth fell. “Don’t ’ee take no notice, maidie. I weren’t thinking what ’ee do reckon I were.” + 

He lowered his voice and leaned close to Wolf. “She were afeard I were thinking of God,” he whispered. + 

“No I weren’t, Uncle!” cried Miss Elizabeth. “So don’t tell stories to Mr. Solent.” She looked Wolf straight in the face. “He’s worried,” she repeated. + 

“I see he is,” Wolf responded feebly. “Well, I hope you’ll enjoy your sardines, Mr. Round.” And he added in a firmer voice, “Goodbye! Goodbye!” and, lifting his hat, moved away from them. + 

As he crossed the field he tried to think of each particular spot of ground he had come to be so familiar with in this locality⁠ ⁠… Lenty Pond⁠ ⁠… Melbury Bub⁠ ⁠… Poll’s Camp⁠ ⁠… the Lunt meadows.⁠ ⁠… + 

“These are the reality. These are what will last,” he thought, “when all those agitated people with their crazy fancies have passed into nothingness!” + 

At the gate of Pond Cottage garden he glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes past four. “I should have sworn it was five,” he said to himself. “Time’s like a telescope. It compresses itself or lengthens itself according to our feelings.” + 

The mystery of time continued to tease him as he strode up the path. + 

His whole past seemed swallowed up by Mr. Urquhart’s two hundred pounds and by “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth.” “The misery of these decisions assumes time,” he thought; “but what if time is itself an illusion?” + 

After he had rung the bell, he was struck by the curious silence that always falls down on the thresholds of houses, like the feathers of some vast overshadowing bird, when house-bells are rung.⁠ ⁠… + 

But the door was brusquely flung open now; and there were Darnley and Jason! + 

“You?” cried the younger brother. “How splendid! Our ladies have gone for a walk; but they’ll be back presently. They’re sure to be back presently, because it’s Dimity’s day out. Dimity’s gone to tea with Mrs. Martin, up at the House. I’ve just been making Jason put on a new tie.” + 

He turned and looked affectionately at his brother, while Wolf hung up his coat and hat. + 

“There!” Darnley cried. “You’ve been fooling with it again. What a demon you are, Jason, after all my trouble!” And lifting his hands to his brother’s throat he set himself to rearrange the tie in question, which was of a brilliant vermilion. Wolf was amazed at the amiable gravity with which the poet submitted to this gesture. + 

“These young wimming,” he mumbled⁠—pronouncing the word more quaintly than Wolf had ever heard Mr. Torp pronounce it⁠—“like red ties.” And moving to the mirror above the hall-table, he proceeded to regard the improved adornment with whimsical complacency. + 

They had not been seated many minutes beside the drawing-room fire when Wolf took the bull by the horns. + 

“Look here, Jason,” he began. “Why don’t you let me send a selection of your poems up to London, so that we can see what the critics think of them?” + 

There was an ominous silence. Darnley’s hand went up to his beard; while his eyes fixed themselves frowningly upon the coal-scuttle. + 

Slowly Jason spoke, putting an abysmal malice into his words. + 

“You think you’re God, don’t you?” he remarked; while out of a stony countenance his eyes flashed with nervous fury. + 

Wolf felt a tremor of anger; but he suppressed it resolutely. “Those poems of yours ought to be published,” he said. + 

“For you Londoners to scoff at!” returned the other. “My poems may not be much,” Jason went on, “but I don’t like their being poked about by you clever dogs, any more than I’d like to have such rogues spit in my porridge.” + 

“My mother has a cousin,” continued Wolf obstinately, “who is very good at getting things taken he feels interested in. He happens to be a lord, and had some connection once with a publishing-house. I’d send your poems to him first.” + 

“Will this lord you’re boasting about get a share of the money?” asked Jason harshly. “Why don’t you introduce Darnley to him? He might give Darnley a place at that⁠—Institution, where you used to teach Latin!” + 

“Jason! Jason!” protested the young brother indignantly. + 

But the man went on. “If you’re not so much like God as to be angry at everything that isn’t praise, I’ll give you my advice. My advice is⁠—” + 

“Shut up, Jason, can’t you?” interrupted Darnley. + 

“My advice is that you go back to London. This Dorset climate isn’t good for you! Those Londoners would very soon give you plenty of money, when they heard that your mother was cousin to that lord you were telling us about just now.” + 

“Jason can’t forgive you, Solent,” interposed Darnley, “for having heard his poems at all. Years ago he read some to me, and afterwards stopped speaking to me for three days!” + 

Instead of being annoyed at this remarkable reminiscence, the Slowworm of Lenty raised his shoulders and chuckled audibly. + 

“You schoolmasters!” he cried. “Your holidays have lasted too long! Teachers of Latin, like you, always get fidgetty when you’re not with your boys.” + 

