Essential Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

wet, too. She, fey and war-like, was waving her twig. The dashing gods had gone. And now, as the ring of the hooves on the road grew fainter, Mr. and Mrs. Harkaway stood alone on top of the silence which spread like a dew on the earth. The broad aspect of the country was weird with melting capes of mist. The new day shapes were not yet born and as yet there was an unearthly configuration on the land. The hills and their woods had capsized and disintegrated and in the valleys below the Harkaway’s cottage the lower vapours poured into milky lagoons that smoked and foamed, and the higher ones grew out of the earth in melting smoke through which the woods could be seen fragmentarily in violet immaterial palisades. Appearing above the highest branches of the mist, like a gaudy parrot in a forest, was the glow of the unseen sun. Harkaway in his pyjamas and his wife in her night-dress seemed to be the only living and breathing creatures in the world, for there was no sound, not even singing, and they stood in awe like two travellers who in a dream had come upon the beginning of a world before anyone was born in it and unshaped spirits kneeled in the final vigils of their ritual, entranced. Harkaway, feeling his moustache, thought in his professional way of all the people he would call upon after the sun had long risen that day. They were all asleep. Even Radfield in his farm that was sunk in mist—asleep, and their houses dead. He thought, supposing they were not there. Supposing there were nothing. No more rents to collect. He marvelled. If at any time in his life he had felt magnified and immortal it was at that moment. Jupiter, the great progenitor. He thought he shone like the god upon his wife with sudden love.
    She laughed at him.
    “You have a spider web in your hair,” she said. But that did not dash him. He flung the mockery aside and suddenly picked her up in his arms and ran stumbling into the house. He laid her down upon her bed, with all the morning winding in his blood and his heart beating like the hooves of the horses. He was like them, godlike and great and ruinous, a communicant with darkness and mystery. But as she lay there quickly curled up like a feather, looking at him with a kind of fear, he suddenly became timid, tender, pitiful, apologetic. Alas! he sneezed and the god vanished.
    “You will catch cold,” she said, “if you stand there.”
    And at this, misery stamped out his fire and almost with tears of desolation he kissed her and went to his own room and the tepidity of his bed. She called to him through the wall:
    “You did leave the gate open. That is how they got in, the cheeky boys.”
    That serious question of the open gate came rushing into his mind to add to his perplexities. When he was calm the daylight became cold and golden and the new sun was born. The vigilant hills had got their day but, his children, they had vanished.

SENSE OF HUMOUR
    It started one Saturday. I was working new ground and I decided I’d stay at the hotel the weekend and put in an appearance at church.
    “All alone?” asked the girl in the cash desk.
    It had been raining since ten o’clock.
    “Mr. Good has gone,” she said. “And Mr. Straker. He usually stays with us. But he’s gone.”
    “That’s where they make their mistake,” I said. “They think they know everything because they’ve been on the road all their lives.”
    “You’re a stranger here, aren’t you?” she said.
    “I am,” I said. “And so are you.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Obvious,” I said. “Way you speak.”
    “Let’s have a light,” she said.
    “So’s I can see you,” I said.
    That was how it started. The rain was pouring down on to the glass roof of the office.
    She’d a cup of tea steaming on the register. I said I’d have one, too. What’s it going to be and I’ll tell them, she said, but I said just a cup of tea.
    “I’m TT,” I said. “Too many soakers on the road as it is.”
    I was staying