the
hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like
great green wings spread by a small white bird. And eastward yet a mile
or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of
Yaverland's End. Under that thatch was his mother. She would be asleep
now. Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn. With a
constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now,
lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head
and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn
across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.
Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead. At the picture
he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for
having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid
sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on
the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors. Then he
recognised the necessity of this adventure. It was his duty to her to go
out into the world and do great things. He had said so very definitely
to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.
So that boy, thirteen years before....

He shivered and wished he had not thought of the time when he meant to
do great things, for this was one of the nights when he felt that he had
done nothing and was nothing. He saw his soul as something detached from
his body and inimical to it, an enveloping substance, thin as smoke and
acrid to the smell, which segregated him from the participation in
reality which he felt to be his due, and he changed his position, and
cleared his throat, and stared hard at the people round him and at the
woman on the platform in hopes that some arresting gesture might summon
him from this shadowy prison. But the audience sat still in a sheeplike,
grazing sort of attention, and Mrs. Ormiston continued to exercise her
distinguished querulousness on the subject of male primogeniture. So he
remained rooted in this oppressive sense of his own nothingness.

"Oh, come, I've had an hour or two!" he reassured himself. There were
those three days and nights when he stood at the wheel of the Father
Time, because the captain and every man who was wise about navigation
were dying in their bunks of New Guinea fever; days that came up from
the seas fresh as a girl from a bathe and turned to a torturing dome of
fire; nights wh