“I don’t teach Latin,” murmured Wolf, in a voice almost as silky as the Squire’s own. Anger was mounting up within him like a black wave. + 

“Do you want to know why I advise you to go back to London?” went on Jason, disregarding this protest. “Not because of Urquhart⁠—though I’m tired of warning you against him⁠—but because if you go about with me much longer, you’ll wake up one fine morning with your merry little ways fallen from you like a snake’s skin.” + 

“What ways?” asked Wolf. + 

“Oh, do shut up, Jason! Do stop making a bloody ass of yourself!” interjected Darnley. + 

“Those feelings you have when you stretch out your legs in the morning, and when you walk home to tea, swinging your stick, and when you go up those backstairs of old Malakite’s, and when you drink that bottle of gin of yours which I’ve heard about and forget that it isn’t your first night with your young lady, and when you enjoy those books in old Urquhart’s library and tell yourself stories about them, and when he brings out his second-best wine and you warm yourself at his fire, and when you look over gates on your walks and think that Nature is something!” He stopped breathlessly, and then added, in the dead silence that followed, “If you go about with me much longer you’ll find yourself falling into reality, like⁠ ⁠… like an abortion into the Bog-stream!” + 

“Jason, if you don’t shut up,” cried Darnley fiercely, “I’ll go straight off to Preston Lane with Solent and leave you alone!” + 

“It’s all right,” interposed Wolf. “I don’t mind hearing these things. But, if Darnley doesn’t object, I’d like to ask you one question, Otter. What is it about me that annoys you so?” + 

The poet’s whole frame seemed to hug itself together, to contract, to tighten. Then he said: “I’m not in the least annoyed by anyone’s ways. We’re all beetles in the dung of the earth. If you go about with me, Solent, you won’t be able to think of yourself like you like to do, or about any of your young ladies either! You’ll be glad enough to get three good meals every day and to sleep as long as you can.⁠ ⁠… You’ll learn from me more about the value of sleep than about courting young ladies.⁠ ⁠… So my advice is, get back to London, where that lord of yours is, and teach⁠—” + 

He was interrupted by the opening of the front-door and the sound of Olwen’s shrill voice rising above those of her companions. As they all hurried out into the hall to greet the newcomers, Wolf thought to himself, “Now we’ll see how three generations of feminine sensibility will take possession of a house!” But things arranged themselves very quietly. Mattie took Olwen upstairs, to tidy her up, while Darnley followed his mother into the kitchen, to help her getting tea. So that soon after their arrival Wolf found himself alone with Jason by the drawing-room fire. + 

“They’ll be a long time,” said the poet, with grave solemnity. “They always are a long time on Sundays.” He then walked gingerly to the door and furtively closed it. Returning to Wolf’s side by the hearth, he drew from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper, which he carefully unfolded. + 

“When you send my poems to London,” he began quietly, while Wolf, watching him with astonishment, possessed himself of a seat from which he could see the window, “I think it would be a good thing if you didn’t leave out the last one I’ve written. It’s called ‘The Owl and Silence.’ Do you mind if I read it to you now?” + 

“I’d like very much to hear it,” Wolf responded humbly; but while the man was thus occupied, he allowed a portion of his consciousness to appropriate to itself a lovely bluish light that, with the falling of that winter twilight, began to fill the uncurtained window. + 

“Does it mean that the horizon is now clear of clouds?” he thought to himself. And then he thought, “It seems early for the twilight to be setting in.” The disarming monotony of Jason’s voice blended with the impalpable colour that filled the window-frame.⁠ ⁠… + 

