For the rest of the day Paul was in peculiarly good spirits; he went about the place full of bedevilment of all kinds, to the astonishment of the household in general and of his sister in particular. The oppressive heat seemed to have no effect upon him. There was something in the air that excited him, and he was very busy getting rid of the excitement.
With bedtime came no desire to sleep. ‘I feel all worked-up, Margaret,’ he said as he lit her candle in the hall. ‘I think it must be an “aventure” coming,’—though, of course, she had no idea what he meant.
‘There’s thunder about,’ she replied. ‘It’s been so very close all day.’
‘Sleep well,’ Paul said when he left her at the top of the stairs; and the last thing he heard as he went down the long winding passage to his bedroom in the west wing was her voice faintly assuring him ‘One always does here, I’m glad to say.’
Once inside, and the door shut, he gave himself up to his mood. It was a mood apparently that came from nowhere. A soft and mysterious excitement, all delicious, stirred in the depths of his being, rising slowly to the surface. Perhaps it was growing-pains somewhere in the structure of his personality, engineered subconsciously by his imagination; perhaps only ‘weather.’ He always followed the barometer like a strip of dried seaweed.
But on this particular night something more than mere ‘weather’ was abroad; his nerves sent a succession of swift faint warnings to his brain. To begin with, the night herself claimed definite attention. Some nights are just ordinary nights; others touch the soul and whisper ‘I am the night. Look at me. Listen!’
He obeyed the summons and went to the window, leaning out as his habit was. The darkness pressed up in a solid wall, charged to the brim with mysteries waiting to reveal themselves. No trees were visible, no outline of moor or hill or garden. The sky was pinned down to the horizon more tightly than usual—keeping back all manner of things. Very little air crept beneath the edges, so that the atmosphere was oppressive. The day had been cloudless, but with the sunset whole continents of vapour had climbed upon the hills of the evening wind, driven slowly by high currents that had not yet come near enough the earth to be heard and felt.
He coughed—gently. The least noise, he felt, would shatter some soft and delicate structure that rose everywhere through the darkness—some web-like shadow-scaffolding that reared upwards, supporting the night.
‘Something’s going to happen,’ he said low to himself. ‘I can feel it coming.’
He became very imaginative, enjoying his mood enormously, letting it act as a mental purge. Aventures that he would discover for the next Meeting swept through him. The stress and fever of creative fancy, stirred by the deep travailing of the elements behind that curtain of night, was upon him. Then, sleep being far away, he went to the writing-table, where Nixie’s deft hands had everything prepared, lit a second candle, and began to write.