Giles Goat Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

other gadgetry attached here and there along its length, which was adorned with rude carvings (both intaglio and low-relief) of winged lingams,
shelah-na-gigs
, buckhorns, and domestic bunch-grapes.
    Near the tip of this unprecedented tool was a small blunt hook wherewith my visitor first unstopped and closed the door, then smartly drew himself a chair out and sat him down at the desk next to mine. All this I remarked in two glances, and then to collect myself returned to that manuscript of my own at which I’d been tinkering when he entered. The fellow’s dress, if extreme, was not unique—one may see as strange at any gathering of student artists, and I myself in disorderly moods will wear mungos and shoddies, though my preference is for the conventional. But your average bohemian’s manner is shy as a kindergartener’s with those he respects, and overweening with everyone else, while my caller’s was neither: brisk, forthright, cordial, he plunked his paper-box onto my desk, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and both hands at the cane-top, and rested his chin upon all, so that his striking beard hung over. Disconcerting as the grin he then waited my pleasure with was the cast of his features, not just like any I had seen. Such of his kind as had strayed into my office thitherto were either dark of beard, coal-eyed, and intense, after the model of a poet they admired, or else had hair the shade of wheatstraw, forget-me-not eyes, and the aspect and deportment of gelded fawns. Not so this chap: his bronze beard; his eyes not pale nor tormented but simply a-dance; his wiry musculature, the curl of his smile, even a positive small odor about his person that was neither of dirt nor cologne—in a word, he was
caprine:
I vow the term came to mind before I’d ever spoken to him, much less read what he’d brought me. And that walking-stick, that instrument without parallel …
    “Don’t fear,” he said directly—in a clear, almost a ringing voice, somewhat clickish in the stops. “I’m not a writer, and it’s not a novel.”
    I was disarmed as much by the insouciance and
timbre
of his voice as by the words themselves. It sounded as though he actually meantwhat he said, sincerely and indifferently, as who should announce: “I’m not left-handed,” or “I’m no clarinetist.” And this I felt with the ruefuller twinge for its expressing, glibly as the verdict of a child, that fear no fictionist is proof against, and which had dwelt a-haunt in my fancy’s garret for the twelve months past. I had just turned thirty; it was my seventh year of toil in the prevaricating art, and scant-rewarded for my labors I was weary as the Maker of us all on the seventh morning. Monday, I still trusted, would roll round; in the meanwhile I was writing so to speak a
sabbatical-piece
—that book you’ll never see. I knew what novels were:
The Seeker
wasn’t one. To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths—it bored me, I hadn’t taste or gumption for it. Especially was I surfeited with
movement
, the without-which-not of story. One novel ago I’d hatched a plot as mattersome as any in the books, and drove a hundred characters through eight times that many pages of it; now the merest sophomore apprentice, how callow soever his art, outdid me in that particular. His inspirations? Crippled: but I sat awed before the bravery of their unfolding. His
personae?
Raw motors cursed with speech, ill-wrought as any neighbors of mine—but they blustered along like them as if alive, and I shook my head. Stories I’d set down before were children gone their ways; everything argued they’d amount to nothing; I scarcely recognized their faces. I was in short disengaged, not chocked or out of fuel but fretfully idling; the pages of my work accumulated to no end, all noise and no progress, like a racing motor. What comfort that in every other way my lot improved? House and gardens