When the mossy vistas call to the rain + 

To ravish their fern-fronds green, + 

Thro’ the dripping hazels they dart again, + 

These points of damascene! + 

And each root holds blood in its amber cup, + 

Holds blood in its emerald bowl, + 

While the White Owl covers silence up + 

As death covers up the soul. + 

The great White Owl, he passes by + 

Like a ghost among the guests. + 

The wood-mice watch him with frightened eys; + 

The birds crouch in their nests; + 

And Silence asleep on her lichen bed, + 

Asleep on her fungus sheet, + 

Feels those feathers sink on her drooping head, + 

And fall on her tender feet! + 

They have known each other so long, so long, + 

That Owl and that Silence deep! + 

The mosses and ferns to life belong; + 

But they belong to sleep. + 

They belong to the land behind all lands + 

Where the greenest leaves look grey; + 

Where the tree of the unknown sorrow stands + 

Weeping its well-a-way! + 

For the Owl is old and Silence is old, + 

And that tree is older yet! + 

Its tears, malignant, drizzling, cold, + 

Make their love-pillow wet! + 

New moss, new ferns, the new spring brings; + 

New primroses in death + 

Are soothed by new moth-flutterings + 

Of euthanasian breath; + 

But the Owl that over Silence sinks, + 

With strange and drooping feathers, + 

Eternal rest-without-end drinks, + 

Absolved from all life’s weathers. + 

Each root holds blood in its amber cup, + 

Holds blood in its emerald bowl, + 

But the White Owl covers Silence up + 

As death covers up the soul. + 

“Oh, I like that very much!” he murmured gently, when the man’s voice died away. “Certainly we will include that in what we send to London!” It somehow seemed quite natural to him now, in the fleeting loveliness of this blue light, that Jason should, without retracting his spleen, have accepted his offer. As he watched the man crouching there between himself and that unearthly atmosphere, his sombre figure became for him a monumental symbol charged with feelings beyond expression. At how many hearths, that winter afternoon, were human beings watching this strange blueness, flung against their casements like the dreamy breath of the earth itself, caught ere it dissolved into space! That aerial transparency might easily be something that never again in all the days of his life would appear exactly as it did now! Oh, how he longed to scoop it up in great handfuls and pour it forth over every wounded spirit in the world! How he longed to sprinkle it like holy water over that face upon the Waterloo steps! A strange melting happiness began to thrill through him⁠—and then, suddenly, “Mr. Malakite at Weymouth.” No! He would have supper with Christie; but he would keep his integrity. At eleven o’clock he would go back to Gerda. The idea of this eleven o’clock seemed like a penitential offering, heavy to lift, which, by a superhuman effort, he would offer up to his Deus Absconditus. But even now, as he heard Olwen’s light steps and bursts of laughter in the room above, the thought of the two-hundred dragged his resolution down. He couldn’t give up the relief of flinging this cheque into his mother’s lap; and by some intricate psychic law it seemed useless to renounce Christie’s bed and yet accept Urquhart’s money! + 

Jason’s voice interrupted his meditations. But it was not of poetry he spoke. “Tell me, Solent,” he said, “would you prophesy from what you know of me that I would outlive you by ten years?” + 

“Not ten, Jason!” + 

“Five, then?” + 

“No.” + 

“Four?” + 

“No.” + 

“By three years, then?” + 

“Well, perhaps you may outlive me by three! But listen, Jason. I wish you’d let me run up for a minute to your room, before they all come in. May I do that?” And he began to move to the door. Jason rose quickly to his feet and followed him. His expression was grave and extremely perturbed. + 

“I’d go to Darnley’s room if I were you,” he said eagerly. “The basin’s much grander there than in mine. But, of course, if you’re nervous of doing anything in there⁠ ⁠… and would feel happier in mine⁠ ⁠… but mine wouldn’t suit you⁠ ⁠… It’s not in your style.” + 

“I know very well what style it’s in,” retorted Wolf, as he opened the door; “but don’t be worried. I’ll use Darnley’s.” + 

It was indeed with a curious relief that he found himself in his friend’s room. How refreshingly bare it was! The dressing-gown hanging on a nail upon the door, the three pairs of boots placed in a neat row at the bed’s head, the grey schoolmaster’s-suit carefully folded upon a chair⁠—all these objects, combined with the faint sea-sand smell that came from the enormous sponge upon the washing-stand, brought to Wolf as he stood among them, washing his hands with Windsor soap, a wholesome and liberating peace. + 

He, a man, was in a man’s fortress, a man’s retreat! How cool and quiet did that strip of uncarpeted floor look, with the beautiful blue light lying upon it! How reassuring was the great flat tin bath propped up against the wall! + 

He couldn’t help thinking, as he poured the soapsuds out of the white basin into the white chamberpot⁠—for evidently Darnley was allowed no slop-pail⁠—how all his agitations had to do with women. “I’m attracted to them,” he thought, as he instinctively pressed his friend’s great sea-smelling sponge against his face, “but there must be something in my nature that causes them to weary of me⁠ ⁠… that irritates them, that infuriates them⁠ ⁠… unless I behave with diabolical cunning over a long stretch of time⁠ ⁠… and that is difficult⁠ ⁠… that is almost impossible!” + 

Half-an-hour later, seated between Olwen and Mrs. Otter, with Darnley and Mattie opposite him, and Jason at the foot of the table, Wolf found that the airy chatter that had been going on, ever since they began their tea, about this and that aspect of the countryside, ended by troubling him with a bitter nostalgia. His brief holiday was already near its close; and how many days and months and years of his life was he destined to spend in that accursed schoolroom! Stirred into magnetic activity by the candlelight and the strong cups of tea, his deepest will set itself to overcome this menace. “I am god of my own mind,” he said to himself; “and when I’m not actually teaching history⁠—or ‘Latin,’ as Jason would say⁠—I can recreate, out of thin air, the essences of earth, grass, rain, wind, valleys, and hills! I’ve only to concentrate my mind on the living eidolons in my mind; and even if they put me into prison⁠—and Blacksod School is a prison⁠—I ought still to be able to cry at the end like my father, ‘Christ, I’ve had a happy life!’ ” + 

