CHAPTER IV
WILLIAM HASTINGS sat writing at the window in the upper back room of Toll-Pike Cottage.
Pale watery sunlight, faint as though it had passed through fathoms of attenuating mist, spread itself out over his minute meticulous manuscript, over the bare floor, over the shabby bookcase, over the gaunt discoloured volumes of Philo, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Paracelsus, which stood like dehumanized, featureless ghosts between the melancholy milestones of his Latin and Greek theology.
The Napoleonic stomach of the man was pressed forward against the edge of the wretched little table which served him for a desk, while his white, plump ecclesiastical fingers held the pen with a suave ferocity.
It was not permitted just then to any living person to catch the expression on William Hastings’s face as with calm, monotonous scrupulosity he formed word after word and punctuated them and dotted them and preserved their measured margins.
There happened to be two little crumpled-up dead flies upon the window sill before him, and it seemed as if some power inimical to life itself emanated from the movements of that white, plump hand. Was it an accident, a coincidence, that on the grass below the theologian’s window a forlorn heap of frost-bitten feathers was all that was left of a seven-month-old sparrow?
Is there, perhaps, a power of destruction in human thought capable of projecting its magnetism beyond its own realm of immaterial ideas? Nothing moved in that shabby room except the hand that was writing, and yet there undoubtedly did mingle with the pale, watery light that filtered in something that seemed to make the more friendly of the volumes upon the shelves draw closer together, to make the print of Saint Jerome with his lion and his skull look unnaturally ghastly, and to make the black marble clock upon the mantelpiece tick like the heart of a condemned man.
But if the furniture in Mr. Hastings’s room caught in such a troubled manner the vibration of his “not very cheerful book,” there was someone in the house who received these mysterious emanations much more woefully.
The young woman down below kept wandering uneasily from parlour to kitchen and from kitchen to parlour. She presented the appearance of someone who struggled with an overpowering impulse to run out of the house, to run down the road, to run for miles and miles and miles.
At one point as the hours went on she did actually steal up to her bedroom and snatch her hat and cloak from the shaky cupboard; but she flung them aside when she came down and returned to her stove in the kitchen.
She was boiling something in an iron pot, and as she stood stirring this, she kept looking furtively round, holding herself very still to listen, her hand on the spoon and her head turned sideways.
Once she opened the back door a little and let the misty yellow light lie cold and comfortless on the gray flagstones and the smell of leaf mould mingle with the steam of her cauldron.
It was one of those days when the stillness is so absolute that it seems as if all the winds of the world had actually dropped out of the air, like great birds shot through the heart, and were now lying stone dead in remote lakes and ponds and backwaters out of all reach of recovery.
There was a small poplar tree behind Toll-Pike Cottage, and just because there were so few leaves left each one of them seemed to float in its own particular atmospheric circle; and as it floated, to be consciously holding its breath.
The very prevalence of pale yellow over every other colour gave to the fragment of space framed by the open door a look as of royal obsequies, as if all the land were covered, like a naked archaic corpse, with flakes upon flakes of chilly gold.
It sometimes happens, in an out-of-the-way country spot like this one, that even the most harmless and commonplace noises cease altogether, leaving behind them a silence so profound that it becomes ominous.
Such a silence, saturated like a great wet sponge with a watery yellowness that might have been washed from the golden body of some drowned idol, gathered closer and closer round the agitated girl.
She put her hands to her ears at last. She was afraid of hearing the scratching of a pen up there; but this gesture only had the effect of making her abominably conscious of the beating of her own heart.
Suddenly she decided to endure the thing no longer; and very silently, moving on tiptoe, she crept upstairs.
Pausing at her husband’s door she found herself without the courage to open it and without the courage to descend. She just stood outside on the landing listening.
Ah! she was sure she could hear his pen now; and it seemed to her as if it were the beak of some obscene bird pecking at the throat of life. This monstrous thinking-machine was the only thing that was alive in that windless morning. By the chilly mortuary light of the same sun whose pallid gold made the leaves so yellow and the air so misty this infernal cerebral gimlet was boring its way into some undefended crevice in the foundations of human sanity.
She would have found it hard to say by what gradual means she had become so certain as to the nature of her husband’s thought. But certain she was now; and if she had dared she would have rushed into the room like a madwoman and torn the abominable thing into a thousand fragments.
Why didn’t she dare? What was there about this man that always paralyzed her? She leaned against the closed door and bowed her head upon her elbow. She seemed beyond the relief of tears, beyond the power of any decision.
It had all been so wonderful to her at first. To be loved by a recluse, by a thinker, by a person so different from the rest. And Aunt Martha had been so pleased about it before she died; so pleased that her nervous, troublesome niece had someone to look after her.
To look after her! What would the old lady have said could she have known? She recalled her feelings when she first fully realized that her ideal image of the man had been broken to pieces. But she mustn’t think of that. Nothing that could ever happen would be quite as bad as what she went through then. Who was it who had told her once that cut flowers before they actually die suffer a spasmodic crisis and stretch themselves out with a palpable jerk, stark and rigid? That was just the way her romantic feeling for William had ended — given a horrible spasmodic jump, like a broken spring, and fallen in a dead heap!
And it was not only that the mainspring of her love was broken. There had taken its place another feeling about him, a feeling very difficult to define, a vague, mysterious terror of something within him that baffled and perplexed her, something that roused an agitation in her such as people feel in the presence of the supernatural.
It is true that this particular sensation came and went. It was at its worst at moments like this when something in the day itself played into its hands. But there were other days, when, in the ordinary exchange of little diurnal domestic interests, the thing subsided and died down. During these calmer interludes, though the romance of her love was dead beyond recall, she was not devoid of a certain quiet affection for him, strong enough to respond to his own attenuated, eccentric, spasmodic fits of tenderness.
But to-day that almost supernatural terror seemed at its very worst. Oh, she was at the end of her tether to-day and something would have to be done. She could bear the strain of it no longer. She began listening again with increased intensity….
Ah, he had pushed his chair back in there and put down the pen. She could see him as clearly as if the wood against which she leaned had been glass. She saw how his white hands clasped themselves upon his stomach, just where the little gold cross hung down. Oh, loathing! Loathing! Loathing! What was this? She was downstairs now, pulling on her cloak. Bang! The door had shut behind her and she was in the garden. Click! The gate had swung behind her and she was in the road.