And as he continued to bandy jests with first one and then another, in his heart he thought, “Lenty Pond, the Gwent Lanes, the Lunt Meadows⁠ ⁠… there they remain, all night⁠ ⁠… all the long windy nights⁠ ⁠… there they remain; and I can see them, touch them, smell them, yes! and become them, whatever burdens Fate puts upon me!” + 

It was at this point that he found himself arrested by something Mattie had begun to say. She was speaking of some recent argument she had had with Darnley; and as she murmured the words, “Darnley and I,” Wolf was suddenly struck by the nature of the look she turned upon his friend. It was a glowing, possessive look, full of just that maternal sensuality which he himself hated to receive more than any other look he could think of! But Darnley seemed to derive satisfaction rather than annoyance from this look of hers; for his eyes darkened to a colour like luminous indigo, as he responded to it. + 

“Ha!” thought Wolf. “So that’s how it has worked out! His love for her spirit has been accepted on its own terms; and his inhibition with regard to her body has become a matter of maternal solicitude to her. Ay, what convoluted beings we all are!” + 

“Go on, my dear,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s have it! Let’s hear everything about it.” + 

Mattie met his eyes with an equivocal response. He knew she was aware of something hostile to her in his mood. There was a flickering half-second of actual contention between them as their grey eyes encountered. Then she said, turning to Mrs. Otter: “It was a long discussion we had⁠ ⁠… it would be silly to tell it all. I happened to say something about plants having souls inside them⁠ ⁠… no! trees it was⁠ ⁠… and Darnley said that the souls of trees and flowers and everything else weren’t ‘inside’ at all, but on the surface⁠ ⁠… I’m putting it right, aren’t I, Darnley?” + 

“I don’t⁠—” protested the schoolmaster gravely. “I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘souls’; but if you mean what’s most essential to them⁠ ⁠… colour⁠ ⁠… scent⁠ ⁠… expression⁠ ⁠… appearance⁠ ⁠… yes, it’s certainly on the outside!” + 

“I don’t understand, Darnley,” threw in Mrs. Otter, with a face full of nervous concern, “how you can talk like that! We’ve been taught⁠ ⁠… haven’t we⁠ ⁠… ?” She broke off and looked appealingly at her eldest son. “What do you think about it, Jason?” + 

But Olwen, who had been keeping up a surreptitious dialogue with Jason during the whole of teatime, raised her voice at this. + 

“He knows about it, because he’s a tree himself⁠ ⁠… aren’t you, Jason? And I know about it, because I’m a bird in a tree!” + 

Jason, who with flushed face had been encouraging her in her mischief⁠—and Wolf fancied that both Mattie and Darnley had been the butts of their roguery⁠—now became gravely sardonic. + 

“We ought to have Tilly-Valley here,” he said, “to tell us what he’s learnt from the Bishop of Salisbury about the soul!” + 

“I agree entirely with Darnley!” Wolf burst out with a violence that astonished himself. His annoyance at Mattie’s maternal sensuality must have suddenly mingled with a sharp suspicion that Jason and Olwen had been making sport of him too! + 

“With Darnley?” murmured Mrs. Otter, still anxiously looking at her elder son to see if he had anything further to say. + 

“Wolf’s not a bird or a tree, is he, Jason?” whispered Olwen, with teasing eyes. + 

“It’s absurd,” cried Wolf excitedly, while his upper-lip began to protrude and tremble so much that an observer might have been reminded of Miss Gault. “It’s absurd to talk of souls being inside things! They’re always on the outside! They’re the glamour of things⁠ ⁠… the magic⁠ ⁠… the bloom⁠ ⁠… the breath. They’re the intention of things!” + 

His irritation at this moment was not lessened by a furtive taunt of the demon within himself repeating Mr. Urquhart’s biting phrase, “So you have a soul, then, Menelaus?” + 

“But, Wolf,” protested Mattie, in an obstinate and sulky tone, “you’re contradicting yourself! How can anything be intended and expressed if it isn’t there⁠ ⁠… inside⁠ ⁠… already?” + 

Wolf bit his lip to restrain himself from an outburst of anger. + 

“It’s all so confusing to most of us, Mattie dear,” murmured Mrs. Otter. “We can only hope and pray that the Judge of all the earth will do right.” + 

The incongruous piety of this expression seemed to act like the old “Ite missa est” to the company about that candle-lighted table. As Wolf rose to go, there swept over him a shuddering vision of what such encounters as this might prove to him in the future, when he had lost all his self-respect. As he said goodbye to Mrs. Otter over the child’s head, and felt that hot little forehead pressed against the pit of his stomach, and those long, thin arms clasped passionately round his waist, he realized that to assassinate his self-respect in the manner he intended would be to break the luminous interior life-pool that nourished all his happiness with its fleeting reflections! To feel toward himself in a certain way⁠ ⁠… to recognize himself as a person incapable of doing this or that⁠ ⁠… such apparently was the “glassy essence” of that ecstasy that was his grand secret. + 

When at last the garden-gate had closed behind him and he had entered the darkness of Pond Lane, he found that in his mental exhaustion all manner of queer little objects, casually noted during his months in Dorset, were floating in upon him. The bell-handle of Mrs. Herbert’s door, the white scar on the hand of that old waiter at the Lovelace, the stunted laburnum-branch in his backyard⁠—his mind had to make a definite effort to throw off these things. + 

“I’ve got a sort of under-life,” he thought, “full of morbid hieroglyphics. Something must have died down there, and the blowflies are laying their eggs in it.” + 

Gathering up all the spiritual strength he possessed, he flung his mind outwards, far over those silent reaches of meadow-grass and fallow land. He imagined as vividly as he could all that was going on in that darkened margin of Blackmore. He followed the skulking of foxes under the hazels, the stirrings of hedgehogs in their hibernating-quiescence, the crouching of birds on leafless boughs, the burrowing of moles under their hillocks, the breathing of cattle in their barns. + 

He imagined all these things so intensely, one by one, that he began to feel that he shared those nocturnal movements⁠—that he was no stranger among them, but himself a furtive, lonely earth-life among other earth-lives, drawing, as they did, some curative magnetism from the dark greenish-black hide of the great planetary body! And he thought how stoically all these living things⁠—the patient trees most of all⁠—endured those diseased portions of their identities, those morbid under-lives, where the blowflies of dissolution were at work. + 

“I can do it!” he thought. “It isn’t forever.” And in his necessity he laid hold of those two dark horns of nonexistence, from the cold slippery touch of which all flesh shrinks back⁠—the horn of the ages before he was born, the horn of the ages when he would have ceased to be. “I can plough on,” he said to himself. + 

The clock in the mid-Victorian tower of the town-hall was just beginning to strike a quarter to seven when Wolf reached the Blacksod High Street. The words of an unknown farm-labourer he had met on the road repeated themselves in his brain as he turned up his collar against a merciless downpour. “Blowing up for rain, Mister!” and Wolf’s mind turned these harmless words into a vast nonhuman menace, directed against him by some malignancy in the very system of things. + 

He stopped for a minute at the entrance to Preston Lane, to decide whether to go straight to Mrs. Herbert’s and give his mother the cheque, or to let it wait till the following morning. + 

“If I were a bit more superstitious,” he thought, “I’d curse Mukalog for this!” + 

He stood disconsolately watching the splashing of the water-drops in the puddles by the roadside. “They don’t dance!” he said to himself. “Reality’s always different from the way people put it.” + 

With an obscure instinct to postpone giving the cheque to his mother, he stared intently at those splashing drops, to see what they really did do under the flickering lamplight! + 

No, they didn’t “dance.” Each individual drop, as it fell, seemed to draw up the water of that dark puddle in a tiny pyramid; but there were so many of them that it was hard to focus the attention upon any single one of those minute waterspouts. When, however, he lifted his head, the volume of rain driving eastward along pavement and gutter took a continuity of form, like the identity of some desperate living thing, bent on pursuit or escape. + 

Against this cold, blind presence he now resolutely pushed on. “If there’s a light in mother’s room,” he said to himself, “I’ll go straight in and give it to her.” + 

True to the usual caprice of Chance, when it’s invoked as an oracle, there was a light, and yet there was not a light. It was clear to him, as he approached Mrs. Herbert’s door, that there was a glow in his mother’s room that came from the fire and not from any lamp or candle. + 

“I’ll have done something for you, old Truepenny,” he muttered, “if you care anything what becomes of her!” + 

He opened the little iron gate and moved stealthily to the door of the house. Before ringing, he peered as closely as he could into the fire-lit room. + 

“God!” he gasped, in a spasm of irrational fury, “if that brute isn’t with her now.” There was, indeed, no doubt about it. Mr. Manley was snugly ensconced by Mrs. Solent’s fireside, though all Wolf could detect of their two figures was the shoulders of the man, upright in a high-backed chair, and a fragment of his mother’s profile as she bent over the fire. + 

“Oh, the brute! Oh, the brute!” he groaned, as he sneaked back, returning as stealthily as he had come. “If they’d had the lamp lit⁠—” he added weakly. + 

He crossed the road; and lurching forward against the torrential rain, he stopped when he reached the pigsty. A fantastic dread lest he should find the same fire-lit glow in Gerda’s parlour⁠—with Bob Weevil installed there, like a maggot in an apple⁠—made him reluctant so much as to glance at his own house. Was Christie, too, sitting by her fire, acting the devoted daughter to Mr. Malakite? + 

Three fires and three women⁠—and Mr. Wolf Solent leaning against the pigsty! + 

The rain now began to find his skin. A little trickle of ice-cold drops descended between his coat-collar and his neck. + 

As he clung with his hands to the wet railing, he could hear one of the animals rustling in the straw in the interior shed. Was it ill? Was it moving in its sleep? Or was it simply guzzling in there⁠ ⁠… in warm, dry darkness? + 

He pushed the outer gate open, hardly knowing what he did. So here he was, standing shivering inside that so-often-observed enclosure, from which the familiar stench emerged that had been the accompaniment of all these eventful months! + 

“Weevil’s with her,” he thought. “I know it as well as if I’d seen his Panurge nose! He’s with her. She’s going to give him supper⁠ ⁠… or perhaps they’re roasting chestnuts! She said once they used to roast chestnuts together.” + 

He fumbled about with his fingers for the latch of the inner door. How soaked with rain the woodwork was! A second pig began to stir now and emitted a feeble grunt. Then he gave up trying to find the latch; and pressing his two hands against the jambs of the door, he bowed down his head until his forehead rested upon the low wooden lintel. At this moment it was given to him to taste those secret dregs of misery, cold as ice and black as pitch, that lie dormant under the lips of every descendant of Adam. + 

Here he remained perfectly still, while it seemed to him that the wind was whistling a special little tune, composed for his benefit, through the dripping boards of the pigsty. + 

“Wishaloog!⁠ ⁠… wishaloog!” whistled the wind.⁠ ⁠… Then all of a sudden he burst out laughing. “A comic King Lear! That’s what I am! There’s nothing tragic about this, Wolf, my friend! What you’ve got to do is to defy omens and fight for your own hand.” + 

He rose up erect, tightened his fingers round his stick, and straightened his shoulders. + 

“I’ve got Urquhart’s cheque,” he thought, “and by this time tomorrow⁠—‘Mr. Malakite at Weymouth.’ ” Once more, while he used these words, what he saw in his mind was the little blue veins under Christie’s satiny skin⁠—just above her knees. + 

It was then⁠—and he had remarked it in himself before⁠—that the constriction of lust endowed his spirit with a recklessness that was alien to his character. “Wishaloog! Wishaloog!” whistled the wind; but mounting up, out of the chill of the nether pit, something in his nature, some savage stirring of his animal will, mocked back now at this impish derision. + 

“Whi⁠ ⁠… Hoo! thee own self!” he cried aloud, mimicking the tone in which Gerda’s father used this West Country retort. Without further delay he left the pigsty, crossed the road, and rushed into his house.⁠ ⁠… + 

Not a sign of Bob Weevil. But oh, what a relief it was, a relief beyond anything he had expected, when he entered his own kitchen and found Gerda, arrayed in a spotless print apron, laying the supper. + 

He could see how pleased the girl was at the obvious genuineness of the emotion with which he greeted her. And genuine indeed his feelings were; though not all of them would have caused her equal satisfaction had they been exposed. + 

He ran upstairs to change his clothes, bringing the drenched ones down with him a minute or two later to dry them by the stove. The warmth of the kitchen, the steam that came from his wet things, the rank earthy smell of boiling turnips, the affectionate scolding of this beautiful young being, betrayed him quickly enough into that peculiar intimacy where the safety of virtue becomes the voluptuousness of content. The beat of the rain on the roof enhanced this security; while everything outside his four walls seemed a sweet shiver of excluded danger. + 

“I’ve agreed to finish Urquhart’s book,” he said, “and he’s paid me in advance. But the chances are that I’ll have to lend this money to Mother. Anyhow, I’m not going to think about it tonight. I’ll wrap it round Jason’s idol for the present⁠ ⁠… then you won’t want to meddle with it any more than I do!” + 

Saying this, he opened the dresser-drawer with a jerk and thrust Mr. Urquhart’s cheque under the stomach of the prostrate god of rain. + 

Though he did all this with an air of careless decision, it was with several anxious side-glances that he scanned Gerda’s face as he washed his hands in the little tin basin. + 

This process of washing his hands before a meal was one that he always prolonged with elaborate punctiliousness; and now, as he played with the iridescent bubbles and squeezed the yellow soap into a foaming lather, he could not help making a grimace into the little square mirror that Gerda had hung above the sink, as the thought crossed his mind that although he had sold half his soul that morning and was intending to sell the other half of it tomorrow night, he could still enjoy with childish satisfaction the pleasure of sitting down to supper, in his own kitchen, opposite his own girl! + 

As far as he could read her thoughts Gerda had decided to remain entirely noncommittal over the matter of the two hundred, postponing, he suspected, any struggle about it until she realized more clearly which way the wind was going to blow. She gave him a lively description, as they sat down to their meal, of a visit she had had that morning from her mother and Lobbie. It transpired that Lob was to start his first term at the Grammar School when the holidays ended, and that Mrs. Torp, in complete ignorance of the ways of such places, was assuming that her son-in-law would be her son’s constant and indulgent preceptor! + 

When their supper was finished Gerda leaned over and reached for an open book that lay on the edge of the dresser. Lighting a cigarette as frowningly and awkwardly as if it had been the first she had ever smoked, she pulled the lamp towards her. “I’ve got to an exciting part,” she said. And then, a second later, “I think Theodoric the Icelander is the nicest book I’ve ever read!” + 

Her fair head, for she was a little shortsighted, sank down over the open volume; and Wolf, still seated opposite her on his kitchen-chair, was left to stare at the polished handles of the drawer that contained both Mukalog and the cheque. + 

His pleasant relapse into the comfort of virtue ebbed and vanished with the girl’s absorption in her story. + 

Tomorrow⁠ ⁠… tomorrow⁠ ⁠… what would the upshot be? He sat bolt upright in his chair, holding a matchbox in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other. It was as if he were secretly praying for some unexpected external event, like a sudden uncharted reef, to break up the dark-swelling wave upon which he was being carried. + 

Soon he let both matchbox and cigarette slip from his fingers, and, lifting his elbows upon the table, pressed his knuckles against his closed eyeballs. How they throbbed⁠ ⁠… those eyeballs⁠ ⁠… and what surprising shapes and colours those were, that appeared before his inner vision! + 

With a sort of sullen curiosity he watched those floating geometric shapes⁠—green and purple and yellow and violet. “Each of these,” he thought, “might be a world. Perhaps it is⁠ ⁠… and from the point of view of the Absolute just as important a world as this of ours!” + 

And then something completely different from geometric shapes appeared. Well enough he knew what this was⁠ ⁠… even before its lineaments had grown distinct.⁠ ⁠… The unhappy one of the Waterloo steps! + 

“Very well, then,” he muttered under his breath, taking his hands from his face. “Very well, then, I shall see thee at Philippi!” + 

And as he folded his hands behind his head, looking across at Gerda and her Icelander, he set himself to curse the misery the human mind can go through because of this wretched necessity for action, for decision, for using what is called “the will.” What did a person feel when the hard little crystal of his inmost life lost its integrity? What did food taste like, what did the warmth of fire mean to such a derelict? A Wolf who had gone back to that book⁠ ⁠… a Wolf who had seduced Christie⁠ ⁠… how could such a Wolf ever swing his stick, ever drink up “the sweet of the morning,” ever feel the wind upon his face, with the old thrill? + 

Among the fragments of their meal his eye now fell upon a chicken-bone upon Gerda’s plate, the last surviving relic of their meagre Christmas dinner. It was a “wishing-bone,” from which Gerda, as they had pulled it between them, had won the right of “wishing”; and it lay there now, with the library-cover of Theodoric the Icelander just touching its forked and bare forlornness. But the sight of it sent Wolf’s mind upon a long, fantastic quest. He seemed compelled, by some hypnosis proceeding from the wishing-bone, to make a Domesday Survey of all the trivial and repulsive objects he had ever passed by. Wolf and the wishing-bone set out together, in fact, upon a pilgrimage through the limbo of the world’s rubbish-heaps. + 

Some of the objects were commonplace enough; others were fantastic. The scavenging-obsession of the wishing-bone allowed him to omit nothing that he could rake up out of a thousand obscure half-memories. The thumbnail-parings of a nameless old tramp sitting by a milestone on the Bristol road⁠ ⁠… the amber-coloured drop of rheum in the eye of a one-eyed doorkeeper of a house of ill-fame in Soho⁠ ⁠… the torn-off corner of a butcher’s advertisement lying in a gutter outside St. Paul’s⁠ ⁠… the left arm of a china doll thrown on an ashcan under the west door of Ely Cathedral⁠ ⁠… the yellow excrement of a dog, shaped like a dolphin, adhering to the north wall of the Brighton Aquarium⁠ ⁠… the white spittle of a drunken cabman outside the station at Charing Cross⁠ ⁠… the hair-clippings from an unknown head, wrapped in a French comic paper and dropped in the public urinal at Eastbourne⁠ ⁠… such things, and others like them, all parts and parcels of what humanity sets itself to forget, did Wolf and the wishing-bone redeem from the limbo of obliterated memory and gather in a heap on the kitchen-table of Number Thirty-Seven Preston Lane! + 

Was it a sign that his “mythology” was already dying, that his mind became so easily servile to these rakings among the offscourings of the earth? + 

He struggled to shake off this curious morbidity; and in order to give Gerda a further chance of enjoying Theodoric in peace, he rose from the table now, and carrying their plates and dishes to the sink in the corner, he set himself to wash them up with a slow and concentrated nicety. This mechanical task, at which he was inordinately clumsy, acted as an opiate to his mind. He felt, as he proceeded to dry those various objects, as if, with the wet cloth he held, he were obliterating much more than ever the wishing-bone had called up! + 

Finally, before Gerda and he put out their lamp, he deliberately endeavoured to prolong this pleasant numbness by drinking several stiff glasses of gin. This gin had been their Christmas present from Mr. Torp; and most friendly did Wolf feel to his father-in-law, when under its beneficent influence he slipped into bed beside the already unconscious girl. + 

“It’s the best of all drinks,” he thought. “By God, I’ll be economical with it! It’s a good thing Bob Weevil doesn’t like it.” + 

His mind seemed preternaturally clear now, as he lay on his back listening to Gerda’s soft breathing and to the intermittent wind-gusts that kept tossing into that darkened room a brackish odour from the far-off Sedgemoor marshes. + 

“It’s the stream of life itself that is important,” he thought, “not any particular event or emotion! Just to be thrillingly happy over a crowd of little half-remembered, half-forgotten sensations⁠ ⁠… that’s the whole thing. And it has got in it something much more than that⁠ ⁠… something more spiritual than anyone knows. It has effects beyond the visible world. It needs an effort of will as great as what saints and artists use! Oh, if only I could find words for this⁠ ⁠… but I never shall, I never shall.” + 

He stretched himself stiff and tense as he lay there, while like an aerial landscape, luminous and yet minutely distinct, his vision of things gathered, clarified, mounted up, as if out of a transparent sea. + 

“The stream of life is made of little things,” he said to himself. “To forget the disgusting ones and fill yourself with the lovely ones⁠ ⁠… that’s the secret. What a fool I was to try and make my soul into a round, hard crystal! It’s a lake⁠ ⁠… that’s what it is⁠ ⁠… with a stream of shadows drifting over it⁠ ⁠… like so many leaves!” + 

Instinctively he avoided any definite thought of Urquhart’s cheque and of the morrow’s supper. But they were both there. They were like a dull throbbing at the back of his closed eyes. + 

“What people call ‘futility,’ ” so his thoughts ran on, “is just the failure of great emotions. But it’s a good thing for them to fail. Let them fail! Only when they fail does the under-tide of life itself rise to the surface. Futility is the transparency of the lake⁠ ⁠… what makes the shadows fall and float⁠ ⁠… beautiful⁠ ⁠… like leaves!” + 

Before he knew that sleep was anywhere near him, he sank, just as he was, like a drifting log in his own leaf-strewn lake, into the region where the living are as the dead. But the suppressed intention at the back of his brain awoke him into full consciousness again, just before dawn. + 

There was by this time an indescribable chilliness in the room, different from the chilliness of the rain and the wind as they had been when he had gone to sleep. Lying with hunched shoulders and hooked knees close to Gerda’s side, his arm flung across the girl’s body, he felt through every nerve this new feeling in the air. + 

His human soul seemed to leave its body and pass out of that small room into the great air-spaces that suspended themselves above the West Country. The interior chilliness of the darkness as the delaying dawn drew him forth, had that within it which corresponded to the spring of the year; only, this was the spring of one winter’s night! There was a greenish, wet-growing stir in that dawn’s approach; and the whole night about him seemed to shudder and contract like the cramped shuddering of an unborn child. + 

Not a muscle did he move as he lay there, hunched and inert, his stiff fingers folded around Gerda’s right breast like the fingers of an infant around the toy with which it has been soothed to sleep. But within his curved skeleton his mind was lucid with the lucidity of something starkly at bay. + 

“Mr. Malakite at Weymouth” and that piece of paper wrapped about Mukalog had become part of his very brain⁠ ⁠… part of the machinery of his brain⁠ ⁠… but his mind was grappling now with something more than machinery. More? Yes! There was more⁠ ⁠… somewhere⁠ ⁠… more⁠ ⁠… than just this dawn-chilled Space, through which, like a wingless, tailless, beakless bird’s head, with oceans for eyes, the earth he lived upon lurched, darted, oscillated, shivered, spun! + 